A decade ago, I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. I was curious to understand how good people in a reasonable democracy could have allowed the Nazi Party to rise, and a madman to achieve dictatorial power. I learned how it happened that day.
The ruling party first shuttered independent radio stations, destroyed printing presses, and jailed newspaper editors, until its own propaganda was all that remained. Then they systematically and brutally replaced government workers with Nazi sympathizers. Unquestioning loyalty replaced expertise and experience.
They turned citizen against citizen through fear. They chose a scapegoat, the Jews, and blamed them for everything wrong in their society, but especially the post-Versailles economy. They rounded up these people — children and entire families — and deported them to death camps. The Nazi state used bogus science to “prove” their own Aryan racial and cultural supremacy, so it became acceptable to eradicate anyone with a different ethnicity or sexuality or any disability. The decency and humanity of an entire nation began to erode.
The populace gave their leader the fervent adulation of a god. They acquiesced when he deployed the military against his own citizens, and packed the courts with loyalists who would administer justice as he demanded. He surrounded himself only with like-minded sycophants who would not oppose even his most dangerous ideas.
Since that day at the museum, I have seen these same tactics begin to show up in my own nation. They are not as violent or pervasive as they eventually became in Germany, of course, but the seeds of all of them are clearly present. America led the Allied effort to rescue Germany from itself and end the Holocaust during WWII, but if our nation’s new leadership continues to tread Germany’s dark path, who will rescue us?
Christine Sharer, Taylorsville
