Trump is not Hitler. The question that I wanted to answer by traveling to the CANDLES Holocaust Museum was how to keep a country that elected a man like Trump from following the path of Germany in the 1930s. Was there a way to keep Hitler from becoming, well, Hitler?
Hitler was active in German politics from before the publication of Mein Kampf, in which expounded his anti-Semitic views. Unlike Trump, he was politically prominent for at least eight years before becoming Chancellor. Instead of taking over an existing party and dealing with existing elites, his Nazi Party was new.
Three failures of the German polity perhaps bear most of the blame for letting the failed Austrian artist become the butcher of Central Europe. The first is the failure, deliberate or otherwise, of police to protect peaceful political gatherings from Nazi thuggery, which silenced people who were not pro-Nazi. Second was the slavish acquiescence of non-Nazis in passing the Enabling Acts, which required a two-thirds majority. Particular notice must be taken of the Catholic Centre Party, which suffered repressions in late Feburary 1933 but voted with their oppressor in March. Third was the inability of what civil organizations remained (the Lutheran and Catholic Churches) to organize against the regime at a time when the Kristallnacht provoked Germans into opposition to Nazism and the uglier forms of anti-Semitism.
So how does Terre Haute, Indiana get a Holocaust museum, in particular a Holocaust museum dedicated to one aspect of the Holocaust?
Miriam and Eva liberated
After their liberation by the Soviets in 1945, the Kor sisters were taken in by a convent in Katowice, Poland. One of their neighbors from Romania, Mrs. Rosalita Csengeri, tracked them down…
Rosalita Csengeri (L), Solo Levite (C), LTC Andrew J. Nehf (R)
As Romania sunk into Communism, the Kors relocated to Israel and thrived.
Lt. Col. Andrew J. Nehf was from Terre Haute, Indiana. When his division liberated Buchenwald, they sort of adopted Mickey Kor, a young prisoner who was fluent in several languages and served as an interpreter. Kor followed Lt. Col. Lehr back to Terre Haute, where Lehr help him adjust to life in the United States.
Kor travelled to Israel, met the Mozes twins, married Eva and returned to Terre Haute where they built their lives.
In 1978, a miniseries about the Holocaust raised awareness about it. Survivors of the Holocaust, who had kept silent, began to speak out. Eva and Miriam Kor set out to find the other Mengele Twins, founding the CANDLES institute to carry out the search. Eventually 122 individuals were found of the 1,500 “selected” for the experiments. A museum was founded in Terre Haute.
Meanwhile Eva Mozes Kor developed an intense urge to forgive her captors. This forgiveness is not any sort of condoning the acts, it is forgiving their perpetrators. As such Mrs. Kor has become a major exponent of forgiveness, forgiving the guards and sadists, “adopting” one of their grandchildren and speaking around the country about it.
In 2003, one of the Oklahoma City bomber’s fanboys did this to avenge Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber executed at the Federal prison near Terre Haute:
CANDLES firebombed in 2003
The good people of Terre Haute and CANDLES simply built a larger facility, including this display that emphasizes the positive response of the Terre Haute community, including $25,000 raised by schoolchildren.
To finish the tour, here is a (not very good) photo of an experimental installation where people can ask questions of a virtual Holocaust survivor.
Pinchas Gutter is a Holocaust survivor, though not among the Twins. The USC Shoah Foundation created this exhibit, in which he was asked about 2,000 questions regarding the Holocaust and his answers were filmed. If you speak into the microphone (and the docent or intern are around), his avatar will respond to a closely related question. Mine was about what could have been done to stop Hitler — he said that it was important to keep nations from fighting other nations — it is an AI after all that decided which of the 2,000 questions should be answered.
Nancy Edwards was the volunteer docent on the day I visited. She has forty years of experience teaching German, which probably helps her in understanding the primary documents of the Holocaust. The questions I had for her were discussed in the first installment of the series, but the salient points bear repeating.
First, Germany was in a very bad place after World War I and the Depression. It should be added that the last Weimar administration chose to fight the depression with austerity, which brought the usual results of austerity during a depression.
Second, Germany was an intensely patriarchal society. Some of the flowering of Weimar culture was not, so the instinct to oppress was already there. The ideal was father in the workplace, mother in the home and children obeying authority figures without question. Hitler just had to become the “strong father” that such a system craves.
Third, Germans of the time did what they were told.
We disagreed on one point, though possibly because I was unclear. I believe that the step by step discrimination targeted against Jews and others were needed to pave the way for ever harsher measures, culminating in the Holocaust. Edwards believed that the responses of Germans were baked in by their culture — it should be mentioned that the Germans themselves have been trying to purge the second and third elements from German society, though with varied success.
When Germany started the European phase of World War II in 1939, it decided upon a final solution for “the Jewish problem”. In occupied Eastern Europe, the solution was to send out the Einsatzgruppen to carry out massacres of Jews, in some countries with local assistance. But the Einsatzgruppen, though monstrous, was not fast enough in its work, so a more “scientific” solution was developed.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference on January 20, 1942 sketched out the plans for a coordinated extermination of Jews in Europe. Jews would be collected into ghettos (if they already were not), then deported from the ghetto to Poland for extermination. The healthier victims were used as slave labor and given enough food “to die more slowly” as the narrator in the comic Maus puts it. The young, the old and infirm were sent to the gas chambers, after being told that they were merely going to the showers. Periodically, the Nazis and their minions would conduct a “selection” in the barracks, condemning those who failed the physical test to the gas chambers.
Miriam and Eva Mozes were twins from Port, Romania. The Mozes family were the only Jewish family in Port, which was occupied by Hungarian Nazis in 1940. Their teachers encouraged fellow students to bully them, but the Kors avoided deportation until 1944, first to the ghetto and later to Auschwitz. While in the lines determining their fate, a Nazi guard asked Eva’s mother if the girls were twins. “Is that a good thing?”, said her mother.
While the twins were spared “selections”, the indignity of the striped uniforms and maybe got a bit more food, they spent six days per week as the subjects of “scientific research”, that is, sadists playing the role of mad scientist. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays they were examined closely by “doctors” and “medical personnel” with little respect for their bodies. Tuesday, Thursdays and Saturdays were worse: a child would be injected with a mystery substance in one arm and a blood sample would be taken from the other arm. The substance could be drugs, vitamins or pathogens — the injections were painful and debilitating. After one “experiment” Eva was sent to her deathbed, but decided not to die and her body agreed.
A fuller story of these “experiments” can be found in this VICE story…which also describes Eva Mozes’ imprisonment, liberation from the Nazis, and as she might put it, the self-liberation that came from forgiving her guards and “doctors”.
The CANDLES museum details the steps that Nazi Germany took in the years from the Enabling Act on March 27, 1933 to the eve of World War II on the north wall of its exhibit. Here are some of the steps that they mentioned, together with other steps taken from the Wikipedia. The Holocaust did not spring full-form from Hitler’s brow, it was assembled piece by piece. Jews and other “untermenschen” (under-men) were progressively shoved to the margins of German society. The mechanics of extermination were tried out on political opponents and the disabled.
April 1, 1933: Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses begins.
April 7, 1933: Non-Aryans barred from legal practice and the civil service.
May 10, 1933: Nationwide book-burning of “un-German” books taken from libraries and universities by the National Socialist Student League.
July 1933: Naturalized German Jews stripped of citizenship.
July 14, 1933: Compulsory sterilization of the disabled…just like in Indiana.
June 30 – July 2, 1934: Night of the Long Knives. The Nazis turned on the SA (Brownshirts, Party thugs) who brought them into power, killing dozen. Members of the National Socialist party who were of its left wing were murdered, as were conservative Germans within and without the Nazi Party. The Brownshirts had made themselves unpopular with their assorted thuggeries, so Hitler suspected that they would not be too sorely missed. From this point on, oppression would no longer be the game of amateurs.
September 15, 1935: Nuremberg laws passed unanimously. Germans and Jews were forbidden marriage and any such marriages were dissolved. German women under 45 could no longer work for Jews. Jews, Roma and other “undesirables” lost their German citizenship and were reclassified as “state subjects”
November 25, 1936: Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan against the USSR. Other nations, including Hungary, Italy and other nations who fought on the Axis side, joined.
July 6-15, 1938: Evian Conference. The United States called a conference of 32 nations in order to boost the number of Jewish refugees allowed to leave Germany. The US and the UK then strangled it in the cradle: the US got the UK to agree not to mention that US immigration quotas were not quite full, and the UK got the US to forget to remind the conference that Great Britain’s mandate in Palestine included provided a home for the “Jewish nation”. In the end, only Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic substantially increased their quotas, the Dominicans by 100,000. The US made the 1938-1940 lists available and allowed another 30,000 in for a total of 120,000.
The Evian Conference was a propaganda coup for Hitler and the Nazis. The route to escape was shut off for many Jews.
October 28, 1938: Poland having announced that it would not allow Polish Jews to return after October 1938, Hitler sent 12,000 of them in Germany to Poland, which refused to accept them. A brutal game of tag developed as Poland and Germany refused to let them in. Eventually they settled in Poland. Of course, ten months later the Nazis invaded Poland
November 9-10, 1938: Kristallnacht. Almost all of Germany’s synagogues were damaged or destroyed, as were 7,000 Jewish shops. Germany’s Jews were collectively fined one billion marks for the damage, then underwent the confiscation of 20% of their property to boot. Wikipedia does cite evidence that most Germans disapproved of Kristallnacht to a degree rarely seen in totalitarian societies, though many “decent” Germans participated in the “festivities” as well. Goebbels and Nazi propaganda went into overdrive to tamp down this outbreak of conscience, and the religious bodies who disapproved did not organize their disapproval. (Emphasis mine — organize, organize, organize!)
The nature of the Nazi regime was clear — from repressive methods that had parallels in other self-styled free countries like eugenics and segregation, the Nazis were breaking into new territory. While the United States saw its share of “crystal nights” in places like Wilmington, NC and Tulsa, OK as mobs put the local black neighborhoods to the torch, Kristallnacht was approved by the Nazi national government.
The Lafayette Sentinel 