Corporal Adolf Hitler was convalescing after an eye injury received in WWI when he wrote down his thoughts about Germany's defeat. His manuscript--Mein Kaempf-- turned out to be a blueprint for his future actions. In it he wrote: "The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist. Pacifism is the deadliest sin; for it means surrender of the race in its fight for existence." During WWII this evil genius (Hitler) went on to round up Jews from all over conquered Europe and ship them in overcrowded trains to concentration camps. I have personally visited Anne Frank's secret home in Amsterdam where her family was hidden from the Nazis for some considerable time before finally being discovered and hauled off to encampment. (Anne Frank's journal luckily survived.)
As the Allies turned the tide and eventually drove the Nazis back into Germany, they discovered the concentration camps. The sight of human abuse and starvation appalled Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley as they inspected the first camp in Ohrdruf. The smell of stacked up naked dead men in one shed was so bad that Patton could not enter for the stench. Eisenhower wanted to ensure that future generations would not deny the Holocaust, so he had people from the nearby town witness the carnage and bury the dead themselves. When visiting another camp in Auschwitz Eisenhower said: "We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, we know what he is fighting against."
Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota has recently compared the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency to the Nazi black shirts. He says that ICE is a "modern day Gestapo." The Gestapo was Hitler's personal police force and assisted in his arrest of Jews and others who were classified as undesirable. The Gestapo was "a vital component both in Nazi and the Holocaust."--the Holocaust Museum. ICE officials have called Walz's comments "sickening," and it is rhetoric like that which is responsible for a dramatic rise in aggression towards the agency.
Here today in this country some of the political Left has called MAGA Republicans "Nazis." Have they ever been informed of the atrocities that the Nazis committed in those concentration camps? Who is carrying out the persecution of Jewish students in the Ivy League universities? It is certainly not the Republicans. The Left is strangely silent about the current rise in antisemitism. Harvard, the once great university of higher learning founded in 1636, has been taken over by a faculty that indoctrinates rather than educates. Trump has revoked many of the advantages that this university has held at taxpayers' expense. In response the university says that it is being denied its first amendment rights. Pardon my French, but that's BS. Now an activist judge has intervened in support of some of the university's claims, especially with regard to international students. The fight will go on as it should.
Peter Gilderson, Madison.
