Ancient History

When I was 18 years old I picked up a train schedule near Constance, Germany, where I was a student at an immersive German language program, and made my way 113 miles northeast through the Black Forest to the Dachau concentration camp, the first Nazi concentration camp, which operated from March 1933 to April 1945. Photographs of Dachau today show a comprehensive, visual history of the notorious death camp, but when I walked through its gate from the train station Dachau had the air of a raw, recently abandoned place. Which it was, having been liberated by World War II allies scarcely 20 years earlier. As the product of one of our nation’s best public school systems and the daughter of a U.S. Marines fighter pilot during the war, I knew all about Hitler’s Nazis; but spending a day at the camp among its blackened crematoria and towering piles of prisoners’ discarded shoes put a real face to the estimated 35,000 prisoners who died there.

I don’t recall at the time any mention of the murder of German journalist and historian Carl Albert Fritz Michael Gerlich, who, as a vocal critic of Hitler, was arrested and died on the very ground where I was standing, shot and incinerated at Dachau in 1934. I write this as two independent American journalists, targeted by the authoritarian Donald J. Trump, have been arrested. One of them, former CNN anchor Don Lemon, was arrested after a Minnesota federal magistrate judge refused to sign a complaint against him in connection with a protest inside a church in St. Paul, reportedly enraging Attorney General Pam Bondi. If Bondi is not charged and permanently disbarred for violating her oath to uphold the law, there is no regulation of attorneys in the United States.

Before 1933, Germany had a constitution, the Weimar Constitution, which included fundamental rights including freedom of speech and religion. It ultimately collapsed from within from the twin forces of political instability and the rise of authoritarianism. What followed was the Nazi repression of speech in all its forms under its newly created ministry, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi’s new regime glorified Hitler by featuring his image on postcards, posters, and in the press (Trump memes, anyone?); making radios cheaper so that more Germans could listen to Nazi propaganda; broadcasting Nazi speeches; and organizing large, celebratory Nazi rallies (remember Trump’s military rally?). It was just one year later that journalist Gerlich was arrested, shot, and incinerated at Dachau in 1934.

I learned a lot about Hitler and the Nazis in school, even wrote my first paper at UC Berkeley on the Nuremberg trials. But it was all within an assumed context of relief, relief that understanding and public exposure surely inoculated us from the possibility of it ever happening here; faith in our own constitution and its rule of law would surely protect us from a similar fate. Our complacency and confidence in the rigor of our laws allowed us to miss or take seriously the warning signs of an approaching apocalypse that could topple it all.

Just like the Germans in 1933.