A Neighbor’s Nazi Experience

A Neighbor’s Nazi Experience

D. S. Mitchell

Martin Hartman, a tall slender man, his thinning white brushed back leans against his cane for support. There is a sadness in his eyes and a soberness in his demeanor. You can tell he has a story, and he wants to tell it.

He was born in Holland in 1924. He looks to the ground, before looking back into the reporters eyes. His family had owned a prosperous construction business, until the Depression he tells us. His family like many others had suffered during those economically depressed times, but by 1940, things he explains slowly as memories cloud his 93-year-old face, the economy “had begun to turn around”.

The turnaround was slow, but things had been looking up.  Within just a few days his life, and the life of friends and family were inexorably changed forever.

“I was 16. It was May 10, 1940. We heard bombing and saw planes. It was the German invasion, and the blitz was over in three days.” The squashing of Holland’s defenses was quick, but far from painless.

After the German invasion, the Germans began barricading city blocks and then sweeping the apartments for young men to fill the military ranks due to troop loss.

“Gradually Nazism crawled into Holland. Good people were sent to prison, Jews and ministers.”

Fearing conscription, Hartman went underground, “A lot of young men and Jewish people were living underground, working mostly on farms.” Hartman was nearly captured by the Nazi’s on two separate occasions. He remembers “sleeping in a chicken coop in a doctor’s garden with a Jewish boy, Karl.”

Those years are still fresh today, 70 years dropping like dead leaves he continues his story, “at night you saw a car with only one headlight, that was a ‘one-eyed car’ of the underground. They were moving Jews. There were two girls who were always on the roads; they were couriers for the underground.”

Hearing Martin Hartman’s stories of wartime Holland and the terrorism of the Nazi regime during the 1940’s should give us all reason to be deeply concerned by the activities of the Neo-Nazi’s, the KKK and other fringe white nationalist groups.

My father and my uncles fought the German’s to defeat a scourge that threatened the globe. Hitler and his fascist doctrine of Aryan supremacy marched across Europe with nothing stopping its progress but the United Kingdom and the United States.

It sickens me and millions of other Americans to see the fringe right rearing its ugly head once again.  They are transforming their look, to fit the needs of its current recruits. The new Nazi’s and the new KKK don’t wear hoods or black uniforms, but they are delivering the same message, a message of hate and white supremacy rule.

If my father, or his brothers had seen those thugs carrying their disgraced flags he would have gone after them, calling them out. Those men of the “greatest generation” knew Nazism and had seen the mass graves of its victims first hand.

We cannot allow our country to be transformed into a country of mass HATE  rallies led by Trump der Führer and his ‘brown-shirt’ thugs. Thugs carrying guns and wood bats terrorizing the unarmed and the fearful. Trump has filled his Cabinet and the West Wing with alt-right advocates.  The possibility of such visions  becoming reality feel dangerously close.

What happened in Charlottesville, VA could become commonplace as the dark elements of racism threaten the fabric of our society. Starting at the top, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with members of the alt-right, the White Supremacists, and overt bigots. There seems to be a statistical connection between Trump’s election and the notable increase in racial violence by whites against people of color.

In Charlottesville, fatigue garbed instigators armed with guns and baseball bats came together (12 separate groups) under the guise of protesting the removal of a Confederate monument from public property. In reality they had come to threaten and intimidate a small town, who had chosen to remove those memorials to slavery and suppression of the human spirit.

This threat to our democratic institutions could happen anywhere in the country. The Klan could come to your town next week with their dark histories and dangerous rhetoric, assaulting your friends and neighbor’s and our basic democratic values.

Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be quiet. Don’t sit back doing nothing. It may seem impossible, but a Nazi flag flying over the White House could become a reality if we remain silent. It has happened in the past and it could happen here.

I support the shaming the thugs caught in photos at Charlottesville on social media. You are what you say, and do. There are consequences to your speech and your actions.

My only concern is that an uncertain or mistaken identification could be devastating to an innocent person.  All  identifications must be certain and verified.

Join the Resistance

Dar

****I want to give special thanks Martin Hartman and the Daily Astorian newspaper for the information for this article.

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