EDITORIAL: Flirting With Nazis Is Dangerous
EDITORIAL:
Flirting With Nazis Is Dangerous
A Neighbor’s Nazi Experience
D. S. Mitchell
Martin Hartman is a tall slender man. His thinning white hair is brushed back, his jacket zipped against the winter wind, as he leans against his cane for support. There is a deep sadness in his eyes and a soberness in his demeanor. You can tell he has a story, and he wants to share it. Martin Hartman is my neighbor.
Martin was born in Holland in 1924. Prior to the Depression of the 1930’s, his family had owned a prosperous construction business. His family like many others had suffered during those economically depressed times, but by 1940, the 97-year-old said, the economy “had begun to turn around,” things were looking up he confirmed. The future looked promising.
There had been rumblings of war, but few took them seriously, after all WWI was a mere twenty two years in the past. No one could imagine the world once again plunging into conflict. The next few days would change his life and those of his friends and family 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, they began barricading city blocks and then sweeping the apartments for young men to fill the military ranks due to troop loss. Hartman describes it, “Gradually Nazism crawled into Holland. Good people were killed, or sent to prison . . . Jews and ministers.”
Editorial: Flirting With Nazis Is Dangerous
Fearing conscription, Hartman disappeared into the 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, 74 years dropping like dead leaves, he continues his story, “at night you saw a car with only one headlight, going up and down the road. That was a ‘one-eyed car’ of the underground. They were moving Jews and resistance fighters. 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, the Proud Boys, and other fringe white nationalist groups in the United States. These groups have been seen visibly flexing their muscles in public over the last five years. Not unlike the days prior to Hitler’s takeover in Germany. Violence and intimidation the apparent goal now, as it was then.
It has been eighty years since my father and my uncles fought the Nazi’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 soldiers and sailors of the UK and the US. The battles were memorable. The goal glorified. The men and women that served in that war are fast leaving us. We should listen closely to those who are still with us. Men like Martin Hartman. They were ready to sacrifice their lives to protect democracy, to defend the world against genocide, bigotry, and authoritarianism. People of this new generation may be called on to defend democracy once again.
It sickens me and millions of other Americans to see the fringe right rearing its ugly head once again. These bad guys have transformed their wardrobe and their language to suit the needs of its current recruits. The new Nazis and the new KKK don’t wear white hoods or black uniforms with shiny gold buttons. Despite the lack of such familiar accoutrements, make no mistake, these groups are delivering the same old message, a message of hate and white rule.
If my father, or his brothers had seen those thugs carrying their disgraced flags he would have gone after them, calling them out. These are men who had found mass graves of those murdered by the Nazis in concentration camps. Six million dead in the gas chambers. Now denied by this new generation of haters.
We cannot allow our country to be transformed into a country of mass hate rallies led by cult leaders a la Trump der Führer and his ‘Hawaiian shirt wearing’ thugs. Thugs carrying guns and wood bats terrorizing the unarmed and the fearful. When Trump was in office, he filled his Cabinet and the West Wing with alt-right advocates. Names like Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, Mike Flynn, Mike Pompeo and Steve Bannon are stars of the alt-right and brought that fringe into the daylight and elevated them into the halls of power.
What happened on January 6th at the U.S. capitol and in Charlottesville, VA, three years previously could become commonplace as the dark elements of racism threaten the fabric of our society. Starting at the top, Donald Trump, while in office, surrounded himself with 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, Asians and Jews.
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, that had chosen to remove those memorials to slavery and suppression of the human spirit. Hordes of men shouting vile epitaphs and carrying torches symbolize hate-not love and inclusiveness.
August 11-12 2017 Unite the Right groups converged on Charlottesville, VA. It wasn’t until November of 2021 that the organizers of that event were sued in a civil court. After three days of deliberation Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler and Christopher Cantwell, as well as other white supremacists and neo-Nazis, were ordered to pay nine plaintiffs in the civil trial $25 million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages for both physical and emotional injuries.
On January 6th, 2021, flag carrying Trump supporters assaulted the capitol, attacked police officers, and attempted to interfere with the certification of the election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. A year later more than 700 of the rioters are being convicted in criminal trials. Elected members of congress are being called to testify in front of the 1/6 Commission. Is it possible that sitting members of our government participated in the attempted coup? It is possible that at the very heart of our government are those who wish to do it harm.
The Nazi threat to our democratic institutions is real. They are brazen and they are confrontive. The Klan could come to your town next week with their dark histories and dangerous rhetoric, assaulting your friends and neighbor’s, threatening our basic democratic values. Do not confront them in the street. That’s what they want. Do what the victims in Charlottesville did, sue the SOB’s. Hit them in the pocketbook, cripple their resources. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be quiet. Don’t sit back doing nothing. Make the them pay. Cut off their money sources. Demand publication of names who support these groups.
It may seem impossible, but a Nazi flag flying over the White House could become a reality if we remain silent. It has happened elsewhere, and it could happen here. As many, before me, have said, democracy is not free, nor self-perpetuating.
****I want to give special thanks Martin Hartman and the Daily Astorian (Astoria, Oregon) for telling Mr. Hartman’s story described at the beginning of this article.