History researchers uncover chilling correlations between Nazi Germany propaganda and Donald Trump racial profiling

Nazi letters reveal paper restorers’ role in compiling Holocaust ‘hitlist’. Researchers continue to uncover Nazi history to show the purposeful intent to create propaganda to support protecting a dominant race and to justify the evil Holocaust. 

Exclusive echo report published in The Guardian: Research uncovers program to make centuries-old records legible to detect people’s ancestry.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) dictator of Germany

Large numbers of paper restorers and bookbinders were recruited by the Nazis and “contributed directly to genocide” during the second world war, according to research.

A British historian has uncovered a Europe-wide program in the 1930s, and 1940s, in which restorers repaired and cleaned historic church and civil records, making them legible so that the Nazis could detect anyone with Jewish ancestry.

Dr. Morwenna Blewett, a researcher in conservation history and associate member of Worcester College, University of Oxford, unearthed Nazi letters and other material showing the role played by craftspeople in restoring registers of births, conversions, baptisms and marriages to seek out inherited “racial” status.

In various public institutions including the German federal archives in Berlin, she found documents that show the complicity of these conservators, restorers and paper chemists, who used their skills within Germany and in occupied countries.

“They were creating an accumulated record of who might potentially be killed – a kind of hitlist, really,” she said. “They went above and beyond to enforce their ‘racial’ registration of populations.”

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. “Even though it was known that there was this need to prove your heritage,” Blewett said, she “looked into the actual technical nuts and bolts of how this was achieved through cleaning documents.

“I found in the archives official documents about engaging bookbinders, as well as letters between various officials talking about cleaning documents, in the hope that these records would represent ‘racial purity’.”

Surviving administrative records show that by 1940 a master bookbinder called Franz Krause, from Neisse, a town now in south-west Poland, was among those recruited.

Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime' book launch - Worcester College

In one passage, a Nazi official wrote: “German church books, which capture the smallest place and every little farmstead in their closely bound mass of more than a hundred thousand volumes, are by far the most important source for the German population history, the proof of descent and the genealogy.”

Manuscripts dating back several centuries were illegible because they had become fragile, dirty and moldy.

Despite their potential importance as historical papers, the restorers used “quite destructive processes”, Blewett said. “They weren’t ensuring the safety of the historic objects, they were making them readable. It didn’t really matter to them what these objects were.”

For example, manuscript pages were saturated with glycerin to make the entries legible, even though that fell short of accepted conservation practice of the time. 

“The physical rubbing in of glycerin risked tearing already damaged paper as well as softening the paper fibes by swelling them,” Blewett said. “I also found promotional material from technical companies that made laminating material that was used to preserve very fragile pages to make them more readable.”

Blewett, who previously worked as a paintings conservator at the National Gallery in London, stumbled across the material in researching cultural heritage organizations set up under the Nazis. “I just found all this material and I didn’t understand why they were talking about bookbinding and cleaning church documents. That led me to look further into what the scheme was and what was related to producing proof of Aryan ancestry.”

Her research features in her new book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, published by Palgrave Macmillan this month. “Through their work, restorers conspired with the Nazi regime to aid and abet criminal acts,” Blewett writes in the book. “Their rewards were rich. But their reputations have largely remained unsullied.”

Michael Daley, the director of the ArtWatch UK restoration watchdog, said the research revealed a “shocking abuse of skill”. “How much power accrues to those who control the appearance of things – for good or ill,” he said.

In his first presidency, Donald Trump called journalists the enemy; a year into his second term, it’s clear that this time around, he’s treating us like one.

From Hungary to Russia, authoritarian regimes have made silencing independent media one of their defining moves. 

Sometimes, outright censorship isn’t even required to achieve this goal. In the United States, we have seen the administration apply various forms of pressure on news outlets in the year since Trump returned to office. One of our great disappointments is how quickly some of the most storied US media organizations have folded when faced with the mere specter of hostility from the administration – long before their hand was forced.

While private news organizations can choose how to respond to this government’s threats, insults and lawsuits, public media has been powerless to stop the defunding of federally supported television and radio. This has been devastating for local and rural communities, who stand to lose not only their primary source of local news and cultural programming, but health and public safety information, including emergency alerts.

While we cannot make up for this loss, the Guardian is proud to make our fact-based work available for free to all, especially when the internet is increasingly flooded with slanted reporting, misinformation and algorithmic drivel. 🙏

Republicans must face the historic parallels between ICE raids and 1930s Nazi Germany - Chicago immigrants are hiding in fear

The moral test feels painfully familiar. Shadows of the 1930s.

By Jennifer Obel for the Philadelphia Inquirer- Excellent reporting❗

"I thought of families in Europe who hid neighbors in attics and back rooms..."

This is what is happening to immigrants and citizens in Chicago right now | Opinion

Right now in Chicago, immigrants are fleeing the militarized city at night, helped by U.S. citizens who fear for their own safety.

Just before 9 p.m. on October 15, Tracy pulled up outside the townhouse on the west side of Chicago. She ushered Juliana and her 6-year-old, Yori, into the back seat and headed for Union Station — the overnight train to New York City, their best shot at safety.

For a month, mother and daughter had barely opened the door of their one-room apartment. Yori stopped attending first grade. Juliana stopped cleaning houses. Neighbors left groceries at the threshold.

In mid-September, during a construction site raid, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained José, Juliana’s husband and Yori’s father, and deported him to Venezuela. He was “lucky”: at least he wasn’t lost in detention purgatory or sent to a prison in El Salvador.

From Venezuela, José texted me about conditions at the Broadview Detention Center, where he had been held before deportation, calling them inhumane.

He asked for only one thing: “Please help my family to leave Chicago. It’s too dangerous for them there.”😟😡

I first met José outside my local grocery store, Jewel-Osco, in Wilmette, one of Chicago’s North Shore communities. He held up a sign, looking for odd jobs. 

Many Venezuelan immigrants who congregated around the Jewel ended up there when Texas Governor Greg Abbott bused them to Wilmette shortly after 2023, when they crossed the border.

I spoke with José and hired him to do some repairs and painting. He traveled by subway two hours each way for work, Juliana and Yori in tow. While José worked, I drew with Yori.

One warm summer day after José finished working, we all walked to the edge of Lake Michigan, where Yori made sand castles.

These were good people who faced difficult circumstances. It felt right to help them.

José was a proud craftsman, and I recommended him to other friends, including Tracy — one of the three of us who would later make sure Juliana and Yori had some money and helped arrange their transportation to New York after José’s deportation.

What happened last month is not the 1930s. But as a Jewish woman, I can’t ignore the echo of that dark period.

The author's great-uncle, Max Berg, standing, third from right, was a Jewish immigrant from Poland, the third of seven children. He became a successful lawyer in New York and, on the eve of World War II, sponsored 49 families to enter the U.S. These individuals wrote to him because they shared a common last name, though it remains unclear whether they were actual relatives. Many of those he sponsored became judges, writers, and leaders in their respective fields.Read moreCourtesy of Jennifer Obel

In Adolf Hitler’s Berlin, families packed by day and moved quietly toward the border by night, clutching papers that might open a path to New York, a city that, for many, meant survival.

They wrote to cousins, begged for affidavits, queued at consulates, and measured hope in stamps and signatures. The promise was simple: make it to New York, and you can gain freedom from terror.

Our family, led by my great-uncle Max Berg, had settled in New York City after immigrating from Poland. On the eve of World War II, letters began arriving from people in Europe desperate to escape Hitler. They wrote because they shared his last name — Berg — hoping for a connection that might save them.

Max never knew whether any of the 49 families were actually relatives, but he sponsored them all, buying their passage and covering their first month’s rent so they could begin new lives.

The differences matter, of course. Hitler engineered annihilation; today’s migrants are not facing that. But the moral test feels painfully familiar.

When government policy makes ordinary life like work, school, or a doctor’s visit unsafe for families who pose no threat, do we widen the circle of protection or narrow it? In the 1930s, too many Germans hid behind drawn curtains rather than opening their doors.

As residents of Philadelphia and other American cities steel themselves for the possible deployment of immigration agents, Chicago offers a bleak preview of this chilling and shameful moment in our nation’s history.

My hometown has faced an onslaught of immigration enforcement as part of Operation Midway Blitz. Chicago has responded to the crisis by widening its circle of protection. Our neighbors are already organizing.

Rapid-response networks canvass homes and storefronts, sharing “know your rights” cards and training witnesses to safely document encounters with ICE — even here in the affluent North Shore, where there are few immigrant residents but many immigrant workers.

We also hold peaceful protests, which include clergy and citizens from across Illinois, to exercise our right of free speech.

And we record encounters whenever possible. In some instances, Chicagoans have faced down multiple ICE agents wielding weapons during an attempted arrest. In one such incident, a man, once pinned to the ground, was released because bystanders gathered to document and demand accountability.

However, ICE agents are using aggressive tactics, often crossing the line into violence directed at protesters and people who document their activities.

On September 19, federal agents, who appeared like snipers perched on a rooftop at the Broadview Detention Center, shot a local pastor in the head with a pepper ball and then teargassed him.

In recent footage, rows of agents in tactical gear surround protesters and push their faces into the pavement. On October 10, a producer with a local television news program was thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and detained without cause.

These are not “isolated incidents,” but rather tactics intended to intimidate and provoke. Chicago feels combustible — one itchy trigger finger from our own Kent State massacre.

The real suffering isn’t confined to the protesters, of course, but to the detainees inside Broadview’s walls. In Lake County, Ill., immigration attorney Kimberly Weiss described the case of her client, Juan — who, like all the immigrants included in this commentary, was willing to be included in this essay only if his surname was withheld. (Likewise, some of the native-born U.S. citizens I interviewed agreed to participate only if their surnames were withheld, for fear of retribution.)

Juan is a widowed father of four U.S.-born children, ages 12 to 20, detained by ICE outside his home. “His children contacted me terrified,” 💢Weiss said.😰

That same night, she filed emergency motions to stop his deportation and request bond, with a hearing set for the next morning. “It would have been a strong case,” she said. “He entered legally, held valid documents, like a work permit, Social Security number, and driver’s license. He’s a union roofer, a widower caring for his U.S. citizen children. He qualified for lawful status under a widower petition.”


But before the hearing could take place, Juan was gone. Weiss said her client described Broadview Detention Center as so inhumane that he couldn’t endure another night. Detainees had no access to water. The air was so thick and suffocating that Juan witnessed others gasping for breath.


Officers threatened Juan into signing his deportation papers, using an ICE agent as a “translator” to deceive him. Without his glasses and terrified, he finally signed. By the next afternoon, Juan was across the border.

There’s no accountability for what happens inside Broadview,” Weiss said. “It’s overcrowded, filthy, and cruel. There is no oversight, even when the conditions amount to torture.”

Stories like these ripple far beyond detention centers. Dread doesn’t stop at the gates of Broadview. Anxiety seeps into neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools, touching even those who are U.S. citizens.

During a recent nighttime raid in a South Shore neighborhood, Blackhawk helicopters dropped armed federal agents on top of an apartment building, as dozens of masked ICE agents arrived in trucks.

Hundreds of agents moved through the building, kicking in doors, setting off flash-bang grenades, and rounding up residents as they slept. Children were separated from parents, zip-tied, and held in vans for hours.

Imagine being a child, awakened in the middle of a peaceful slumber, snatched from your parents, and restrained. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security proudly boasts about the raid, but dozens of those arrested were U.S. citizens.

We’ve now reached the point where friends of mine, Indian American physicians named Shila and Ravi, make sure they and their 14-year-old daughter always leave the house with their driver’s licenses and U.S. passports, in case they are stopped by ICE.

“Show me your papers” is a demand one might expect from the Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police, but as Americans, we do not expect this, and should never accept it.

“Being a brown-skinned woman in America means constantly proving my right to belong,” Shila told me recently. “My citizenship and contributions never seem enough to erase the question — ‘Where are you from?’ — that marks me as foreign. I’ve learned to live with this othering, but seeing my child inherit it breaks my heart.”

“What was once an occasional ‘Go back home’ has become a deeper threat: ‘I’ll make sure you get home,’” she added. “But where is home when this is the only one we’ve ever known❓ 🏠🏡Nothing can shield us from the fear that belonging can be questioned or revoked at any moment.”

When ICE occupied Los Angeles and the National Guard was deployed, José and I exchanged texts so that I could better understand his asylum case.

José then called me at the end of August. I could feel his embarrassment reaching through my phone, but he asked: Could he and his family move in with us? He’d heard about the planned ICE buildup and wondered whether his family would be safe in the predominantly Latino neighborhood where they were living.

I declined. I thought of families in Europe who hid neighbors in attics and back rooms, and felt the weight of closing my door to him. My daughters were still home from college, and there wasn’t space for anyone else. I also wanted time with my girls before they left.

And truthfully, I wasn’t sure José and his family would be any safer in my predominantly white suburb. I suspected my next-door neighbors were Trump supporters, and worried they would report him.

Still, I told myself that by mid-September, when the girls returned to school, I would offer them refuge.

But when I finally texted him, it was too late. He had already disappeared. 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans want to rewrite American history to eliminate American slavery history

“It has been said that history repeats itself,” Theodor Reik, a Jewish psychoanalyst..."

As a German, Trump’s push to eliminate shameful history sounds familiar. It’s a bad idea. Opinion essay published in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Adrian Schultz. 

Annalena Baerbock places flowers at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe on the 85th anniversary of the November 1938, pogroms in Germany and Austria, in 2023.

Donald Trump’s targeting of displays at national parks reminds writer Adrian Schulz of his country’s far-right politicians' call for burying Germany's dark past.

“It has been said that history repeats itself,” Theodor Reik, a Jewish psychoanalyst, wrote in his 1965 book, Curiosities of the Self: Illusions We Have About Ourselves. “This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

Sometimes, the attempts to get rid of history also rhyme.

As a German journalist visiting Philadelphia, I find a familiar echo in Donald Trump’s targeting of displays at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” 

Trump's actions reminds me about what my country’s far-right politicians call for doing with our own dark past: they want to eradicate it.

“Rather than bringing the following generations in touch with the great benefactors, the well-known world-changing philosophers, the musicians, the genius discoverers and inventors, of whom we have so many,” Völkisch politician Björn Höcke said in 2017, German history, he claimed, “is slammed and ridiculed.”

Compare that with Trump’s Executive Order 14253, which posits that “rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.”

The order — issued in March and titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” — specifically names Independence National Historical Park as an example of the “corrosive ideology” it denounces and aims to “restore” in time for the nation’s Semiquincentennial next year. The directive is the basis for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s current effort to review texts, most prominently at the President’s House, about the role slavery played at the time of the nation’s birth.

Liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland, January 27, 1945

Of course, the atrocities of slavery and those of the war, suffering, and genocide that Germany brought upon the world and its own Jewish, Romani, and queer population during the Nazi era are not the same. But the ways in which nationalistic ideologists today try to deny these historic realities are.

As a German, I am heavily indebted to America. Without the United States, my country would not be free, let alone one of the leading nations in the world today.

It is often claimed that Germany has reckoned with its past. Probably the most eager to claim that are Germans themselves. 

As Germans, we even have a word for it: Erinnerungsweltmeister — the world champions of memory. If you have messed up so badly, you have to find your pride somewhere.

This claim is only partly justified. The Nazi years are dealt with extensively in school. In the streets of nearly every German region, you will find small golden Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones,” in the pavement before the houses in which deported Jews used to live, to memorialize them. Since 2005, in the city center of Berlin, right next to the federal parliament, stand the 2,711 gray concrete stelae that constitute the 4.7-acre Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

But in spite of all that, remembrance was always contested. And it is still.

In 1986, two in three Germans said the Nazi years should be “left behind” and not be talked about so much. In 2005, 54% still agreed with that. After a decline in 2018, when 45% argued in favor of setting history aside, the number rose again to 55% this year, mirroring the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, known as the AfD, which is now Germany’s second-largest political party despite being considered a danger to democracy.

The decision to build the Berlin Holocaust memorial wasn’t an undisputed one, either. In 1998, influential author Martin Walser called it the “concreting of the capital’s city center with a nightmare the size of a soccer field.” 

In 2017, Höcke, one of the AfD’s most dominant figures, voiced that Germans are the “only people in the world that has planted a memorial of shame in the heart of its capital.”

But memorials keep people from letting history be just the past. They make it present. They confront you with it every day. Thus, they become a target for those who’d prefer to not see, not hear, not talk about reality.

The global right is on the hunt for historical facts. It aims for national pride through denial. But that is a fragile basis. It ultimately means that the horrors can happen again, because the heirs refuse to learn from them.

Like it or not, the past lives on. You cannot get rid of it. If you try, you risk a vicious cycle of defiance and hate.

Both America and Germany deserve better.

Adrian Schulz is a journalist with Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin and an Arthur F. Burns fellow at The Inquirer.

Unexplained and unsupported American protective (PPE) mask aversion

Querdenker (essentially “against-the-grain thinkers”).

My family has lived and traveled in Asia, especially when my husband was in the US Navy and stationed in Subic Bay, Philippines. From my experience, wearing protective masks in Asia is widely accepted. In fact, it is common to see children wearing masks.

This New York Times opinion echo describes how mask aversion seems to be an America anomaly - i.e. departure from the normal or common order, in Germany.

A world view about wearing masks.

Opinion echo by Alec MacGillis published in The New York Times.

BERLIN — You see it everywhere here in Germany, day in and day out: People taking the subway or bus or train put masks on as they prepare to board. And when they arrive at their stop or station and disembark, nearly all of them take the mask off, almost in unison.

For someone who arrived here after spending the first year and a quarter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, it is a remarkable sight: a communal, matter-of-fact approach to mitigation, turning what has become such an intensely charged symbol for Americans into a mere practicality.

This approach to masks and public transit is on display not only in cosmopolitan Berlin, but everywhere I’ve been in my reporting travels these past two months: I witnessed this effect in the eastern industrial city of Chemnitz, in the small western city of Erkelenz, and even in the rural eastern region of Lusatia, where the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, known here by its German initials as the AfD, had one of its strongest showings in the national elections last month. Mask on when you’re inside the train or store; mask off when you’re out of it.

Throughout 2020, and the first part of 2021, I traveled across the United States reporting stories, and wondered why it was so hard for the country to arrive at a sensible middle ground on COVID-19 measures.

Even after public health experts had established the vastly lower risk of transmission outdoors, I watched local officials close playgrounds and swimming pools, leaving young people with fewer options for low-risk activity and social contact. That was (mostly) the blue states. In one red town I attended a crowded memorial service in a windowless church where precious few people were wearing masks, and many shared embraces as though the virus simply didn’t exist. 

All or nothing, nothing or all.

And I saw how these wildly conflicting responses were fueling a vicious cycle of ever wider divides in behavior, with corrosive political side effects. For someone who had been documenting the country’s growing political fissures for more than a decade, it was not hard to discern what was happening: Reports of Trump supporters refusing to wear masks in big-box stores or indoor campaign events seemed to make liberals more inclined to wear masks even when outdoors with few people around; seeing mask wearing turned into a political statement, more partisan talisman than necessary tool, in turn made many conservatives less likely to mask up indoors when the circumstances justified it.

This was what Julia Marcus, a public-health researcher at Harvard Medical School, found when she interviewed mask skeptics last year: “They said they felt ridiculous wearing a mask when there are few people around, like outdoors or in a spacious store,” she wrote. “When I agreed that masking isn’t as important in certain settings, they became more amenable to wearing one when it matters most.” Overselling danger seemed, in other words, to have the opposite of the intended effect.

So it has been striking to be in a country where common-sense protocols generally prevail. It might be tempting to chalk up the uniformity of Germans’ behavior to their penchant for rule-following. This certainly helps explain why most Germans are observing requirements for masks on public transit or in stores, but it doesn’t really explain why — in contrast to what I witnessed in blue American cities — I have seen so few people going over and above the rules here, wearing masks outdoors or in other situations where they are not required.

And this tendency was reflected in the response to the coronavirus: The difference between the share of Germans on the ideological right and left who thought there should have been fewer restrictions on public activity was 20 percentage points, a Pew survey found early this summer. 

In the United States, the difference between right and left on that question was a whopping 45 points, by far the largest gap of any country surveyed by Pew.

This is not to say that Germany’s 83 million people are utterly free of disagreement on COVID. The rate of people with at least one vaccination shot — about 68 percent — is lower than that of many other European countries, barely ahead of the United States, and lower than that of many American cities with strict COVID requirements still in place. This is, in part, because Germany particularly lags on vaccinating teenagers, compared to other European Union members, but it is also a sign that the country has its share of dissenters. And there have been large protests against mask mandates, travel restrictions and the proliferating vaccine requirements for restaurants, sports events and other gatherings, a movement called Querdenker (essentially “against-the-grain thinkers”).

Notably, this movement has been more ideologically heterogeneous than equivalent protest groups in the United States, with some left-leaning vaccine skeptics and people upset about nightclub closings in the mix. (This diversity may partly reflect the role of the police in enforcing masking and other COVID rules — on several occasions, I’ve seen armed officers reminding transit riders on the platform to mask up — which can scramble the lines of resistance.)

To be sure, some of the anti-restriction rhetoric sounds similar to that in the United States — in Chemnitz, a supporter of the AfD who had come out to heckle the Green candidate for chancellor told me that “masks are humbug — they don’t help at all” and that mask mandates served no purpose other than keeping people scared. The very next day, the police in southwestern Germany arrested a 49-year-old man accused of fatally shooting a 20-year-old gas-station clerk who had told him to wear a mask in the shop. It was reportedly the country’s first instance of deadly violence apparently fueled by disputes over pandemic restrictions, a category of killing of which the United States has more than a half dozen examples.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are still some head-scratching restrictions here that challenge scientific guidance, such as the museums that have still disabled audio features on exhibits for fear of visitors touching the same headsets.

But German public health authorities seem to be making decisions with less concern than their American counterparts are about whether they will somehow abet right-wing narratives. For instance, requirements for proof of vaccination here in Germany can also be satisfied by showing that you’ve already had COVID, following the studies that have shown prior infection to provide strong protection. In the United States, public health officials seem to worry that anything validating anti-vaxxer claims about natural immunity will reduce vaccination rates. And education officials here speak much more freely about the downsides of masks in classrooms as they now start lifting school masking requirements.

The role of the media undoubtedly plays a role, as well — there are far, far fewer fear-stirring articles or segments in the national press or broadcast news here about, say, the potential risk that the coronavirus poses to children.

No, it seems to me that the likelier explanation for the less polarized approach to virus mitigation behavior is that Germany is, well, much less polarized. Politics are so consensus-driven here that for the past eight years Germany has had a governing coalition consisting of the two largest parties.

The overall effect is of an environment set at a lower temperature, far closer to normalcy, where the public space is not forever on the verge of flaring into a divisive battleground of signaling, judgments and resistance.

Meanwhile, the reports keep coming from what looks like an ever more inflamed landscape back home: incidents of resistance rage like the two people arrested at the Nashville airport in late August for refusing to wear masks on separate flights; officials in high-transmission areas barring mask mandates in schools while officials in low-transmission areas require schoolchildren (and college students) to wear masks even outdoors; a former Obama administration cabinet member comparing Americans opposed to mask requirements to the suicide bomber who killed about 170 Afghans and 13 American troops in Kabul. The middle ground seems more out of reach than ever.

One day during the just-concluded election season here, I went to see a Berlin campaign rally for Olaf Scholz, the chancellor candidate of the center-left Social Democrats and, it now appears, the likely successor to Angela Merkel. Mr. Scholz invoked the unity and sense of purpose that Germany had demonstrated during the pandemic as his model for bringing the country together to confront other challenges, such as climate change. “We saw in this corona crisis that we can hold together, that solidarity is possible in this country,” he said.

I couldn’t help thinking that the line seemed far more plausible here than if used in the United States.

A few weeks later, I went to a different campaign rally, for the far-right AfD in Lusatia. Hundreds of people gathered in a square in the small city of Görlitz to see the party’s two top national candidates. Nearby were gathered dozens of counterprotesters, with police officers on hand to keep the two groups separate.

None of the AfD supporters wore masks. Virtually all of the counterprotesters did, a rare incidence of outdoor mask wearing. Here, at last, in the most acute of political circumstances, was a stark COVID culture-war contrast.

It felt almost like home.

Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is the author of “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.”

"Humans who had a name": Fighting anti-Semitism in social media

Echo report published in Associated Press News (APNews)

By David Rising

BERLIN (AP) — Alarmed by a rise in online anti-Semitism during the pandemic, coupled with studies indicating younger generations lack even basic knowledge of the Nazi genocide, Holocaust survivors are taking to social media to share their experiences of how hate speech paved the way for mass murder.

Yellow Star badge of Heinz-Joachim Aris (Dresden 1941) reading 'Jew' is displayed in a showcase during a press preview in the new special exhibition 'Shoes of the Dead - Dresden and the Shoah' at the Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany.

With short video messages recounting their stories, participants in the #ItStartedWithWords campaign hope to educate people about how the Nazis embarked on an insidious campaign to dehumanize and marginalize Jews — years before death camps were established to carry out murder on an industrial scale.

Six individual videos and a compilation were released over Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, followed by one video per week. The posts include a link to a webpage with more testimonies and teaching materials.

“There aren’t too many of us going out and speaking anymore, we’re few in numbers but our voices are heard,” Sidney Zoltak, an 89-year-old survivor from Poland, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Montreal.

“We are not there to tell them stories that we read or that we heard — we are telling facts, we are telling what happened to us and to our neighbors and to our communities. And I think that this is the strongest possible way.”

Once the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933, its leaders immediately set about making good on their pledges to “Aryanize” the country, segregating and marginalizing the Jewish population.

The Nazi government encouraged the boycott of Jewish businesses, which were daubed with the Star of David or the word “Jude” — Jew. Propaganda posters and films suggested Jews were “vermin,” comparing them to rats and insects, while new laws were passed to restrict all aspects of Jews’ lives.

Charlotte Knobloch, who was born in Munich in 1932, recalls in her video message how her neighbors suddenly forbid their children from playing with her or other Jews.

”I was 4 years old,” Knobloch remembered. “I didn’t even know what Jews were.”

The campaign, launched to coincide with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, was organized by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which negotiates compensation for victims. It is backed by many organizations, including the United Nations.

It comes as a study released this week by Israeli researchers found that coronavirus lockdowns last year shifted some anti-Semitic hatred online, where conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the pandemic’s medical and economic devastation abounded.

Although the annual report by Tel Aviv University’s researchers on anti-Semitism showed that the social isolation of the pandemic resulted in fewer acts of violence against Jews across 40 countries, Jewish leaders expressed concern that online vitriol could lead to physical attacks when the lockdowns end.

Supporting the new online campaign, the International Auschwitz Committee noted that one of the men who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January wore a sweatshirt with the slogan “Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom.”

“The survivors of Auschwitz experienced first-hand what it is like when words become deeds,” the organization wrote. “Their message to us: do not be indifferent!”

Recent surveys by the Claims Conference in several countries have also revealed a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust among young people, which the organization hopes the campaign will help address.

In a 50-state study of Millennials and Generation Z-age people in the U.S. last year, researchers found that 63% of respondents did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and 48% could not name a single death camp or concentration camp.

Claims Conference President Gideon Taylor told the AP that the surveys highlighted that “messages and concepts and ideas that were common and understood 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago” are not any more.

After the success of a social media campaign last year using the messages of survivors to pressure Facebook to ban posts that deny or distort the Holocaust, Taylor said it made sense to seek social media help again.

“The Holocaust didn’t come out of nowhere,” he said. “Before Jews were driven out of their schools, their jobs, their homes, before the synagogues, shops and businesses were destroyed. And before there were ghettos and camps and cattle cars, words were used to stoke the fires of hate.”

“And who can draw that line from dangerous words to horrific acts better than those who lived through the depths of human depravity?”

For Zoltak, the escalation from words to deeds came rapidly after the invading Nazi army occupied his town east of Warsaw in mid-1941. The Nazis rapidly implemented anti-Semitic laws that they had already instituted in the western part of Poland they occupied two years earlier and forced Zoltak’s parents into slave labor, he said.

A year later, the Germans forced all of the town’s Jews — about half the population of 15,000 — into a ghetto segregated from the rest of the town, subject to strict regulations and kept on restricted food rations.

Three months later, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto, transporting its residents to the Treblinka death camp or killing them along the way.

Zoltak was one of the few lucky ones, managing to escape with his parents into a nearby forest. They hid around the area until the next spring, when they were taken in by a Catholic family in a nearby farm and sheltered for the duration of the war.

After the war, he returned to his town and learned that all but 70 of its 7,000 Jews had been killed, including all of his classmates and his father’s entire family.

“It’s sometimes hard to understand,” he said. “We’re not actually dealing with numbers, they were humans who had a name, who had families.”

___

Follow David Rising at https://twitter.com/davidrising

Trio of echo opinion letters ~ protect the immigrant children

Appreciate this echo opinion published in the news DelMarVa Now

I ask this question, as posed in a Mennonite hymn by Michael Mahler: “How can we be silent as we turn our eyes away, and ignore the poor and broken who lie bleeding in the street?*

In a time when the US government used the Bible to justify separation of immigrant families at our border — a time when at least 2,000 children in May and June were taken from their innocent immigrant parents and when families will be held together in detention indefinitely, while innocent children, who are already separated, are not promised a way back to their parents:
“How can we be silent as we turn our eyes away, and ignore the poor and broken who lie bleeding in the street?

How can we be silent when we’re called to heal and serve in the image of Lord Jesus, who has stooped to wash our feet?”

As we hear the firsthand accounts of children taken from their parents, how can we be silent?

As we learn about warehouses the tent city children have been housed in, how can we be silent?

As we hear the Bible used to justify this new zero tolerance policy, how can we be silent?

As we hear rhetoric that dehumanizes, how can we be silent?

As our current administration uses children as political pawns, how can we be silent?

As we seek to justify the detention of immigrant families who are fleeing violence, how can we be silent?

Those who claim the name of Jesus, speak. Hold your representatives accountable. Write to your local newspaper. Be bold.

As the hymn finishes: “We will shape the future. We will not be silent!”

Sara Waltermyer lives in Snow Hill Maryland.

Stop! We are breaking God's heart

I found my faith as a Christian while living as an immigrant in a foreign country.

I was not the perfect stranger. I spoke the language some, but not perfectly. I did not always understand all the cultural implications of my actions, but I was welcomed and I was loved.

I was told my presence was a “gift from God” -- and I was treated as such.

The crisis unfolding at our borders is urgent. Children are ripped from their parents, while their parents can only cry in agony.

Who are we as a nation? Who are we as Christians, who acknowledge families as a centerpiece to the fabric of our lives, if we allow this to continue?

How can we ignore Jesus’ command to love and welcome the strangers among us?

How can we allow our attorney general to insist a mother, while seeking asylum to save and protect her children, should be punished or “taught a lesson” by having her children ripped from her?

How can we allow him to misuse Scripture for this immoral crusade?

To me, as a Christian -- as a human -- these actions are incomprehensible.

In the name of God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: Stop! We are breaking God’s heart.

Whitney Palmer lives in Berlin Maryland.

Biblical verse doesn't justify unholy actions

The present (Donald Trump) administration is now quoting partial biblical verses to justify separating children from their parents. This, of course, after our Republican leaders have falsely accused the Democrats of making this procedure law.

That's not true. But that hasn't stopped anyone.

Democrats only housed unaccompanied children crossing the border and only for no longer than 45 days.

As the government shows off a few of the shelters, it reminds me of the Nazi propaganda machine that showed the Jews lovely make-believe villages to assure them all would be OK.

Of course, that was a lie. But we are getting darn close to the same thing. Remember, those quotes from the Bible were also used to justify slavery -- and even the Germans claimed biblical verses to justify their unholy actions.

Just during the past few months, our nation has separated more than 2,000 children from their parents. Our president likes the North Korean despot and wishes people here would sit up straight when he speaks, like they do in North Korea.

He really respects Vladimir Putin, who seems to kill reporters and polticial enemies at will -- and no one interferes. Russia also likes to take over countries.

And Trump blames that on Obama.

All you people who claim news is boring and there's no point in paying attention really should start getting that information -- and not just from (right wing propaganda spewing!) Fox news -- so you can see the erosion of all the norms this nation has tried to follow for more than 200 years.

Joan Seiler lives in Eden Maryland

*Also check this link published in The Mennonite