Donald Trump and maga Republicans taking American democracy into political dark ages: Germany 1933 Redux

Echo opinion published in The New York Times: Donald Trump has wielded power as no previous president has, often in open defiance of the law. His evil actions have raised a chilling question.

Is America Losing Our Democracy❓

To the Editor of The New York Times:

As a refugee from Nazi Germany, I noticed that there is one indicator of authoritarianism that you did not mention: the use of masked agents grabbing people off the streets and from their workplaces, invading their homes in the wee hours and “disappearing*” them without hearings or even allowing them to contact their relatives. 

I believe that the danger⚠️ of this tactic outstrips all the other evil Trumpzi executive over-reaches❗

From Martin Oppenheimer in Franklin Township, New Jersey
The writer is a professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers University

*The Holocaust was Nazi Germany's deliberate murder of approximately six million European Jews and at least five million prisoners of war. "Disappearing" peoplel is a serious human rights crime against humanity:  Hundreds of thousands of people have vanished during conflicts or periods of repression in at least 85 countries around the world.

These enforced disappearances are secret abductions by a state or a political party, or their proxies, with a refusal to acknowledge the person’s whereabouts and condition. The abducted person becomes a ghost, invisible, never heard from again.

Enforced disappearances as an international human rights crime can be traced back to the Nuremberg trials in Germany following World War II.

Rest in peace Mr. Ben Ferencz: Hero of justice for millions of murdered Jews

Ben Ferencz (1920-2003) - After World War II, he brought 22 Nazi officers to trial for murder. The men were Einsatzgruppen commanders who were responsible for killing more than a million people — not in concentration camps, but in towns and villages across Eastern Europe. 

They would never have been brought to justice were it not for Ferencz.

Ben Ferencz, was the last living Nuremberg prosecutor. He died at 103, in Boynton Beach, Florida.

At 27, he prosecuted Nazis for more than 1 million deaths in perhaps the largest murder case in history.

Echo report by Emily Langer for The Washington Post.

Ben Ferencz was a 27-year-old lawyer with no courtroom experience when he prosecuted what would be called the largest murder case in history. Standing 5-foot-2, he nearly disappeared behind the lectern in the packed courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1947.

Mr. Ferencz, a Transylvanian-born Jew who had arrived in the United States as an infant, presented to a U.S. tribunal the massive case against 22 authorities of the mobile Nazi killing units, called Einsatzgruppen, that operated in Eastern Europe during World War II.

A memorial plaque in Budapest, Hungary

 (L'Heureux photograph)

Most of the murders along the edge of the River Danube took place around December 1944 and January 1945, when the members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party police ("Nyilas") took as many as 20,000 Jews from the newly established Budapest ghetto and executed them along the river bank.

All 22 of the defendants were convicted. Four were executed. If not for Mr. Ferencz, a former Army investigator who personally tallied the million deaths using sequestered German war documents and brought the case to his superiors, the men might never have been tried.

Mr. Ferencz, who devoted much of the rest of his life to the cause of international justice, and who was the last living Nuremberg prosecutor, died April 7 at an assisted-living facility in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 103. 

His son, Don, confirmed the death but gave no cause.

Mr. Ferencz spoke only Yiddish until he went to school, and he was the first person in his family to go to college. He graduated from Harvard Law School, where he studied war crimes before joining the Army midway through World War II. He was detailed to an investigations unit collecting evidence of Nazi crimes.

Following Allied liberators, Mr. Ferencz visited Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau.

“Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget — the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned,” he once said. “I had peered into hell.”

He was “the lawyer for humanity,” said John Q. Barrett, a professor of law at St. John’s University in New York City and a scholar of the Nuremberg trials. “The scale of the atrocities, the pure innocence of the victims … was at the heart of the exterminationist evil of Nazism.”

Mr. Ferencz said that when he left Europe at the end of his military service, he wished never to return to Germany. But he was soon recruited back to serve as a civilian under Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, who succeeded U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson as chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg.

By the time Mr. Ferencz’s phase of the proceedings began, the highest Nazi officials, including Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess, had been prosecuted. Britain, France and the Soviet Union had moved on to other postwar concerns, leaving the United States to oversee any further prosecutions in Nuremberg.

Under Taylor’s prosecutorial leadership, the tribunal decided the cases of Nazi doctors who had conducted medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, as well as industrialists who had availed themselves of slave labor.

Mr. Ferencz was overseeing investigators examining documents in the German Foreign Ministry when one of his researchers discovered top-secret reports from Einsatzgruppen, detailing the towns and cities the killing squads passed through and the horrors they visited upon them. Barrett described the documents as “murder receipts.”

One, labeled Exhibit 179, was a dispatch from Kyiv.

“The city’s Jews were ordered to present themselves,” read the document, according to an account on the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes.” “About thirty-four thousand reported, including women and children. After they had been made to give up their clothing and valuables, all of them were killed, which took several days.”

Speaking to the London Guardian, Mr. Ferencz recalled that one defendant had ordered his troops: “If the mother is holding an infant to her breast, don’t shoot the mother, shoot the infant because the bullet will go through both of them, and you’ll save ammunition.”

With the United States seeking to form a Cold War alliance with what was to become West Germany, Taylor was under pressure to conclude the tribunal’s proceedings, Barrett said. 

Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor in the "Einsatzgruppen Trial", 1947 - 48. Bust by Bjørn Okholm Skaarup. Donation to the Nuremberg Museum, by the artist, in honor of the 101st birthday of Benjamin Ferencz on March 11, 2021.

Initially, the overextended staff seemed unprepared to take on another case, especially one as large as the Einsatzgruppen matter. But Mr. Ferencz implored his superiors not to overlook such a consequential crime.

“I start screaming,” Mr. Ferencz told “60 Minutes” in 2017, recalling his conversation with Taylor. “I said, Look, I’ve got here mass murder, mass murder on an unparalleled scale. And he said, can you do this in addition to your other work? And I said, sure. He said, okay. So you do it.”

With that, Mr. Ferencz found himself in charge of the case.

He chose the defendants based on their rank and education. He could have charged thousands, he said, but was limited by the number of seats in the courtroom.

Family separations is a crime against humanity- condemn the cruel Trump policy

Echo from Independent by Mythili Sampathkumar

Last surviving prosecutor at Nuremberg trials says Trump's family separation policy is ‘crime against humanity’

"The administration separated the children because they are unable to enter the US criminal justice system and placed them in detention centres."

Born in 1920, Ben Ferencz is a Hungarian-born American lawyer. He was an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the Chief Prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of the twelve military trials held by the U.S. authorities at Nuremberg, Germany

The last surviving member of the Nuremberg trials prosecuting team has said Donald Trump committed “a crime against humanity” with the recent family separation policy.

Ben Ferencz, age 99, made the comment during a recent interview with outgoing United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.

The lawyer said it was “painful” when he heard about how the Trump administration had separated more than 2,000 children from their families after they had crossed the US-Mexico border.

Mr Ferencz had been just 27 when he served as the chief prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen trial, during which 22 Nazi officials were found guilty of killing more than a million people.

The administration separated the children because they are unable to enter the US criminal justice system and placed them in detention centres.

“I knew the Statue of Liberty. I came under the Statue of Liberty as an immigrant,” Mr Ferencz said during the interview, which was posted on the UN website. His family came to the US from Romania when he was a child.

Referencing a line from the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the statue – “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” – Mr Ferencz said “the lamp went out when [Trump] said no immigrants allowed unless they meet the rules that we laid down”.

“We list crimes against humanity in the Statute of the International Criminal Court. We have ‘other inhumane acts designed to cause great suffering’. What could cause more great suffering than what they did in the name of immigration law? It’s ridiculous,” the prosecutor of war criminals said regarding the family separation policy.

Mr Ferencz’s comment comes after Mr Hussein – a Jordanian prince, former ambassador, and UN political officer during the Bosnian war – announced he would not seek another term as the world body’s top human rights official.

He had become known for taking a stand against Mr Trump in particular, calling the US leader “grossly irresponsible” when he implemented the Muslim travel ban.
Read more

Six-year-old raises $13,000 to help separated immigrant families

A Nazi rally is in your neighborhood? Advice from history

We have an ethical obligation to stand against fascism, racism and Nazism. 

But we also have an ethical obligation to do so in a way that doesn’t help the fascists and racists, more than it hurts them.

Resistance Americans must be strategic in how we respond to Neo-Nazi  "Trumpism".  There's nothing Donald Trump and his political cult want to see more than civil disobedience. 

History repeats itself

Charlottesville Virginia, the evil White Supremacy and the response to it, was right out of the Nazi playbook. 

In the 1920s, the Nazi Party was just one political party among many in a democratic system, running for seats in Germany’s Parliament. For most of that time, it was a small, marginal group. 

Yet, in 1933, riding a wave of popular support, it seized power and set up a dictatorship. The rest is well-known.

It was in 1927, while still on the political fringes, that the Nazi Party scheduled a rally in a decidedly hostile location – the Berlin district of Wedding. Wedding was so left-of-center that the neighborhood had the nickname “Red Wedding,” red being the color of the Communist Party. 

The Nazis often held rallies right where their enemies lived, to provoke them.

The people of Wedding were determined to fight back against fascism in their neighborhood. On the day of the rally, hundreds of Nazis descended on Wedding. Hundreds of their opponents showed up too, organized by the local Communist Party. The antifascists tried to disrupt the rally, heckling the speakers. Nazi thugs retaliated. There was a massive brawl. Almost 100 people were injured.

I imagine the people of Wedding felt they had won that day.

They courageously sent a message: Fascism was not welcome.

But historians believe events like the rally in Wedding helped the Nazis build a dictatorship.

Yes, the brawl got them media attention. But what was far, far more important was how it fed an escalating spiral of street violence. That violence helped the fascists enormously.

Violent confrontations with antifascists gave the Nazis a chance to paint themselves as the victims of a pugnacious, lawless left. They seized it.

Moreover, it worked. We now know that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. 

Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes like the one in Wedding. It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis themselves were fomenting the violence didn’t seem to matter.

One of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence.

KEY NAZI DATES

SEPTEMBER 15, 1935

NUREMBERG LAWS ARE INSTITUTED

At their annual party rally, the Nazis announce new laws that revoke Reich citizenship for Jews and prohibit Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of "German or related blood." "Racial infamy," as this becomes known, is made a criminal offense. The Nuremberg Laws define a "Jew" as someone with three or four Jewish grandparents. Consequently, the Nazis classify as Jews thousands of people who had converted from Judaism to another religion, among them even Roman Catholic priests and nuns and Protestant ministers whose grandparents were Jewish.

OCTOBER 18, 1935

NEW MARRIAGE REQUIREMENTS INSTITUTED

The "Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People", requires all prospective marriage partners to obtain from the public health authorities a certificate of fitness to marry. Such certificates are refused to those suffering from "hereditary illnesses" and contagious diseases and those attempting to marry in violation of the Nuremberg Laws.

NOVEMBER 14, 1935

NUREMBERG LAW EXTENDED TO OTHER GROUPS

The first supplemental decree of the Nuremberg Laws extends the prohibition on marriage or sexual relations between people who could produce "racially suspect" offspring. A week later, the minister of the interior interprets this to mean relations between "those of German or related blood" and Roma (Gypsies), blacks, or their offspring.

Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington