The last several years have brought about a gradual increase in the power of government, especially at the federal level. This has led to a corresponding erosion in our rights as Americans. It is vital that we not ignore the lessons of history. Here are some quotations from William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary that should be a sober reminder of what can happen when we become complacent.
“Berlin, April 11 [1935]
Dr. S., a successful Jewish lawyer, who served his country at the front in the war [World War I], suddenly appeared at our apartment today after having spent some months in the Gestapo jail…. He was in a bad state, a little out of his head, but apparently aware of his condition, because he was afraid to go home and face his family…. He said no charges had been preferred against him other than that he was a Jew or a half-Jew….” [Does this parallel the men being held without being charged year after year at Guantanamo Bay – even including one young teenage boy?]
“Bad Saarow, April 21 [1935] Easter
Taking the Easter weekend off. The hotel mainly filled with Jews and we are a little surprised to see so many of them still prospering and apparently unafraid. I think they are unduly optimistic.” [Like the complacency of so many Americans today concerning draconian statutes like the Patriot Acts?]
“Berlin, January 23 [1936]
At noon Tess turned on the radio for the news just in time for us to hear a ringing personal attack on me…. I had written in a mail series, some time ago, that the Nazis at Garmisch [site of the winter Olympic games] had pulled down all the signs saying that Jews were unwanted (they’re all over Germany) and that the Olympic visitors would thus be spared any signs of the kind of treatment meted out to Jews in this country.” [Contrast Shirer’s journalism with that of the subservient, controlled media of today !]
“Berlin, Feb. 27 [1940]
Though the quota of Germans allowed entrance into America annually is 27,000, Marvin [Breckinridge] found a waiting list of 248,000 names at the American consulate. Ninety-eight percent were Jews – or about half the Jewish population left in Germany.” [Yet at present we are allowing millions of illegal aliens into this country.]
“Berlin, December 1 [1940]
[The German] can be a kind and considerate person. But as a unit in the Germanic mass he can persecute Jews, torture and murder his fellow men in a concentration camp, massacre women and children by bombing and bombardment, overrun without the slightest justification the lands of other peoples, cut them down if they protest, and enslave them.” [Sounds all too much like the present war in Iraq in many respects.]
And from the same author’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
“Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of Hitler ‘the worst of all,’ General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg, stemmed from the Nacht und Nebel Erlass – ‘Night and Fog Decree.’ This grotesque order… was issued by Hitler on December 7, 1941. Its purpose… was to seize persons ‘endangering German security’ who were not to be immediately executed and make them vanish into the night and fog of the unknown…. No information was to be given their families as to their fate even when, as invariably occurred, it was merely a question of the place of burial in the Reich.” [Compare this with recent reports of CIA renditions and secret prisons.]
“In the background, to be sure, there lurked the terror of the Gestapo and the fear of the concentration camp for those who got out of line or who had been Communists or Socialists or too liberal or too pacifist, or who had been Jews…. Yet the Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship.”
[Need we say more?]
Mrs. Kitty Werthmann, in a recent video from the Prophecy Club (Freedom to Dictatorship in 5 Years) describes how in this very short period of time Germany descended into tyranny. We must all be alert, as Kitty says, that we do not repeat this tragic mistake. Otherwise, we will have learned nothing from the past. The story of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia may become our own fate.
