Hitler again?

by Paul Kink, Stevensville

My father was born on a small farm in Munich, Germany in 1913. He recalled that in the first democratic elections after World War I, that my grandfather was not particularly worried about a radical, upstart political party called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The party won a trivial 3% of Germany’s vote in 1924. He told me that a young, gifted orator by the name of Adolph Hitler found himself at the forefront of this new party. In more than 5,000 persuasive speeches, Nazi leader Adolph Hitler bewitched his audiences. Hitler understood that he had to speak to as many people as he could, in order to get votes. Hitler even wrote in his “Mein Kampf” in 1925: “I know that men are won over less by the written word than the spoken word, that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great orators and not to great writers.”

By 1934, Hitler and his frightening political agenda were leading the German government. When Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf, Volume II,” was published in 1926 with some of the following quotes, “Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state,” “I’ll put an end to the idea that a woman’s body belongs to her…Nazi ideals demand that the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand,” “I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few,” “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed,” “The Nazi party should not become a constable of public opinion. It must dominate it. It must not become a servant of the masses, but their master!” Sadly, we are hearing these same words spoken in political speeches in this country today.

I have an old, weathered note that my dad wrote and had translated into English in 1926 upon his arrival in the United States that I read often:

“I shall forever thank God for instilling the wisdom in my parents that made them recognize the shadows of the dark clouds slowly forming, for the courage to leave the farmstead that had been passed down through generations, leave life-long friendships and their own brothers and sisters. All this not for their own gain and future, for my dad was already fifty-one, but to give me and my children the life, the opportunities, the freedom and the peace that they would be losing in Germany.”

I sincerely hope that this suffering endured by the murdering of more than 6 million Jews, incalculable suffering by so many German citizens, more than 405,000 American soldiers died because of the horrific authoritarian rule of one man, will never be visited on our country and that we will never have to flee from our homes, farms and ranches like my grandparents did.