I know it’s old news at this point and also lost in a sea of other horrible world events but I didn’t want November to end without taking a moment to fully absorb Donald Trump’s smear of Veteran’s Day. The Donald spoke to a crowd of adoring fans and in interviews with words he cribbed from Adolph Hitler himself, of ambitious plans to “build camps,” to deal with the immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Maybe we are so complacent with his obnoxious bluster that we should let it go, but on behalf of thousands of American GI’s in the 42nd Rainbow Division who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, I want a word with you Trump supporters. I want to know who’s side you’re on.
Maybe you were in the crowd in Claremont, New Hampshire when he talked of plans to “root out” the left wing “vermin,” who he contend are more a danger to this country than our foreign adversaries. Maybe you got so excited you indulged in a few rounds of “lock them up!” Lock up who? Me? Your neighbor? The Librarian or the volunteer Election Poll worker? Who cares! It doesn’t really matter who when the cruelty is the point. At some point “lock them up” may mean you too, if you are ever caught not applauding the Donald loud and long enough, but let’s save that thought for later. For now let’s talk about camps.
While in Munich a few months ago, my husband and I took a day trip to the Dachau concentration camp. As I learned from Jamie, our amazing Irish tour guide, Dachau was the very first concentration camp, a sort of model where SS guards were trained before being stationed at the other camps. It was built quickly, mere months after the 1932 election and was filled at first with Hitler’s political opponents, journalists and other “criminals” and “vermin.” Everyone was a “criminal” if they didn’t like der Füher, a policy that the thin-skinned Trump seemingly approves. Later, when the Nazi’s changed laws to enshrine racial discrimination, the camp filled with Jews, Roma, homosexuals, immigrants and more “undesirable” people.
It was a “work” camp meaning people were worked to near death here then sent elsewhere to be gassed. But it was also a testing ground for the different ovens that would be needed to deal with all those corpses. Our tour guide told of the letters found at Dachau from numerous German companies trying to outbid the others with their high heat capacity and efficient body to ash ratios. It was numbing, this bureaucratic number crunching of murder.
We walked Dachau with lead weights in our heart and very little to say. Words can be useless sometimes. I asked Jamie how often Holocaust deniers show up on a tour and he admitted with a sigh that more were showing up lately, challenging him to a fight, saying none of it was true. Most, he said, were drunk. They refused to believe the photos and the records and the invoices from the oven builders. They looked at the the cells and the ash pit mass graves and saw nothing. They had done their “own internet research.” They had their own version of the truth.
The truth I want Trump supporters to see, something surely we can all, as Americans, agree upon, is the plaque outside the gate, next to that cruel joke in wrought iron that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei,” (work will set you free). There you’ll find a plaque dedicated to 42nd Rainbow Division, the American Infantry troop who liberated Dachau in 1945.
As a GI, my grandpa Bud saw his own version of the truth at Dachau, a truth he found too painful to utter out loud, something he refused for years to discuss. Later in life he would recount stories out of that blue, apropos of nothing, like a specter crossing his field of vision and suddenly he’d tell us of a starving man reaching out to grab his hand and cry out “Thank you, America! Thank you.” In a letter home to my Grandmother he didn’t go into detail but wrote “I don’t know as I’ll ever understand what happened here but I do know this; those Nazis got what was coming to them and more.“
Perhaps Trump isn’t intelligent enough to realize what an affront it is, on Veterans Day of all days, to do some Hitler cosplaying. We know from his former Chief of Staff John Kelly that then President Trump stood bored and bewildered at Arlington Cemetery, muttering that he just “didn’t get it,” and couldn’t understand “what was in it for them.” From other in his administration we now know he avoided Veteran cemeteries because they were “filled with losers.”
Like the drunks who challenge Dachau tour guides to fights, Trump is clearly beyond redemption. But Trump fans, you who so loudly claim to “support the troops”, it’s time to pick a side; are you with the 42nd Rainbow Division and all the other US Veterans who stopped fascism in its tracks and dismantled a camp of horror, or are you with the dictator wanna-be who dreams of building them? Do you want to honor a moment, perhaps all too brief, when America was truly the good guys on the world stage or are you going to do “your own research?” Are you going to let a thin-skinned chicken hawk with “bone spurs” convince you that your neighbors are vermin and Veterans are losers, or can you do your soul a favor and say “enough of that nonsense, Donald.”
The election is less than a year away. Not a lot of time Trump voters, to decide.