On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Shenk von Stauffenberg appeared at Hitler’s well-guarded military headquarters in East Prussia. Like all his other outposts, Hitler had named it–appropriately enough–“Wolf’s Lair.”
“Wolf’s Lair”
Stauffenberg entered the large, concrete building while the conference was in session. He placed his yellow briefcase next to Hitler–who was standing with his generals at a heavy oaken table.
Then Stauffenberg excused himself to take an “urgent” phone call.
At 12:42 p.m. on July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb erupted.
But the Third Reich didn’t come to an end–because, as if miraculously, Hitler had survived.
Hitler shows off the site of the explosion
What had happened?
First, the conference location had been changed–from a wooden building to a concrete one. The concrete absorbed much of the blast.
Second, owing to the summer’s heat, Hitler had ordered all the windows–about ten–opened to let in a breeze. This allowed much of the force of the blast to be dispersed.
Third, and perhaps most important: Stauffenberg had carefully placed his briefcase near Hitler, who was standing next to a heavy oaken support of the conference table.
But after Stauffenberg left the room, Colonel Heinz Brandt, who stood next to Hitler, found the briefcase blocking his legs. So he moved it–to the other side of the heavy oaken support.
When the bomb exploded, Hitler was partially shielded from its full blast. Brandt died, as did two other officers and a stenographer.
Not only did Hitler survive, but the plotters failed to seize the key broadcast facilities of the Reich.
This allowed Hitler to make a late-night speech to the nation, revealing the failed plot and assuring Germans that he was alive. And he swore to flush out the “traitorous swine” who had tried to kill him.
Adolf Hitler
Mass arrests quickly followed. Among the first victims discovered and executed was the conspiracy’s leader, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Standing before a makeshift firing squad at midnight, he cried: “Long live our sacred Germany!”
At least 7,000 persons were arrested by the Gestapo–of which 4,980 were executed.
Had the conspiracy succeeded, history would have turned out differently:
- If Germany had surrendered in July or August, 1944, World War II would have ended eight to nine months earlier.
- The Russians–who didn’t reach Germany until April, 1945–could not have occupied the Eastern part of the country.
- This would have prevented many of the future conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union over access to West Berlin and/or West Germany.
-
Untold numbers of Holocaust victims would have survived because the extermination camps would have been shut down.
Thus, history can be altered by the appearance or disappearance of a single individual.
Which brings us back to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump
Since declaring his candidacy for the Presidency on June 16, 2015, Trump has been the first choice among the Republican base.
At first, he was dismissed as a bad joke–by Republican Presidential candidates as well as by Democrats.
Surely voters would reject a bombastic, thrice-married “reality show” host who had filed for corporate bankruptcy four times.
Yet from the outset Trump dominated the field–and a series of Republican debates. The other Republican candidates watched him with envy–and tried to out-do his hate-filled rhetoric and agenda.
But none of them succeeded–and, one after another, they dropped out of the race: Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul.
Eventually, only two were left to deny Trump the Republican nomination–Texas U.S. Senator Rafael “Ted” Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich.
On May 3, 2016, Trump captured 53.3% of the votes in the Indiana primary, compared to 36.7% for Cruz and 7.5% for Kasich.
That night, Cruz bowed out of the race. The next day, so did Kasich–the man who had dared compare Trump to Adolf Hitler.
For conservative columnist David Brooks, a Trump Presidency would be disastrous. On the March 25 edition of the PBS Newshour, he offered this assessment of Trump’s character:
“The odd thing about [Trump’s] whole career and his whole language, his whole world view is there is no room for love in it. You get a sense of a man who received no love, can give no love, so his relationship with women, it has no love in it. It’s trophy.
“And so you really are seeing someone who just has an odd psychology unleavened by kindness and charity, but where it’s all winners and losers, beating and being beat. And that’s part of the authoritarian personality.”
In his bestselling 1973 biography, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, British historian Robert Payne harshly condemned the “Army bomb plot” conspirators who failed to kill Hitler:
“The conspirators died heroically, but they were not heroes. They bungled the most necessary assassination of their time when it was within their power to do the job well….They were amateurs when professionals were needed.”
There is a very real danger that Donald Trump will assume the Presidency–and all the awesome power that goes with that office.
If that happens, future historians–if there are any–may similarly condemn those Americans who stood by like “good Germans”–and allowed their country to fall into the hands of a ruthless tyrant.
.jpg)
.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPope_Francis'_visit_to_the_Philippines&docid=MrlhHX0IDhYhuM&tbnid=wAeMK3JqWfBmtM%3A&w=1297&h=1638&ved=0ahUKEwjmqo7njIvLAhVL6WMKHf_xBUYQxiAIAg&iact=c&ictx=1)
ABC NEWS, ADOLF HITLER, CBS NEWS, CNN, FACEBOOK, FBI, GENOCIDE, HITLER-STALIN NONAGGRESSION PACT, HOLOCAUST, HOLOCAUST MUSEUM, JAMES COMEY, JEWS, JOSEPH STALIN, NATO, NAZI GERMANY, NBC NEWS, POLAND, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TWITTER, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, USA TODAY
GENOCIDE: DO IT, BUT DON’T ADMIT IT
In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 2, 2016 at 1:07 amEverybody, it seems, hates genocide. But not everybody owns up to it.
FBI Director James Comey found this out firsthand.
On April 16, 2015, he published an Opinion piece in The Washington Post, entitled: “Why I Require FBI agents to Visit the Holocaust Museum.”
Comey wants them to see the horrors that result when those who are entrusted with using the law to protect instead turn it into an instrument of evil.
FBI Director James Comey
And he wants agents to “see humanity and what we are capable of.”
“Good people helped murder millions,” he wrote.
“And that’s the most frightening lesson of all–that our very humanity made us capable of, even susceptible to, surrendering our individual moral authority to the group, where it can be hijacked by evil.
“Of being so cowed by those in power. Of convincing ourselves of nearly anything.
“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil.
“They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.”
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
It was these paragraphs that landed Comey in diplomatic hot water.
Click here: Why I require FBI agents to visit the Holocaust Museum – The Washington Post
On April 19–three days after the editorial appeared–Poland’s Foreign Ministry urgently summoned Stephen Mull, the U.S. Ambassador to Warsaw, to “protest and demand an apology.”
The reason: The FBI director had dared to say that Poles were accomplices in the Holocaust!
Poland’s ambassador to the United States said in a statement the remarks were “unacceptable.”
And he added that he had sent a letter to Comey “protesting the falsification of history, especially …accusing Poles of perpetuating crimes which not only they did not commit, but which they themselves were victims of.”
Shortly after Poland’s announcement, Stephen Mull, the U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw, told reporters he would contact the FBI about the situation.
“Suggestions that Poland, or any other country apart from the Nazi Germany was responsible for the Holocaust are wrong, harmful and offensive,” he said, speaking in Polish.
And he emphasized that Comey’s remarks didn’t reflect the views of the Obama administration.
In fact, Comey’s remarks were dead-on accurate.
And Mull’s were a craven act of Political Correctness.
But at least one Polish citizen was not offended by Comey’s editorial.
Jan Grabowski
Jan Grabowski, 50, is a graduate of Warsaw University and is currently a history professor at University of Ottawa. He is also the son of a Holocaust survivor.
He has suffered death threats, is boycotted in the Canadian Polish community where he lives today, and is not always welcome even in his homeland.
But he will not be intimidated from speaking and writing the truth about those in Poland who enthusiastically collaborated with Nazis to slaughter Jews during World War II.
Over the years, he has published several books on this subject. And his latest one is certain to outrage many of his countrymen. His new book, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, was published in October, 2014.
“I tried to understand how only very few of those Jews who decided to hide were able to stay alive until 1945,” said Grabowski in an interview with The Times of Israel.
“The purpose of my research was to discover the condition of the Jews who managed to avoid being sent to death camps and chose to live in hiding. My research brought me to the level of individual cases of people who chose to hide.”
It took Grabowski more than three years to research and write his book. He interviewed Holocaust survivors and local residents, primarily in Poland, Israel and Germany.
“It is more complicated than just blaming the Poles for betraying their Jewish neighbors,” said Grabowski.
“On the one hand there were extraordinarily brave Poles who risked their lives to save Jews, and on the other hand there was no great love between Poles and Jews before World War II.
“During the war these relationships became even more hostile. A large segment of the Polish population was displeased with their neighbors’ help to the Jews during the war, and for many it seemed even as an unpatriotic step.
“Therefore, some segments of the Polish population took an active part in the hunt for the Jews, and that is what the new book deals with.”
Many Poles still refuse to acknowledge the the collaboration of so many of their countrymen with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. It’s a role often played by nations that don’t want to acknowledge their past criminality.
During the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Russian judges representing the Soviet Union successfully lobbied to conceal a vital historical truth.
In late August, 1939, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had negotiated a “non-aggression pact” with Adolf Hitler. That was known.
But a secret protocol of that agreement dictated that Germany could conquer only the western half of Poland. The eastern half of that country would be occupied by the Red Army.
As long as politicians’ fragile egos are at stake, genocide will continue to be a matter of state policy–and a disowned one.
Share this:
Like this: