"Band of Brothers" Private David Webster confronts a German baker in a bakery where Webster has arrived with his compatriots to seize bread they intend to feed to the newly discovered concentration camp prisoners--today we would call them "detainees"--and the baker protests that he is and never has been a Nazi. "Nicht Nazi!" the baker yowls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7b0ZX61DLA
"Nicht Nazi?" Webster repeats, incredulously. "You are trying to say you never smelled the fucking stench?"
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| Deportees, Detainees, Doomed |
What this all about, of course, is the complicity of the townsfolk, who had to know about the concentration camp within sniffing distance of their lovely homes, bakeries, wine shops. The American troops are thunderstruck by what they discover in the camps--they called them concentration camps--today we would call them "detention camps."
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| Nice People (note the flag) |
This depiction is accurate. American troops capturing SS officers and troops at concentration camps, seeing the walking dead prisoners, the cattle cars brimming with bodies, so the Americans lined up the SS guards against walls and shot them, or hanged them in front of the prisoners.
American soldiers, having seen plenty of horrors on the battlefield, still had the capacity to react to the horror of seeing people reduced to cattle, people who did not even speak their language, but who were human or who showed the sorry remnants of humanity, and the Americans were outraged.
American soldiers could never look again at those German villagers and see them as anything other than accomplices, silent, passive accomplices, but accomplices nevertheless.
In "Band of Brothers," this is economically portrayed in the nodding relationship Captain Nixon has with the wife of a German colonel, whom he firsts encounters when he breaks into her home looking for whiskey and she appears before him, folding her arms and silently rebuking him for being a common thief, a marauder-- and he feels enough shame to simply slink away. But the next time he sees her is when she is ushered into the concentration camp just outside the village and she is forced to carry bodies of dead prisoners to burial sites; then the roles are reversed--it is she who is humiliated and exposed as a criminal, and her crime is not simple breaking and entering but indifference to murder.
If you walk through Amsterdam, around the corner from the "Anne Frank" house, there is a canal lined on either side by lovely, neat row houses and across from those houses, on the far side of the canal, are individual metal plaques engraved with the names of the people who lived in those townhouses, and their ages when the Nazis dragged them off, and which concentration camps they died in: Peter DeVries, age 7, Anna DeVries, 32, Sobibor concentration camp.
The Dutch handed over 75% Dutch Jews to the SS and they all died in concentration camps, the highest percentage of any European nation.
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| Anne Frank |
The Dutch were tidy, well behaved, decorous and yet, in that lovely land of beautiful, blonde people, something really ghastly happened.
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| American Citizens Japanese Extraction 1942 |
During the Deliberative session in Hampton when the warrant article (#38: instructing the Hampton Police to sign no contract with ICE) was discussed, and one speaker spoke of Renee Goodman and Alex Pretti, dead at the hands of ICE, a well scrubbed couple, looking to be about seventy or eighty years old (old enough to remember World War II and the Holocaust) were visibly upset and they got up from their front row seats and hurried out of the gymnasium, in mute protest to the unseemly mention of murder and mayhem.
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| Worst of the Worst? |
Others, who shared their views stood up to speak, to protest that those who spoke of ICE and Minnesota were "politicizing" our Deliberative Session, our warrant articles and our civil, polite, orderly town proceedings by bringing up ICE.
As if the most political police force we have ever seen in the United States is not political.
The image of Anne Frank, whose crimes were: 1/ Being an illegal immigrant 2/ Being Jewish may seem to be a long stretch from Amsterdam to Hampton, but it could hardly be more relevant.
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| Not Political, Nicht Nazi |
Comfortable, proper, quiet, polite Dutch families stood by silently, averted their eyes, ignored the stench, as 75% of their Jewish neighbors were rounded up and sent off.
The crime of silent complicity is what those Dutch were guilty of, just like that German baker, and all the townsfolk of that German town. The American soldiers rubbed the clean German noses in it and made the townspeople line up and walk through that concentration camp.
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| Is Nice Enough? |
And now we have ICE scouring the country, looking for empty warehouses to serve as "detention centers"--oh, the euphemism!--or spare jails (in Rockingham County, NH) to set up the 21st century version.
Of course, these centers are not Bergen-Belson, Dachau, or Auschwitz--they are not charnel houses, but they look enough like it to warrant comparison: Big places for lots of people grabbed up arbitrarily on Kavanaugh stops (i.e. they spoke Spanish and looked Hispanic) and kidnapped, transported to these warehouses of humanity.
But we do not want to politicize the discussion. MAGA is not political; it is aspirational.
We are not Germans or Dutch, after all.
We are Americans.
