On Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact agreeing not take any military action against each other for 10 years. On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began.
Inconceivable evil would follow.
“The Holocaust Explained” references The Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority telling that, in January 1939, Nazi Reinhard Heydrich was ordered to find a solution to “the Jewish question by means of emigration or evacuation the most convenient way possible.”
This led to the Final Solution.
The Final Solution would be sought at the 1942 Wannsee Conference (Berlin) attended by 15 upper-crust men. They were a mix of very educated lawyers and many holding doctorate degrees “from leading German universities.” One prominent attendee was Lt. Col. Adolph Eichmann.
Adolph Hitler’s policies were to be implemented; policies designed to rid the “German Sphere of Influence” (five countries) of Jews. The social cleansing also called for murdering Polish people, about 200,000; the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The Nazi government considered the victims as subhuman and not fit for survival. The men estimated there were about 12 million Jews, alone, to be evacuated, or emigrated. Those were sweetened words meaning “exterminated.”
Men, women, children, babies — it didn’t matter. Bodies were dumped into mass graves, alive or not. Being alive didn’t matter because German soldiers would stand above open pits of bodies and shoot them.
Europe was to be a “Jew-free” society. The eerily superior message of the meeting was, “We control events better when we control the opinion.”
The movie “Conspiracy” documents the Wannsee Conference very chillingly. This film was able to authenticate pure evil because of the U.S. Army’s 1947 finding of the Wannsee Conference’s (meeting) minutes in the archives of the German Foreign Office; the only surviving record.
The United Holocaust Museum states there were 40,000 camps established between 1933 and 1945. There were incarceration camps for purposes of forced, hard labor where starving skeletal men were literally worked to death.
The largest Nazi concentration camp was Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz II and Auschwitz III followed; all in Southern Poland. History.com reports it was originally a detention camp for political prisoners but evolved into a death camp to exterminate Jewish people and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state. This same camp was the location of the barbarism of Josef Mengele, who used prisoners for unthinkable, outrageous atrocities under the guise of medical experiments.
Another prominent documentation of the unabashed cruelty of Nazis is the New York Times’ reference to the “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” that “was finally finished and restored in 2014 by the Imperial War Museums, in Britain…”
All of the aforementioned is expounded with a purpose: to show what pure barbarism is and the evil of those who performed it: Nazis.
The word Nazi is as vulgar and offensive to many people as much as the words “racist” and the “N” word. They’re all tossed around so freely. The unreserved misuse is flippant and churlish.
The exploitation of such powerful and offensive words is perilous.
The left, high-profile Democrats and many other anti-Trumpers, are calling Republicans, conservatives and, especially Donald Trump, Nazis. It’s a loutish word tossed around, far too often carelessly, lightly and, frankly, ignorantly.
The most recent coarse word-of-the-day is “treason.” Merriam-Webster’s definition of treason is: “the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign’s family.”
The new treason topic arises from the recent Trump-Putin meeting. The same critics, who are shouting treason with the allegation that Trump sold the U.S. out to Russia, are coincidently whining that they do not know what Trump said to Putin.
So which is it?
The real Nazis demanded that everyone they deemed deplorable be exterminated so their sphere could be cleansed.
Sound familiar? Selecting a body of people and labeling them as deplorable should get your attention. The casualness and the lazy-mindedness of spewing convenient words demean the whole intensity of their true definitions.
In the end, reality and evil are cheapened.
Betty Arenson is a Valencia resident. “Right Here, Right Now” appears Saturdays and rotates among several local Republicans.
