To the Editor:
Last night I watched the film, Nuremberg.This morning I woke up haunted.
One might think a movie about an event that happened 80 years ago would feel out-of-date. If you take everything Nazis said about Jews, however, and replace it with the word Immigrants, the movie becomes disturbingly contemporary.
For anyone who doesn’t think Nazis had a detailed playbook for systematically demonizing a vulnerable minority with vicious lies to generate enough fear and loathing to propel them to total power should watch the film. Anyone who doesn’t think Trump Republicans, particularly the authors of Project 2025, are following that exact same Nazi playbook should see the movie.
I don’t know what game Holocaust Deniers are playing. It’s either an infantile willful ignorance to gain attention and make a living manipulating the pitifully gullible to deny fact, or a malevolent intent to resurrect the most heinous evil ever and recreate it
here in America.
What I do know is this: No one who financially profits from espousing Holocaust Denial should ever dine with the President of the United States. They should never be tolerated or excused by rightwing Think Tanks (The Heritage Foundation) advising the current administration. Anyone who thinks Nazis weren’t that bad, or think living under a fascist government won’t be bad at all because they enjoy the cruelty they’re seeing in America today, should watch the movie. No matter how much one believes standing quietly aside while cruelty is institutionalized will keep them safe, history reveals time and again how easily and quickly evil can turn and swallow everyone. When 12 out of 1200 concentration camps were liberated by Allied Forces, American and British film crews documented what they encountered once the gates to unspeakable atrocity were opened. Over 80,00 feet of film exists providing a nauseating, eye-witness account of Nazi depravity. One of the most depressing takes from the movie was
Douglas Kelley’s (the psychiatrist who interviewed Hermann Goring) failure to convince America that Nazi evil was not unique to Germans. All attempts to warn people that such evil can happen anywhere at any time in any country fell on deaf ears. “If you want to know what humans can do, look at what they’ve done” was sadly considered America-bashing back then.
The quote in the movie that haunted me most, however, came from Kelley’s Jewish translator, Howie Triest, when asked how Nazis managed to take control in the first place. “People let it happen. By the time they decided to resist, it was too late.” And thereafter, unfathomable agony and suffering broke out on planet Earth until 57 million people were dead.
Jane Barrett
Potsdam