I want to thank Susan Soule for her thoughtful and incisive letter about how demonization of Jews and Romani people among others helped fuel Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and how we are seeing similar tactics being employed by the Donald Trump campaign and his supporters with their calls to deport immigrants from our country, claiming they are destroying us from within and don’t belong here.
On that note, I would like to add that after Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship in 1933, the Holocaust did not immediately begin. It formally started in 1941. It was preceded by claims that Jews did not belong in Germany, and with calls to deport them. In the following eight years, Hitler and the Nazis engaged in continuously escalating attacks on their targeted groups.
Arriving at the Holocaust required the full dehumanization of Jews and others before mass slaughter came to be not just possible but acceptable to millions of Germans. They first had to numbed to the idea that Jews, the Romani, and others could possibly be fellow citizens and fellow human beings worthy of the same rights and legal protections as ethnic Germans.
That’s how these things work. They don’t go from zero to 100 overnight. It takes time. But left unchecked, 100 is invariably where they arrive. History offers us a clear example. Whether Americans choose to heed it remains to be seen.
— David A. James
Fairbanks
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