“Elon Musk told members of the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party that ‘there's too much focus on past guilt,’ days after he gave what scholars and rights groups said was a Hitlergruß, or Nazi salute,” Russell Contreras recently wrote on Axios.
Musk spoke virtually on a big screen at a January 25 AfD rally. Because he is one of Donald Trump's closest advisors, his appearance seemed to imply that the president was backing the party in next month’s snap elections called after the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition.
Maybe the South African-born Musk, said to be the world’s richest man, doesn't know it, or maybe he wouldn’t care if he did: approximately 250,000 Americans (and more than 7,000 South Africans) died fighting Hitler and his junior partner, Benito Mussolini, in World War II.
The sweep of history is replete with irony. January marked the 80th anniversary of two milestones in the world's bloodiest and destructive conflict: American victory in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps where a million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered simply because they were Jewish.
Between Dec. 16, 1944, and Jan. 25, 1945, U.S. forces fought through bitter cold and snow to halt a massive last-ditch German surprise offensive on the Western Front in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg. Before they were beaten and driven back, the enemy drove a deep bulge in the American lines, hence the battle’s name.
At the same time, our Soviet allies, having pushed the Germans out of the U.S.S.R., were driving deeper into Nazi-held Poland. On Jan. 27, 1945, elements of the Red Army reached Auschwitz.
Recalled Alexander Vorontsov, a camera operator in the Soviet military film crew that recorded the liberation of Auschwitz:
“A ghastly sight arose before our eyes: a vast number of barracks (in Birkenau). ... People lay in bunks inside many of them. … I believe that not even the commanders of our army had any idea of the dimensions of the crime committed in this largest of camps. The memory has stayed with me my whole life long. All of this was the most moving and most terrible thing that I saw and filmed during the war. Time has no sway over these recollections. It has not squeezed all the horrible things I saw and filmed out of my mind.”
Contreras wrote that in his speech, Musk also denounced multiculturalism while “defending Germany's past.” He pointed out that “The comments also follow a series of Nazi-related “jokes” Musk posted on X, which were a series of puns referencing prominent Nazis like chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler.”
I’m 75. Never did I dream that I would live to see news reports of a close advisor to an American president cozying up to a foreign political party whose members trivialize the Holocaust and spout Nazi slogans like Alles für Deutschland (everything for Germany), according to the Anti-Defamation League. The slogan was so popular with Hitler’s Brownshirt militia thugs that they engraved it on their daggers, the ADL said.
Musk isn’t far off the Donald Trump mark. While the new president vows that he hasn’t read Mein Kampf and isn’t up on the history of Nazi Germany, his rhetoric sometimes echoes Hitler's. Trump has said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country;” he has called his opponents “vermin.” Hitler said Jews were poisoning the blood of “Aryan” Germans; he likened Jews to rats.
Participants in Monday’s memorial service at the Auschwitz camp complex, preserved as a museum and memorial, included 86-year-old Tova Friedman from New Jersey. Friedman “was 6 when she was among the 7,000 people liberated on Jan. 27, 1945,” CBS News reported.
CBS said she came “to add her voice to those warning about rising hatred and antisemitism.”
She told an Associated Press reporter, “I realize that we're in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don’t stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction.”
In his Holocaust Remembrance Day posting, Forward Kentucky publisher Bruce Maples echoed the essence of her words: “Today, eighty years later on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we have to stop and remember what happened. We must not turn away, or hide our eyes. We must look at the evil that took place in one of the most educated countries on the earth, and ask ourselves what we would do if we saw it happening again. ‘Never again’ doesn’t have any meaning unless we are willing to be the ones to say ‘No.’”
The service also attracted Scholz and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “Germany had never before sent both of its highest state representatives to the observances before, according to German news agency dpa,” CBS reported. “It is a sign of Germany’s continued commitment to take responsibility for the nation’s crimes, even amid a growing far-right movement that would like to forget them” – a movement now given a big boost by one of the Trumpiest of Trumpers.
Scholz and Steinmeier are members of the German Social Democratic Party. When Hitler took power in 1933, he outlawed all political parties but his. Most members of Germany’s traditional conservative parties went along with Hitler or joined the Nazi party.
When the Social Democrats rebuked Hitler, he had party leaders beaten, tortured, murdered, or thrown into concentration camps. Social Democrats were among the first anti-Nazi Germans penned behind barbed war.
Auschwitz was a complex that consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz I, a concentration camp in the city of Oświęcim; Auschwitz II, known as Auschwitz-Birkenau; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the IG Farben chemical-pharmaceutical company, and other smaller camps.
Melinda and I visited Auschwitz I and Auschwitz Birkenau almost 11 years ago. The sign above the entrance gate to Auschwitz I reads Arbeit Macht Frei. It means “Work will make you free.” We saw the same lie over the gate at the Dachau concentration camp. Near Munich, it opened in 1933.
Displays at Auschwitz include victims’ personal belongings from suitcases, baskets, and shoes to eyeglasses, shaving brushes, and other toiletries. Behind glass, too, is a huge pile of small, empty mental canisters, each marked with a skull-and-crossbones and labeled “Zyklon B” and “GIFTGAS!” Giftgas is “poison gas” in German.
The pile of shoes of the victims; the ruins of the crematoria; cans of Zyklon B; the memorial at the end of the tracks into Auschwitz.
“The extermination procedure in the gas chambers” is on the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum website. It tells how Zyklon B killed:
SS men escorted the men, women, and children selected for death to the gas chambers – initially to the gas chamber in crematorium I and “bunkers” 1 and 2, and, from the spring of 1943, to the gas chambers in crematoria II, III, IV, and V.
Trucks carried those too infirm to walk, and the rest marched. These people had to disrobe before entering the gas chambers. In crematorium I, they undressed either in the yard (surrounded by a wall) or in the antechamber. Wooden barracks were erected for this purpose at bunkers 1 and 2. There were special undressing rooms at crematoria II-V.
When large numbers of transports were arriving in 1944, the people assigned to death in the gas chamber in crematorium V also disrobed in the open air. After the Sonderkommando was quartered in the undressing room in crematorium IV, the people sent to die there undressed in a specially constructed barracks.
The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them. They were told that they were being sent to the camp, but that they first had to undergo disinfection and bathe. After the victims undressed, they were taken into the gas chamber, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.
After they were killed, Sonderkommando prisoners dragged the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces. (Until September 1942, some of the corpses were buried in mass graves; these corpses were burned from September to November 1942.)
Bones that did not burn completely were ground to powder with pestles and then dumped, along with the ashes, in the rivers Soła and Vistula and in nearby ponds, or strewn in the fields as fertilizer, or used as landfill on uneven ground and in marshes.
Freddie Clayton of NBC News quoted Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims, in a post on X: “The remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society. Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.”
And of the United States.
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