On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler’s long-desired invasion of the Soviet Union, the German high command issued a chilling edict to the Axis armies waiting for their marching orders, setting the tone for one of the most horrific and prolonged episodes of mass barbarity ever recorded.
“This will be a war of annihilation,” said the German Army chief of staff, General Franz Halder, relaying the wishes of his Führer. “Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.”
Beyond the scope of Hitler’s four million-man operation spanning a front line some 1,200 miles from Finland to the Black Sea, it was the viciousness, indeed the racial hatred, that underpinned the assault on the detested Slavs, Bolsheviks, and, of course, Jews, that made this crime and others of Hitler and his Nazi hordes so unique in the annals of warfare.
Barbarossa was the ultimate expression of Hitler’s megalomaniacal zeal to eradicate tens of millions of those whom he considered unworthy of sharing the same continent with his master race. The orgy of mass murder his loyal soldiers inflicted upon the people of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States was the equivalent of over six 9/11s each day, every day, for over 1,400 days. The 27 million dead would be added to the tally of millions more murdered Poles, Greeks, French, Dutch, Belgian, Danes, British and British Commonwealthers, Americans, Norwegians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and others, to the point where Adolf Hitler, in his hate-filled descent into bona fide madness, could claim direct responsibility for the deaths of over 36 million people. This does not even include Axis dead.
This is the man to whom a desperate Democrat Party is once again shamelessly trying to link their GOP opponent, Donald Trump. Such lack of shame in making so ludicrous an analogy actually beggars the mind. More so when you consider how many Americans on the left blindly accept this comparison as even remotely valid. As such, although not surprisingly, Trump has been the target of three assassination attempts due to such demonization. After all, when you draw a nexus between him and the architect of Barbarossa, The Holocaust, and other atrocities, it is easy to see how not just the mentally unstable, but even many otherwise normal Americans fearing for their nation’s future can want the man dead. In fact, almost one-third of Democrats surveyed expressed disappointment that Trump was not felled by the bullet that took the life of an innocent father of two. That is self-evidently disturbing.
But who is Donald Trump really, when you strip away the bizarre, visceral hatred for the man? As it turns out, he was a politician who was already President for 1,447 days. And the nation survived with its bedrock civil liberties well intact while the world was at relative peace. This was a man who firmly supported the Jewish state of Israel, and was, in fact, the only President in my adult lifetime to refrain from starting yet another ill-conceived war.
Indeed, the only atrocities I ever saw him commit while in office were his hairdo, fast food diet, and sometimes undisciplined tongue. And, yes, he should have been more forceful in his words to try and stem a four-hour riot on Capitol Hill.
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With that said, I have often wondered if those who somehow compare Donald Trump (or anyone really) to Hitler have ever even heard of such nightmarish places as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, Sobibor, or Dachau. And these infamous death factories, run with the Nazis’ knack for dispassionate efficiency, are just a handful of the over 6,000 concentration camps set up throughout Germany and the conquered territories from 1933-1945. And the millions of innocents murdered in these grisly places do not even include the inhumane POW camps into which millions of Red Army prisoners were dumped and condemned to die of starvation, summary execution, torture, and disease.
As just one example of the atrocities about which I’ll guarantee you the “Trump is Hitler” crew are unaware, consider Babi Yar. In September 1941 as the Wehrmacht moved through the Ukraine, Hitler’s roving SS assassins called the Einsatzgruppen, along with elements of the regular German Sixth Army, sent out an order that all Jews in Kyiv were to report for relocation. They were instructed to bring ID, money, and warm clothing. The unsuspecting Ukrainian Jews were ignorant of the Nazis’ rabid anti-Semitism; until the invasion, Stalin had forbidden negative press re: Germany as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact. Some 33,000 showed up and were subsequently ushered to the ravine of Babi Yar. Hitler’s executioners then systematically massacred them all…men, women, children, the latter of whom were often lined up and shot three at a time with one round to save ammunition. It has been said that before there was “Shoah by gas”, there was “Shoah by bullets.” And the Nazis were just getting started. Not only was Hitler fully aware of this and countless other atrocities in his name, he enthusiastically encouraged them.
As for the broader Ukraine, Hitler and his Nazi henchmen vowed to strip “Europe’s breadbasket” of its grain harvest which would be spirited away to the Reich. In what they unashamedly labeled “der Hungerplan,” Hitler gleefully expected that his edict would condemn some 30 million to die of slow starvation. The very well-fed Hermann Göring, echoing his Fuhrer’s sentiments, boasted that the population would have to “eat Cossack saddles!”
Those allowed to live and work the land at the behest of their German overlords would be relegated to slaves, modern helots. It is not difficult to see where Tolkien’s inspiration for his “Lord Of The Rings” series — featuring Sauron’s malice, lust for power, conquest, and drive to inflict suffering upon the people of Middle Earth — originated.
Like many of us in the post-war world, I’d grown up knowing about Hitler and his crimes. But it was not until I began researching my first book that I came to understand just how close to pure evil this man was. Indeed, for Europe, Hitler’s ascent to power, and the unfathomable suffering and devastation he unleashed upon the continent in his six-year rampage of gore, was, quite simply, the worst thing to happen since the Black Death.
Yet, now we must endure the latest round of “Trump is Hitler” from the Left that will try any and every approach to save Kamala Harris’ sinking campaign.
Do such dubious equivalences stem from ignorance? Is it desperation? I don’t know. But I do know this: The more the “H” word is casually bantered about as the go-to analogy for anyone the Left finds disagreeable, the less the actual crimes of Hitler himself are properly remembered. Like his morally anesthetized soldiers, we become inured to them. And that is dangerous. Because, as Mark Steyn said, “When everybody’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.” How, then, will we know if a true successor to the man the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper referred to as “the coarsest, cruelest, least magnanimous conqueror the world has ever known” is among us?
That a president should choose to use his Constitutionally granted authority to secure the border and sit across the table from bad actors who command nuclear arsenals, so as to prevent a Third World War (from which humanity would never recover), while placing U.S. interests above those of the other 192 nations, does not make him the new Führer.
To compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler only serves to shamelessly insult and belittle the memory of the Nazis’ tens of millions of victims. This is a truly grotesque tactic deployed at the eleventh hour to score cheap political points to salvage a campaign that is rapidly sinking under the weight of its own candidate’s incompetence, mendacity, and astounding vacuousness. When this campaign is over, no matter who wins, the Democrats will owe not just Trump, but Hitler’s victims, some still living, an apology.
It is time to banish the “Hitler” analogies from the political landscape once and for all. Otherwise, I fear that, given our lack of understanding of just how horrific the real Hitler was, we may not recognize his true reincarnation when we see him. And like those poor souls of Babi Yar, we won’t come to realize just how mistaken we have been until it is too late.