Back in the early 1950s, our family lived in Heidelberg, Germany, where my father, an Army officer, was stationed. Because Dad was a reserve officer who had been recalled to active duty, the Army didn’t include his family in this move to Germany. But Dad decided he wanted his family with him. He booked us on the Holland-American Line’s New Amsterdam, covering our travel expenses himself. We also couldn’t live in Army housing or attend Army schools, so we lived “on the economy” in a small, bare-bones apartment and attended German schools. It was a wonderful experience, one I’ll always cherish. I especially liked my teacher, Frau Scharmer, a lovely young woman in her 20s who ran her small school in her home, where she taught about 10 little German kids, an English girl, and me. We were all 6 to 8 years old.
Dad occasionally took us on brief trips around Germany. In late 1951 and early 1952, our family vacationed in Bavaria, spending Christmas and the New Year in Berchtesgaden, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and Munich. One day Dad took us to the former Nazi concentration and death camp at Dachau, a horrendous place tucked into a quiet Munich suburb. Although I have only partial memories of our year in Germany, I can recall almost everything about that day at Dachau — the ovens, the so-called barracks, all of it. As you might imagine it was a moving and memorable experience for a youngster, and I thank my dad for allowing me to see first-hand what happens when we reject God and accept evil as the norm. Those who don’t believe Satan exists need only pay a visit to one of these death camps. They will be changed.
Opened by Hitler in 1933, Dachau (above) was the first of the Nazi concentration camps. Although designed as a political camp to remove from society those who opposed the Nazis, it was no summer camp. Of the 160,000 people who were sent to Dachau, over 32,000 were executed or succumbed to disease. Often enough those diseases were the result of medical experimentation. Dachau was also the camp to which Hitler sent the clergy who resisted his unholy regime. Records indicate that 2,720 Catholic and Protestant clergy were imprisoned at Dachau but 95% of these were Catholic priests, and over a third of them died there. If you’re interested, there are two wonderful books about these priests who lived and died at Dachau. Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau, written by Fr. Jean Bernard, tells the author’s story of his own experience as a priest at Dachau. Another book worth reading, The Priest Barracks: Dachau 1938 - 1945, by Guillaume Zeller, offers more complete coverage of life and death at Dachau, particularly among those Catholic priests imprisoned there.
A few years ago, in a conversation with a Jewish friend, he remarked how thankful he was that nothing like the Holocaust could ever happen again. I, of course, disagreed and told him it has already happened many times, and continues to happen today. Jews might not be the target, but the methods and results are identical. The communists of the former Soviet Union created the gulags to destroy those who resisted communist rule. They imprisoned and executed Christians, Jews, Muslims, anyone who placed God above the state. Millions died. The Chinese Communist Party has done the same for decades and continues to do so today. The Chinese communists’ latest victims are the millions of Uyghurs interred in concentration camps where they work as slave laborers, are tortured and subject to forced sterilization. And don’t forget the Cambodian killing fields, another example of widespread slaughter by the political left. Never forget, Hitler was a socialist, a national socialist, but a socialist nonetheless. In truth, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would have disagreed on very little. Each was a mass murdering materialist, a psychopathic egoist who rejected the idea of a loving God who cares for those He created. Each had replaced God with himself, the embodiment of the state.
The reality is that socialists, once they obtain power, cannot accept resistance to their policies. At first they stigmatize those who disagree accusing them of any number of secular sins. With the media in their pocket, this becomes much easier. If you disagree, you must be racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or fascist, or a religious zealot, worthy only of disdain and of social and political cancelation. This, of course, is never enough because those who desire freedom just won’t shut up. The next step, then, is to criminalize politically incorrect language as “hate speech” so the offenders can be fined or imprisoned. Justice, as exercised by those in power, then becomes the means to ignore the real crimes of supporters — e.g., BLM, Antifa, and all the rest — and punish the non-crimes of opponents. Eventually, because the desire and cry for freedom cannot be silenced, the ideologues resort to “re-education” camps where their opponents can be permanently silenced.
Years ago a Jewish friend gave me, whom he considered (undeservedly) a righteous Gentle, one of several armbands that his uncle had given him. His uncle, who had no other family, had managed to survive the camp at Sachsenhausen. Framed, the armband hangs on the wall of my office where I see it every day.
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