Next week I am flying to Germany to join my best friend Cliff on a thousand-mile tour of Nazi Concentration Camps. We have visited other concentration camps together in 2017, 2019 and 2020: Buchenwald, Dachau, and the first concentration camp opened in the state of Hesse in February1933.
We also visited Nuremberg in 2020, the site of the rallies that were central to Hitler's power.
In July we will visit Flossenburg, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt. We chose these because Cliff had never been Auschwitz, I had never been to Flossenberg and neither of us have been to Theresienstadt.
Auschwitz is the largest and worst of the camps. A million Jews died Auschwitz, but by the time the camp was in operation, three million Jews had already been murdered. They were shot by tens of thousands of German soldiers, German police, and by police and volunteers in conquered countries.
Flossenburg is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred by the Nazis just before the war ended. One of the worst Trump toadies wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer in 2011. Eric Metaxas could write about a martyr and then praise Trump.
Thereseienstadt in the Czech Republic was the "show camp" for the Nazis early in the war. It was a place they took the Red Cross to show them the camps were not as bad as the rumors. It was also the camp where Jews who were confessing Christians were sent. Churches in Germany stood aside and let their members who had any Jewish heritage be murdered.
Bruder Timotheus and Kanaan
Cliff was Sergeant Cliff Almes in the1970s in Cold War Germany where we were roommates. After leaving the U.S. military he became Bruder Timotheus at the Land of Kanaan in Darmstadt. Kanaan was founded in 1947 by two women who believed Germany must repent for the Holocaust.
Before 2017, I had never been to a Holocaust museum or memorial or a concentration camp. But when a racist President put the head breitbart.com in the White House, I knew I had to get connected to my genetic heritage. Steve Bannon gave white supremacists and neo-Nazis a place to promote hate on breitbart.com
In August 2017, Nazis were "fine people" according to the President and I needed to learn more about the hateful people who are his base of support.
Germany was a civilized, if impoverished, country in 1932. By 1945, the country was bombed, invaded and defeated. The Nazis killed millions of innocent people and left their own country a smoldering ruin. America was the leading democracy in the world in 2016, we are now slowly sinking into tyranny while Republicans cheer.
I am going to concentration camps to see just how bad it can get if a tyrant rips away American democracy.
