By Dorian de Wind
The Moderate Voice
Dorian De Wind
AUSTIN, Texas — “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had…” Trump is reported to have said in a private conversation in the White House, according to a recent article in The Atlantic. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders,” The Atlantic adds.
In July 2021, the Guardian reported on a conversation between Trump and his then Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, in which Trump insisted that “…Hitler did a lot of good things.”
In an October 22 article in the New York Times based on an on-the-record interview with General Kelly by investigative reporter Michael S. Schmidt, Kelly confirmed that Trump spoke positively of Hitler “on more than one occasion.” (Trump spokesperson, Alex Pfeiffer, denies Trump ever said such.)
Some are comparing Sunday night’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden to the February 1939 rally organized by the then-German American Bund, “a pro-Hitler organization.”
A witness to the Nazi atrocities, born and living in the Netherlands during World War II, reacted to some of the revelations in a very personal manner in a New York Times letter to the Editor.
In the letter, Hendrika de Vries* describes how as a little girl, living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, she “personally witnessed Hitler’s fascist thugs break into people’s homes with the goal of exterminating those whom they deemed inferior: Jews, the disabled, the very old or those with special needs, and those who did not obey the dictator and were killed for daring to listen to a foreign radio broadcast or hiding a Jewish child.”
She thanks the “brave young Americans at the end of the war [who] risked their lives to free us from that horrific brutality,” and for her own survival and long life.
But she also expresses feelings of incredulity and dismay.
“I cannot believe that now 80 years later, some of the descendants of those brave young men are willing to elect a man to the presidency who we have been warned by his own generals is a ‘fascist’ who admires Hitler,” she writes, concluding “What will they tell their children and grandchildren?”
De Vries has every reason to express dismay about a man who admires Hitler, a man who wishes his generals were more like Hitler’s generals.
For it is one of those generals, totally loyal to the Führer and blindly following his orders, who was directly responsible for the deportation of 110,000 Dutch Jews — 75 percent of the entire Dutch Jewish population at the time — to Nazi concentration camps. Only approximately 5,000 returned home alive after the war.
That general, SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei, Johann Baptist Albin Rauter, was the highest security and police officer in the occupied Netherlands, reporting directly to another loyal Nazi, Hitler’s SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the man entrusted by Hitler to implement the “Final Solution.”
Rauter, a fierce antisemite responsible for many other atrocities and crimes against humanity during his reign of terror in the Netherlands, was convicted for his crimes after World War II and executed by firing squad.
The Dutch web site “Beladen Geschiedenis** Apeldoorn” writes that Rauter showed no remorse. “During his execution he shouts ‘Deutschland,’ pulls off the blindfold and unexpectedly gives the command ‘Fire!’”
Traut indeed represents “the kind of generals that Hitler had…People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders…”
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Hendrika de Vries, now living in the U.S., is the author of When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew, a memoir about her childhood in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam where she witnessed her father’s deportation to a POW camp in Germany, and watched “as freedoms formerly taken for granted are eroded with escalating brutality by men with swastika armbands who aim to exterminate those they deem ‘inferior’ and those who do not obey.”
In WE Magazine for Women, she wrote ”…after seeing torch-bearing Neo-Nazis carrying swastikas in Charlottsville, Virginia…and witnessing the current resurgence of hatred, prejudice, and attacks on women’s rights, I realize that those of us who have experienced the swift erosion of freedom and the brutality of Nazi tyranny have an obligation to future generations to share our stories.
** English: “History Loaded with Emotion.” Apeldoorn is a city in the Netherlands
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Dorian de Wind, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, is military affairs correspondent for The Moderate Voice, with which San Diego Jewish World trades stories under auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.