10 Sobering Facts From 1930s Germany

1. At the time of the rise of Nazi power, Germany had a democratic constitution.

2. When Hitler first rose to national prominence, he was not viewed as extremist.

3. Hitler's feigned 'warm personality' charmed the German electorate.

4. Hitler promised hope and change during troubled economic times.

5. When the German electorate allowed gun registration, they did so with no inkling that in time their gun registration records would aid the Nazis in confiscating their firearms.

6. The government that placed Hitler in power was duly elected by the German people according to the provisions of their democratic constitution.

7. As early as 1931, a young man across the channel in Great Britain by the name of Winston Churchill began to warn Britons about Adolf Hitler.

8. Voices among the German people began to rise up in opposition to Hitler, only to find themselves arrested and jailed. One of these was a Lutheran minister by the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was later executed for helping an insurgent movement plan the assassination of Adolf Hitler.

9. Winston Churchill stepped up his rhetoric against Hitler, warning that unless Britain and the rest of Europe stopped him, there would be a heavy price to pay later.

10. By the time Hitler began the systematic elimination ('extermination') of Jews, Catholics, political dissidents, and others deemed a threat to his government, the citizens had already been rendered powerless through disarmament and intimidation.

A Question to Ponder: At what point above could the German citizens have resisted their elected government and prevented Hitler from advancing to the Holocaust?

Point to ponder: So far in the history of the world, no nation has ever implemented registration of firearms and failed to eventually proceed to confiscation.

Anne Frank, Desecrated

By now a large part of the world, particularly the West, knows about the young Jewish girl whose family fled Nazi Germany for Holland, only to find that the country had the highest rate of police compliance in turning Jews over to the Nazis.

And thus, Anne Frank wound up in a Nazi concentration camp, where she lost her life at the mere age of 14, her battered corpse disposed in a mass grave where human beings were treated on a par equalling that of trash or animal waste.

The original play about Frank, written by Meyer Levin, was based upon Anne Frank's diary but was rejected by Communist and anti-Jewish producer Lillian Hellman because it was 'too Jewish.'

The play that finally made it to Broadway and was ultimately adapted into a major film complied with Hellman's insistence that Frank's Jewish roots be de-emphasized and that she be 'universalized' into a generic 'everyman.'

That version, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, won a Pulitzer prize.

Curiously, that version never tells us that Frank died anonymously in the camp or that her body was dumped into a mass grave at the hands of barbarians who hated Jews or anyone else who loved freedom.

And that version is also the one that desecrates the heritage and memory of Anne Frank, as Meyer Levin later wrote in his book Obsession.

Marilyn Penn at Political Mavens has done the world a great service in exposing the fraud that Hellman and company unleashed on the world, and thereby preserving the integrity and truth of the real story of Anne Frank.

Penn's excellent essay can be found here.