If you listen to the current President of the United States of America, the Press is the enemy of the people, spreading “fake news”. That does not surprise me any more. But I learned early on how that plays out. I grew up in Nazi Germany. When the National Socialists took over the government in 1933, the first thing they did was to shut down all opposition papers to prevent them from spreading “Jewish lies”.
Beginning in January of 1945, however, three months before the end of the war in Europe, the American army reached Aachen and started the first post-war German newspaper.
The Army, incidentally, lost twenty thousand men in the struggle to get there. The absurdity is that those twenty thousand American citizens died fighting an enemy whose enemy was, as we now hear, the same as theirs, the free Press. That of course was a year before the current leader of this Nation was born and, if we stretch it a little, he can be excused for not knowing that in those days the American military administration was so old-fashioned that they actually thought the re-establishment of a free press was vital to the reeducation of us Germans.
But wait! I am both, one of those reeducated Germans as well as an American citizen. I am confused now. Which is the America we are making great again?
© 2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman
It is not in a valley. It is on a hillside. But as cemeteries go the Park has one overriding advantage: it is close to my home. Within walking distance actually, yet all the fellows that have come to rest there were brought in by car and a few were carried up on the shoulders of six to eight sturdy sons and grandsons. So far none, I have been assured, availed themselves of the pedestrian access.
In the days when Tsar Peter was ruling Russia and the Great Northern War was raging the invading Swedish forces lived off the land. Russian farmers would prepare for the Swedish soldiers’ raids by stashing away supplies in secret places and then pretending to have nothing. The Swedish soldiers, however, came upon a very simple and effective way to make the farmers give them the key: they took away the children. More recently, the Hitler government rounded up unwanted people. He had them separated into men, women, and children. I think I know what happened to the men and the women. I wish I did not know about the children. But the testimony of SS-Obersturmfuhrer Hafner is on record: “The children were brought in a tractor. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave…” I am glad, though, to know that the surviving guilty members of the Nazi German government were hanged.