In the early morning hours of June 10, 1944, four days after the D-Day invasion that marked the onset of the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule, elements of the 2nd SS Panzer Division surrounded the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. In a few hours, hundreds of women and children were herded into the village church and the doors locked. Inside, they could hear the men of the town being machine-gunned, the few survivors finished off with a rifle shot to the head.

Then, the church was set ablaze.

As the building burned, some tried to escape the inferno only to be raked with machine-gun fire. One woman, 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche, crawled out a sacristy window, was shot, but lived — the only survivor.

In a few hours time, a village that had existed for a thousand years was no more. In all, 642 men, women, and children were murdered in Oradour-sur-Glane. The burned-out village was never rebuilt upon the orders of General Charles DeGaulle, its ruins a testament, he said, to the cruelty of the Nazi occupation.

In Charlottesville, Boston, San Francisco, Knoxville, Lexington (maybe), and perhaps a city near you, young men and women are parading in American streets wearing the swastika and other Nazi regalia, giving the straight-armed “Sieg Heil” salute and calling for a return to the halcyon days of the Third Reich, the barbarous regime that was manifested in the atrocity that befell a little French village in 1944 and thousands of other destinations whenever and wherever the Nazi hordes marched.

This being the 21st century, excuses are made and rationalizations suggested to explain this unsettling development. Some say that these ersatz Fascists are disaffected, uneducated white men caught up in the throes of a complex world they don’t understand or that such poisoned minds are perhaps a phenomenon linked to the opioid epidemic prevalent in the United States.

It’s unlikely that any of these “disaffected” souls have read Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Der Führer’s published, fevered musings written in 1925 while he was a political prisoner in Landsberg prison, but they would be thrilled he had them in mind even then: “All great movements are popular movements,” he wrote. “They are the volcanic eruptions of human passion and emotions, stirred into activity by the Ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people.”

Hitler fed on the Germans’ suffering during the Great Depression and their smoldering resentment over the harsh dictates of the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I.

Today’s Nazis are enraged by the relocation of statues of long-dead Confederate generals or racial hatred, or, well, fill in the blank. Whatever the reasons, real or imagined, any time people appear in public wearing Nazi armbands and shouting Nazi slogans – especially in our beloved country – we must be resolved to remind the uninformed about the record. 

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In a world war Nazi Germany started in 1939, 60-80 million people perished, 50-55 million of them civilians. Of that number, 419,400 are American servicemen and women, lying by the thousands in cemeteries in England, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Italy, and Tunisia.

Some, before they died, liberated concentration camps where 5.5-6 million Jews were slaughtered. The word “million” dulls the mind and anesthetizes the senses – every one of these defenseless people had a name, they were someone’s mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife, lover. They were killed hideously and indiscriminately at Auschwitz, Belzec, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Dachau, Theresienstadt, Sobibor, Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen, where 15-year-old Anne Frank, future diarist to the world, and her older sister, Margot, died of typhus.

History knows these horrific details because the Nazis were very efficient killers, they kept meticulous records. One report, an exhibit at the Nuremburg war crimes trial, was written by SS Commander Karl Jager that informed his superiors that from July-November, 1941, precisely 137,346 people, mostly Jews, had been liquidated in Lithuania by the men of the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary death squads that followed close behind the Wehrmacht invasions.

This is the legacy of terror and pure evil glorified by the new Nazis all over the world, and it must be vigorously opposed even at the cost of life and limb (God rest Heather Heyer). Our generation, as those before us that paid a far higher price, must heed the prophetic, impassioned words of the Allies’ chief counsel at the Nuremburg trial, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who said in his opening statement: 




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