“Camp Auschwitz” was among the slogans thugs displayed upon attacking the Capitol January 6. Concentration camps are the logical result of a fascistic insurrection. The slogan reminds me: my father, Reuben Berman, was a physician and lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, which ordered him to investigate Dachau in May 1945. The report was classified; he kept a copy and gave it to the Minnesota Historical Society in 1995. I remember that he told me, “The bodies were stacked up like cordwood. Don’t tell me the Holocaust did not happen. I was there; I saw it.”
NPR reported that the United States employed Dachau physicians to help with a torture program. Why did we bother fighting World War II only to adopt fascist techniques?
In 1923 the Nazis attempted a coup, the Munich Putsch; it failed. In 1933 Hitler became chancellor. Failed coups, like the one January 6, may result in successful coups. The attack on the Capitol reminds me of the Reichstag fire, which destroyed the German parliament in 1933: arson attributed to one communist. Now scholars believe it was Nazi sabotage. Fascists do not like democracy.
Some people claim, baselessly, that Antifa staged the violence at the Capitol. At age 8, the same time my father was investigating Dachau, I attended an antifascist demonstration in Minneapolis: VE Day. My mother took her four children downtown on the streetcar; the whole town was there, cheering ecstatically.
President Trump encouraged the insurrection. He and everybody involved must be held accountable.
Elizabeth B. Appelbaum, Ph.D.
Overland Park KS
