By Dorian de Wind
Moderate voice

AUSTIN, Texas – “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had…” Trump allegedly said in a private conversation at the White House, according to a recent article in Atlantic. “People who were totally loyal to him, who follow orders,” said The Atlantic add.

In July 2021, Tutor 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 article dated October 22 in New York Times Based on a taped interview with General Kelly by investigative reporter Michael S. Schmidt, Kelly confirmed that Trump had spoken positively about Hitler “multiple times”. (Trump spokesman Alex Pfeiffer denies Trump ever said such a thing.)

Some are comparing Trump’s Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden to the February 1939 rally organized by the then-German American Bund, “a pro-Hitler organization.”

A witness to Nazi atrocities, born and living in the Netherlands during World War II, reacted to some of the revelations in a very personal way, 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 “witnessed first-hand Hitler’s fascist thugs breaking into people’s homes to exterminate those they considered inferior: the Jews, the disabled, the very old or those with special needs and those who disobeyed 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 since the end of the war (who) risked their lives to free us from that horrific brutality” and her own survival and long life.

But she also expresses feelings of disbelief and dismay.

“I can’t believe that 80 years later some of the descendants of those brave young men are willing to elect a man to the presidency who his generals warned us was a Hitler-admiring ‘fascist,'” she writes . concluding “What will they tell their children and grandchildren?”

De Vries has every reason to express dismay at a man who admires Hitler, a man who wishes his generals were more like Hitler’s generals.

For it was 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 about 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 Nazi loyalist, Hitler’s SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the man entrusted by Hitler to implement the “Final Solution.”

Rauter, a virulent anti-Semite responsible for many other atrocities and crimes against humanity during his reign of terror in the Netherlands, was convicted of his crimes after World War II and executed by firing squad.

The Dutch website “Beladen Geschiedenis** Apeldoorn” writes that Rauter showed no remorse. “During his execution, he shouts ‘Deutschland’, removes his tie, and unexpectedly gives the command ‘Fire!'”

Traut really represents “the kind of generals that Hitler had…people who were totally loyal to him, who follow orders…”

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Hendrika de Vries, who now lives in the US, is the author When a toy dog ​​became a wolf and the moon broke the resorta memoir of her childhood in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, where she witnessed her father’s deportation to a German prison camp and watched “as previously held freedoms are eroded by increasing brutality by men with swastikas, who they seek to exterminate those they consider. “inferior” and the disobedient.”

In WE Magazine for Women, she wrote “…after seeing torch-bearing neo-Nazis carrying swastikas in Charlottesville, Virginia…and witnessing the current resurgence of hatred, prejudice and attacks on women’s rights, I realize that those of us who experienced the rapid erosion of freedom and the brutality of Nazi tyranny have an obligation to future generations to share our stories.

** English: “History charged with emotion.” Apeldoorn is a city in the Netherlands

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Dorian de Wind, a retired US Air Force officer, is a military affairs correspondent moderate voice, with which San Diego Jewish World trade stories under the auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.