My parents grew up in Nazi Germany.

[BlueMTexpat]

60. Thank you for your thoughtful essay!

Having just recently returned from a trip to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, & Lithuania) and Poland, I am so heartened and impressed by the courage and endurance of those peoples, who were all invaded and occupied by various regimes throughout their history and who have accomplished so much in their countries since 1991. We hve been remiss in not emulating them - certainly we who are "white" US citizens have had much better beginnings than they.

We in the US - other than our fellow Native American citzens - never had the experience of invasion and occupation in our comparatively MUCH shorter history, once our country won its 18th century war against the British. We had our heart-wrenching "civil" war that may have legally emancipated oue enslaved population. But the DNA of racism (and mysogyny) Has been in our culture from the beginning, despite our Founders' statements to the contrary. As can be seen in so many ways, even today in the US.

On the second to last day of our tour, we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. https://www.auschwitz.org/en/

Auschwitz-Birkenau is probably the best preserved site of the horrors and atrocities that human beings inflicted on other human beings simply because they were deemed by the Nazi Reich to be members of specific "target" groups: Jews; Roma (gypsies); people with mental and/or physical defects; homosexuals; and Jehovah's Witnesses. But these groups were also joined by others who were NOT members of these target groups simply because those others either were caught assisting target group members (or their children) to escape or because they spoke out against the Nazi authorities for what they saw happening.

I already knew quite a lot about this history from the last international claims project I worked with before my official retirement in 2007, having met some of the people in person who had risked their lives at the time (without being caught) and whose contributions have been recognized because their names are included among the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous.html

But it was also disheartening to realize that so many people in the USA either never learned about this history or never cared to learn. Of course, many of these same people care little about our own US history as well, except for the "Rah, rah" bit.

Like you, I read Shirer, specifically his "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," as soon as I could get my hands on a copy in the 1960s. I was born during WWII (my father was in the US Navy in the South Pacific when I was born) and I wanted to learn as much as I could about what had happened in Europe because we literally did not know much then about the extent of the horrors.

We have learned so MUCH more since then, especially since the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact when more documents and witnesses have become available.

For us even to have as a PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE (let alone as an ex-President) who openly states his admiration of Hitler and his Nazi Reich and for ANY of our fellow citizens to CONSIDER voting for him, is literally something that is incomprehensible to the thinking world.

We know his track record; we know what he plans to do; we know what his oligarchic friends in the US and abroad want him to do.

IT MUST NOT HAPPEN.

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For reference: I mailed my absentee ballot (straight BLUE ticket for all partisan races) to the US before leaving for this trip and received confirmation from the Maryland State Board of Elections that my ballot has been received and will be counted.