OKLAHOMA CITY PLUS TEN YEARS – April 20, 2005

In 1945, the last time Adolf Hitler was alive to celebrate his birthday, what was left of the Third Reich was a smoking ruin,

most of it either a battlefield or occupied by British, American, French, and Canadian armies. But in the blitzed remains of the Reichchancellery, Hitler received all of his courtiers for the last time.
As they had every year since the birth of the Reich, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, and the service chiefs paid their homage to Der Fuehrer. Normally, the event was an immense party at the Reichchancellery or Berchtesgaden, and a national holiday throughout Germany.

This time the party took place amid dusty, wrecked buildings, the distant thump of Soviet shellfire, and perfunctory statements of good wishes. Der Fuehrer inspected a group of Hitler Youth, patted their cheeks, and passed out medals. Hitler was last seen on camera patting the cheeks of a Hitler Youth who had earned the Iron Cross for destroying Soviet tanks with a Panzerfaust anti-tank launcher. “No one knew quite what to say,” Albert Speer remarked later.

After the brief ceremonies, Hitler and his entourage descended into the Fuhrer Bunker for yet another exhausting daily conference around the situation map. The news was all bad: the Americans and Soviets had linked up on the Elbe…Vienna had fallen… the British were moving into Bremen and Hamburg…the Battle for Berlin was about to start.

The uniformed flunkies, in their striped pants and dress uniforms, urged Hitler to decamp to the Obersalzberg, as the last road out was about to be cut.

“How can I call upon the troops to undertake the decisive battle for Berlin if at the same moment I withdraw myself to safety?” Hitler asked. He told his staff he intended to stay in Berlin, and shoot himself at the last moment. Nobody was happy. Most of the bigshots kept their mouths shut, but when the meeting was over, they decamped on their own to South Germany or Schleswig-Holstein, hoping to stay one step ahead of the advancing Allied forces.

After that, Hitler had time to examine his birthday presents. One of them was a traditional annual sack of cash “from the troops.” Hitler hefted the sack, and pointed out to his immediate retainers that it didn’t feel as heavy as in previous years.

There was a good reason for that. When Adolf Hitler celebrated his last birthday, his admirers, even among those he led, had grown few. By April 20, 1945, it was plain to every German – indeed every person in the world reached by mass communications – that Adolf Hitler was not fit to lead a road-sweeping team, let alone Europe’s most powerful industrial nation.

His “Thousand-Year Reich” had lasted only 12 years, and had about two weeks to run. He had promised his countrymen a vast empire across Europe and lands in the East. Instead the vast Germanic population of Eastern Europe was a refugee mass, fleeing Soviet armor. He had promised to make Germany the object of world admiration. Instead it was held beneath contempt for its acts of aggression and sadism. He had promised to restore German honor. Instead, he had butchered millions of innocents in unbelievably cruel fashion, which had made Germany into an object of worldwide hatred.

Hitler had promised to enhance German culture. He had done so by burning books, hounding artists into exile, and looting Europe. Germany’s public servants ranked among the world’s greatest thieves, building fortunes on everything from stolen paintings to melted teeth of concentration camp victims.

Germans were slave-holders, too. By law, Alfried Krupp became the greatest slave-holder in history, with hundreds of thousands of sklavenarbeiter building 88 mm guns in his factories, starving in his concentration camps.

Hitler had said, “Give me 10 years and you will not recognize your cities!” That promise, at least, had been kept…Germany’s cities had been blasted to pieces by Allied bombs and artillery. Now the Reich would endure division and foreign occupation.

Worst of all, Hitler’s insane dream of eradicating the Jewish people had gone from being the demagogic ramblings of a beer-hall speaker to a highly-organized and codified national policy. Six million Jews had died ghastly deaths at Hitler’s desire and order, and the human and skeletal remains of the dead and living were now being seen by thousands of invading GIs and Tommies of all ranks – and on every newsreel in the world. It was a legacy of nihilism and butchery, sadism and racism, violence and kleptomania.

It was hard, even on Hitler’s last birthday, to find anything admirable about him or his works.

Which is what makes what happened 10 years ago on April 19 even more painful.

Every schoolboy used to know that April 19 was the day the rebel militia at Concord, Massachusetts, fired the first shot at the British Army, starting the American War of Independence. Between 1995 and 2001, every person in America knew that April 19 was the day that Timothy McVeigh committed what was then the most horrific terrorist attack in American history, the destruction of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The events of September 11, 2001, obscured the pain and suffering of Oklahoma City.

That’s too bad, because Oklahoma City was horrible and painful enough, killing 168 people, including 19 children in the building’s day-care center.

And the date of the bombing was not random. Tim McVeigh blasted the Murrah Building into rubble to avenge the Federal assault on the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993. The attack ended a 51-day standoff, with the deaths of 84 men, women, and children in the compound. Adherents to conspiracy theories noted the coincidence of the dates – April 19 and 20 – and their linkage to both the stand at Concord and Hitler’s birthday.

When McVeigh pulverized that building, he claimed he was doing so because of the Waco debacle. But the federal investigation of McVeigh revealed more unpleasant facts about this unpleasant young man – his adherence to and fascination with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi creed. He had told one of the few women he dated that he believed Hitler had done “a lot of good things” for Germany. There was no second date.

After winning a Bronze Star in the first Persian Gulf War and failing to get into the Special Forces, McVeigh had left the US Army and turned to right-wing politics and militias. He devoured a sick little novel called “The Turner Diaries,” written by one of America’s leading neo-Nazis, the late William Pierce, which described how to blow up federal buildings.

“The Turner Diaries” was written in about 30 days, and the turgid prose shows the result of fast writing and no rewriting. In the novel, Earl Turner and his like-minded neo-Nazis form a revolution against a tyrannical government dominated by evil Jews and their black puppets, climaxing with the hero, Earl Turner, driving a truck loaded with an atomic warhead into the Pentagon. Among its uglier features are white nationalists viciously murdering interracial couples and cannibalism (by the blacks).

McVeigh, inspired by this rhetoric, apparently figured he could, as in the book, inflame the nation against the government by blasting one of its buildings open. The bombing did indeed give more publicity to the “militia” movement at the time, and opened their previously furtive and shadowy activities to greater public attention and scrutiny.

They probably reveled in the attention, but it wasn’t what they wanted – their leaders were revealed to be con men, fakes, flakes, and felons. Most of these “militia” organizations came under public fire for espousing the doctrines McVeigh put into action, and ran for cover. Those that applauded McVeigh’s acts came in for public stoning and investigations.

Eventually, McVeigh got the blue juice. He gave up his appeals, and even heaped scorn on people who suggested that he was a patsy, fall guy, or scapegoat for some other group or a covert government plot. Yes, he’d done it all himself. He had no regrets. And he would die for it, which he did. Sort of like the Fuehrer, I thought.

The militia movement ran into trouble, too. For a while, they were hot stuff – even testifying before federal legislators, filing frivolous lawsuits to harass judges, declaring independence in Texas, and warning members and everyone else that disaster and apocalypse were looming on the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000…unless you bought that particular movement’s “Y2K Survival Pack,” with its load of canned tuna fish and gas masks.

When the new millennium arrived with nary a problem, the militia movement crashed and burned, the only real casualties of Y2K. Adherents from Maine to Manila were annoyed that they had spent their life savings on canned tuna and gas masks, to no purpose. They had been conned, and they were mad as hell.

But at the same time, I wondered how, 50 years after the opening of the concentration camps, 50 years after Hitler had blamed his defeat on his own followers and shot himself, 50 years after Nazism had been revealed to be a kleptomaniac and murderous sham, anyone could still admire Hitler.

The Oklahoma City bombing was the most deadly and obvious example of such admiration. While there were no greater acts of domestic terrorism after Oklahoma City, there were plenty more troubling incidents.

Eric Rudolph, the man who did do it in the Olympic bombing of 1996, was described by his sister in interviews as a rabid anti-Semite and admirer of the Nazi war machine. Buford Furrow, who shot up a Jewish day-care center in Los Angeles, was active in a Nazi movement.

The skinheads who in 1990 pulverized an Ethiopian exchange student to death in Portland, Oregon, had done so pretty much at the behest of neo-Nazi leader Tom Metzger, who communicated his interpretation of Hitler’s views through videotapes and speeches. At the wrongful-death trial of Metzger, the faux Fuehrer denied links to the killing, but was proud to declare adherence to Hitler.

In the last few years, we’ve seen the strange life of “Pontifex Maximus” Matthew Hale, a police officer’s son and classically-trained musician, who ran the “World Church of the Creator” out of his Illinois house, which espoused Hitler’s views on the Jews. When a court copyright case on the name of his church went against Hale, the Pontifex ordered his followers to have the judge whacked. Instead, the followers ratted Hale out to the feds, and the “Pontifex Maximus” is in maximum security for the next 40 years.

I wondered how a man who was intelligent enough to make it through law school, the son of a police officer, could put himself on the side of Hitler.

Finally, my favorite Fascist, David Irving, sue Deborah Lipstadt for libel, saying that Lipstadt naming Irving as a Holocaust denier in her book “Denying the Holocaust,” was defamatory to Irving’s reputation as a historian.

In a spectacular libel trial that pretty much hinged on reports and documents – how historians work rather than how history happened – Irving was proved to be a Nazi admirer and an ideologue dressing himself up as a historian. He proved the defense’s point when he addressed the judge as “Mein Fuhrer.” For that alone, he should have suffered a crushing defeat, but the judge slammed him anyway, saying he perverted facts, twisted them, and was a liar.

Irving’s reputation was wrecked, but like Willie Nelson’s “Highwayman,” he did not die – Deborah Lipstadt told a lecture I attended that despite personal bankruptcy, Irving is zipping around the United States, armed with a toll-free cellphone line, giving lectures on how the Holocaust didn’t happen and what a wonderful fellow Hitler is. The lectures are not well-attended – he spoke to about 40 people and a C-Span camera in an Atlanta diner, for example – but again like Willie Nelson, he’s “On the Road Again.”

Again I was baffled – the court case was pretty savaging to Irving. On numerous occasions, on direct testimony, he had admitted he was wrong about what he’d written about Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, but before the trial was done, he was spouting the same discredited information again, in his closing statement (when he said, “Mein Fuehrer”).

And he’s still going around, spouting the same lies, and adding a few new ones, and still finding ready audiences, willing to pay ready cash for his self-published books and tapes. Good work, if you can get it, I guess.

But the most chilling “commemoration” of Adolf Hitler’s birthday came in 1999, when two high school students in Littleton, Colorado, dressed in black and armed to the teeth, entered Columbine High School after a morning of bowling, and proceeded to gun down their classmates in the school cafeteria.

After an hour of horrific gunfire, they shot themselves, sparing the state of Colorado the expense of an investigation, but leaving enormous questions unanswered.

Among the many attempts to answer those huge questions came indications that the two killers had planned an even more horrific act of mass murder – to destroy the school with explosives, and then drive out in a vehicle configured as a bomb, and blast themselves to infinity amid the rescue workers coming to help the victims.

It would be an act of savagery whose parallels would only have been seen in Hitler’s Third Reich, and sure enough, the two kids were apparently also admirers of Hitler, and had in fact planned their assault on their school, schoolmates, teachers, and permanent record cards to coincide with Adolf’s birthday. Killing a lot of innocent people and themselves seemed an appropriate way to honor Der Fuehrer’s memory.

After reading all this, I found myself wondering…how and why do people – even poorly-educated people – hook into Hitler’s arrant nonsense?

Even poorly-educated people are created, we are told, in God’s Image, in His Mind. How can a God who preaches loving-kindness, justice, and mercy, inculcate people with worship of false gods, sadistic violence, and utter savagery?

Then comes the mystery of how educated people can support Nazism and its rhetoric. Most of the original Nazi writings – Mein Kampf and “The Myth of the 20th Century” and so on – is poorly written and impossible to comprehend. Even the leading Nazis of the time didn’t read it. Hitler said “Myth of the 20th Century” was “an ideological belch.”
The best take on “Mein Kampf” came from a 1927 dinner party for leading Nazis to which Goering and Goebbels were invited. The bigshots chomping on the bratwurst asked Otto Strasser, then a Nazi bigwig, if he had actually read “Mein Kampf.” No, he hadn’t. In fact, none of the diners had waded through the work. They decided to play a game – whoever read the book from cover to cover would be stuck with the dinner tab, and each diner was asked the big question as soon as he arrived.

When Goering showed up, he got the 64,000-Reichmark question, and merely laughed out loud. When Goebbels arrived, he admitted, with some guilt, that he had been unable to get through the book. When the dinner was over, each diner had to pay his own bill. Nobody had read “Mein Kampf.”

Today’s neo-Nazi screeds suffer the same weaknesses – and yes, I’ve read them. Dull prose alternating with hysteria, vulgarities, apocalyptic warnings, and calls for sadistic violence. The more intelligent-sounding neo-Nazis turn themselves into master chemists and physicists to “prove” that the Holocaust didn’t happen. The less intelligent-sounding neo-Nazis spout the dire menace of Communism (long after its expiration date) and how Communism is a Jewish conspiracy (even longer after that expiration date).

Of course, great minds and lesser ones try to answer the question as to why people buy into this garbage, and write books or articles on the subject. For the followers, the answer’s pretty simple: they are already in the garbage.

News stories, books, and articles about the followers of neo-Nazi organizations and rhetoric reveal enormous holes in the characters of these folks, ranging in importance to lengthy records as violent criminals to mundane ones of dysfunctional families, weak education, grinding poverty, and poor job prospects. Joining Nazi organizations, such as they are, transforms criminals and other members of society’s refuse into (at least in their own minds) important storm troopers, vanguards of an elite, defenders of a faith, a force to be reckoned with, which will ultimately re-shape the world.

It certainly beats living with one’s mother, doing casual work, and smoking marijuana all day long. They don’t understand or probably really care about the deeper implications of what they believe. Even when they deny the Holocaust, they are obsessed with it – they enjoy identifying with a body of people who could perform such massive atrocities. They all want to do it themselves, seeking the sadistic joy of stuffing into the gas chambers the fathers who abandoned them, the teachers who failed them, the managers who fired them, and the police officers and prosecutors who jailed them.

At the higher level come the leaders, whose entire lives are wrapped up in this alternate reality, where they see a conspiratorial network of rabbis, corporate executives, and Marxists secretly working with Satan himself to re-engineer the world to Beelzebub’s commands.

After a while, whether or not they actually believe it is immaterial. Their role as leaders of these various semi-Nazi organization is like a heroin addiction – it keeps them going. Without the work of finding followers, setting up events, creating newsletters, writing articles, denouncing rivals as federal agents, creating web pages, carrying on flame wars with anti-Nazis on the web, collecting dues, speaking at rallies, they would be nothing.

They know they will never take over a major corporation, media outlet, or elected office, let alone the United States. They know their grandiose fantasies of creating a separate Nazi nation in Idaho, Texas, or Inner Mongolia are just that – grandiose and idle fantasies. But without their work, they would just be annoyed and crotchety men, arguing with the meter reader, firing off periodic angry letters-to-the-editor about how society is going to hell – which they probably do anyway.

A capable observer of the neo-Nazis, Dr. Raphael Ezekiel, wrote of one Nazi leader that he “cannot plan a program; there is no program, there is no strategy, for the same reason there is no intellectual content. The movement is powerful because it contains all that bitterness; it is powerless because it has nowhere to go.”

And there lies the danger – the power and powerless of the bitterness. The neo-Nazis know very well that their mere presence draws four kinds of attendees: extreme left-wingers, who engage in the fight to enhance their own equally ridiculous views of the world; ordinary passersby, who either laugh or gasp at the idiocy in front of them; police officers, who try to keep the bickering groups apart; and TV reporters, who know that Nazi armbands and shouting Communists make for better ratings.

Their rallies and banners don’t win them elections, hearts, or minds. They know that. They also know that their fate will be obscurity (at best), public attack (after some outrage by like-minded idiots), lawsuits (after their own idiotic outrage), or prison.

Given the choice of the above, they occasionally pick (usually without thinking much about it) the last option, and that’s where the danger comes in. The bitterness and powerlessness makes these people lash out at a world that does not share their love of Hitler and hatred of all ethnic groups save large-muscled blondes and their husbands.

They lash out in appalling ways. Hurling libel suits at university professors is one. Beating an Ethiopian exchange student to death is another. Shooting up a high school is a third. And blasting a federal office building and its occupants – including 19 children in the building’s day-care center – to the ground. Nothing but mindless, pointless, sadistic destruction. Following Hitler’s orders, wishes, and footsteps.

It’s interesting to note that among Hitler’s final order to his flunkies was to destroy everything in Germany – power stations, canals, rail yards, sewer plants. He intended to turn “scorched earth” over to the occupiers. One of his few retainers who showed some sense, Albert Speer, questioned this order. Speer rightly complained that destroying all of Germany’s material assets would condemn the German people to live in utter misery. Hitler raged that the German people had, like the generals, the SS, and everyone else, had betrayed him.

Speer knew this was not so. Despite his continued loyalty to Hitler, he feared his countrymen living in a barren desert more. Speer prepared to assassinate his patron and chief to prevent its implementation, and came within an ace of succeeding. Hitler’s acts enraged even his most loyal liegemen.

So in the end, Hitler turned on his own people, willing them to suffer and die because they were not worthy of his cause. He turned on his supporters, ordering the arrests of Goering and Himmler, believing they were trying to overthrow him (falsely for Goering, accurately for Himmler). He even had a key member of his entourage, SS General Hermann Fegelein, shot. Fegelein was married to Gretl Braun. Gretl’s sister was Eva Braun. Later that evening, Hitler married Eva Braun. Thus, Hitler shot his brother-in-law on the eve of the wedding.

And less than a day after the wedding, Hitler and Eva shot themselves. Their funeral was hastily conducted, their graves unmarked.

So Hitler’s true legacy is not the claptrap Nazis spout about racial supremacy, nor the lies they spread about Jewish conspiracies and the “holohoax,” but a doctrine of ruthless, utter destruction – destruction of everything…people, institutions, and nations. A vast void, bereft of people, structure, and values, filled with nothing but pain and devastation. A world worse than Pandora’s Box, as it would also lack hope. Perhaps worse than hell, because this world would exist on the plane of reality, not spirituality – our world, not the next world.

On April 19, 1995, we saw a vision of that world, when Timothy McVeigh, seeing Hitler’s vision, created a piece of it in this world.

It’s probable that McVeigh knew nothing about Hitler’s last birthday party. It’s too bad. I doubt he would have noticed the point, but maybe he would have – the end result of Hitler’s life on that day – the shattered city, the children pressed into uniform, the hypocritical and lying flunkies pledging homage while planning escape, the hopeless and stupid war, and the empty sack, bearing neither money nor value.

Hitler’s true legacy…an empty sack.

by David H. Lippman

© April 20, 2005