The Hitler Freeze

What happens when a speaker talking to any size audience mentions three of the world’s worst mass murderers, Stalin from the Soviet Union, Mao from China and Hitler from Germany?

Stalin may have murdered upwards of 22 million people. At the mention of Stalin’s name, the people listen intently. At the mention of Mao and his slaughter of some 60 million people, people also listen intently.

And why not? These are horrible crimes of unimaginable scale.

At the mention Hitler and his murder of between 11 and 13 million people – six million of whom were Jews, what happens? People become silenter than silent. It’s hard to tell if people are even breathing.

The word “Hitler” freezes people solid. His name takes the air out of a room. People become transfixed.

What is it about Hitler that brings such a response? Is Hitler in some other category even though he committed fewer murders than Stalin and Mao’s? Or is it something else?

It’s something else.

If any European country, and that means the Western civilized world including the United States, Canada and Australia, can lay claim to being a brilliant one, it is certainly Germany. Germany was the epitome of culture and class in philosophy, science, art, engineering, music. Germany was indeed the brightest light among the lights of the intellectual world.

Russia and China were not in such a class. They were not Western. They were merely the other in the public’s mind; countries that stood outside of the advanced world; countries from which you might possibly expect wholesale slaughter.

How could Germany, now composed of chanting, goose stepping, militaristic concentration camp monsters, espousing their racial superiority and finally instituting the “final solution”—in short, the killing of all the Jews in the world—how could such people be such beasts? How could this great civilization become totally barbaric?

There are reasons. The underlying hate of despised groups can undermine whatever veneer of higher civilization a country might seemingly possess. Despised groups included the Jews, gays, gypsies, and the physically deformed, among others.

But there is another reason for horror. According to Tom Beck, “The Nazis were exporting their terror. With each successive victory that Germany had over other countries, the ‘final solution’ was instituted in those conquered countries. The Nazi killing machine spread across the continent and Hitler made it plain that his ideas would take over the world, as would his slaughter.”

According to Tom, “Those whom Stalin murdered were Soviets; those Mao murdered were Chinese. They did not have a ‘final solution’ for the rest of the world.”

So Hitler, the resplendent ruler of a civilized European country, was able to militarize them not just to fight wars, but to slaughter select groups no matter where those groups resided.

To top it off, the final view of the ‘final solution’ had the Allied soldiers discover the concentration camps and their moribund inhabitants. Our soldiers got to see the horrors Hitler perpetrated, and pictures of these starved men, women and children were shown to the world. In the words from the great horror movie Night of the Living Dead, “They’re coming to get you Barbara!” and, yes, for each one of the despised groups and those of us who would defend such groups, the Nazis were coming to get us.

As a kid I remember when my father had Jewish friends with tattoos on their arms. “What are those tattoos?” I asked him. He looked at me and shook his head, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.” He knew of the horror, as did his friends, and he was trying to spare me.

What my father tried to spare me from is exactly what freezes those hearing Hitler’s name. The Nazi terror is the real monster under all of our beds. It doesn’t just exist in one country; it builds concentration camps beyond its borders. That fact frightens adults and children. “The monster is coming to get you…”

[Buy Frank’s new book Confessions of a Wayward Catholic. Available on Amazon.com, kindle, Barnes and Noble, and at bookstores.]