I could see the whole world burning on a peaceful day from a German mountain that had a clear view back to America.
An American Soldier is surrounded by survivors at the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945 in Dachau, Germany.
29 April 2025 — Eighty years ago this morning, American soldiers liberated Dachau.
At first, the prisoners did not comprehend what was happening, and neither did the approaching Americans.
Neither the prisoners nor American soldiers could see clearly.
FDR had been dead for 17 days, but 12 years earlier, while accepting the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States, the patrician from New York, Lincoln’s only presidential peer, declared that “this generation has a rendezvous with destiny”.
When he said it, FDR could not imagined that the destiny he foresaw was about to be realized in a camp opened by Nazis when German Jews still retained their citizenship.
From the superb Substack newsletter World War II Today, one of my favorites, from a Dachau survivor:
A single man emerges from behind a cement mixer parked at the edge of the camp, wearing a helmet embellished with leaves and branches, he moves cautiously forward, submachine gun in one hand, grenade in the other … he is still far away but I imagine I see him chewing gum … he comes cautiously, but upright, stalwart, unafraid …I almost expect him to be followed by a pure white charger … we knew America only by its films.
This first image of the liberation was truly out of an American western … this soldier of the 3rd Battalion, 45th Combat Division was the very incarnation of the American hero … we will never forget those first few seconds … the memory of the unique, magnificent moment of your arrival … you had come at the risk of your life, into an unknown country, for the sake of an unknown people, bringing us the most precious thing in the world, the gift of freedom.
The encounter between liberator and Nazi prisoner had been 22 years in the making.
Hitler attempted to seize power by violence in 1923, and was sentenced to a prison term of five years in Munich prison. He served just five months, and wrote his autobiography called “My Struggle” (Mein Kampf) while in prison.
Hitler left nothing unsaid in his book. His intentions were perfectly clear, yet The New York Times declared upon his release that “Herr Hitler had retired from radical politics”.
They don’t call it the “paper of record” for nothing.
Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, but was not yet dictator.
52 days after being sworn in he used the Reichstag fire to pass the Enabling Act through the Reichstag. It gave him extraordinary powers to detain “criminals” — opponents — in the name of security and national greatness.
Dachau, the Nazi’s first concentration camp, opened its gates on March 22, 1933, 51 days after Hitler took power, and it started to fill with the regime’s opponents.
There were professors and Christian democrats, socialists, and members of the press. Anyone who spoke out was sent to Dachau, where the future was foretold with a “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work makes one free”) sign that would cynically hang over almost all the subsequent extermination camps in Poland, which were still 9 years away from being built:
After the war, the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (an early supporter of the Nazis, who was then imprisoned at Dachau) gave the world a lesson that seems forgotten by a combination of ignorance and ambition with American politicians on both sides of the political spectrum – political performance artists whose glibness can no longer mask their stunning public vapidity.
It is this:
It was a statement of hindsight, but Pastor Martin Niemöller could see clearly by 1945.
He survived Dachau.
Those battle-hardened Americans who liberated the camp lost their minds when they witnessed what the SS had done, and where the road had led. Many captured SS officers were simply gunned down, commanding officers looking the other way. Other captured SS guards were killed with shovels and axes by Jewish prisoners. It was equally ignored.
They understood why they had come to Germany. Again, as shared in World War II Today:
There they found some fifty-odd cattle cars parked on the tracks – the cars were not empty. The train was full of corpses, piled one on the other, 2310 of them to be exact. The train had come from Birkenau and the dead were Hungarian and Polish Jews, children among them. Their journey had lasted perhaps thirty or forty days.
Adolf Hitler became absolute Führer and dictator of Germany 515 days after Dachau opened, and 2,711 days before the Wansee conference. At the conference, the extermination of the Jews was planned over a 90-minute lunch meeting hosted by Reinhardt Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann in a leafy Berlin suburb.
Tomorrow marks 80 years since the grubby Führer blew his brains out in a dank bunker after killing his dog and wife.
Yet, some people don’t think what happened in Munich those 22 years before the bullet passed through his brain matters because we know that, in the end, Hitler killed 80 million people in the war that he started, and 11 million in extermination camps that were commissioned in a meeting he didn’t attend — and could always deny.
Those people are either fools, ignorant or blind.
Seeing clearly does not require perfect vision. It only requires paying attention.
As political analyst Steve Schmidt and John Nichols (and so, so many others) warned us after January 6, 2021: we are seeing the beginning of a destructive civil war in the GOP. Coalitions would be formed, a media industrial complex would be built (something I began to write about here, but that I will expand upon) that will bring autocrats and fascists to power in America, and they will devour the conservatives.
But what has been happening has been clear for many years, as detailed by Lewis Lapham, George Packer and Daniel Rodgers as I have written many times before.
And it was certainly clear on a beautiful sunny day last year from the German Alps.
The view was magnificent that morning, and was matched by a perfect temperature. The sky was an ocean of colliding blues, and below, the valleys were a verdant green, while a perfect white blanket of clouds lay over a pristine lake:
This is the view from Obersalzburg Mountain, near Hitler’s retret, which was the playground for the highest ranking Nazis — a restricted zone where only the most loyal and highest ranking party members were permitted.
I saw the remnants of the sun deck where Eva Braun sunned herself, where Easy Company officers drank the Führer’s booze after liberating his Eagle’s Nest.
The spectacular vista, clear skies and location meant I could see far.
Very far.
From here I could see all the way to Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek, Treblinka, the Warsaw Ghetto – the gas chambers, and the crematoria chimneys.
I could see clearly JD Vance’s obsession with single women or single teachers or married women with no children.
It’s not a new dogma.
Neither is replacement theory.
JD Vance venerates Viktor Orban, who delivered a speech 3 years ago that was a full embrace of Hitlerism. Remember, Hitler didn’t run on genocide. His campaign was about traditional values and curbing inflation. It was based on lies, propaganda, grievance, resentment and hate.
And I can see clearly what RFK Jr. means by “healthy children,” and I can see clearly what binds him and Trump:
I could see Donald Trump’s desecration and fight at Arlington National Cemetery. Fascists always try to incorporate the sacred and the unifying symbols of nationhood as expressions of the party and their political cause. There is no differentiation between the two for a fascist.
I see clearly how evil can emanate from a beautiful place like Palm Beach, Florida.
Because it mirrors Obersalzburg Mountain:
That day, I could clearly see the danger from the man who kept the speeches of the man this building was built for on his night stand, according to his first wife, who now rests peacefully at Trump’s Bedminster golf course near the first tee.
I wish more people had the fortune of clear days. It is amazing what can be seen, and how far you can peer into the distance, into the past, and into the future.
It’s amazing what can be seen from the Eagle’s Nest.
I could see the whole world burning on a peaceful day from a German mountain that had a clear view back to America.
There is a question that has long hung in the American mind. Could that happen here?
I see that answer clearly, too.
It is happening here. Right now.
Where it leads is what is unknown.