Madeline Albright’s Prague Winter, A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948, is jarring and unsettling, particularly now. Ms. Albright shared the tragic story of Lidice, a small village a few miles from Prague. In June of 1939, Czech resistance fighters killed Reinhard Heydrich, deputy to Hitler’s security chief, Heinrich Himmler. At Hitler’s direction, Nazis, in retaliation, committed the following:
- Searched all the villagers’ homes and confiscated their valuables
- Separated 173 men from their families and shot them at dawn
- Gave those children with “fair hair and Nordic face” to German families to be raised as their own
- Sent the remaining 80 children to Poland, where they were murdered in the gas chambers at Chelmno
- Sent the women to concentration camps
- Tracked down and murdered those citizens who were not in the village at that time
- Burned and razed the town
- Removed the town from maps
This was one of many travesties and horrific acts committed by the Nazis during their reign of terror. Ms. Albright outlines a number of their atrocities in gruesome detail throughout her book. Ultimately, the Nazis would kill 10 million people, including 6 million Jews.
Fast forward 78 years. On August 11, 2017, a group of tiki-torch bearing white nationalists marched on the grounds at the University of Virginia, chanting, “You will not replace us,” and “Blood and Soil,” a nationalist phrase used by Hitler and Nazi Germany to link Germans to their glorious rural past and to condemn the Jews for the decline in rural life.
The next day, August 12, 2017, a group of Neo-Nazis and white supremists gathered for a Unite the Right rally to protest the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue in what is now Market Street Park near the downtown mall in Charlottesville. Many were armed. Some carried Nazi and Confederate flags. Others either carried shields or wore clothing and helmets with white nationalist symbols. After a violent confrontation with protestors, the Charlottesville police stepped in and the groups disbanded.
Later that day, James Alex Fields, Jr., who long had a fascination with Hitler, Nazi culture and the Confederacy, drove his car into a group of protestors, killing Heather Danielle Heyer of Charlottesville.[1]
This is not to say there will be a repeat of Nazi Germany. However, it is disconcerting that there are Americans who believe in, emulate, admire and parade the symbols and ideology of a hateful, cruel and vicious time in history. Particularly, when Americans and their Allies died on the beaches of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, Sicily and all over Europe.
In addressing the country after Charlottesville, the president stated, “But you also had people, that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Indeed.
[1]On July 16, 2019, Fields was sentenced to life, plus 419 years.