Tomorrow's Tyrants
In 1933, a clear majority of Germans voted to cement Hitler’s power. In the same year, all government agencies were brought in line with Nazi ideology. They were forced to support the expansionist mania of Aryan supremacy.
‘The truth will set you free’ is a quote from St. John’s gospel: ‘Wahrheit macht frei’. The Nazis cynically changed ‘Wahrheit’ to ‘Arbeit’: Labor sets you free. This was the inscription over the entrances to many of their concentration camps, most infamously, at Auschwitz.
12 years after the Nazi’s rise their symbols of power lay in ruins. The 1000-year Reich was destroyed. Millions of Germans in the Eastern provinces were fleeing the advance of the Soviet army. They fled on foot, on horse carts, and on ships. Many died. They froze, they were bombed, and they sank to the bottom of the sea.
My father was 11 when he fled with his mother and sister from their home just east of Berlin. For months, they fled through battle zones and bombed out places. They ended up in a small town near Hannover. Today this would be a 3-hour train ride.
Alongside the Germans hundreds of thousands of prisoners were also fleeing. They came from the hastily disbanded Nazi concentrations camps. Severely weakened from years of abuse from their German captors, many marched to their death. Perpetrators and their victims marching side by side.
Berlin 1945. One block from a city in ruins. For years after the war, the women were in charge of keeping everyone alive. Their children were left to their own devices, cloaked in scars after years of war. Three girls playing in the rubble that had made up the city of Berlin. Maybe they were put to work to clear the billions of bricks off the streets. One of them could have been my mother.
Today a new extreme right-wing party is on the rise in Germany. The red arrow in its logo points from West to East, counter to the direction their ancestors fled 80 years ago. Pointing to the vicious cycle of history.
Early in 2025, Germany held snap federal elections. The results showed an explosion of votes for the far-right party ‘Alternative für Deutschland’, AfD.
Its leaders refer to the Berlin Holocaust memorial as a ‘monument of shame’, use Nazi terms such as ‘Umvolkung’ to describe the effects of immigration on the German race, and make dehumanizing statements about migrants such as: “We can always shoot them later; that’s not the issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn’t matter to me.”
This party won the majority of the votes in the Eastern states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cold War divisions still run through the country.
The winter of 1945 was one of the coldest in European history. The entire Baltic Sea was frozen over. Millions of German families had to flee West in the advance of the Soviet Russian army. They fled the vengeance of an army that had witnessed its people brutally decimated by the German Wehrmacht.
The party leader of the AfD calls May 8th, 1945 “Day of defeat of one’s own country”. Her party trivializes Nazi crimes and performs a perfidious reversal of perpetrator and victim.
Shortly after the end of the war, the district offices of greater Berlin decided that sport was essential for the wellbeing of the population. They organized children’s games in the parks of the city. In Treptow a teacher leads children in the game called ‘We are travelling by train’
It was trains that brought some of them to Berlin from further East. It was also trains that brought Millions of Jews to the Nazi extermination camps as part of the ‘Final Solution’. Conditions on those trains were extremely inhumane. They were brought about by a dehumanizing view of entire ethnic groups. A view on the rise again today.
2 weeks after the 1933 election Hitler passed the Enabling Act, making him dictator of Germany. Opposition parties were banned. Non-compliant judges were removed from the bench. There was a lot of political violence. There was a lot of political acquiescence. Joseph Goebbels was appointed minister for public engagement and propaganda, controlling the national media, film, theatre, arts, and other cultural aspects.
The Nazis claimed the arts as theirs. The art of their time was silenced and declared ‘degenerate’. Hitler’s architect Albert Speer built the gigantean Reichs Chancellery in the center of Berlin. Together they drew up plans of their grand visions for the German capital Berlin, renamed ‘Germania’. It was the same style of romantic realism and classical architecture that Donald Trump promotes to ‘Make American Architecture Beautiful Again’. His White House lists exhibitions at the Smithsonian institution they deem ‘degenerate’. Or, in today’s language: ‘Woke’.
It was in the Führerbunker below his grandiose Chancellery that Hitler took his own life. His body was dowsed in petrol and burned in the garden behind the building. The building was heavily damaged during the battle of Berlin and dismantled by the Soviets, along with the remains of one of the greatest mass murderers in history. With this act of suicide, he escaped being held responsible for the suffering of millions.
Like Hitler, my father’s father also committed suicide, not believing in a chance to rebuild his life after the war. He had run the family pharmacy at a time when most medications were teas and ointments made by hand. Everything was plundered by the Russians and destroyed.
Months after the war, my grandmother received a typed letter from a caretaker pharmacist in their shop. He tells of the death of both her husband and her mother. The destruction of their hometown and the plundering of their pharmacy. And, because her children had asked, the death of their beloved pets. By then, they were refugees in the Western part of the country. They had to rely on the kindness of strangers to survive.
Now, 80 years on, Germany has become a destination for refugees fleeing various catastrophes south of the Mediterranean. Their stories are just as harrowing as the ones of my ancestors fleeing the Soviets in 1945. A growing number of German politicians are being voted into office promising to send them back to the catastrophes they came from.
Across the Atlantic, the MAGA movement has implemented the art of disappearing people they deem unworthy of their country. Likely, their ancestors, too had fled a catastrophic event.
During World War 2 Berlin was the center of the German arms industry. Maps of the city from 1940 have blocked out critical infrastructure like gas and electric supply stations, the Reichs Chancellery, airfields, and metal processing sites. One of those was my grandfather’s workplace in the Northwestern segment of the city.
The factory produced light weight metal alloys used in war planes. Stock market reports from the Hamburg world economic archive show the rise of his company’s value because of the war. This value was built on the back of forced laborers.
Most of them had been deported from Poland and Russia. The further East their origin, the less considered Aryan, the worse their treatment. With only pocket money as wages, they were slaves to the company with no way to escape. The lives of people thus devalued it was a short road to the gates of Auschwitz.
As managing director (Betriebs-Führer) in the defense industry, my grandfather did not have to fight in the war. Instead, the Russians captured him in 1945 and transported him to a labor camp in Siberia. He was there for 5 years. Switching roles from supervisor to forced laborer. He never talked about his experience.
In the 2025 election the left leaning city of Berlin switched to the right. The far-right nationalist party gained a third of the vote. Of those, a majority were younger, poorer, less educated working-class men. Politics on the backs of laborers.