Some writers in the Peninsula Daily News seem to have a hatred and contempt for people they call liberals.
Even in this Easter season, they willfully abandon truth to make a dishonest point.
To claim that the Nazis were socialists (“Race and Facism,” PDN, 3/23) is willful ignorance.
Perhaps the letter writer should learn some facts about Nazi Germany.
A good start would be to read firsthand sources.
I suggest Martin Niemoller, a German evangelical pastor and early Hitler supporter, who soon turned against Hitler and was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps from 1937 to 1945.
Niemoller became famous for saying:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
“Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Trade Unionist.
“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
“Then, they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Why would this Protestant theologian claim that the Nazis, if they were socialists, would first imprison themselves into concentration camps?
It’s an absurdity.
They were racists, not socialists.
German capitalist firms like Mercedes, Audi and Bayer profited under the Nazis, even using slave labor taken from concentration camps, according to media reports.
But Niemoller — unlike the letter writer — only lived through it.
Sadly not long enough to write the PDN a letter sharing his “opinion” about Nazism.
But as Pontius Pilate famously said, questioning Jesus, (John 18:38), “What is truth?”
Bob Domin,
Port Ludlow