Only a few weeks ago, on Holocaust Memorial Day, the world was contemplating why Hitler massacred six million Jews; today, two weeks into Putin’s attack on Ukraine, we wonder why Putin is doing it; while these two events have occupied our thinking minds in succession, challenging us with their horrific similarities, we in America must also deal with our own version at home, the impending threat to democracy of one Donald Trump who might overshadow even Hitler’s genocide and Putin’s madness.
Coincidentally as a historical series of events, three most notable autocrats have come together, each wielding awesome powers of carnage and destruction, to teach us something about ourselves. What are they teaching us in our desperate moments of thirst for wisdom — from Hitler’s past, Putin’s present, and Trump’s future? Of the three, only Hitler’s Holocaust is past history, so let’s start with Hitler and the Jews to learn about Putin and Trump.
Virtually all known literature on the subject says it was Hitler’s and the Nazis’ obsessive hatred of Jews that ended in the Final Solution. But, with Hitler dead and the Nazis gone, how and why it could happen again, nobody seems to know for sure. Still, the warning is persistent that “hate” is the cause of such evil and the world nods in agreement. To prevent future holocausts, we are told, we need to eliminate hate from the interactions among humanity. It seems to make perfect sense, but, alas, neither historically correct nor existentially helpful.
To be sure, Hitler hated Jews, as Europe was full of anti-Semitism, but his hate, as powerful or useful it might have been as his inner motive or his political tool, does not explain it. Why? Because hate does not kill anybody, and if one is looking for Jew-hating, one need not go very far, as it is everywhere where there are Christians and Muslims. No, hate doesn’t kill anybody, not in systematic massacres. But power does, and Hitler in his triumphant peak had plenty of it. In fact, rates of Jewish killing rose and fell according to Hitler’s battlefield successes and failures. With his mighty power, Hitler could kill not just Jews but also Slavs, and he killed anyone in his power-domain that he wanted killed. He killed them in Poland, in the “Bloodlands” between Poland and western Russia (that now includes Ukraine), and everywhere where his power extended. Many times more Slavs than Jews were killed by the Nazis because there were more of them. He may have really hated Jews, not Slavs so much, but he killed Slavs in the millions just the same.
When power is great, hate is hardly necessary to have the enemy killed. In South Africa during the apartheid, white government officials started the day with a prayer meeting and went on with their daily atrocities against Blacks. In Nazi Germany, government bureaucrats, neither Nazi nor particularly anti-Semitic, worked on meticulous plans to massacre and enslave millions of people, Slavs and Jews. With or without hate, you need power to organize the institutional machineries of the state to kill or to do anything else that requires command over other human beings.
Why did Hitler do it? Because he could. When you have near-absolute power, the question of motive is insignificant if not entirely irrelevant. But, without his power to do such large-scale evil deeds, Hitler of old age might have gone to his grave still merely hating Jews, but his hatred for Jews would have been no different from that of many ordinary Jew-haters all over Europe. The world should have learned, from the Jewish altar of sacrifice, how easily absolute power equates with evil.
Now, Western pundits and historians are busy trying to guess Putin’s motive for his Ukrainian invasion: Maybe he wanted to return to the czarist empire, thinking of himself as the czar reincarnate; perhaps border insecurity, with the haunting memories of Napoleon and Hitler, and seeing the Baltic states joining NATO and feeling encroached, and wanted to head off that happening with Ukraine; perhaps he is a power-mad megalomaniac; maybe deranged by COVID isolation, and so on. There can be as many reasons as there are analysts, all reasonable analytically, but irrelevant in reality. As we see in Hitler’s case, they are useless unless Russia’s power over Ukraine (10 to 1) enters the equation. Ukraine’s fate was sealed early on when President Biden declared that neither the U.S., nor NATO, would defend Ukraine militarily, thus giving Russia’s military power an unopposed advantage in its power calculus. So, we ask: Why did Putin invade Ukraine? Our answer, as in Hitler with Jews and Slavs: Because he could. All other reasons are mere conjecture and psychology. Once again, the world is learning, at the Ukrainian altar of sacrifice, why Putin the autocrat and his awesome power should have never been combined.
Both Hitler and Putin were granted an enormous advantage in military power by the West, which refused to stand up to them. And, here in America, if we survive Putin, we are about to face Donald Trump with his frightful power to do anything he wants. At the American altar, the world will sorrowfully recall democracy as its long-gone memory. Whenever we see great unopposed power amassed, whether political or corporate or military, we see the next Holocaust or Ukraine debacle around the corner, this time on American soil.
Thus, the final lesson from Hitler, Putin and Trump: Don’t let anyone be so powerful as to be uncontrollable by countervailing democracy.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, is the author of two books on the Holocaust and power, “Call from the Cave: Our Cruel Nature and the Quest for Power” and “Auschwitz, U.S.A.” He lives in Greenfield.