Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Following the defeat of Germany in World War I, the United States retreated into an isolationist stance, extracting itself from the international scene. While some believed that Hitler had arisen from the ashes of a German nation treated too harshly by its conquerors nearly three decades before, others believed the relatively lenient enforcement of aspects of the Treaty of Versailles had permitted Germany to again pursue imperialistic aims...
...speaker is Richard von Weizsacker, current president of the Federal Republic of Gernmany. His father, Ernst von Weizsacker, was Hitler's state Secretary in the Reich foreign ministry and a member of Himmler's personal staff. Most significantly, he was the man who informed Adolf Eichmann, the official in charge of Jewish extermination, that there were no objections on the part of the German foreign ministry to the deportation of thousands of French and stateless Jews to Aushwitz. He was also the man who rejected Sweden's offer to accept Norwegian Jews about to be sent to Nazi death camps...
...sins of his father. So let us catalogue the sins of the son and compare them with his virtues. Richard von Weizsacker was certainly no conscientious objector to Nazi aggression. He was a soldier who participated in the brutal invasion of Poland which commenced both World War II and Hitler's genocidal program. After the war, he helped his father lie to the Neurenberg tribunal by denying that he knew what was going on at Auschwitz. He helped his father construct a perjurious and unsuccessful defense which included the outrageous claim that even the Jews had no "misgivings against Auschwitz...
...mortal peril and Congress was intransigent, so a courageous President bent the law in the cause of freedom. Ronald Reagan and the contras? No, it was Franklin Roosevelt's decision to provide Britain with 50 overage destroyers during the desperate summer of 1940. The destroyer deal helped discourage Hitler from invading England; small wonder that Reagan's defenders now cite it as a precedent to justify secret efforts to skirt the Boland amendment...
...from the revelations or digressions of their special prisoner. Ever since Marcel Ophuls's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity unreeled in Europe and America, people have stopped believing in the myth that France united to resist the occupying forces. On the contrary, France under Petain fully collaborated with Hitler's Germany. It handed its Jews over to the Nazi executioners -- 76,000 were deported, few came back. French militia competed with the Gestapo for efficiency. French police organized the roundups. Will the nation be forced to remember its sins? Or will its citizens allow themselves to be manipulated...