PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

No doubt some would answer “yes” to the question in the headline. I say “no.”

The most egregious example of Trump’s atrocities revolves around the camps for immigrants, which, to some, resemble Hitler’s concentration camps. To Democrats who criticize the camps, I say what are they going to do about it, for action is possible in Congress, if only to offset Trump’s preoccupation with his own aggrandizement rather than solving a pressing problem in this country – immigration.

Here is a quote from news commentator site, Salon, that captures the ignominy of the Trump regime, which is taking America down a path like Hitler:

“The presidency of Donald Trump has been one horror after another  — the endless lying, the coddling and worship of dictators, the rank incompetence and corruption of the people he has chosen to run government departments, the saber-rattling and about-facing with various enemies, the repeated attacks on voting rights and free speech and a free press, the countenancing of rank racism and white supremacy in Charlottesville and elsewhere, the personal corruption and grifting at his resorts and golf clubs, the reverence for a celebration of ignorance, the disdain for science and expertise, the constant tweeting and spewing of hate and stupidity and racism and misogyny and xenophobia  — the list goes on. Add your own outrages at will.”

Further, columnist William Galston in the Wall Street Journal contends that it is within the power of Congress to do something about immigration.

Here is the way he put it:

“The comprehensive immigration-reform bill of 2013 enjoyed bi-partisan support, and there’s still widespread approval for its core elements: Stronger border enforcement, a path to citizenship for current undocumented immigrants, and a shift to skills-based admission criteria. What these policies lack is the explicit support of a Democrat candidate who could make a case for them, which must include a defense on both the merits and the politics. Without a full-throated defense, this balanced approach to immigration would be dismissed by the left as a timid capitulation to Trump.”

So, again Trump appears to be appealing to his supporters as he calls, essentially, for eliminating immigrants, or, at least, locking them up without their children.

Here are my reasons why the Trump-Hitler comparison works (as I repeat points I wrote couple years ago after returning from a visit to the D-Day killing fields in Normandy, France, not to mention a more recent trip starting in Nuremberg, which among things, was the site of the War Crimes Trials that Hitler avoided because he had committed suicide):

• Like Hitler, Trump has watched approvingly as his followers use violence to silence hecklers, dissenters and protesters.
• Like Hitler, Trump appeals to a specific race – his race — as being above all others and, thus, able to subjugate the “others” to near-death.
• Like Hitler, Trump offers few real plans or strategies for confronting the nation’s challenges, giving voters instead the assurance that he, by force of his personality alone, will solve them. Of course, he never does, believing that he benefits more from the problem than any solution.
• Like Hitler, Trump has presented the electorate a scapegoat for its fears and vulnerabilities. Hitler gave the Germans the Jews. Trump has given the U.S. the immigrants.
• Like Hitler, Trump proposes to register and restrict the immigrants whom he condemns as all being criminals, even though most of them simply seek a better life in this country.
• Like Hitler, Trump views everything through his own lens – and he is front and center. This is one of the clearest illustrations of what a narcissist is. Hitler was one. Trump is another.

My hope – yes, my prayer — is that citizens in United States will realize the specter of what Trump is doing and has proposed doing before it is allowed to continue for another four years.

I often wonder what prompted the German people to worship Hitler, even as he convinced them that the only way to national glory was to exterminate an entire race of people.

After being in Germany a couple times in the last few years, I have reflected on what could have prompted the German people to go along with Hitler. Of course, that is a question formed by hindsight, which always is 20-20.

So, with that question hanging, I cannot help but reprint this story, which appeared this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

As written by Greg Lewis, it focuses on five books written about German citizens who opposed Hitler and paid with their lives for doing so. Their stories are marked by courage and selflessness.

Five Best: Greg Lewis on the Anti-Nazi German Resistance

The co-author of “Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule” on the White Rose movement and others who didn’t give in.

By Greg Lewis

July 19, 2019 11:12 am ET

The Oster Conspiracy of 1938

By Terry Parssinen (2003)

1. As Hitler pressed for war against Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hans Oster, a senior member of Germany’s military counterintelligence and a committed opponent of the Nazis, formed a snatch squad to kill him. Author Terry Parssinen traces the fate of this plot and of the German officer who planned it. The operation was to take place in the 48 hours between the time Hitler gave the order to invade Czechoslovakia and the time the German tanks began to roll. Mr. Parssinen’s compelling history establishes Oster as the key anti-Nazi figure in Germany’s prewar military. His acts of resistance continued after the war began. Oster passed military secrets to the Dutch, warning them that Hitler was about to sweep west—messages that Dutch intelligence viewed as a trap and ignored. Oster was finally arrested when the Gestapo learned he was smuggling Jews into Switzerland. “It is my plan and my duty,” Oster said, “to free Germany and at the same time, the world, of this plague.” On April 9, 1945, as the U.S. Army approached, Oster was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp.

Counterfeit Nazi

By Saul Friedländer (1969)

2. “If resistance within the body of a totalitarian system is ambiguous by its very nature,” Saul Friedländer writes in this extraordinary biography of Kurt Gerstein, “one criterion nonetheless remains essential for defining it: that of the danger incurred.” Gerstein was at the heart of the apparatus of Nazi terror, the Waffen-SS. Even more significantly, he was involved in supplying the deadly Zyklon B gas to the death camps. A staunch Christian, he had joined the Waffen-SS to expose its crimes. But what he uncovered he also became a part of. At the height of the war, he destroyed consignments of gas and tried to tell the Allies and the Vatican about the mass murder of Jews—messages that were ignored. Recognized at war’s end for the intelligence he provided, he was for a time treated respectfully—until he found himself facing interrogation for “complicity to murder.” Realizing that he was to be tried as a war criminal, Gerstein killed himself in July 1945. Mr. Friedländer, a Prague-born historian whose parents were murdered by the Nazis, relates Gerstein’s story in all its heart-rending depth. “Had there been in Germany thousands or even hundreds of Gersteins,” he writes, “hundreds of thousands of victims would have been saved.” Tragically, Gerstein was the only resister of his kind.

Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst in 1942. They were members of a secret student group in Munich that resisted the Nazis. Photo: George (Jürgen) Wittenstein/akg-images

A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich

By Lucas Delattre (2003)

3. In the words of spymaster Allen Dulles, Fritz Kolbe was “undoubtedly one of the best secret agents any intelligence service has ever had.” A nondescript career-functionary in the German foreign office, Kolbe succeeded, during the war, in smuggling some 1,600 copied diplomatic cables from his office—mainly tucked into his pants—to be passed on to Dulles. The cables revealed details of German atrocities and efforts to break Allied codes. They helped uncover a German spy in the British Embassy in Turkey, who was close to discovering plans for D-Day. Kolbe’s identity was such a close-held secret that even President Roosevelt, who read Kolbe’s reports with astonishment, knew of him only as “George Wood.” Kolbe received little recognition for his courage after the war. But when he died, in 1971, “two unknown men laid a wreath” at his grave. They were, Mr. Delattre reveals, from the CIA.

Sophie Scholl

By Frank McDonough (2009)

4. Sophie Scholl’s story has never been more affectingly told than in the pages of this biography, which makes eloquent use of her letters. Sophie, her brother Hans and their friends formed the White Rose group, a small but dedicated band of Munich students who printed and distributed thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets during the war. For this, Scholl would pay with her life. After her death sentence by guillotine was carried out, a prison guard discovered her final message. On the back of the indictment against her she had written one word: “Freedom.”

Resisting Hitler

By Shareen Blair Brysac (2000)

5. In Berlin, as she was led to the guillotine in February 1943, Mildred Fish-Harnack of Milwaukee—the only American woman to be executed on Hitler’s orders—whispered, “And I loved Germany so much.” She had loved Arvid, her German husband, a senior official at the German ministry of economics, and supported him when, in 1938, he was approached by American intelligence sources and agreed to pass on secrets about Germany’s preparation for war. When war came, both husband and wife passed military intelligence to Moscow. Fish-Harnack and her small group of anti-Nazi resisters—which the Nazis later dubbed the Red Orchestra—had determined that their hopes of defeating Hitler lay with the Russians. Arrested, along with her husband, by the Germans during the war, Fish-Harnack was at first given a prison sentence but then, on Hitler’s orders, was retried to ensure a death sentence. During the Cold War, when her former German prosecutor, now serving as a CIA source on German communists, dismissed her as a Stalinist, she and her services to the Allied cause were written out of history. “Her obscurity, though unjust, is somehow appropriate,” Ms. Brysac writes, “for her life suggests how an ordinary person can rise to extraordinary circumstances, and acquit herself with remarkable courage and dignity.”