When Connie Comes Marching Home, Part 2

“Unpleasant Thought for the Day”

In the last Paul Street Report, I told the sad story of my uncle Connie’s death on the very first day of Operation Torch, the joint US-British invasion of fascist-/Axis-controlled Northwest Africa on November 8, 1942. Last Tuesday, mid-term Election Day, was the 80th anniversary of Connie’s death along with hundreds of other US and British troops in the port of Oran.

Connie Freed, Fort Dix, Kentucky, 1942

My topic this week may seem a departure from my usual writing about contemporary US politics, especially as the mid-term elections (which have left unresolved the question of whether the Republifascists will take back control of Congress as of this writing) are still being processed. As I hope becomes more apparent in Part 2, however, there’s a shared thread between this WWII story and current US politics: ignorance about, denial of, and indifference towards fascism.    

I’ll begin with the concluding two paragraphs of Part 1.

While generally liberal in orientation, my mother was not especially political.  But she hated war and was an easy convert to the movement against the US War on Vietnam. One of my favorite old photos of her shows her costumed up for a national Moratorium Day March against the US War on Vietnam. Connie’s death and the way it was handled by the War Department was part of that.

That’s the best part of this war story. The real time story gets worse, however.  It has to do with what Connie and other US Americans thought – perhaps it’s better to say didn’t know or in some cases didn’t care to know – they were fighting against in what some of us rightly call “the global war against fascism.” 

“Those Who Laugh Today Probably Will Not Laugh Much Longer”

The rest of the story that I want to tell about my Uncle Connie’s death gets darker in ways that begin to be suggested by the following passage from the British historian Martin Gilbert’s aforementioned volume. The passage comes directly after Gilbert’s flattering description of Operation Torch as “swiftly successful”:

“[On the evening of November 7, 1942], when Hitler made his annual speech in the Munich beer hall, he focused his attention on Stalingrad [where the Third Reich and the Soviet Red Army were suffering epic mass casualties in the leading battle of World War II – P.S. ], of which he said, ‘That was what I wanted to capture, and do you know, modest as we are – we’ve got it too!’ [false, the Battle of Stalingrad would be the Third Reich’s most decisive defeat – P.S.].  There are only a few more tiny pockets!’ Hitler spoke also about the Jews, and of his 1939 prophecy that the war would lead to their annihilation. ‘Of those who laughed then,’ he said, ‘countless already laugh no longer today; and those who still laugh today will probably not laugh much longer’” (emphasis added).

“From France and Holland, thousands were being deported to Auschwitz that November.  In central Poland, tens of thousands more were being deported to Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka…On November 9, a new name entered the vocabulary of evil: Majdanek, a camp outside the Polish city of Lublin where, on that day, four thousand Lublin Jews were brought, the first of several hundred thousand to be incarcerated and murdered…half the deportees were taken to the gas chambers.” (Gilbert, The Second World War, p. 376)

The Nazi Holocaust – the campaign to literally eliminate the Jewish population of Europe – had been underway for well more than a year by the time of my uncle’s death.  At first, the victims in Nazi-occupied Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states were rounded up by mobile Einstatzkommandos and killed primarily by shooting. Later they were sent in boxcars to fixed concentration camps to be worked and gassed to death.

The Nazi invaders at first delighted in handing the task of extermination to Eastern European pogromists, local anti-Semites who took revenge on “Jewish Bolshevism” in mass public slaughters.  A German photographer reported an all-too common Balkan scene from the Lithuanian town of Kovno on June 25, 1941, four months before my uncle started his short career in the US Army:

“Close to my quarters I noticed a crowd in the forefront of a petrol station surrounded by a wall on three sides.  The way to the road was blocked by a wall of people…In the left corner there was a group of men aged between thirty and fifty.  There must have been forty to fifty of them. They were herded together and kept under guard by some civilians.  The civilians were armed with rifles and wore armbands, as can be seen in the pictures I took. A young Lithuanian man with rolled up sleeves was armed with an iron crowbar.  He dragged out one man at a time from the crowd and struck with the crowbar one or more blows to the back of the head.  Within three-quarters of an hour he had beaten to death the entire group of forty-five to fifty people…After the entire group had been beaten to death, the young man put the crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem. The behavior of the civilians present (women and children) was unbelievable.  After each man had been killed they began to clap and when the national anthem started they joined in…In the front row there were women with small children in their arms who stayed there right until the end of the proceedings.” (Ernest Klee et al.“The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders [Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky, 1988], pp. 31-32)

Third Reich soldiers joined the cheering crowds viewing the blood-soaked scenes. Hitler’s SS helped coordinate the terrible events.

By the time Connie was sent to England and then to his death on the HMS Hartland, Hitler’s mad machinery of mass murder had largely taken over and industrialized the genocide. When the Nazi extermination camps were completed, the Jews of all occupied Europe (including France, Holland, Belgium, the low countries and Italy) were shipped to the death sites in trains “efficiently” organized by Adolf Eichmann.

A contemporary politics aside: here is perhaps a good place to recall that Donald Trump’s favorite US paramilitary fascists, the Proud Boys, protested the supposed “theft” of the 2020 presidential election in a December 2020 Washington DC rampage during which some of the group’s thugs wore t-shirts saying “6MWE,” meaning “six million Jews killed by Hitler wasn’t enough.”  Recall also that Trump has openly embraced Q Anon, which is an essentially neo-Nazi tendency that updates the anti-Semitic blood-libel allegations made against Jews by Hitler.  When some of us update Sinclair Lewis for the 21st century by saying “it can happen here,” the “it” in question isn’t just fascism, it’s also genocide, something far from alien to “exceptional” US-American history.   

It was all very consistent with Hitler’s racist ravings in his best-selling memoir, Mein Kampf.  This sickening tome, published by a Nazi publishing house in 1925, advanced the main ingredients of Nazism: palingenetic and racist ultra-nationalism, virulent Social Darwinism, rabid antisemitism, the embrace of political and imperial violence, and an aggressive foreign policy dedicated to Lebensraum (living space) in eastern Europe. From 1925 to summer 1945, Hitler’s sick “autobiography” sold over 12 million copies and was translated into more than a dozen languages.  

The Holocaust was foretold also in the Nazis’ 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which denied Jews German citizenship and equality under the law and in “the Kristallnacht.” Three years and 364 days before my uncle Connie’s death in the Port of Oran, on November 9th , 1938, the Nazis undertook “a series of pogroms against the Jewish population in Germany and recently incorporated territories. This event,” the United States Holocaust Museum reports, “came to be called Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) because of the shattered glass that littered the streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes.”  

“Unpleasant Thought for the Day”

Which raises a curious question, the depressing answer to which is partly evident in the two boxes of correspondence I inherited from my mother: what in the name of God and/or history did Uncle Connie and his family and his families’ friends think their young soldiers were fighting against “over there again” across the Atlantic?

Sadly, there’s nothing in the letters between family members and friends that shows the slightest understanding of what the Axis enemy and its demented leader Hitler and his Nazi Third Reich were all about.  The most one can garner from the correspondence is a sense that the new war in Europe is a replay of the previous global war and that the Germans and their dictator wanted to run the world in nasty and autocratic ways. There’s no sense of the difference between the German Kaiser of WWI and the Nazi dictator of WWII. There isn’t the slightest hint of a wisp of a scent of Germany’s nine-year immersion in virulent racist fascism or of how Germany is exterminating millions of Jews (and many others) in accord with Mein Kampf, Hitler’s 1930s political speeches, and Nazi ideology.  There isn’t a word about any of this. The notion that Connie was involved in what leftists have long accurately called “the global war against fascism” – much less a war to stop genocide – is outside the bounds, consistent with the great US historian and journalist William Shirer’s account of willful American ignorance in his mournful memoir of Nazi Germany The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940.

Here's a depressing indication of how indifferent and ignorant the US populace was regarding the genocidal nature of the German enemy just weeks after Connie went “MIA.” The same December 19, 1942 Aberdeen American News that included quotations from Connie’s high school Blue and Gold column (see Part 1) was loaded with reports of various battles in both the Pacific and European theaters and gas rationing at home.  Down at the very bottom right-hand corner one can read this story:

“UNPLEASANT THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Rabbi Says Nazis Use Jew Corpses for Soap

Washington – (AP) --  The United States has joined other United Nations governments in condemning Germany’s ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’ of the Jews….In announcing the move, the state department said reports from Europe indicated German authorities ‘are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.’ The announcement described Poland as ‘the principal Nazi slaughter house, where ghettoes are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few skilled workers valuable to the war industries.’ It added: ‘None of these taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions….Rabbi Stephen Wise issued a statement charging that the Germans…utilize the corpses in the manufacture of soaps, fats, and other products.”

Yes, you read that correctly: “Unpleasant thought for the Day,” Not “Horrific Reports of Mass Genocide, Consistent with the Maniacal Fascist Dictator Hitler’s Promise to Exterminate the Jews.”

The story appeared far below news reports on gas rations, domestic food shortages, high school sports, and a truck robbery in Chicago. In retrospect, the story belonged at the top of page one. Instead, it went to the bottom almost as an aside on a strange and “unpleasant” rumor best not to be thought about.

US Battle of the Bulge GIs Were “Interested in Two Things: Getting Drunk and Getting Laid”

My old Marxist British history professor CH George enlisted in the US Army as a teenager, fighting his way in 1944 and 1945 from Belgium through the Battle of the Bulge to the opening of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. Influenced by Marxist and left-anarchist ideas picked up from a leftist tutor in Popular Front France (where his industrialist father did business during the mid-late 1930s), CH enlisted with one goal in mind: to kill fascists and defeat fascism. I asked him if his goals were shared by any other troops with whom he served. “No,” he said, adding that “my fellow soldiers were interested in two things: getting drunk and getting laid.” (CH’s little-known and idiosyncratic WWII memoir, Journey to Dachau: An American Solider’s Odyssey contains no reference to this indifference and/or ignorance, out of perhaps exaggerated respect for his fellow GIs).

Meanwhile, as the bodies piled up, US planners were scheming to emerge from the Second World War as the hegemonic heir to the British Empire and the leader of the so-called Free World. In building the new Pax Americana, which would murder millions in east Asia and the Middle East in coming decades (please see my 2018 essay “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony”), they would enlist and protect former Nazi operatives as intelligence and military-industrial “assets” in the new Cold War with Hitler’s great enemy: the Soviet Union.

I’ll Keep My DNA

True story: a couple years ago the US Army reached out to me with a DNA kit.  They’d like to see if there’s a forensic match with some remains from the HMS Hartland.  Perhaps Connie was among a few of the corpses who were recovered from the ship and buried outside Oran. If there’s a match, a friendly Army bureaucrat (based in Fort Dix appropriately enough) told me, I could decide to have Connie’s remains buried in Arlington National Cemetery or in another location of my choice.  I could pick his hometown of Aberdeen, South Dakota, where this uncle I never met wrote as a precious teenager of “the Dakota prairies…where the fields of golden grain/hide the furrow’s steady turn/And thank God a little rain/When your lips begin to burn.”

There’d be a military flyover at Connie’s belated funeral.

Some media would turn out to cover the event.  You’ve probably seen stories like that on CNN: “WWII veteran finally returns home.”

I ran it by a lawyer I know. He recommended that I not put my DNA in a federal database.  “Too many false matches.  You could end up being accused of some heinous crime you never committed.”

True but I had a different thought: here we are in Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and his fellow and (easily re-elected) Q’ANazi Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Amerikkka, which is undergoing an ongoing normalization of fascist politics — idiotically described as “working-class” and “populist” by certified morons across the political media spectru, (with the open charlatan David Brooks in the lead) — in the United States.  The process is especially pronounced in South Dakota, where a virulent neofascist governor – a potential running mate for the orange fascist reptile Trump (Kristi Noem) or his fellow Florida fascist – sits atop a legislature jammed with Republi-fascists who feel if anything pride about the genocidal destruction of the Sioux nations that once thrived in the Dakota territories.  These revanchist assholes (who have passed a law that essentially forbids honest teaching about the genocide inflicted on the Sioux in South Dakota) and their base talk constantly about “civil war” and I am not a pacifist.  Who knows what kind of “heinous crimes” I might get accused of committing — or actually have to commit — against these post-republican white nationalist Christian fascist MAGAts as “their” America becomes progressively less white in coming years.  I have no intention of helping the state track me down in light of that.