Dr. Carson, Please Read Holocaust History
BERLIN -- It would be a good idea for Ben Carson to spend some time in this city.
Some recommendations for the Carson tour:
-- The 1936 Olympic stadium, where Adolf Hitler presided over games in which the Aryanized German team won 33 gold medals, as exuberant German crowds thrust arms upward in the Nazi salute.
-- Track 17, where, starting on Oct. 18, 1941, thousands of Jews were deported from the Grunewald train station to ghettos and concentration camps, and 186 steel plaques line the platform edge, documenting the Nazis' relentless efficiency: "6.7.1942/100 Juden/Berlin-Theresienstadt." "12.10.1944/31 Juden/Berlin-Auschwitz."
-- Wannsee House, the lakeside villa where, on Jan. 20, 1942, Hitler's lieutenants diligently planned the implementation of the final solution, poring over Adolf Eichmann's meticulous typewritten list of Jews to be exterminated -- 160,800 from the Netherlands, 742,800 from Hungary, and so on.
I came to Berlin for pleasure, expecting to escape from the U.S. presidential campaign. But that turned out to be impossible with the news about Carson's rise to the top of the Republican heap in Iowa and perhaps even nationally. Touring this city's sobering sites as Carson once again defended his use of Nazi analogies underscored his offensive blend of tone-deafness and historical ignorance.
No mainstream German politician would employ such rhetoric. The wounds are too fresh, the acts too appalling, to unleash that jarring comparison. Germans recoiled during the Greek debt crisis, when a newspaper aligned with the Greek ruling party Syriza ran a cartoon showing German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble in a Nazi uniform, and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras referred pointedly to austerity policies as a "social holocaust."
Imagine how they would respond to Carson.
"We live in a Gestapo age, people don't realize it," Carson said last year, complaining that he had been targeted for audits by the Internal Revenue Service after criticizing President Obama.
The United States, he said shortly afterward, has become "very much like Nazi Germany ... the government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe."
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