OUR PRESIDENT!: "The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. SILENCE IS COMPLICITY."

[halfulglas]

50. That's why I was surprised how much Rachel Maddow was able to dig up for Ultra.

Growing up and going to school in the 1950s we, of course, knew about WWII. They were still making a lot of war movies then. We were taught about the depression - our parents certainly lived through it and remembered it. We knew there were Nazi extermination camps but not that much about the horrors of them, and certainly not our role in supplying German companies with products, and not our role in not accepting Jewish refugees when they needed refuge. I was a volunteer student librarian in our small high school library and had access to the glassed off stacks at the back of our library where the books were kept which were considered only for advanced history students, except that so many of them were fairly recent, not more than a decade or two old. I was so surprised at the reading material there. I never knew about the German American Bund. I was shocked to find out that Lindberg, the hero who flew the Atlantic solo (Spirit of St. Louis was made in the 50s), was a Nazi sympathizer. I learned about Father Coughlin.

When Judgment at Neurenberg came out and they showed actual footage from the camps so many Americans were absolutely shocked. I think when the war ended and they didn't see the pictures of the horror they just thought of them as concentration camps, not killing camps. That's when the word Holocaust really entered the English language.

Over the years I thought about the books in that room. I loved history but knew something was wrong in the way they disappeared all that information, pretended it didn't happen. It taught me that we never learn the complete history and will never be as great as we hoped we would be if we keep hiding the truth and do not talk about our failings and face them. It's not just the Confederate states that won't face their past. We all do it. Now we have the rise of the moms that don't want their kids to be taught anything that may make their darlings even feel uncomfortable. I guess this is how we disappeared the mid-30s through the early 40s. I just never thought that Americans would deny it ever happened, or wasn't as bad as reported, or even worse, that Hitler didn't exterminate enough.