I realized America had a problem as early as January 2000. We had just entered a new millennium and my church youth group held an open forum. I asked the students, “Who were the true heroes or best leaders of the 20th Century.” The response floored me! The top name mentioned by four students was Joseph Stalin. I later traced their response to one seriously biased high school history teacher who had influenced them.
I tried not to react and calmly asked them, “Why Stalin?” The reply was that he brought together many diverse countries and people groups to form the Soviet Union. There was no mention of the Soviet gulags (prisons in Siberia), shutting down of churches and religion, the loss of individual rights, and economic disasters that led to famine. They were totally unaware of Stalin’s body count through mass murder, forced labor, and forced famine of twenty million or more people. Some historians say 6 million, some say up to 20 million or many more if you include wars.[1] How could people forget so soon the horrors perpetrated by twentieth century dictators! I see similar errors today as people bandy about the terms Nazi, Fascist, or Communist. I wondered what my father and father-in-law would have said. As veterans of WW II, they saw these horrors up close.
My grandparents were Italian immigrants. My father was the first in his family to go to college and earned a master’s degree. I am so proud of him. He was a World War II veteran who served as part of the occupation forces in Italy. He spoke Italian well enough to work with the newly formed Italian government and the US Army. When he arrived in Italy, he bought a good camera and brought home many pictures. Among his pictures is a photo of Mussolini and his girlfriend, Clara Petacci hanging in front of a gas station in Piazzale Loreto near Milan. Mussolini’s crimes may pale in comparison to Hitler and Stalin, but Mussolini’s war crimes were considerable. Mussolini used mustard gas in Ethiopia killing 100,000 and had concentration camps going long before his 1939 Pact of Steel with Hitler.[2] My father said the shame of most Italians after the war was so profound in having supported Mussolini.
My wife’s grandparents on her father’s side came from Ukraine. Thankfully, her grandfather, Vasili got out before the “Holodomor”, when Russian Communist leader Joseph Stalin starved and murdered as many as five million Ukrainians. This event was denied for years and is still denied by many. Her dad was also a WW II veteran. He served with the Eighth Air Force, 447th Bomber Group. He was a “Mickey Operator” referring to the H2X radar used on Allied planes late in the war.
On Christmas Eve 1944, The Eighth Air Force scrambled every available plane. Mike went out with his B-17 crew to support ground troops fighting in the brutal winter. Since his plane was equipped with advanced radar, it was one of the first to meet the German aircraft over the German-Belgium border. The Nazi’s were in the midst of a last military putsch that we named “The Battle of the Bulge.” Mike’s plane was shot down, and he landed in a tree in Prum, Germany. It was so cold, he had a broken arm, and he was unable to extricate his parachute lines from the tree. Only two of the crew survived.
It was freezing when the Nazis came to get him out of the tree a day after the crash. He carried some of the frostbite damage the rest of his life. He spent the rest of the war in a Nazi prison camp. He was so proud that he never gave up more than his name, rank, and serial number. He was tortured with scars to prove it and nearly starved. The Nazis apparently thought he had top secret information as a late-design radar operator. We did not understand all of this until records were found that had been lost by the army in 2006. Pictures of Mike’s B-17 going down with recovered parts of the plane are in the American Air Museum in Duxford, England. [3] He went on to become an engineer, who among other things, worked on NASA’s Gemini project in the early 60’s. Unfortunately, his experiences in the war impacted him and his family throughout his life.
I think if they were alive today, both my father and my father-in-law would be horrified to see how people cavalierly throw around the words, Nazi, Fascist, and Communist as part of a political strategy to slander the opposition. To hear people praise Hitler or Stalin portraying them as heroes is nauseating and frightening. That seems to be a trend with radical right and radical left leaders these days.
As for me, I have taken Veterans Day to remember the true heroes who fought the real Nazis, Fascists, and Communists, among the my father and father-in-law.
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/when-moscow-acknowledged-stalins-crimes-august-1990
[2] https://historyguild.org/the-forgotten-war-crimes-of-fascist-italy/