Subject: Are We Becoming “Good Germans”?
We’re all familiar with Trump’s famous deportation flights of Venezuelans and Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a concentration camp in El Salvador in violation of a court’s order.

But did you know there have been over 1,000 such flights in the past few months, some to absolute hellhole countries?

On top of that, the Washington Post reports this morning that ICE is planning to open or expand 125 new “detention facilities” across the country, including ones to hold families, giving America the largest prison system in the world. The paper notes:

“The documents outline the strategy behind ICE’s breakneck expansion, a chaotic effort that has already triggered lawsuits and accusations of cruelty.”

Are Americans being conditioned by our media to become “Good Germans”?

For several decades I did international relief work for a nonprofit based in Germany; my family and I even lived at the organization’s headquarters in Stadtsteinach for much of 1986/1987. One of my closest co-workers and mentors was a man 25 years my senior, Horst Von Heyer, who’d been a teenage member of the Hitler Youth when WWII ended.


Me and Horst Von Heyer, circa early 1990s, in Statdsteinach, Germany
I started working with Horst in the late 1970s after his assistant was eaten by a crocodile in southern Africa; for example, we went into Uganda together to deal with the post-Idi Amin 1980 famine and set up a program for orphaned kids that continues to this day. When we lived in Germany, Horst and I used to have lunch together nearly every day when we were both in town; he became one of my closest friends (he’s now passed away).

So, of course, I asked him how Germans (and him, as a teenager) could possibly have been okay with the Nazis rounding up millions of Jews and other “undesirables” to ship via boxcars to the death camps.

His answer was frankly shocking in its simplicity:

“We didn’t know.”

The concentration camps within Germany were, he explained, for “the worst of the worst” criminals and “traitors” who’d tried to overthrow the country. The Republican Great Depression and the chaos that followed World War I, he told me, had created a massive problem of street crime and homeless people, so most middle-class Germans, feeling unsafe, enthusiastically supported Hitler’s “law and order” agenda.

Those “innocent” Jews, Gypsies, and others removed from local areas were being moved, Horst said he was told, because their residences were slated to be part of what we’d call “urban renewal” efforts. They were simply being resettled, and it would end up better for them and the communities they were leaving.

“I remember how shocked we all were when the pictures came out from the Polish death camps like Auschwitz at the end of the war,” he told me. “You Americans and the rest of the world were shocked, too. Hitler’s men and the German media had done a really good job of keeping it all under wraps.”

In that, I discovered by reading Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and other research, Horst was right.

By the end of 1933, Hitler had largely neutered Germany’s free press; not by market competition, but by bankrupting writers and outlets with libel lawsuits, unleashing police raids for “slander” claims, vigilante “Brownshirt” militia violence against reporters, arrests of publishers for “publishing anti-German propaganda,” the outright seizure of progressive newspapers, and a sweeping Schriftleitergesetz “Editor’s Law” which criminalized journalism that exposed government excesses.

Nazi loyalists and party-friendly oligarchs took over the press outlets that remained in a massive media consolidation project, ensuring that every headline and every radio news report served the regime much like Fox “News” and rightwing hate-radio/podcasts do today for Trump.

When stories were published about Jews and others being transported, they were couched in euphemisms such as Umsiedlung (“resettlement”) or Evakuierung (“evacuation”) and Arbeitseinsatz (“labor deployment”) in official communications, press coverage, and public speeches.

These terms fit neatly into propaganda narratives about “urban renewal,” war-effort labor needs, or “population transfers” from “overcrowded” and “crime-ridden” cities. There were literally no public reports in Germany about mass killings or illegal detentions between 1934 and the end of the war in 1945.

Today in the U.S., the lack of coverage of Trump’s brutal treatment of immigrants, lack of due process, and hundreds of monthly deportation flights to hellhole countries or foreign concentration camps isn’t due to a Schriftleitergesetz legal ban but rather to billionaire owners sucking up to Trump, partisan political framing, and the media’s tendency to underplay ongoing, systemic human rights abuses once they’ve been normalized.

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