The most important question in all of history
The world famous Arc de Triomphe in Paris is the largest victory arch in the world. It stands at 164 feet tall.
The proposed height of the Trump Arch is 250 feet tall.
Here is what the side-by-side comparison looks like:
Here is how the grotesquerie would align with the other monuments in Washington, DC:
Do you know what this is?
It is the Schwerbelastungskörper, which means “Heavy Load-Bearing Body.”
Adolf Hitler believed himself to be a builder and an architectural visionary.
Does it surprise you to learn that when Hitler conquered Paris, he went on an architectural tour accompanied by the architects Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler, Arno Breker, his favorite sculptor, and a delegation of military officers?
He vowed to make Berlin even greater.
This is what the Nazi dystopia was to look like in his twisted mind:
The Volkshalle, or people’s hall, was conceived to hold 180,000 faithful Nazi party members for Führer rallies in a space so large that the condensation caused by human breath would have made it rain inside.
Hitler imagined Berlin as the center of the world, to be renamed Germania, the power center of the Thousand-Year Reich.
Hitler said:
As a world capital Berlin will only be comparable with Ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Rome!
What is London, what is Paris compared to that!
Indeed.
Albert Speer was the chief architect of the Nazi Reich. At the center of his plans for Germania was the Triumphal Arch, with a height of 394 feet.
The scale of Hitler’s Triumphal Arch was so immense that the Arc de Triomphe would fit inside it 40 times over. His plan was to carve the names of Germany’s 1.8 million World War I soldiers killed in action — minus the Jews — on it.
The Schwerbelastungskörper is all that is left of the monstrous vision. It was designed to test whether Berlin’s sandy soil could accommodate the immense weight of Hitler’s fantasy.
It couldn’t.
Yet, that is not the lesson of the Schwerbelastungskörper.
Adolf Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich ended when a bullet blew out the back of the grubby Führer’s head in a dank bunker.
Two days earlier, he was still moving phantom armies into battle, and directing his generals to the final victory.
In the end, underground, the final lesson of Nazism was learned.
When Germany was destroyed, the mad man who destroyed it blamed the German people, who believed in him, and fell for his lies and hatreds as being unworthy of his genius.
Hitler demanded the destruction of everything, everywhere.
The order was called the “Nero Decree.”
Hitler could not sate his desire for retribution and revenge against his own people for failing him.
The plan called for the destruction of all of Germany so that nothing of value could fall into the hands of the Allies, who were closing in from all sides. It was a death sentence and a punishment inflicted on the nation by Hitler for losing.
Everything was to be destroyed.
The decree was mostly ignored as untrained boys and old men were sent to the front to die for the Führer, even though by then the Reich was rubble, and the cause was lost.
By the end, the only promise left for Hitler to make was to take away one last possibility from a complicit people who allowed the madness to fester.
He demanded the poisoning of the soil and the water.
He demanded the destruction of every bridge and every pipe.
He demanded that every animal be slaughtered, and every surviving German be sentenced to a slow death of starvation and misery.
Hitler promised a Thousand-Year Reich and German greatness.
Each day built upon the last.
Each hour tightened the vice.
Some looked at the Autobahn, and thought that he was a genius.
Some looked at the German economy, and said that he was a miracle worker.
Some looked at all of the blond-haired and blue-eyed children dressed in uniforms of brutality, playing children’s games, and saw happiness instead of fear.
There is a lazy tradition in American politics where politicians have been quick to throw the Nazi or fascist epithet at a political opponent over some matter of trivia.
In fact, this is not limited to America.
Putin has justified his invasion of Ukraine as being necessary because Ukraine is where the Nazis are, when in fact Moscow is home to the murderous fascist Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump’s idol.
What this has produced in total is the erasure of what Nazism and fascism were.
Most people look at Adolf Hitler and his Thousand-Year Reich and remember the genocide, war crimes and immolation of Europe as his legacy.
He fills a space as the greatest evil of the 20th century — a monster beyond comparison, who unleashed a wickedness on the world that has not lost its capacity to instil horror 80+ years later.
What Hitler did is something much better known than how he did it.
How did it happen?
The German general who commanded occupied Paris refused Hitler’s orders to destroy the world’s most beautiful city that Hitler had so admiringly toured with his architects.
General Dietrich von Choltitz reflected back on the insanity. Here is how he answered the “how” question:
We all share the guilt. We went along with everything, and we half-took the Nazis seriously, instead of saying “to Hell with you and your stupid nonsense”. I misled my soldiers into believing this rubbish. I feel utterly ashamed of myself. Perhaps we bear even more guilt than these uneducated animals.
(This was an apparent reference to Hitler and his supporting Nazi Party members.)
How did it happen?
This may be the most important question in all of history because knowing the answer — and recognizing the signs — may turn out to be the key to survival for humanity.
The most important history lesson of the 20th century is the following:
Hitler was elected. He was chosen, and that choice was a final one.
After it, there was no more need for Germans to choose anything.
Everything was decided for them, and his last decision was to impose a death sentence on Germany, which is what the “Nero Decree” was.
The evil man who fancied himself a builder was, in fact, a destroyer.
After the bullet passed through Hitler’s brain, his body, along with that of Eva Braun, was wrapped in blankets, carried outside, placed in a shell crater, doused with diesel fuel, and lit on fire.
Stalin was obsessed with the recovery of Hitler’s charred remains, which he wanted in Moscow as a trophy.
Hitler, Goebbels, their wives and the remains of Goebbels’ children were ground to dust, and dumped into the Ehle River near Biederitz in Germany on April 4, 1970, by Soviet soldiers.
His journey was at an end, and finally there was nothing next that would ever happen regarding the man who lit the world on fire.
Twenty-two years passed between Hitler’s Munich coup, and a bullet meeting his brain.
When it ended, there was nothing.
Only death.
Only murder.
Only evil.
Some say that talking about gathering evil insults the dead because the evil that is gathering is unlike that which came before.
Because the times are different, the patterns and predicates must be dismissed as irrelevant because the known conclusion seems unlikely to repeat itself — even as the predicates line up in perfect symmetry.
The lessons of the past are not bound in the outcomes, but rather, in the “how.”
How did it happen?
This is what must be known.
Two things combined: (i) a lack of imagination and (ii) a willful blindness that held what was happening could not be so because who could ever do the evil deeds they promised to do?
Some believe that Adolf Hitler was the only tyrant in history who kept his evil promises.
They would be wrong, and that is the lesson.
What comes tomorrow can only be stopped today.
America doesn’t need a Trump victory arch because, in a sense, we already have one.
The Washington Monument, the dominant landmark in Washington, DC, is an obelisk that stands 500 feet tall.
It is the largest in the world, which is appropriate for a man who was considered by his adversary King George III to be the greatest man of his or any age in more than 2,000 years of history.
When Washington died he was famously eulogized as “First in War, First in Peace and First in the hearts of his countrymen” by his friend General “Light Horse Harry Lee.” Harry Lee’s son was the traitor Robert E. Lee, who would try to destroy the Union conceived by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and Hamilton.
It is always important to remember that our American story is deeply woven together by connecting threads of contradictions and surprises that make clear that history is complicated.
Washington was not a perfect man, but he was America’s wisest teacher. His chief lesson was about humility, which is why the proposed Trump Arch, a symbol of psychotic egotism, is a desecrative symbol and an appalling one.
This painting by John Trumbull of General Washington resigning his commission hangs in the rotunda of the United States Capitol:
Notice the chair larger than the rest draped with a cloak.
It symbolizes Washington’s act of resigning from his position of power.
Turnbull considered this to be amongst the “highest moral lessons ever given to the world.”
Washington entered the chambers of the Maryland State House, where the Congress of the Confederation had convened for a highly scripted ceremony that had been meticulously planned down to the last detail.
The date was December 23, 1783, and Washington had come to lay down his power.
He could have been Caesar.
Instead, he became president six years later when his country called him to service again.
Washington could have been a tyrant or a king.
He chose a different path because of the magnificence of his character, and after eight years as president, he relinquished power again setting in motion 224 years of uninterrupted peaceful transitions of power within the “Great Republic.” That came to a bloody and violent end on January 6, 2021, because of the worst and most faithless American in history, Donald John Trump.
The cornerstone of the Washington Monument was dedicated on July 4, 1848, with both Dolly Madison and Eliza Hamilton attending. By 1854, the obelisk stood as a 156 foot stump.
Nations from around the world contributed marble to the project. One came in the form of an immense block of marble from a 300 BC Roman temple, donated by the Vatican. This triggered a fierce reaction from political extremists who called themselves the “Know Nothings.”
The anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic extremists stormed the incomplete construction site, and smashed the marble block to pieces and cast them into the Potomac River.
The Monument was not completed until 1884.
Look at this photo:
Can you see the line?
That marks the spot where construction stopped for decades.
Yet, in the end, the project was completed.
America will always be a work in progress.
In the end, Trump will be the most reviled name in American history, and it will linger in infamy around the world.
There will be no buildings named for Trump, no rest stops, not even a plastic urinal in a national park latrine.
Nothing.
All that will linger is disgrace and shame.
He won’t even have a Schwerbelastungskörper, which is very good thing indeed.
Well, as I have mentioned here previously, my uncle was one of the Third Army soldiers who arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 and liberated it from the SS. He was awarded the Bronze Star and is buried thankfully in blue New Jersey.
I am glad Minnesota is fighting back against the American descendants of the SS, but if South Carolina brings back Lindsey Graham for another six years, or Alabama decides that Tommy Tuberville should be its next Governor, then I’m all for succession. Enough is enough.
If anyone is in need of a good cry, I recommend listening to CSNY's "Find the Cost of Freedom". It is timeless.
In honor of Rene Good and Alex Pretti.