What we talk about when we talk about Hitler
It was a tweet from veteran American journalist Dan Rather on Feb. 17 that caught my eye: “To see this face staring back at us, with a message like this, is absolutely beyond the pale of any civilized communication. I think of the millions dead. I think of a world destroyed. I shake with anger. The pit of my stomach is sick. I am deeply saddened.”
Rather was responding to a meme that had been tweeted the same day by billionaire Elon Musk during the protests in downtown Ottawa. The image was a picture of Adolf Hitler, with the words: “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau. I had a budget.”
Days earlier, Musk had tweeted support for the convoy that had rumbled into Ottawa to protest the vaccine mandate for truckers.
His Hitler tweet provoked outrage and he deleted it hours later, but not before it had received more than 35,000 likes and more than 9,000 retweets, according to Reuters news agency. Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has 74.8 million followers on the social media platform, so his tweet was undoubtedly viewed by a very wide audience before he removed it.
Musk is not some anonymous troll sitting in a musty basement, but the CEO of major companies and the richest person in the world. He has tremendous clout.
To say it is odious to compare Canada’s prime minister to the homicidal maniac responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and other marginalized people during the Holocaust is a gross understatement. Mandating that truck drivers and civil servants be vaccinated against COVID-19 has no shred of similarity to the methodical extermination of millions of people.
Memes are satirical — I get it. Satire is a genre I enjoy for its laserbeam accuracy in exposing hypocrisy, but there are lines to be drawn between what is humorous and what is repugnant.
As it happens, on the day I saw the tweets from Rather and Musk, I was reading Lucy Adlington’s “The Dressmakers of Auschwitz,” a rigorously researched account of the young female inmates who sewed fashionable clothing at a concentration camp tailoring studio for the wives of the Nazi elite.
It’s one of many accounts of the Holocaust I have read in an attempt to educate myself about this deeply disturbing event in human history.
Adlington, a clothes historian from Britain, contrasts German magazine ads of the 1940s, showing women in smart and beribboned gardening dresses, luxurious furs, jaunty hats and beach attire with the realities of the brutal life in the camps, where underwear and shoes were often unknown luxuries and people who still had the strength fought each other in lice-ridden barracks for scraps of bread as the world went on around them.
The sewing studio at Auschwitz was the brainchild of Hedwig Höss, the wife of Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant of Auschwitz from 1940-45. Hedwig Höss did not see the need to forego luxury, even as innocent people were being gassed and cremated just beyond the garden walls of her family home.
Indeed, as Adlington writes, when the Höss children enjoyed fruits grown in their lush garden, they were told to “‘wash the strawberries well, because of the ash.’ Auschwitz I crematorium was just over the wall, after all.”
Human ash from the innocents who had been gassed was used to fertilize vegetables and cover walking paths. Excrement from the latrines enriched garden soil, human hair was woven into fabric and human skin tanned into leather for riding breeches and slippers.
These atrocities happened 80 years ago — a period that may seem like something from the distant past, and yet there are still a few alive who experienced the horrors first-hand.
To make light of their terrible suffering and the loss of millions of people — countless families torn apart or completely obliterated — seems to me to be the depths of callousness.
Have we really learned so little from the Holocaust that we are ready to turn Hitler into a social media caricature in order to shock and provoke likes or comments?
What a cruel and vicious world this can be. As Dan Rather said, “The pit of my stomach is sick. I am deeply saddened.” If enough people become desensitized to the horrors of genocide, we are bound to turn a blind eye to it again and again. Musk, for all his billions, is a poor man indeed.