Most people associate Donald Trump’s bigotry with groups such as Mexicans, African Americans, women, Muslims, and Jews, to name a few-and with good reason. That’s why it’s critical to pay attention now, to be alert to any efforts to de-value, to denigrate any group, because any group is a potential target. What happens after that we can’t foresee. The danger at present is exclusion-the marginalization and potential removal of various groups of people beyond the boundaries of Trump’s national community. In writing this, however, I do not mean to imply that the President’s horrible comments will lead to gas chambers in our immediate future. At a campaign rally in November 2015, he mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski in disgustingly crude fashion. Of course, this was not the first expression of Trump’s disdain for the disabled. Instead, the targets for this program were German Christians -those with various physical and mental conditions that designated them, in the regime’s terminology, “life unworthy of life.”Īs a historian of modern Germany, I felt compelled to write about this after seeing Donald Trump tell a crowd of Paralympic athletes visiting the White House on April 27 that it was “tough” to watch “too much” of the Paralympic games. The population targeted for extermination in this case was not German Jews. What I’ve just described was not the Holocaust. Afterward, the bodies were removed and burned. Once they were all inside, the doors were sealed and carbon monoxide gas was released into the chamber until all were dead. Upon arrival, they were told to undress and then led into a room designed to look like showers. First, they were transported to special facilities. They were people he considered undesirable and dangerous. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler began a program that involved the selection of a particular group of people for extermination.
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