From Einsatzgruppen to College Campuses
by Cory Franklin
October 25, 2023
In late 1939 when World War II broke out, the Nazis mobilized machine gun units, known as Einsatzgruppen, whose purpose was to kill as many Jews (as well as political opponents) in Eastern Europe and the Western Soviet Union as quickly as possible. The death squads were not formally part of the German Wehrmacht, but the Nazis had no trouble lining up citizen conscripts, who would round up Jews and transport them to isolated areas. The victims were stripped of clothes and valuables before being machinegunned, often in front of friends and families, who were next up to be killed. After being shot, the Jews, including infants and the elderly, collapsed into mass graves they had been forced to dig themselves. The corpses were then machinegunned again to guarantee no survivors before the area was covered over. (SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler once visited a mass grave site during the killings and had to be taken away when he became physically ill after some brain matter splattered his SS boots.)
The Einsatzgruppen may have been responsible for as many as one and a half million murders, nearly one-third of the Jews killed in the Holocaust. The Germans, however, were nothing if not efficient. This method of mass killing ultimately required too much time, too many guns, bullets, and too much fuel for transportation as well as taking an emotional toll on the gunmen, who had to be paid high wages and plied with alcohol to motivate them to kill women and children. The Nazis progressed to small stationary gas chambers using piped-in carbon monoxide before graduating to transporting victims on trains to larger gas chambers in concentration camps and employing reliable, quick-acting cyanide gas.
But for all their feral evil, the Nazis tried to hide what they did.
For the most part, the camps and killing fields were located remotely. When the Red Cross came to investigate the camps during the war, the killings stopped briefly and inspectors saw clean sheets and swept floors. At the end of the war, General Eisenhower made Germans citizens and camp guards parade through the camps, ensuring they saw the enormity of the crimes. And when the Holocaust was finally revealed and the world discovered that enormity, there was little public quibbling about good and evil.
Comes now Hamas, which in the first week of October employed terrorists who infiltrated into Israel and employed similar methods as the Einsatzgruppen used to kill Jews: indiscriminately gunning down innocents with assault weapons, raping, torturing, burning people alive and taking hostages including toddlers. It was the worst slaughter of Jewish civilians in a short period since the Holocaust – in population terms the equivalent of killing 50,000 Americans.
In one sense, it was worse than what the Nazis did.
Of course the absolute numbers of those killed was on a far smaller scale than the Holocaust, but no one should confuse lack of opportunity with lack of motivation. As opposed to the Nazis, the Hamas killers made no effort to hide their crimes. In fact, the opposite.
They videoed and posted the killings and torture on social media for wide release, in some cases directly to victims’ families. They wanted the world to see.
Unlike the Holocaust, these killers earned widespread international support with celebratory rallies in many different countries.
But one positive has come from this atrocity: it provides a moment of moral clarity – a prompt and uncompromising demonstration of where people stand on the question of good and evil.
And on that question, it is crystal clear that American higher education, from top to bottom -college administrators to university students – has become infected with an abhorrent moral rot.
Effete university presidents who regularly meet in walnut-paneled offices, partake of wine and cheese while discussing tenure and hiring decisions, and are quick to align themselves with Black Lives Matter, can barely utter the word “evil” in this case. A survey of America’s top 100 universities’ leaders’ statements revealed that fewer than half issued outright condemnation of Hamas’s terrorist attack against Israel. One-third expressed general grief but refused to assign blame. Northwestern University president Michael Schill, who publicly criticized the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, could do no better than “regardless of what the University has done in the past, I do not foresee that I will be issuing statements on political, geopolitical, or social issues.” There’s some moral courage for you.
University of Florida president Ben Sasse, the outlier among his peers nationwide, said “(his fellow university presidents) have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother.”
What of the university professors who teach our children, while clutching their pearls when confronted with an opinion on climate change or abortion they can not abide? A Cornell professor praised the Hamas attacks as “energizing” and “exhilarating.” A Stanford instructor separated the Jews in his class and told everyone calmly that “only”six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
And a teacher at the School of the Art institute, who describes herself on social media as “Chicago ‘s radically optimistic transsexual climate scientist,” wrote on Instagram after the attacks, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very bad people. Irredeemable excrement.” She added, “It’s disgusting and grotesque. May they all rot in hell.” She has since disavowed her remarks. Must have been taken out of context.
And the pusillanimous students who get the vapors at the use of a pronoun they believe is misassigned? Not only are they unwilling and unable to see the evil in front of them, they sing its praises publicly in huge rallies on campuses all over the country – with bullhorns and signs. Those signs? Some of them show a Hamas paraglider, meaning they were promptly made to order. Look at the signs: professional, perfectly color-coded, fonts and type selected for maximum effect.
And nary a misspelling – that’s how you know they weren’t made in the college dorm. Signs bought and paid for, created so that students can better celebrate evil.
How did we get here? In the newsletter Law and Liberty, Zachary Goldsmith explains the fault is not in our stars but ourselves, “In our own time it is truly us -parents, teachers, tastemakers, and the culturally and politically elect among us – who have brought forward a new generation that despises all that has come before them. The parents who produced these little demons…have raised these children on fashionable ideas of their own time – the political correctness of yesteryear, worthy then of a laugh and a dismissal, confident as we dissidents were that such silly beliefs could be ignored with little harm done. Alas, political correctness has returned with a vengeance in recent years, spawning an increasingly militant wokeness, increasingly proscribing the ever-shrinking bounds of accepted speech and belief.”
Implicit in this is how antisemitism has become the American Express Card of academia: Don’t leave home without it.
Whatever virtue academia signaled and pretended to project has been exposed as nothing more than rank hypocrisy riding shotgun with the warped moral decay of antisemitism. It is likely to intensify; Jews worldwide are now in more danger than any time since the Germans held sway in Europe – perhaps even more so. And right now American college campuses are not their place to look for succor.
What can be done to reverse this moral rot? One avenue is looking to religion. A crucial aspect of the best part of every religion is acknowledgment of evil. Return to the advice of The Bible (if it unsettles you to read it as religious advice, read it as an admonition from the greatest piece of literature ever written),
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
George Orwell, who knew a thing or two about moral equivocation, having witnessed it on a large scale at a time when the Einsatzgruppen were doing their utmost to exterminate Jews, once said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Regarding academia in our century his observation calls for updating, “There are some moral abominations so unspeakable only an intellectual could applaud them.”
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He was director of medical intensive care at Cook County Hospital in Chicago for more than 25 years. An editorial board contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page, he writes freelance medical and non-medical articles. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Post, Guardian, Washington Post and has been excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Cory was also Harrison Ford’s technical adviser and one of the role models for the character Ford played in the 1993 movie, “The Fugitive.” His YouTube podcast “Rememberingthepassed” has received 900,000 hits to date. He published “Chicago Flashbulbs” in 2013, “Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” in 2015, and most recently coauthored, A Guide to Writing College Admission Essays: Practical Advice for Students and Parents in 2021.
Comments 41
Evil Lurks in the Heart of Man. They are changing History and Boundary of Country’s and the History of Countries that young people have no clue as to what has happened and those that lived through the Nazi Era and Civil Wars understand as to what is happening today. Our young have no clue and believe the lies that are told without having the brains or common sense to check the facts. Third World War is not far folks.
Cory Franklin, this is one of the best things you have written here. Thank you. I will share this with as many people as I can that will read it.
Great article. So true, so sad, and so scary for the times we now live in.
Just ordinary folks! Ordinary folks who watch Public TV, CNN, MSNBC, hate MAGA, hate people who defend the unborn, the elderly, the mentally, physically and economically challenged, read nothing, remember nothing, value only the momentary and easily consumed and expect government to suckle them are like the ordinary folks who guzzled beer, blamed Jews, deferred values to Goebbles and der Fuehrer, went along to go along and expected the Reich to suckle them.
Your opening statement reminded me of a book I just picked up: _Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland._
I’ve been putting off reading it, because it does seem so dark. But now I’ll pick it up as soon as I finish my current read.
Everyday people, ordinary folks… Milgram’s obedience experiments come to mind…
Powerful piece. When the atrocities struck in Israel, I reached the immediate conclusion that these horrific acts of Hamas against innocent people was an evil and unjust act that deserved an immediate military response. However, even having visited the Holocaust museum in Skokie earlier this year, where I wept over not just the Jewish slaughter but the plight of black Americans on exhibit in the lower level, I did not equate these attacks by Hamas as the equivalency of Einsatzgruppen. It clearly was! Wow! Thanks for pointing this out. What Israel is now doing is founded on a military objective to eradicate the evil doers of the enemy — not aimed at the innocent, which is the exact opposite of the GENOCIDE objective of Hamas, extending their evil by using their own innocents as human shields.
What we see around us is, of course, the repetition of history. Most are familiar with Santayana’s statement, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” What Santayana did not say, or perhaps did not realize, is that history is repeated with a vengeance: stronger, more heinous, more hateful, infinitely more destructive. The so-called advances of modern communication have helped to exponentially exacerbate our dire situation.
I must take issue with Mr Franklin’s assertion (through the Zachary Goldsmith quote) that the fault of this whole debacle lies with the parents: “…The parents who produced these little demons…have raised these children on fashionable ideas of their own time…”
Most parents did the best we could with what we had. My own children were educated in a conservative home, attended a Christian parochial school, yet the evil found its way into our family. Parents are not the only influence on their children. Through the use of the “educational” systems and the internet, our children were indoctrinated without our knowledge, while we thought we were doing right by them.
Now, like the historical Brown Shirts who preceded them, our children reject God and their kin, destroying with their own hands the gift with which God blessed them: the gift of supportive Family. The Narrative has become their god and their family. This was orchestrated on a spiritual level, and implemented on the temporal plane.
Don’t blame all parents. Blame evil.
But don’t stop at pointing the finger.
Pray unceasingly. Speak truth in love. Stare down the evil, and don’t blink. Don’t even blink.
Your was comment about repeating history was excellent!!!
Thank you!!!!
A very powerfully written piece. If you ever wonder how the antisemites and Hamas apologists can get things so morally wrong just waste an hour or two watching MSNBC or listening to WCPT AM 820 in Chicago. Hate speech is the topic of the day.
Just stumbled on 820 yesterday. Accusations and just plain fictional statements by a couple of what sounded like just flunked- out sophs demonstrating their mis-understanding of what Ethics 101 is about.
Powerful summary which should be required reading to all of those “placard” carriers in those demonstrations on the nightly news. But let’s start having this summary required reading for our “so called” representatives in the White House/Congress/City Hall etc.
“A moment of moral clarity” only to those who know what morals are. The terrorists and their bankers in Iran long to go down in history as having completed the unfinished work of the Nazis. What kind of people want to go down in history as that?
Repugnant. Despicable. Etc. are there even words that can describe the extent of that evil?
“There are some moral abominations so unspeakable only an intellectual could applaud them”
Spot on. Perfectly said.
This is why we here in Jerusalem have no patience for moral equivalence from the bien pensant class. This time was different from others in recent memory, but not different from millenia of jew hating.
As I taught my daughters: never start a fight, but always finish it.
This time Israel is finishing the fight. Bien pensants and celebrities be damned.
Extraordinary elocution on the heinous face of evil on display for all the world to see.
It’s so sad. If I had small children, I would be on every school board in my district. I listened to our illustrious Secretary of State here in Illinois testify that books shouldn’t be banned, but handled by Parents as part of their responsibility. Now, if those parents go to a school board meeting to complain (show concern for what is being taught to their children) they are labeled Domestic Terrorists. As far as our colleges go, somewhere in Hell H*mml*r and G**bbl*s are smiling!
We have gotten the corrupt Government we voted for!
By the way. Coming home from Vietnam I was called a baby killer and war monger by students. Probably the same ones who now thank me for my service. Hypocrites!
Great Column John. Hope you are feeling better every day!!
” Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints. As up is down just call me Lucifer cause I’m in need of some restraint..” Sympathy for the Devil. Yes, this is where we are as a society. Democrats want to tear down and create a new society in their image. Republicans just want to keep what little civility is left in the world. The fight is a difficult one with your kids constantly getting indoctrinated with social media and leftist public education. Hopefully you’ve raised a child with strong enough moral fiber to withstand the assault, especially when you send your young adult off to college. I used to wonder why people sent their kids to Christian colleges. Now I get it.
Here is your Democrat party.
These on campus useful idiots listen to the dark wacko professors and think they have been to the mountain top. To prove their enlightenment they get noisy and blow in the wind trying to give meaning to their, so far, meaningless lives.
Any woman on campus supporting Palestine should consider where she would be in that Islamic state. No education, no driving, no going out in public unescorted by a family member. Those member of the LGBYTQ should consider what Islam has to say about them and what there treatment of them has been.
Times have certainly changed over the years. It was not that far back that the protestors were against American envolment in southeast Asia, infact the Chicago Police were wrongly accussed of a police riot. I was there and the police had to do what they did because of “spoiled brats” wanted their way. That was 1968 and it has not changed a bit. Kids protest about Israel doing what they do because of what Hamas did; our education system did the same! I would also blame the admistration for the Hamas slaughter of the Jewish people as it released the funds to Iran to fund what Hamas.
Well stated. As the complete destruction of the Reich abomination now stands as a mere speed bump on the hatred highway, I fear the systematic reduction of Gaza and ferreting out of the burrowed Hamas killers will also do as much. The American campus Einsatzgruppen doubtless prefer the sanitized antisemite label, but the stench needs to be appended to the adherents: they are “Jew-haters”, not just reasoning, rational opponents thereof.
Dr. Franklin nails it. We now learn that White House pro-Hamas staffers are getting special
counseling to deal with the trauma that Pres, Biden has stood with Israel so far. Talk about a Fifth Column in the White House!
I would prefer university leaders decline to issue declarative political statements unless they are directly related to education/ limited national issues. They are in the news too much IMHO. Professors who have tenure have carte blanche but I wish they wouldn’t use it.
Outstanding article.
What can be done to reverse this moral rot? Find evil’s weakness and exploit it. What do university presidents and administrators fear the most? Loss of funding. If you donate to your alma mater and discover it promotes woke, stop donating. If they ask why you stopped, tell them you no longer support their mission and demand that they end tenure, the greatest fear of the woke professors. Attend your local school board meetings; if you can’t, find someone who shares your values who does attend and use that person as your eyes and ears to monitor them. VOTE out woke board members at the first opportunity. No matter how tired or busy you are, make time to check Little Johnny’s homework and assigned reading. You should be doing that regardless of the political and/or moral leanings of your local educators. These are just a few steps we as individuals can take to reverse the rot. If it worked with Bud Light, it’ll work with the educational system. It will take longer, but remember, cash is king.
Most excellent assessment, Mr Allen! We must remove the supporters of evil, cut them off at their financial knees.
I’m in MO, and our congress-critter Jason Smith has brought up the tax exempt status of the indoctrination institutions. Remove that as well, and it would be a fair bet that the woke masses will change their tune.
Those of us who had parents, family members, professors, and faith leaders who took their formative responsibilities seriously, rooted my moral convictions. I personally refuse to abdicate responsibility for skirting the realities of “unpleasant to talk about” historical events. The holocaust was evil, 9/11 was evil, the attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli’s was evil. A gelatinous pulpit, avoidant CEO’s & University administrators, a federal government filled with manipulators and liars will continue to undermine civilization unless we speak the truth- thank you Dr. Franklin- we must and I will, pray with intensity, search for truth in the researched written and spoken word, stand firm and guide our children and grandchildren, as well as, withhold our hard-earned dollars from disseminators of moral rot. Forgetting is not an option.
Speak truth! Yes, ma’am!
There is record of the Nazi occupation published in 1942 is the 750 page report, “the Black Book of Poland.” Several articles on the facts of this report were in the old American Herald newspaper at that time. It is a horrific account of the atrocities performed on people of Poland which 20% of the citizen population were murdered. The Nazi’s would take a family and ask the mother/wife to decide which one of sons or husband that she would save since all of the others would be killed. If she was unable to decide, then all of them would be killed. This was the basis for “Sophie’s Choice.” This level of evil never left this world, it was just hibernating.
Great point about the scale of the attack, 1000 Israelis = 50,000 Americans. Imagine how we would react if 50,000 Americans were slaughtered in a single day, and many more taken hostage. 9/11 was 3000 people, no hostages. Then imagine how the American general public would react if the radical left staged protests supporting the attackers at cities and universities scattered throughout the land. All hell would break loose.
Excellent article and readers’ comments. Hope they can be spread far and wide.
Sadly, we can’t expect our self-serving, amoral mainstream media to help. Their only interest is in spewing incendiary fictions to attract eyeballs and advertiser $.
But we can speak out. And we can NOT FUND every government, news media, ‘university’ or business organization that fails to uphold the positive moral values embodied in our Constitution, Bill of Rights, Rules of Law, The Golden Rule… “BUD LIGHT” them all.
You ignore the elephant in the room. Many of whom you accuse of moral rot – such as NU President Schill – are in fact Jewish. He is not an outlier. Some of my long term NY friends – all Jews – have aligned with the moral relativism of justice for Palestine. Their usual line is “yes what Hamas did was bad BUT …”
I also think you should get out of your Jewish victim lane. Yeah, I know, it’s tough since us Jews have been assigned to that lane for centuries. At least it was tough for me. And when we stand up for ourselves, and no longer accept our traditional role as pasty faced meek scholars, we are scorned as evil, apartheid loving white supremacists. So Cory, stop thinking and acting like a victim. As a Jew you should embrace the 2nd and learn how to fight. Because as your article illustrates – although I doubt you intended it to – no one is going to save your skinny Jewish ass except you. So wake up to reality buddy.
I do not know if you have seen the reporting about the attempts by Hamas to invade via the sea, but they were caught before they reached the beach and terminated.
Upon searching their remains, a note/letter was found telling them to execute and behead all those they come across. Then, they need to cut out their hearts and livers….
Yes, Hamas is much worse than anything we have come across so far. Perhaps they took an education from the Einsatzgruppen and enhanced it some what.
It is time for Biden to get away from the beach and start protecting American citizens who find themselves being killed and held hostage by Hamas. Stop funding these terrorists and that includes IRAN…Biden is looked at as a fool, demented and feckless…..weakness beyond any thing ever seen by our enemies.
God help us all.
Tom
Thank you for this.
I doubt that the students, or even most of the faculty (neither of which seem to be big students of history) know what “Kristallnacht” was.
But they were re-enacting it, almost to the letter. All that was missing were the armbands, those neatly pressed brown shirts and jack boots.
Maybe the next time the same people that paid for all those neatly printed signs can provide the armbands too?
Very powerful, sums up what’s going on in our country and it’s not looking good for us.
A well-written article, unnecessary for our generation but, sadly, needed for this one. While they were wimps on masks, at least one university president got this right. Check out: https://www.rutgers.edu/president/a-message-in-these-troubling-times
Excellent powerful article.
It was hard to watch and hear the atrocities which occurred. Yes I cried. Who couldn’t?
Sometimes there are no words.
All I can say and think is God is watching.
These modern day American Nazis represent the left wing of the Democratic Party. The Dems own it big time. Their Frankenstein DEI has come home to roost. Have we heard anything condemning these Hitler Jugend part II, from our local or national Democratic party. Has Jumbo Boy, who is Jewish, lashed out in the strongest language about expelling them from his party? Where are the Jewish/Democratic elected officials strong statements about this? Nothing but silence. Why not strip the Gang of 4 of all the committeeships and monies. Will the Dems have the courage to run Dem candidates against them in the up coming primaries!
Wouldnt be great if Jewish voters abandoned the Dem party in 2024. They should………before it’s too late.
Look no further than:
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org
The only thing I can add to this is a personal note. Throughout my life, I have been befriended by Jewish people. Both in Canada and here, I have cherished my Jewish friends as some of the most humane, kindly, and loving people, as well as being successful and yes, intellectual.
The idea that my friends are now deemed pariahs because they are Jewish fills me with hatred and disgust toward those who would apply this hatred to innocent people. That includes the large number of students of my alma mater, Harvard University, and their sickeningly amoral and brainwashed administrators, including professors and going right to the top of the formerly-respected university.
So keep up the good work of reporting. It’s only by continually exposing this kind of evil is there a chance of defeating it. It’s all I can cling to. Veritas indeed!