A Man Who Admires Hitler Must Never Be President Again

I remember going to the Holocaust Memorial and seeing the pile of shoes.

I was a teenager. My mother and some of the other homeschoolers of high school aged girls had arranged a sort of class trip, for us to go sightseeing in Washington DC. One day was dedicated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Towards the end of the museum tour, we all shuffled into a dim room, filled with shoes: men’s, women’s, and children’s shoes, some of them fashionable and some not, some I might like to own if they were new. But they were sixty years old.

These were shoes found at the Majdanek killing center, where 78,000 Jews were murdered. When the Soviets found the camp, they kept the ovens, the gas chambers, the gallows and the other buildings as a testimony to what had been done there, but one heap of the shoes stolen from the prisoners was sent to America. The curators of the Holocaust Memorial put the shoes in a gallery on the ground floor.

There was no glass case covering them. They were in the open air. I could smell them. I could taste a bit of acrid mildew on the back of my tongue. Everyone who walked into that room had to smell those dusty old shoes.

They smelled exactly like you’d think a heap of sixty-year-old shoes would smell.

I hadn’t known what genocide smelled like, until then.

This week, we’ve had an October Surprise, one of many.

It seems that while in office, Donald Trump admired Adolph Hitler.

He commented frequently that Hitler “did some good things.” He said he wished he had generals like Hitler had– apparently not knowing that Hitler’s generals tried to assassinate him more than once. He meant that he wanted the United States military to do exactly as he ordered, no matter how terrible, so he could be a dictator with absolute power. This goes along with what we already knew: that he was infuriated when the military refused to shoot protesters in the legs, for example. He wants to be a Hitler.

I watched Republican sycophants refusing to condemn him for this, even trying to defend him. That Fox News talking head Brian Kilmeade stammering about “German generals who were Nazis and whatever.”

Nazis and whatever.

I used to believe that “Hitler was a bad person” was a statement that would never had to be defended. That an assertion like “Hitler did some good things” would be career-ending for anyone who said it, because there’s no room for debate about this point.

All day, I’ve been remembering the Holocaust Memorial. Myself, a naive teenager, staring at those shoes, smelling those shoes, tasting the stale air. Shuddering, inwardly, while looking outwardly calm. Saying to myself, as so many have said when they walk through that memorial: “Never again. Never again. This must never happen again.” 

I don’t know how to tell you, if you don’t already know, that Hitler was a bad person through and through.

He did not do good things. Men who want power like his and soldiers who would do what the Nazis did, are bad men.

I don’t know how to tell you that the atrocities committed by Hitler and his enablers can happen again, quite easily, if enough people are willing to let them.

I wish I could convince you that a man who admires Hitler and aspires to be like him must not be allowed to hold power, ever again. He cannot become president again. He must not hold any office at all. He ought never to command large amounts of money or be promoted by the press or have a cameo in a children’s film or see his photo in the newspaper. He is not worthy of any honor at all, because he is an evil and dangerous man.

I wish I could show you that genocide looks like a heap of leather shoes, now eighty years old.

Genocide smells like dust and mold and the feet of human beings who no longer exist.

It tastes like a drop of acrid mildew on the back of your tongue.

It can happen here.

We must not let it happen here.

Never again.

Never again.

This must not happen, ever again.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.