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Donald Trump’s Hitlerian logic is no mistake

82 253
07.10.2024

If genealogy is destiny, as Donald Trump believes, then “poison in the blood” – a phrase Trump repeatedly uses – determines the fate of nations. By Trump’s logic, “blood” is the true and final measure. Trump, like Hitler, appears to classify people and countries by “blood” on a scale of their innate racial characteristics. Those features define the essence of nations, which are themselves delineated on a racial pyramid, with the purest and whitest, the most Aryan, at the pinnacle. True to his doctrine, the Nazis on his family tree must explain his penchant for Hitlerian rhetoric.

“Poison in the blood” was the core of Hitler’s race doctrine as well. Hitler, too, believed it explained the rise and fall of civilizations. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” stated Hitler. It is also Trump’s fundamental trope. “We’re poisoning the blood of our country, and you have people coming in, think of it, mental institutions all over the world are being emptied out into the United States,” he said on Fox News in March. “Jails and prisons are being emptied out into the United States. This is poisoning our country.”

Just recently, on 31 August, addressing Moms For Liberty, a rightwing group devoted to book-banning, he raised again the menace of “poison in the blood”: “But what’s happening to our country, our country is being poisoned, poisoned!”

At a rally on 18 September, Trump elaborated: “They’re coming from the Congo, they’re coming from Africa, they’re coming from the Middle East, they’re coming from all over the world – Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia … And what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer, and you got to get rid of these people.”

Blut und Boden” – blood and soil – was adopted as an official slogan of the Nazi regime to express its ideal of the nation rooted in the authentic unity of Aryan blood. The community of its people – Volksgemeinschaft – comprised only those of shared ethnic blood. Aliens corrupting the blood, principally Jews, but also Slavs, Poles and Roma, were described as disease carriers and “vermin” – Volksshadlinge – and posed an existential threat. Only those people of the blood belonged to the Heimat, a concept the Nazis cast as the racially pure home, intrinsic to Blut und Boden.

Jews were Heimatlos – a people separate from the Heimat, without a true home, wanderers, cosmopolitans and globalists, a menace to the sanctity of the culture and the identity of the nation. They were not simply outsiders, or the Other. They were a different species – subhumans, Untermenschen – and must be eradicated to preserve the blood of the race. “Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal,” instructed a pamphlet entitled Der Untermenschen, illustrated with distorted photographs of these lower beings to depict the “bestial” nature of the subhuman Jews and Slavs. Four million copies were published in 1942 under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.

“In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” Trump said this March. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.” When they are removed, it will be, says Trump, “a bloody story”.

Friedrich Trump, Trump’s grandfather, was deported from his native Bavaria as an undesirable and had his German citizenship revoked in 1905. Born in the town of Kallstadt in 1869, he dodged compulsory military service and emigrated to the United States in 1885. In and around Seattle and the Yukon, he owned restaurants and hotels that also did a brisk business as brothels. He returned to Germany a well-to-do man, married Elisabeth Christ, and took her to New York. But his wife did not like America and was homesick.

He returned to Kallstadt to settle, but the authorities investigated him and ruled he should be banished for dodging military service. He wrote the Prince of Bavaria a letter begging to stay. “Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family.” His plea was rejected. He was expelled. Upon his return to New York, in October 1905, a son, named Fred, was born. The Trump family saga began.

The Trump and Christ families, with the exception of Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump, remained in Kallstadt. Many of them served in the Nazi army. Some were members of the Nazi Party. Two of these relatives of Donald Trump are now known to have fought and died for Hitler. It appears that they were involved in the early stage of the Holocaust. (The research of a certified professional genealogist distinguished in the field discovered these Trump Nazi soldiers, but prefers to remain anonymous to avoid retribution.)

Ernst Christ, of the Christ branch of the family, a first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of his great-uncle Johannes Christ, born in Kallstadt, was a Nazi. Unteroffizier Christ, a corporal, served in the 1st Company of the Panzerjager-Abteilung 670, an anti-tank unit that saw........

© The Guardian


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