Alma and Nuremberg

Today, May 25, we visited Nuremberg, the old imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire that became both a center of Nazism and, as a result of that, the place picked for the post-World War II trials of war criminals. Today the city bills itself as the “City of Human Rights.” Accordingly, the city has the Nazi Documentation Center focused on helping us understand how a nation of well educated people could “fall for” Adolf Hitler.

                                                 Entrance to Nazi Documentation Center,
                                                 with entrance slicing through Hitler's old
                                                                  Congress Hall

This is really an important question, since there clearly have been a number of other modern leaders who, while seldom approaching Hitler's brutality, have used similar methods to win support or delude large groups into supporting or accepting horrendous regimes. Since all of us should be on-guard against the use of techniques of propaganda and mass mobilization to do harm, we need to understand the phenomena that brought so much support for Hitler, especially in this picturesque old city.

The Documentation Center also has an item related to the success of an Alma education. In a display of media (newspapers and magazines) that criticized the rise of Hitler, they had a copy of the Chicago Daily News, the paper published by Frank Knox, the later Secretary of the Navy for Franklin Roosevelt. As those of us from Alma know, Knox, who was in the class of 1898 and became a leading Republican (running against the Roosevelt ticket in 1936), by the late 1930's became a supporter of Roosevelt's criticisms of the rise of dictators in the 1930s (especially the Quarantine Speech of 1937).

Knox in the 1930s challenged the isolationism being promoted in Chicago by the rival Tribune. We can be proud that his foresight was exemplary enough to be singled out at this center which demonstrates the need to confront totalitarianism. Hopefully our little group of people from Alma College will follow in his footsteps and continue to provide needed leadership to oppose such tendencies in the modern world, especially currently in America with our fear of “terrorism,” tendencies that claim we do not any longer have the “luxury” of refraining from torture or universally defending international law (including against Americans who break that law).