Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (Z’L) has pointed out that there is no word for “history” in Hebrew. The word closest to the notion of history in Hebrew is “Zachor” – the injunction “to remember.”

The Torah has two commandments around the word “Zachor.” One is Zachor et Yom haShabbat, – remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy: The second one – Zachor et Amalek – Remember Amalek! Below is the translation of the Torah verses that recalls Amalek.

“You shall remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you went out of Egypt, how he happened upon you on the way and cut off all the stragglers at your rear when you were faint and weary, and he did not fear G-d. So it will be, when the Lord your G-d grants you respite from all your enemies around you in the land which the Lord, your G-d, gives to you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the Heavens. You shall not forget!” (Deut. 25:17-19).

These verses are chanted annually in the synagogue on the Shabbat before the holiday of Purim. Below is what it sounds like.

 

Jewish memory of the last five thousand years is embedded in our texts and holidays. The following documentaries and talks by current scholars about our recent world history bring the recent past vividly to mind. As you read this blog, you will realize why it is vital “not to forget what went before.”

 

STALIN’S RISE TO POWER

Stephen Kotkin has published two volumes on the life and times of Josef Stalin (1878-1953) based on his research into recently released Soviet archives. In addition, I have enjoyed watching him interviewed by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute’s Uncommon Knowledge.

 

In the first volume, we learn that Stalin was not the product of an abusive home. He was educated in Catholic elementary and high schools because these were the best schools his parents could afford in his neighbourhood. His path was open to becoming a Catholic priest. But as a young man, he became enamoured with revolutionary Marxist ideology and made a career of being an anti-czarist activist. Before 1917, he was exiled and imprisoned by the Czarist police five times.

In 1917, the czarist regime was overthrown, and a provisional democratic government was installed. Stalin was close to the group around Lenin that overthrew the interim government. In the spring of 1922, after Lenin engineered a coup replacing all independent parties in the provisional government with the Communist Party, he appointed Stalin as his manager and right-hand man. Officially, Stalin became the Secretary-General of the Communist Party.

Six weeks later, Lenin had a stroke from which he never recovered. This left Stalin open to maneuver himself into the role of a dictator by ruthlessly destroying anyone opposed to him or his ideas. Stalin could do this because he was a workaholic with great people skills and managerial prowess. With no one looking over his shoulder, he was ruthless and used “every underhanded method and then some” to justify his ends. He used manipulation, torture, and outright murder of any potential rivals to maintain his autocratic power.

In the name of his communist Marxist ideology, Stalin and his collaborators engineered the collectivization of farmlands, and the elimination of private property and personal freedom, which led to poverty and death from starvation for tens of millions of people before World War ll. The name given to these events is the Holodomor.

Although Stalin was idealistic, one of his ideas was that the end goal justifies any means. Secondly, he recognized absolutely no restraint in his quest for personal power.

 

THE RISE OF THE NAZIS

I also studied Hitler’s ascent this month and reigned via the excellent documentary Rise of the Nazis on PBS. So far, I have watched two episodes bringing us up to 1938.

In 1930, Germany was a liberal democracy. Just four years later, democracy is dead, and a single party, the Nazis, rules the country. Hitler was an autocratic ruler, and his collaborators, Ernst Röhm, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler, controlled all German national institutions:

• The police, the army and the courts – Heinrich Himmler controls the police.
• Herman Goring created his espionage cadre called the Gestapo.
• Ernst Rohm is in charge of the SA, the Storm Troopers.

In the first episode, we meet the chief actors vying for parliamentary power in 1930. General Kurt von Schleicher, an ally of the right and himself a politician, fearing socialist and left-wing parties enlist Hitler thinking to take advantage of his popularity and his private militia power base, the SA (the Storm Troopers).

Hitler and his cronies first became known to the German public during what is now referred to as the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, which was an attempt at seizing the reigns of power via the armed violence of the Storm Troopers (SA). Goring and Himmler escape and Hitler is tried and imprisoned.

• Hitler was sentenced to prison for five years but served only nine months in the relative comfort of Landsberg castle. Instead, he used the time to dictate the first volume of Mein Kampf, his political autobiography, and a compendium of his multitudinous ideas.
• Hitler’s ideas included inequality among races, nations, and individuals as part of an unchangeable natural order that exalted the “Aryan race” as humanity’s creative element. According to Hitler, the natural unit of humankind was the Volk (“the people”), of which the German people were the greatest. Moreover, he believed that the state existed to serve the Volk, i.e. Weimar Germany. In Hitler’s Germany, these criteria judged all morality and truth. (Source: Britannica)

Hans Litten is also highlighted in the series. Litten was a German lawyer from an established German family. His father, Fritz, was a distinguished jurist and dean of Königsberg’s law school who later became rector of that institution. His mother, Irmgard, was from an established Lutheran family in Swabia, the daughter of Albert Wüst, a professor at the University of Halle-Wittenberg.

The 1924 court case against Adolf Hitler and other events convinced Litten that Germany was approaching a hazardous period. In addition, his perception that right-wing radicals were getting away with murder – unfettered criminal violence in the pursuit of power – convinced him to become a lawyer.

In May 1931, Litten summoned Adolf Hitler to testify in the Tanzpalast Eden Trial, a court case involving two workers stabbed by four SA (Storm Troopers). He cross-examined Hitler for three hours, finding many points of contradiction and proving that Hitler had exhorted the SA to embark on a systematic campaign of violence against the Nazis’ enemies. This was crucial because, meanwhile, Hitler was trying to pose as a conventional politician to middle-class voters and maintain that the Nazi Party was “strictly legal.”

Although Litten managed to expose Hitler in this trial, with some success, all German national institutions were corrupted once Himmler and Goring were appointed to manage the Nazi forces. As a result, Litten is imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps and continuously and mercilessly tortured. He is also declared a Jew and imprisoned in the Jewish prisoner wing. His father was a Jew who had converted to Lutheranism.

The second episode exposes the competition between Goring and Himmler for Hitler’s approval after Hitler acquired his position of Chancellor and sole governing ruler of Germany. Himmler expanded his power by acquiring systematic control of all provincial police departments and announcing the creation of Dachau as a place to house/imprison enemies of the state, the thousands arrested by the SS immediately upon Hitler accessing autocratic powers. Goring advances his power base by creating the Gestapo, a private espionage unit. Their pursuit of power leads them to collaborate to denounce Ernst Rohm and his Storm Troopers to Hitler. Ernst Rohm and his stormtroopers are also imprisoned in concentration camps and systematically murdered in the Night of the Long Knives.

This episode ends with the little-known story of Joseph Hartinger, Deputy State Prosecutor, who, when called to examine the death of four prisoners at Dachau reported to have been shot while trying to escape, notices that all four are Jews and that they have all been shot in the same way at close range. He collects his evidence and writes his detailed report expecting those responsible for being condemned and brought to trial, but his superior refuses to sign off on it. Shocked, he decides to take it further up the chain of command on his initiative, but Himmler is warned, and the report arrives at the highest court and gets locked away in a safe. We know this because the information was discovered by the American armies and was used as evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, which began on November 20, 1945.

These Nazi leaders were personally ambitious, cruel and murderous. Nevertheless, they managed to seduce and intimidate much of the German populace with their racial theories, blaming all of Germany’s ills on Jews, communists, socialists, capitalists, and anyone else who was not a “pure German and Nazi sympathizer.”

 

CHINA UNDERCOVER

In another PBS documentary, China Undercover, FRONTLINE investigates China’s oppression of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang province. In addition, the documentary exposes China’s alarming use and testing of surveillance technology.

The regime’s growing capacity to survey an entire population, using surveillance technology and concentration-type camps visible via satellite to punish and imprison, should cause global alarm. Cameras are placed everywhere, allowing the regime to monitor all its citizens closely, even identifying them by analyzing facial structure. The country’s faithful soldiers systematically download peoples’ phones and label their houses with barcodes. They enlist Chinese families to invade the homes of Uyghur families and “become a part of Uyghur families” on holidays, eliminating any possibility of privacy or resistance.

This reality seems even worse than the dystopia depicted in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984.

Why Is the Injunction to Remember – Zachor – So Important? 

Why is it important to understand the history of Hitler, Stalin, and the current landscape? First, it shows us what can happen when individuals or institutions, unmoored from any moral scruples, and often in the name of “social justice,” have the hubris to declare themselves keepers of the flame and to claim supreme governing authority.

The Torah reminds us to work to eliminate these rulers, even after we prosper, not to wreak vengeance but to create a safer world for all of us, one that is committed to the kind of justice that protects the weakest among us everywhere. We all become witnesses whenever we have the opportunity to review these events.