Faced with criticism of Kitty Werthmann's Obama-is-like-Hitler analogy, a Hutchinson woman who shares those views now implies in a letter that her critics are Holocaust deniers.
An Austrian Catholic who immigrated to the United States in the early 1950s, Werthmann was 12 when Germany annexed her native country. By her own account, she witnessed Nazi oppression first hand, but was never sent to a concentration camp or jailed herself. Prominent horrors of Hitler's regime for Werthmann, president of the South Dakota Eagle Forum, include equal rights for women (historians have discovered a rather different story about women in the Third Reich than what Werthmann recalls).
Werthmann peddled this version of history, along with the notion that American was turning Nazi as early as the second Bush administration (and claims to have been ranting about it for 30 years), but prominent conservatives like Glenn Beck dismissed her until Obama was elected.
The Republican Party of McLeod County sponsored a talk by Werthmann in Hutchinson during October; Yvonne Piker wrote in Speaker warned of perilous path, a letter to the editor:
. . . I was a child at that time but I remember some of the stories I overheard the oldsters talk about. Remember “The Sound of Music”?
Hitler’s fear was going through all of us and throughout the world. He wanted the whole world to be at his feet and obey his every word.
She compared those incidents to present day and our country. It is almost uncanny, the very thoughts and actions our government is taking from us and the path we have just gone through with the banks, health care plans now being dumped on us, crosses and flags taken out of our schools, as well as being deprived of public displays of Bibles, prayer, the Ten Commandments, Christmas scenes and even not being able to wear a cross necklace. . . .
. . . Kitty Werthmann was not Jewish. She was Catholic in a predominantly Catholic country. . . .
While no state-sponsored prayer in schools has been the law of the land since a Supreme Court ruling in the1960s, Piker and Werthmann seem confused about flags being "taken out of our schools." As for banning wearing of crosses, that seems to be related to bone-headed, if well-intentioned, anti-gang efforts; such restrictions have been condemned by both the American Center for Law and Justice and the ACLU.
Bluestem looked at the Piker letter and Werthmann's claims in her stock speech in McLeod County Republican event: the hills are alive with the sound of Eagle Forum's Kitty Werthmann comparing Obama & Hitler.
Hutchinson Leader reader Chris Leonard responded in Comparison to Nazis insulting:
In the Oct. 11 Leader, Yvonne Piker wrote glowingly about her experience hearing the touring speaker Kitty Werthmann in Hutchinson earlier that week. Ms. Werthmann lived in Austria during the Nazi occupation before and during World War II and emigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s. I had occasion to meet her while she was in town and she is a very nice lady. The parallels she attempts to draw between the Nazi regime and the present day United States, however, I find specious and, frankly, insulting to the memory of the victims of the Nazis and those who fought for the cause of democracy and freedom from oppression.
She uses the tragedy in her past to rail against a vision of the present that simply does not exist. She compares the worldwide depression to our current economic difficulties, which are real but in no way comparable to the global hyperinflation and desperation that characterized the 1930s. She cites the secularization of public education and equal rights for women as horrible legacies of Hitler when, in fact, these are both fully consistent with our own founding Constitution and have served to make America greater and more free.
I understand that Ms. Werthmann was invited to speak to a class at Hutchinson High School while in town. I respect her right to express her ideas about the state of American politics and will look forward to the high school also bringing in some progressives to lecture the students with opposing perspectives.
Hitler was not evil because he promoted equality for women [BSP's note: he did not in fact do so] or universal health care. He will always be equated with evil because of his remorseless irrational hatred toward Jews, Slavs, homosexuals and everyone he considered to be inferior.
Piker fires back, playing the "forgetting the Holocaust card" in her letter Victims' accounts describe Holocaust’s worst tragedies:
In his letter in the Oct. 16 Leader (“Comparison to Nazis is insulting”), Chris Leonard apparently did not hear Kitty Werthmann speak as I did.
He must also be years younger than myself and did not hear from actual firsthand victims of the torture that Hitler’s Nazis did to women, men and children of any race and color. You can’t begin to understand what all these people went through unless you had an opportunity to listen to them. The whole world was appalled at his antics and some did not even know all the horrors that he did until the war was over.I had a dear friend who was so sweet and gentle. She became a doctor after fleeing from the German camps and came to to United States. Her name is Dr. Vera Schlamm and her book is “Pursued.” You have to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and also the one in Jerusalem. Women were always used as a test vehicle for medical experiments. People were murdered for their religion and race.
I have visited countries with bullet holes in the walls, and Nazi symbols on the buildings and the Jewish “Star of David.” There are areas that have cemeteries with Americans and others who fought the Hitler bunch, willing to die for you and myself and all the rest of us.
My uncle was on a ship in the Atlantic and shot in the arm while in the Navy, My other uncle was in Iwo Jima and watched the bullets connect with his buddies, blowing their heads off. Being so mad he shot back everything he carried and also what his buddies carried. He told me a few years ago that “I must have killed 20,000.” One cousin was killed the day the Japanese invaded Hawaii.
Some day we will meet, Chris. You don’t live far from us. God bless and thank you for reading my letter.
Dare to challenge a sketchy analogy between Obama and Hitler made by a non-Jewish Austrian Catholic who survived the German annexation without being imprisoned?
Then you must have forgotten the Holocaust. Or just be too young to remember.
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