Feb. 5, 2020, was not only the day the GOP completed the transaction of selling its soul in acquitting Donald Trump of impeachable offenses, it also marked an obscure anniversary.
It was 78 years since the arrest and imprisonment in Hamburg, Germany, of young Helmuth Hübener, a 17-year-old Latter-day Saint who found his brother’s shortwave radio and started listening to BBC broadcasts.
This in itself was illegal. But Helmuth discovered that his government had been lying to him. He felt morally compelled to do something about it, so he typed up 60 pamphlets from the BBC broadcasts and printed them, if memory serves, on his LDS branch’s mimeograph machine. He and three friends, two of them also LDS, distributed copies around Hamburg.
The young dissidents were caught, of course, and Helmuth courageously took the blame. On Aug. 11, 1942, Helmuth Hübener was tried as an adult for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. On Oct. 27, the Nazi Ministry of Justice upheld the verdict, and Helmuth was beheaded by guillotine.
Ten days after Helmuth’s arrest, his branch president, a Nazi supporter, excommunicated Helmuth without consulting his superiors or holding the obligatory church court. After the war, in 1946, mission president Max Zimmer posthumously reinstated Helmuth’s church membership.
Thirty years after the war ended, I served an LDS mission in Helmuth Hübener’s hometown of Hamburg. Many of the Germans I met ― both LDS and non-LDS ― were adults during the war and the years leading up to it.
A question haunted me then and has stayed in my mind ever since. How could so many of these good people have ever supported Adolf Hitler? Or tolerated him? Much of it, I suppose, boiled down to the impressive disinformation machine constructed by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Much of it, I’m sure, was also born in fear of the Nazis.
Oh, and Hitler also worked wonders for the German economy.
Parallels, of course, are never exact, but the parallels are certainly plain to see in today’s America, particularly in the days after Trump’s sham trial in the Senate as he has exacted revenge upon honorable men and women who were courageous and patriotic enough to testify against his abuses of his office, and as he has purged his administration of anyone willing to speak truth to power.
Trump is a completely amoral and self-consumed demagogue who will undermine every democratic institution and break any law that stands in his path toward autocracy. But the parallels don’t end there.
I’ve watched in growing dismay as friends, family members and neighbors swallow the propaganda of Trump’s disinformation machine whole and tune out the non-government-sanctioned media. Finally, after all these years, my question about my German friends and acquaintances has been answered.
And not only is my church silent about the dangers of this corrupt administration, but many of my fellow Latter-day Saints are cheering him on, much as the mindless crowds cheered on Adolf Hitler in his rise to power.
Truth is such a fragile thing. And when people look for confirmation bias, place party above country, or turn their eyes away in fear, democracy dies. What most Utah Republicans don’t realize is that the party they think they belong to no longer exists. It has been swallowed whole by the Party of Trump. Corruption is now applauded, lying is standard practice, and fiscal responsibility is irrelevant.
The only thing Republicans of conscience can do is to follow the example of young Helmut Hübener and speak out (and vote) against what used to be their party. If they want to save the GOP, they must purge it of both Trump and his enablers.
Roger Terry
Roger Terry is a professional editor, writer and occasional novelist who is concerned about the POOOO (Present Occupant of Oval Office) and the state of the Banana Republican Party.