How America inspired the Third Reich
*This is eerily similar to present anti-immigrant rhetoric. Not the blatant death camp Holocaust, let’s make that clear. But the point is that the calls for stopping “disease ridden illegals” are nothing new, here in the U.S. or elsewhere. VL
By Paul Spike, The Week
A brilliant new book by a Mexican-American historian documents how, in the Twenties and Thirties, the Nazis were inspired by what the United States had been doing to their Mexican neighbours since 1917.
In Ringside at the Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, David Dorado Romo establishes the US Immigration Department’s systematic brutality along the Rio Grande border.
Mexican visitors were forced to strip naked and subjected to ‘screening’ (for homosexuality, low IQ, physical deformities like ‘clubbed fingers’) and to ‘disinfection’ with various toxic fumigants, including gasoline, kerosene, sulfuric acid, DDT and, after 1929, Zyklon-B (hydrocyanic acid) – the same gas used in the Holocaust’s death camps.
Romo quotes Hitler writing in 1924, “The American union itself… has established scientific criteria for immigration… making an immigrant’s ability to set foot on American soil dependent on specific racial requirements on the one hand as well as a certain level of physical health of the individual himself.”
In 1938, three years before the first death camps of the Final Solution, Nazi chemist Dr Gerhard Peters published a full account, in German science journal Anzeiger fur Sahahlinskund, of the El Paso ‘disinfection’ plant. He included two photos and diagrams of the machinery which sprayed Zyklon B on railroad cars. (Peters went on to acquire Zyklon B’s German patent.)
Click HERE to read the full story.
[Photo courtesy of The Week]