The Price
Chapter 1
The Nazis Take Over
The Gestapo… took me to the prison at Fuhlsbuettel, where SS guards, members of Hitler's elite security police, kicked me, beat me, and threw me into a cell.
Summary
The author begins this chapter by recounting some of the important steps that led up to the main subjects and events of the book. First of all was his father's conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He describes the insane inflation Germany experienced in the years leading up to World War II, which saw the Deutschmark jump from four per US dollar, in 1924, to 4.2 trillion per dollar, in 1923, meaning it became over a trillion times less valuable in those nine years. "Workers were paid every day," he informs us, "and they spent the money immediately, for the next day it would be worth even less."
He provides some information on the political breakdown in the area where he lived, with many of those he knew being Social Democrats, and a few Communists. They weren't taught politics in school, and most of their teachers were eventually either replaced with Nazis, or forced to join the Nazi party.
He describes their daily life, his mother's routine, their family garden, interactions with American missionaries, and so forth.
He describes the gradual transition to Nazism, the improvements they initially brought to Germany, and the people he knew who joined the Nazi party. He describes the "intoxicating effect" Nazi propaganda had on the country, "especially the young."
He mentions joining the Jungvolk (Young Folks) in the absence of the Boy Scouts, which he had looked forward to but which had been banned by the Nazis. They took the children on campouts, held parades, and taught them about Hitler's life and philosophy.
He describes the gradual disappearance of some of their friends, who were Communists, into concentration camps. Their family, along with others, donated money to support the wives and children who had been left behind; this was discovered by the Nazis and the contributors were arrested. His father was somehow overlooked.
When he was fourteen, he joined the Hitler Youth, which he describes as "much like the Jungvolk, except that we got to wear a dagger with the words Blood and Honor stamped on the blade."
Around this time, he says, he began "to be disillusioned by the Nazis." He credits his parents for always making disparaging remarks about the Nazis, and helping him to remain skeptical about what he was being taught. He got into a fight with a leader at the Hitler Youth, and was officially dismissed from that organization.
He describes the insane inflation Germany experienced in the years leading up to World War II, which saw the Deutschmark jump from four per US dollar, in 1924, to 4.2 trillion per dollar, in 1923, meaning it became over a trillion times less valuable in those nine years. "Workers were paid every day," he informs us, "and they spent the money immediately, for the next day it would be worth even less."
He provides some information on the political breakdown in the area where he lived, with many of those he knew being Social Democrats, and a few Communists. They weren't taught politics in school, and most of their teachers were eventually either replaced with Nazis, or forced to join the Nazi party.
He describes their daily life, his mother's routine, their family garden, interactions with American missionaries, and so forth.
He describes the gradual transition to Nazism, the improvements they initially brought to Germany, and the people he knew who joined the Nazi party. He describes the "intoxicating effect" Nazi propaganda had on the country, "especially the young."
He mentions joining the Jungvolk (Young Folks) in the absence of the Boy Scouts, which he had looked forward to but which had been banned by the Nazis. They took the children on campouts, held parades, and taught them about Hitler's life and philosophy.
He describes the gradual disappearance of some of their friends, who were Communists, into concentration camps. Their family, along with others, donated money to support the wives and children who had been left behind; this was discovered by the Nazis and the contributors were arrested. His father was somehow overlooked.
When he was fourteen, he joined the Hitler Youth, which he describes as "much like the Jungvolk, except that we got to wear a dagger with the words Blood and Honor stamped on the blade."
Around this time, he says, he began "to be disillusioned by the Nazis." He credits his parents for always making disparaging remarks about the Nazis, and helping him to remain skeptical about what he was being taught. He got into a fight with a leader at the Hitler Youth, and was officially dismissed from that organization.
Analysis
It is interesting to get a firsthand view of what it was like as the Nazis came to power. In hindsight, and so many years later, it is hard to understand how the Germans could have allowed it to happen. We see Nazis as obviously evil, based on our knowledge of their later atrocities, but we generally lack such a knowledge of how things looked in the beginning, which this chapter provides.
If you can get your hands on an old encyclopedia, even in English, from the 1920's or early 1930's, you will find nothing but glowing information about Adolf Hitler. He rose to power in such a way as to show much promise, politically, just like any other politician. There was nothing in his general public appearance that showed great cause for alarm. Those things came later, after he had already garnered public trust. As the author points out in this chapter, "when the Nazis came to power, everyone was indoctrinated in their particular version of political reality."
One of the reasons the Nazis had to do things this way was that their public education system was still focused on providing a basic education, for the most part – reading, writing, and arithmetic – and did not indoctrinate children with civics or government classes. In America today, public schools have become government indoctrination centers, where children are taught what the current government administration wants them to believe. This means that political leaders no longer have to indoctrinate the masses when they come to power, as the work has already been done for them.
Even though the author mentions in this chapter that unemployment dropped from 30 percent to less than 3 percent, he makes sure to point out that "they only really helped other Nazis." We can see parallels to this in our own day, as well, but we can also see the wisdom in a Constitutional Republic, where, when it is followed, the rights of all citizens are protected, thereby protecting us from this sort of thing. "There's nothing new under the sun," as they say, and the Founding Fathers, we must remember, looked back through all of history, and crafted our form of government in such a way as to avoid the downfalls of past forms of government. The Nazis, on the other hand, took advantage of public ignorance.
The author also points out that the Nazis "were excellent propagandists." This is one of the few things people probably know about the Nazis. The state-controlled media simply parroted the official government line, until the people no longer knew truth from falsehood. The parallels to our day should be obvious, with the notable difference being that in our day the level of control extends far beyond TV, radio, and pre-movie film reels, to social media, movies themselves, the music industry, and so forth. It is all-pervasive.
Our modern control grid becomes even more ominous when we learn from the past. When the author's family, for instance, donates money to help support the families of those who have been arrested by the government and put into concentration camps, the government gets hold of the donation list and uses that to round up everyone who contributed. This demonstrates the potential for abuse that can come from the tracking of even the most seemingly obtuse act. These people likely saw no harm in what they were doing, or they would never have written down their names. Likewise, people today see no harm in being tracked. "I have nothing to hide," they say. But that's not what it is about. We need privacy to help protect us from others who wish us harm.
For example, Barrack Obama's close personal friend, Bill Ayers, was a member of a terrorist organization called the Weather Underground, which was responsible for multiple bombings and several deaths. They were infiltrated by an FBI agent, Larry Grathwohl, who reported the following from one of their meetings [1]:
If you can get your hands on an old encyclopedia, even in English, from the 1920's or early 1930's, you will find nothing but glowing information about Adolf Hitler. He rose to power in such a way as to show much promise, politically, just like any other politician. There was nothing in his general public appearance that showed great cause for alarm. Those things came later, after he had already garnered public trust. As the author points out in this chapter, "when the Nazis came to power, everyone was indoctrinated in their particular version of political reality."
One of the reasons the Nazis had to do things this way was that their public education system was still focused on providing a basic education, for the most part – reading, writing, and arithmetic – and did not indoctrinate children with civics or government classes. In America today, public schools have become government indoctrination centers, where children are taught what the current government administration wants them to believe. This means that political leaders no longer have to indoctrinate the masses when they come to power, as the work has already been done for them.
Even though the author mentions in this chapter that unemployment dropped from 30 percent to less than 3 percent, he makes sure to point out that "they only really helped other Nazis." We can see parallels to this in our own day, as well, but we can also see the wisdom in a Constitutional Republic, where, when it is followed, the rights of all citizens are protected, thereby protecting us from this sort of thing. "There's nothing new under the sun," as they say, and the Founding Fathers, we must remember, looked back through all of history, and crafted our form of government in such a way as to avoid the downfalls of past forms of government. The Nazis, on the other hand, took advantage of public ignorance.
The author also points out that the Nazis "were excellent propagandists." This is one of the few things people probably know about the Nazis. The state-controlled media simply parroted the official government line, until the people no longer knew truth from falsehood. The parallels to our day should be obvious, with the notable difference being that in our day the level of control extends far beyond TV, radio, and pre-movie film reels, to social media, movies themselves, the music industry, and so forth. It is all-pervasive.
Our modern control grid becomes even more ominous when we learn from the past. When the author's family, for instance, donates money to help support the families of those who have been arrested by the government and put into concentration camps, the government gets hold of the donation list and uses that to round up everyone who contributed. This demonstrates the potential for abuse that can come from the tracking of even the most seemingly obtuse act. These people likely saw no harm in what they were doing, or they would never have written down their names. Likewise, people today see no harm in being tracked. "I have nothing to hide," they say. But that's not what it is about. We need privacy to help protect us from others who wish us harm.
For example, Barrack Obama's close personal friend, Bill Ayers, was a member of a terrorist organization called the Weather Underground, which was responsible for multiple bombings and several deaths. They were infiltrated by an FBI agent, Larry Grathwohl, who reported the following from one of their meetings [1]:
The immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they call against the counter-revolution.
And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing reeducation centers in the Southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be reeducated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be.
I asked, well, what is going to happen to those people that we can't reeducate, that are die-hard capitalists? And the reply was they would have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say "eliminate," I mean kill — 25 million people.
Now how, do you suppose, would they know who had to be re-educated or killed? They would have to know intimate details about those people, of course! What kinds of things would give them this level of detail? Back then, which was the 1960's, they could have looked into which churches and organizations they belonged to, which magazines they subscribed to, and not much else. Today, what can they get? From Facebook alone, they know a lot, including what groups you belong to, what your political leanings are, who you know (guilt by association), and they have a carefully parsed record of everything you have ever posted, so they know exactly how you feel about any given issue. In the article Which Social Media Platform Can We Trust?, Defending Idaho explains why this should concern you, including the fact that Facebook was funded by the United States government. [2]
When you consider that everything you look up (and look at) is tracked by those trustworthy chaps over at also-government-funded Google (who also parse your emails [3]), and that everything you purchase (or save for later) is tracked by Amazon, who also own AbeBooks (so they know everything you read), and that the same companies also own Instagram, PayPal (so they know what you buy), and many other things you use on a daily basis… well, the implications are, shall we say, frightening.
The author closes this chapter by pointing out that when he eventually did get arrested by the Nazis, which is the main subject of this book, "it did not help my case that they had a file on me showing that I had been drummed out of the Hitler Youth for insubordination." This, of course, strengthens our previous argument against government tracking/surveillance, but sadly it leads us to learn how our current situation is worse than his was under the Nazis. How? In the December 2008 issue of Vital Speeches of the Day, author, columnist, and lecturer, Beverly Eakman, gave a speech entitled Education's Role, in which she described "how the basic techniques used to psychologically assess children and their families is essentially a knock-off of marketing and advertising. These techniques are used to predict attitudes, including political reactions—called “worldviews”—and have been used by the Department of Education to collect data on kids and their families." [4]
My favorite quote from this chapter is this:
My father could see that Nazism, which relied on force instead of freedom, enticing people to place their absolute faith in a man and in a political system created by men, was the diametrical opposite of the gospel of Jesus Christ; it was to him a competing religious system."
References:
[1] 'Glenn Beck': Chilling Warning From Only FBI Agent to Infiltrate the Weathermen (glennbeck.com) <https://www.foxnews.com/story/glenn-beck-chilling-warning-from-only-fbi-agent-to-infiltrate-the-weathermen, accessed 2021-02-08.>
[2] Which Social Media Platform Can We Trust? (defendingidah.org) <https://defendingidaho.org/articles/42/which-social-media-platform-can-we-trust, accessed 2021-02-08.>
[3] Google’s Gmail scans, parses, analyzes and catalogs your email (easydns.com) <https://easydns.com/blog/2019/06/03/googles-gmail-scans-parses-analyzes-and-catalogs-your-email, accessed 20210-02-08.>
[4] B. K. Eakman, Education’s Whistleblower, Guest Speaker at 9th Annual Freedom21 Conference in Texas, prlog.org. Unfortunately, the original text is behind a paywall, in the archives of Vital Speeches of the Day. <https://www.prlog.org/10092955-eakman-educations-whistleblower-guest-speaker-at-9th-annual-freedom21-conference-in-texas.html, accessed 2021-02-08.>
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