On this National Holocaust Day lest we forget democrats voted for Hitler.
And while we rightly have the notion of the Great Dictators ruling at the point of a bayonet and a pistol.
It was at the ballot box 90 years ago, on January 30, that the Nazis officially won power.
And if that’s not a reminder for us to constantly be vigilant about who we vote for.
And what checks we put on them then we will, and do, pay the consequences.
Now if you thought that your cosy country was immune to being taken over by megalomaniacs authoritarians.
Then that’s just what the Germans thought about Adolf Hitler back in 1933.
And they believed too that he could rid them of a greater Communist threat and then they could put him back in his box.
Nor should we be blindsided by the threat from within or without as the Germans were back in the 30s.
Seduced as they were by a sense of grievance, common bogeymen enemies within the State.
And a zenophobic hatred of foreigners.
Bavarian barbarity
Sound like Germany of the Thirties… and America of the late 2010s, Brazil now, Brexiteering Britain and a fascist stream in the French Far Right.
All touchpoints for us as we travel through history and the world.
My first introduction to holocaust history was as an offshoot to a very different holiday, the Munich Beerfest in the Eighties.
But Bavaria was where Hitler had his first putsch and where he installed his first concentration camp in Dachau in March 1933.
All under the noses of Bavarians going about their daily business.
While the ‘disreputables’ were packed away to what were presented to the rest of the world as holiday camps.
It is challenging tourism but vital and rewardingly now memorials are now marked across the globe.
With permanent Holocaust centres, the biggest being the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam.
But also in towns and cities in every civilised country.
To remind us that racism exists on our doorstep too and genocide grows from unfettered populism.
Cry Freedom
And that was driven home to me not in Germany, Poland or any of the major arenas of the Holocaust last year.
But in one of the most liberal states in America, the Commonwealth of Massachussets, and its capital Boston .
Where the New England Holocaust Memorial stands next to the Freedom Trail.
And that marks the key points and figures in the American Revolutionary Story.
Alas, the openness which defines our free societies means that racist zealots can broadcast their vile racism.
As happened when neo-Nazis took a selfie of themselves and put it up on social media.
Of course that should never put civilised people off paying our respects wherever we are and steel ourselves.
Because lest we forget democrats voted for Hitler… we who are still democrats.