Mike Huckabee is currently leading dozens of conservative pastors through the U.S. and Europe on a junket he’s calling “Mike Huckabee’s Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II Tour.” On Friday, the group stopped at Auschwitz and Birkenau, where a speaker inevitably compared today’s America to Nazi Germany.
Huckabee, who has repeatedly warned that the U.S. is transforming into Nazi Germany, invited Kitty Werthmann of Eagle Forum to discuss her experience living in Austria during the Nazi takeover.
Werthmann frequently travels the country speaking about what she sees as similarities between President Obama and Adolf Hitler, warning that Obama is ushering in Nazi-style tyranny and urging people to stock up on guns: “Keep your guns and buy more guns.” She also believes that Obama and Mexican immigrants are planning a Marxist “revolution” and told one Tea Party group, “I heard President Obama say anybody who is criticizing him, report it to the White House, the snitch program, so be careful what you say.”
She offered a similar message to Huckabee’s tour group, according to the Christian Post, which also drew a comparison between Nazi Germany and the IRS and a Houston court case involving a LGBT nondiscrimination ordinance.
Another Religious Right leader who believes the U.S. is heading towards Nazism, David Lane, also addressed the group.
Retracing the steps of Pope John Paul II in Krakow Poland, Margaret Thatcher in London England, and Ronald Reagan in California, The Journey: A Spiritual Awakening, was designed to exemplify how “God raises extraordinary leaders for extraordinary times.” Huckabee explains, “their lives and messages brought hope to generations and freedom to millions by confronting evil everywhere. From their lives and their leadership we can extract immeasurable lessons for every nation wishing to be free and great.”
In the wake of Houston Mayor Annise Parker’s subpoena of emails and sermons of ministers, his timing, many argue, could not be more relevant. On Friday, November 14,Journey attendees visited Auschwitz and Birkenau and a museum located in the administrative building of Oskar Schindler’s enamel factory. On route to Auschwitz, Lane referenced similarities between 1930 Germany and 2014 America. Quoting from Inside Hitler’s Germany, Life Under the Third Reich, he paraphrased Martin Bormann’s assessment that national socialism and Christianity are “irreconcilable.”
Pointing to what was largely a Lutheran country and the former home of the Martin Luther who sparked the Protestant Reformation in 1517, life under Hitler immeasurably transformed Germany’s identity and culture. By 1938, much of Germany’s Christian practices were eliminated. Crosses in schools were replaced with Hitler’s picture, the Bible, with Mein Kampf, Christmas carols and the nativity play were eliminated, and the greeting, “Happy Christmas,” was replaced with “Yuletide.”
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Former Austrian Kitty Werthmann helps clarify context and perspective from her experience living seven years under Hitler and three under Stalin. During an unrelated and recent even in New Jersey, she explains similarities between 1938 Austria and 2014 America. Austria was in a deep depression with one third of its workforce unemployed. It’s inflation rate and bank loan interest rates were 25 percent. Many Austrians were declaring bankruptcy and begging for food.
She says, “everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force. We were led to believe that everyone [in Germany] was happy. We were told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime; they had a high standard of living. We wanted the same way of life in Austria.
“We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler. We were overjoyed and for three days danced in the streets and had candlelight parades.”
She lists how the government opened up field kitchens and everyone was fed, crime disappeared under the new government, and within one month people were employed through the Public Work Service.
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The comparison to America could not be more profound.
American unemployment is 25 percent when including the unreported U-3 and U-6 numbers of those who have dropped out of the workforce are no longer on unemployment, and/or are underemployed working several jobs unable to feed their families. Americans are in 28 billion dollars in credit card debt, with credit card interest rates exceeding 25 percent in most states.
Whether its eliminating prayer in school, the ten commandments from court rooms, disallowing the teaching of creationism and only teaching evolution, removing religious holidays from school calendars, common core redefining the family to include same-sex parents and transgender children as normal, and teaching Islam as part of grade school
Additionally, the IRS has pledged to adopt new parameters for auditing churches and Christians are losing their livelihoods because of their religious beliefs.
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Upon leaving Birkenau, Huckabee said, “these people were brutally murdered because they did not fit into the plan of a government that only wanted a people to follow them blindly.” He went on to explain that remembering what millions of people believed and did because of the power of one man, Hitler, is not enough. “It’s not enough unless it does something to change the way we live the rest of our lives. This is not a time to say I’ve been to Auschwitz… because when the day comes when we are called upon to put at risk our lives, our families, our fortunes, we have to decide if we will march like lemmings to our death, or take whatever steps necessary to stop the kind of tyranny that results ultimately in what we’ve been able to see first hand today.”
