Sonder Kommission Nr. 3: ‘The Horror On the Rhine’
Sonder Kommission Nr. 3: ‘The Horror On the Rhine’
How the Nazis weaponized racist fake news and why that matters in the upcoming US election
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As always when I’m reading history books, invariably the authors lead me to other valuable works, historians, and eyewitness archives. In the case of Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, each time I return to the slim tome to mine it for more clues on how to frame current events and narratives, I always find more ledes to follow.
It was in this passage from my report on Moral Panic that I found out where to look for the origins of Trump and Vance spreading fake and dehumanizing news about immigrants.
As Stanley wrote in Chapter Eight: Sexual Anxiety of How Fascism Works:
In the United States at the moment of this writing, we also see a loss of “logical faculties” in the face of a barrage of propaganda connecting immigrant groups to rape. Trump famously began his campaign by denouncing Mexican immigrants to the United States as rapists. In an article for The New York Times on September 26, 2017, Caitlin Dickerson wrote about what happened in the small town of Twin Falls, Idaho, where three refugee boys, aged seven, ten, and fourteen, were accused of some kind of sexual activity with a five-year-old American girl. Immediately after the incident, Facebook groups formed about it, with links to articles on the Internet claiming “that the little girl had been gang raped at knifepoint, that the perpetrators were Syrian refugees and that their fathers had celebrated with them afterward by giving them high fives.” Soon thereafter, the headline article on the Drudge Report, one of the most visited sites on the Internet, screamed “REPORT: Syrian ‘Refugees’ Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.” The articles were all false—for one thing, as Dickerson reports, no Syrian refugees were resettled in Twin Falls. It’s not clear that there was any attack at all (a police officer, based on the cellphone video of the incident, called the Internet descriptions of it “100 percent false, like not even close to being accurate”). Nevertheless, the fake news stories created a wave of intimidating harassment against public officials in Twin Falls, and a storm of outrage against refugees in the community. In short, they created moral panic about the sexual danger refugees posed for American white girls, a panic that has yet to subside.
The rhetoric on immigration that surrounded the Trump campaign (and continues to surround his administration) parallels the tactics of Russian propaganda outlets, which have spread fake news stories (as well as grossly exaggerating facts) about Middle Eastern immigrants raping white women in Europe. To take just one example, discussed in a September 2017 New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg, Russian propaganda outlets tried to create a fake scandal about a supposed rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in Berlin by a Middle Eastern immigrant in 2016. Multiple media outlets produced stories about the supposed rape, stoking outrage among the German Russian community, ultimately to the point where seven hundred people gathered to protest an event that never occurred. Russian media coverage and Russian fake news stories inflamed outrage. The fact that all of this eerily mirrors the spread of the German propaganda campaign in the 1920s of “the Black Horror on the the Rhine” should dissuade us from adopting the view, currently in vogue, that this sort of “fake news” is a consequence of the modern revolution in social media.”
I immediately set out to learn what happened in Germany in the 1920s that could help us better understand the intentional cruelty of Trump and Vance’s latest propaganda wave.
The fake news centered around the territory west of the Rhine under Allied occupation after the Germans lost World War One. A fifth of the French soldiers came from French colonies — Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Madagascar, or Vietnam.
German propagandists went to work, creating stories of barbarism, whipping Germans into a fear-frenzy, while also rejecting the Weimar Republic and the Versailles Treaty. Igniting rage among the population, made-up stories of Black soldiers raping German women were seeded in newspapers and a propaganda campaign known as the Black Shame poisoned the country.
The images created to instigate this rage look very much like the memes we see today — racist caricatures, grotesques that could only come out of the minds of demented people. In fact, multiple historians who documented the fact that these ‘horror’ events never happened, suggest that it was in the perverted minds of the propagandists that the real threat could be found.
According to the DW Documentary Nazi Prejudice and Propaganda “enormous amounts of money were invested in the ‘shame’ campaign Brochures were translated from English, Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish and American, English and so on. There were postcards, illustrations, posters, medallions and plays. They even made films about it.”
Although the stories were proven demonstrably false, that truth didn’t make its way into the general population’. The ‘horror on the Rhine’ was an effective psychological campaign, inducing disgust and creating fear.
In reality, hundreds of German women and soldiers from French colonial countries fell in love and had children.
CW: And this is where I have to warn you of the content.
When Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists seized power, among the laws he enacted was the forced sterilization of mixed race children. I don’t want to use the words they used for the campaign, and I refuse to show you the exhibitions they used to promote the law because they are so f**king cruel, but I want you to know it happened. It’s important for you to know that it happened and where things can lead if cruel men are not stopped.
Sonder Kommission Nr. 3 — Special Commission Number Three
“In April 1937, Chancellor Adolf Hitler personally gave the secret order to forcibly sterilize the Rhineland's so-called occupation children. A special unit was set up under the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, to carry out the order. It was called Special Commission Number Three.”—DW documentary, Nazi Prejudice and Propaganda
The children were so young, some 14, and to get parental consent, the Nazis threatened mothers that their children would be sent to concentration camps.
So I bring you this gory report from history, because I need all of you to understand that the language being used, and the narrative warfare being deployed means nothing good for decent people.
JD Vance and Donald Trump are not running a campaign — they are waging war against America and Americans.
This should have ended before it even started. This flirtation with fascism should have ended the first time Trump used a racist slur to refer to immigrants.
Both these men and the party they represent are telling us what they will do if they seize power — they are telling us they plan to round up millions of people. That is genocidal language. They are targeting immigrant communities with their psychologically abusive lies — cruel lies that are directly linked to real horror events in history with monumentally tragic outcomes for millions and millions of people.
It is my duty as an independent investigative reporter to warn with my words of what has happened and what can happen again.
The Nazis never had the majority, as Anne Nelson has taught me.
“There was never a day when the majority of Germans woke up and voted for Hitler. It didn’t happen. The fault lines in their system were manipulated and exploited by bad actors. And then they ended up with a dictatorship. And I don’t want to see that happen here.”—Anne Nelson in my report End Game
The Shadow Network and Red Orchestra author explained that we must take the dangers of a democratic overthrow with grave seriousness.
Today, she reported that nearly half a million voters have been purged in Oklahoma — that’s one fifth of the state’s 2.3 million voters.
The advantage we have is we know their plays, we have historians who can guide us, and independent reporters who are willing to tell us the hard stories.
We’ve been letting our democracy be trampled on by real fascists, and our entire country has been blanketed with information warfare.
We need to understand that this is not politics.
It’s not politics when dehumanizing stories are used to create moral panic, when deadcatting takes the place of fact-based debate.
Personally, I would feel better if Trump, Vance, and Elon Musk were detained for questioning. I would feel better if the information warfare Putin is waging on us was thwarted and neutralized. These are dangerous men.
Keep doing what you’re doing on behalf of democracy to get Harris-Walz elected.
If the turnout of the Democratic base is so crushing, all the tricks Trump, Putin and their collaborators are deploying won’t matter, particularly if we are willing to take action against the criminals on the Supreme Court.
But we have 46 days.
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