Rick Steves' Europe: "Germany's Fascist Story" (Rick Steves' Europe,Back Door Productions, Oregon Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that KPBS re-ran a show originally broadcast November 7, 2020 – while the U.S. Presidential election was just about over byt Donald Trump and his crew were hatching their plots to keep him in office despite his having lost his re-election bid. It was an episode of the travel show Rick Steves’ Europe called “Germany’s Fascist Past,”and within it’s half-hour running time Steves managed to crowd in a brief history of the rise and fall of Nazism, a warning that the forces that brought the original Fascists in Germany and Italy to power are very much alive in today’s world, and a tour of historical sites associated with the Nazis and their crimes agaisnt humanity. It was an odd program mainly because Steves’ golly-gee-whillikers way of hosting the show felt oddly ill-matched to the material he was presented and the lessons from history which he wanted us to glean from it. There’s also a problem with touring modern Germany in search of the Nazi sites; most of them either don’t exist anymore at all, or exist only in ruined form. They were deliberately destroyed first by the Nazis themselves, who knew what the Allies would think of them and so they did their best to wreck the infamous death camps before the Allies came in and liberated their survivors; then by the Allies, who not only bombed the Chancellery in Berlin and Adolf Hitler’s redoubt at Berchtesgaden in the Alps in hopes of killing him but afterwards went out of their way to destroy the historic sites of Nazism, fearing that Germans still sympathetic to the Nazi cause would turn them into pilgrimage shrines; and lastly by the West German government, who didn’t want to see the fledgling democracy they established in 1949 go the way of the Weimar Republic of 1919-1933.

They also didn’t want the historical sites of Nazism become objects of veneration by Germans who still believed in the ideas behind Hitler and Nazism, including scapegoating the Jews and blaming them for all Germany’s post-World War I problems. So the great stadium at Nörnberg (to use the traditional German spelling of Nuremberg), which the Nazis modeled on the Roman Colosseum and where Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Triumph of the Will was filmed (and of course Steves couldn’t resist using Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of propaganda as “B”-roll!), is today as much of a ruin as the Roman original. The site of Auschwitz (which, remember, was not in Germany, but in Poland) has been turned into an outdoor memorial and just about all that remains of the death machinery is the entrance gate, with its motto, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (which inexplicably has turned into a motto for neo-fascists worldwide, both in the German original and in translation, which in English is “Work makes you free”). The most chilling part of Steves’ mini-documentary on Nazism is how easily it could all happen again – and indeed is in certain parts of the world, notably in Hungary, which fought in World War II on the German side and is now controlled by fascist leader Viktor Orbán, a modern-day hero to much of the American Right.