Fighting Nazis provides lesson for humanity

In April of 1945 two war heroes died in Nazi Germany. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian theologian, hung by Nazis for conspiring to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and my own uncle, Lt. Thomas Zinkand, shot down while flying underground fighters into Germany seven days before World War II ended.

Neither were fighting Germans but a cult, unrestrained by national boundaries. Nazism was a philosophy determined to create a new world order. It believed that those who did not believe what they believed had no right to exist. The Nazis sent 6 million Jews — men, women and children — into gas chambers to suffocate because they “...were sub-human.” How does anyone find the will and justification to do this? It doesn’t come overnight and it’s not an emotional act. It’s indoctrination; a form of religion. The hater is slowly “infected” with murder, and there is no cure.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer concluded that his Christian duty demanded he take up arms against a sea of trouble, he left the safety of American soil and traveled back to his homeland, Germany, to help kill Hitler. He defied religious conventionality with a belief that there are just wars demanding retaliation, and that the arm of God sometimes is your own. Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed that God’s will was to fight against the mindless, drunken aggression of barbarians with whatever means possible, and with as much force as needed.

People can’t always be reasoned with, or trusted. This is contradicted by Ivy Tower intellectuals, hovering in the safe citadels of Academia. Their myth is virtual hemlock, yet glamorized in Hollywood. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, like my uncle, decided to carry a gun to save a world from demonic tyranny. They both sacrificed their lives. God help America if our leaders fail to remember their own history. —Mike Donohue, Kalispell