- By Fred Voss
- Opinions
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Dear Congressman Tom Reed,My heart is filled with sadness and tears that we have not learned anything from our past history, the years of 1933-1945 in Nazi Germany. I was born in Germany in 1920, and was 13 years old when the Nazis took power in Germany
Recently, I saw on the news how innocent Muslims were deported from their homes here in the USA. We are a country of immigrants. Mr. Trump's grandparents were immigrants from Germany and his wife is an immigrant as well.
Mr. Trump should be ashamed to follow in the footsteps of a country which was convicted during the Nuremberg Trials in 1947 and condemned by the entire world for crimes against humanity.
I was a refugee in 1940 when I got legal permission to be a resident in the USA. But before that, I lived for 6 years under the Nazi swastika in Nazi Germany, and it took me 5 years to wait for a USA visa.
During 1944 / 1945, I served in the United Sates Armed Forces in France and Germany.
In the fall of 1938, the Nazis started deporting innocent people like my father,who was handcuffed and escorted by the Nazi storm troopers and then taken to a Nazi concentration camp. What I saw on TV was exactly the same method the Nazis used. American police officers, with the letters ICE on the back of their uniforms, prisoners were handcuffed and made ready for deportation.
I have a German newspaper picture from 1938, showing my father as well as maybe 50 men escorted by uniformed Nazi SS troopers to trains for deportation. I cannot believe that I am seeing the same thing again in my lifetime.
Shame on Mr. Trump, that he has not learned from the past. The German people have regretted and are still ashamed that their ancestors in 1933 voted for Hitler and were later misled by him, causing World War II.
May God bless America, and may we never follow the Nazis' history.
Signed,
Fred Voss
Ithaca, NY
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