Naziism Has Reawakened— In Germany And In America's Very Own Republican Party

Klaus-Michael Kuehne + J.D. Vance Are Warnings We Should Heed

Kuehne, Trump, Miller und Vance

In a brilliant essay Saturday, It’s Time To Oppress Conservatives, A.R. Moxon noted that “Violence has come to Springfield, as violence was intended to. There are bomb threats, and threats upon threats and lies upon lies, and there are Nazi marches, schools are being evacuated, and Haitian immigrants are hiding in their houses, trying to keep themselves and their children safe… This isn't the first time elected Republican thugs and their network of propagandists have used bigoted lies to target a community for violence and then sat back and watched the violence come. It's not the second. It's not the twelfth. It's their modus oparandi. It's all they have. We've seen all this sort of thing before, and we know where it leads.”

J.D. Vance, United States Senator for the state of Ohio, candidate for Vice President of the United States of America, a man with a very real path to becoming the most powerful person on the planet, is actively trying to get people in his own community murdered, for no reason other than the fact that they are immigrants and they are Black. And Vance has got the full buy-in of his boss on this… We should be clear that this is openly Nazi behavior, from a guy who belongs to a party that keeps having these confluences and points of agreement with Nazi memes and Nazi methodologies and Nazi intentions and actual Nazis, and maybe it's just time to look at it plainly and say we've got ourselves a Nazi party in the United States…

And all of it done to oppress people from Haiti— the nation to whom Trump was referring when he famously claimed not to want immigrants from "shithole countries."

…But Haitians aren't the only oppressed people.

Conservatives are oppressed too. They'll tell you all about it. So many, many, many people oppress conservative. We should look at who those people are, and the form that oppression takes.

Conservatives are oppressed by immigrants, of course, even though immigrants add value to their communities and always have, even though immigrants in aggregate uphold the values conservatives claim to hold dear more than conservatives do. Immigrants oppress conservatives by existing, and this oppression takes the form of conservatives having to be aware that they exist, and through other people accepting immigrants, and through laws that accept immigrants, all of which creates an expectation that conservatives will accept immigrants, too, instead of terrorizing and bullying and expelling and killing them, and this is a very oppressive thing for conservatives to endure, and if you don't believe me, go ask them.

Conservatives are oppressed by queer people, too— gay and lesbian and bi and trans and the whole rainbow on the spectrum of gender presentation and sexual orientation. This, even though queer people are people who want to live life on their own terms without being forced into unnatural constraints by government restrictions, which is something that conservatives claim to care about. Queer people oppress conservatives through the fact that they exist, and this oppression takes the form of conservatives having to be aware that they exist, and through other people accepting queer people, and through laws that accept queer people, all of which creates an expectation that conservatives will accept queer people, too, instead of terrorizing and bullying and expelling and killing them, and this is a very oppressive thing for conservatives to endure, and if you don't believe me, go ask them.

And in much the same way, conservatives are oppressed by the existence of anybody who does not adhere to a religion that conforms to the dogmas of their apocalyptic exclusionary yet domineering brand of proselytizing Christianity. This, even though their religion admonishes them to not be the sort of people they insist on being, and divest themselves of the wealth and power they cling to, so that they might care for the human needs of the exact types of people whose existence they claim oppresses them so.

And also conservatives are oppressed by the existence of people languishing in poverty and abandoned by our shared society— by people who have lost homes, and by disabled people, and by sick people, and by people who don't have jobs, and people who have been imprisoned, and on and on. this, even though many conservatives are languishing in poverty, or disabled, or sick, or out of work; this, even though many more conservatives will find themselves in such a state, particularly if they get the sort of cruel and exclusionary society they demand.

And of course conservatives are oppressed by women— the existence of women, I mean, and the fact that women have bodies, and the fact that those bodies produce too many children, and also not enough children, and the fact that these women want to have some say in how many children their bodies produce, and when, and with whom. This, even though many conservatives are women.

The list of oppressive people gets added to daily. Teachers and journalists are being targeted now, and people who eat soy, and people who aren't sexy enough, and people who are too sexy, and performers and artists, and people who are too smart and people who aren't smart enough, and honestly it's just a squirming knot of slithering fearful hate at this point, the sort of thing that makes you a bit queasy whenever you have to consider it, which is often, unfortunately, because conservatives demand to have their worldviews heard and considered no matter how grotesque and debunked those worldviews are, and demand that their opinions be certified as valid no matter how detached those opinions become from observable fact, and they are accommodated in this demand more than any other group in the history of humankind.

There's no end to the lies conservatives tell about all these people who oppress conservatives by existing. Trump's on the stump saying that schools are doing gender-reassignment surgeries at school— where and when I don't know, I guess in the public bathrooms during 4th period or something. And he's lying that Democrats are performing post-birth abortions, by which it seems he means palliative care for terminal neonatal patients. And he's saying he's furious that immigrants are raping young girls, which is pretty rich coming from an adjudicated and unrepentant rapist with plenty of entries on Jeffery Epstein's private jet, and who has speculated openly about the virtues of sexual assault and ogling underaged children, and whose political career's lasting legacy will be preteen victims of rape forced to carry their attacker's baby. I guess what I'm saying is one gets the idea that what he and his mob of cheering fascist thugs are concerned about isn't rape, but rather using rape as a justifying premise for doing violence to immigrants.

And of course conservatives are oppressed by even the suggestion that any of their guns might be taken away, or that any gun that they might want to get wouldn't be gettable at a moment's notice, because their notion of freedom is entirely tied up with being able to kill anybody that they think is a threat at the exact moment that they believe the threat is posed, even as their worldview is entirely tied up with identifying threats based on total nonsense— this, even though as a matter of statistical fact having a gun puts you and your loved ones in far greater danger than any threat that might be solved by a gun.

And on and on and on, if you listen. The existence of people oppresses conservatives, and the sight of others caring for such people oppresses them, and any laws curtailing of the ability to threaten such people oppresses them. It's never-ending oppression of conservatives out there.

You know what? Let's do it. Let's actually do it.

I think we ought to oppress conservatives.

It seems like a great idea.

I lived in Amsterdam for nearly 4 years. My closest friend was Evelyne Pommier. Her father was French and her mother, Hilda Van Noorden, was Dutch. Her parents lived in Paris and Hilda, a fantastic painter, and I developed a close relationship over the years, especially in the years after Evelyne died, age 26 (traveling in India). I bring up Hilda because I was floored that when she was a young girl, she— with her brothers blew up a Nazi train. After the war, the Dutch government gave her a pension for life. She died a few years ago and I never got to record her story, something I had always wanted to get down on tape.

Another Dutch, friend— but not from those days— is the investigative journalist and author, David de Jong, who recently wrote his first piece for Vanity Fair, the story of Germany’s richest man, Klaus-Michael Kuehne, worth $44 billion. David spent part of the last year and a half investigating Kuehne, now 87, his company— Kuehne + Nagel— and his cover-up of his family's Nazi history and Holocaust profiteering. 

Kuehne is 87 years old, doesn't have heirs, and will leave his fortune, estimated at $44 billion, to his family foundation, making it one of world's largest charities. He also carries a family secret. Led by his father and uncle, the company mass transported looted property of Jewish families after they were deported to concentration and extermination camps. Ironically, the train Hilda blew up, which, for no reason, I always imagined was a troop train, could as easily have been a Kuehne + Nagel loot train. This story is something of an addendum to David’s best-selling book, Nazi Billionaires. 

The work David put into this article should serve as a warning  about taking conservatives— and the fascists and Nazis they morph into or, at the very least, enable— seriously. Klaus-Michael Kuehne reveres his long-dead father, Alfred, from whom he inherited the company, and has refused to allow a public investigation into the role Kuehne + Nagel played in the Nazification of Europe and in the Holocaust. “After Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany,” he wrote, “Alfred and his brother Werner, Klaus-Michael’s uncle, ousted their Jewish shareholder from Kuehne + Nagel. During World War II, Kuehne + Nagel, led by Alfred and Werner, transported looted Jewish property, primarily furniture, books, and art, from occupied Western Europe to Nazi Germany as part of the so-called M-Aktion, an abbreviation of Möbelaktion, which translates to ‘furniture operation.’ Over two years, between 1942 and 1944, almost 70,000 homes belonging to Jews in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg were systematically looted after their inhabitants had been deported by train to ghettos and death camps... Big German firms such as Deutsche Bank, Volkswagen and Bertelsmann opened their archives years ago to allow historians to examine their own lucrative Nazi collaborations. The commissioned studies unearthed that Deutsche Bank aided the expropriation of hundreds of Jewish-owned businesses and helped finance the construction of Auschwitz; that tens of thousands of men and women were used as forced and slave laborers to mass-produce weapons at the Volkswagen factory; and that Bertelsmann published antisemitic literature and exploited Jewish slave labor. In 2000 the three firms joined more than 6,500 German companies, including Kuehne + Nagel, in agreeing to pay about $2.5 billion to a reparations fund that provided financial compensation to surviving forced and slave laborers. But Kuehne + Nagel has never opened its archives.” And here’s why this becomes especially important now— the rise of Germany’sown MAGA-like party and the rebirth of German Naziism.

For decades, Germany’s political leaders have accepted moral responsibility and acknowledged the sins of the Nazi past, centering remembrance as a component of German society. But recently the country has seemed to regress. As the last witnesses to the Nazi era die and the cultural memory of the Third Reich fades, the right wing, increasingly mainstream, has attacked Germany’s progressive ideals. For much of 2023, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) polled as the largest party, hitting an all-time high of 23 percent in the polls in December. In June 2024 the AfD won a record number of votes in the European parliament elections. The party captured 16 percent of the German vote and came in second in the elections as concerns about immigration and the economy fanned voter discontent.

“Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over a thousand years of successful German history,” the AfD’s then coleader Alexander Gauland said in a 2018 speech. The AfD’s extremist wing is associated with antisemitism, Islamophobia, and historical revisionism, including the downplaying of Nazi crimes and denigration of the Holocaust. In May and July 2024, Björn Höcke, a leading AfD politician and founder of its extremist wing, was fined twice by a German court for using the banned Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany!” in his campaign speeches. Höcke has lamented the construction of a Holocaust memorial in central Berlin. Calling Germans “the only people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital,” he has demanded a “180-degree turn” in the country’s “politics of memory.”

… Interviews and newly unearthed archival material by VF in Amsterdam, Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, Montreal, and Washington, DC, detail the extent of Nazi profiteering by the Kuehne brothers and firm. Alfred and Werner Kuehne began profiting from the persecution of Jews much earlier than is known: years before World War II and mere months after Hitler seized power in Germany on January 30, 1933.

In late April of that year, the Kuehne brothers ousted their Jewish partner and co-owner Adolf Maass after he’d spent more than 30 years at the firm. Maass, 57 at the time, owned 45 percent of the Hamburg branch of Kuehne + Nagel, which he had founded in 1902 and which was the largest and most profitable part of the firm. When Friedrich Nagel died heirless in 1907, his shares went to his cofounder, August Kuehne, the father of Alfred and Werner. He died in 1932.

According to a signed and dated contract in the Maass family archive in the Montreal Holocaust museum, Maass signed over his shares and claims to the Kuehne brothers on April 22, 1933, for no compensation. The reason? An alleged inability “to fulfill his capital obligations” to the Kuehnes and the company. Such accusations became a common method in Nazi Germany to oust Jewish shareholders from their own firms. “This wasn’t a free and regular business contract,” says Frank Bajohr. “The Kuehnes used the political situation for their own benefit. It’s no accident that this contract was formulated in spring 1933. Maass wouldn’t have signed this contract in the years before Hitler took power. This was a so-called Aryanization.”

“The constitutional element of an Aryanization contract was that Jewish ownership was completely eliminated and that the company was handed over in its entirety to non-Jewish owners,” says Bajohr. “In this case, the Kuehnes.”

Nine days after ousting Maass, the Kuehne brothers became Nazi Party members, according to their denazification files in the Bremen state archive. In the following years the Kuehnes developed their firm into a “national-socialist model company,” an honorary title that the Nazi regime awarded to Kuehne + Nagel in 1937, the year that Klaus-Michael was born. The Kuehne brothers would declare in their denazification proceedings that Maass’s “Jewish origin caused serious trouble” for the firm and themselves. The siblings claimed that Maass left voluntarily and that they “derived no personal economic advantage from dissolving the partnership.”

In 1938 Kuehne + Nagel acquired the Hamburg subsidiary of the Czech transport company Alfred Deutsch. The owner was Leo Lewitus, a Jewish entrepreneur forced to sell his firm by the Nazi authorities in tandem with the Kuehne brothers. In 180 pages of correspondence during the acquisition discovered by VF in the Hamburg state archive, Kuehne + Nagel managers wrote matter-of-factly that the takeover was an Aryanization.

The start of World War II offered the Kuehne brothers the first opportunity for foreign expansion. In the footsteps of the Wehrmacht’s military conquest of Europe, Kuehne + Nagel grew rapidly: The transportation firm went from seven branches in Germany in early 1939 to 26 branches across Nazi-occupied Europe by late 1944, according to a comparison by VF of company letterhead from the years before and during the war listing all the offices. The company says it delivered supplies to the German army. Another driver of growth for Kuehne + Nagel was an agreement with Nazi authorities to ship looted Jewish-owned property from Western Europe to Germany as part of the furniture operation, which took place from spring 1942 through July 1944.

…Even though the Kuehne brothers were considered “high-ranking Nazi industrialists” by American investigators and “big time Nazis” by the British authorities after the war, both ended up being judged as mere “fellow travelers”— Nazi followers who weren’t involved in the regime’s crimes— in denazification proceedings in 1948. No repercussions followed. Their denazification files in the Bremen state archive contain no mention of the furniture operation. [Nor was anything mentioned of their prominent role in stealing millions of dollars worth of art owned by Jewish families, art that has never been returned to the families of the owners.]