Nazis Hated Museums, Too

Written By Leeja Miller

Further Reading:

 

Ministry of Truth by Steve Benen

 

Sources:

Transcript:

Welcome to Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. Y’all I am at the point where I feel like a broken record about a lot of things with the Trump regime, and I’m struggling to find what actually matters through all the chaos and noise, and to determine what’s worth repeating, over and over again, about this administration, because I do think there are things that bear repeating so that we don’t become complacent or forget that NONE of this is normal. One of those things is Trump’s continual, incessant attack on truth: hiding it, confusing it, twisting it, obfuscating it, completely deleting it wherever possible. There have been SO many examples in just the last week alone that I could make a separate video on each one, and maybe I should. He lied about mail in ballots and voting machines (33 other countries also use mail in ballots), he called himself a war hero and supported claims that the war in Ukraine would have never happened with him in office, he lied about the crime stats in DC, and that’s just what I can come up with off the top of my head. He’s been doing it for the decade since he announced his first run for the White House, and likely his entire life, entire books have been written about it, if you’re interested I recommend Ministry of Truth by Steve Benen, producer of the Rachel Maddow show, it came out last year and really lays out quite starkly this clear pattern of how Trump and his cronies rewrite history pretty much as it’s happening, I’ll link it in the description. So as annoying as it is to say over and over and over and over that Trump is lying, I think it’s still important to point out, over and over, because we cannot be complacent. History teaches us that when a regime attempts to hide the truth, it usually means they’re up to no good. And one particularly stark way that the Trump regime this time around is attempting to rewrite and delete history is through its overreach into museums. We’re going to talk about what’s going on with the Smithsonian, which Trump lamented “focuses too much on slavery” this week, the Trump regime’s attack on museums generally, and how this mirrors what the Nazis did in the lead up and during World War 2, because we love a little comparative history on a Friday afternoon.

I feel like I know you guys well enough to guess that most of you are probably museum-goers, so I know I’m preaching to the choir when I say WE NEED MUSEUMS. I love a good museum, especially a free museum, and America is chock full of them, especially if you’re a student. When I was in law school I had one particularly depressive semester and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had an Ansel Adams exhibit up that I went to like 10 times just to feel something. Museums make us feel things, not just in art but in history, in learning about the past, in seeing a physical object and knowing that another human being touched it or made it hundreds or even thousands of years ago. It makes history real. And museums bring that to the masses, often for free or at relatively low cost. That is dangerous if you’re concerned about having an educated voting public able to think critically and connect dots. That is dangerous if you prefer the masses support the government unquestioningly and take the president’s word as gospel. Turns out the government has done a lot of heinous shit that’s made its way into museums, museums that bring the past to life and make us feel moved. A complacent public is certainly not an educated public with open access to information. Every dictator for all of time has known that. And Trump is doing everything he can to chip away at our access to information, especially negative information about the government. That’s where the Smithsonian comes in.

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Often, the way news outlets report on a story differs depending on the bias of the publication. And it’s hard to know how YOUR own perception of bias influences your interpretation of the news. This headline from the Associated Press caught my eye “White House orders a review of exhibits at Smithsonian museums ahead of nation’s 250th birthday.” Using the Ground News browser extension, I can see that USA Today is considered “left leaning.” To get a fuller picture of the story on all sides of the political spectrum I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.

My partner on today’s video, Ground News, uses 3 independent monitoring organizations to assess the bias rating for each publication. Each news monitoring organization has their own methodology - including editorial reviews, blind bias surveys, independent reviews, and third party research. These are legit INDEPENDENT organizations, but they are limited by the data available to them: their analysis is done in the context of the U.S. political system. Our overton window has shifted so far right that USA Today is considered “left leaning.” That tells you a lot about the context within which the media you’re consuming operates. And thanks to Ground News, I get even more context, including how factual each publication is and who owns it, giving me a well-rounded idea of the motivations, biases, and accuracy of the news I’m consuming. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in America had that much information about the news they consume??

Because depending on where you or your family members get the news, you’re going to get very different takes on the same story.

This is where Ground News comes in - and why I've been using them for over a year. Today’s partner Ground News is an app and website that offers tools to help you critically analyze the news you read, providing context to understand the full picture. I feel better equipped to make sense of what’s happening in the world without being influenced by just one perspective. And listen I’m not the only one who loves Ground News, the Nobel Peace Center even called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.”

I’m always really impressed with Ground News and genuinely think they’re a great resource. If you want to stay informed on US Politics and more Subscribe through this QR code or our link below at ground dot news slash leeja for 40% off this unlimited access Vantage Plan. It comes out to $5 a month for unlimited access to ALL the features I’ve mentioned. Thanks Ground News!

Back in March, Trump issued an executive order calling on the elimination of “Anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian. Pursuant to that order, last week the administration sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie Bunch, stating quote “we will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions. This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” It then asks the Smithsonian and a number of its key museums to turn over a trove of information, including information about its collections and plans for the American 250 celebration scheduled for next year to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the declaration of independence. It also asks for internal guidelines and governance documents, likely attempting to uncover anything they can point to to claim woke, DEI laden internal policies infect the entire institution. It then lays out a timeline for how the Smithsonian is expected to comply, including by quote “implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials” within 120 days. It also lays out additional interventions by the executive branch, including interviews with Smithsonian staff and ensuring that museum messaging aligns with the administration’s messaging ahead of the America 250 programming. To say this is a dramatic and unprecedented overreach by an executive intent on controlling the narrative of a historically independent institution is an understatement.

This is not the only Trump administration move to control cultural institutions. For example, back in February he targeted the Kennedy Center, ousting the entire board of trustees and instituting himself as chairman. The Trump administration has also cut funding to the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, though a lot of those cuts are currently held up in litigation.

On Tuesday, Trump did not mince words, lambasting the Smithsonian and museums generally as quote “the last remaining segment of woke.” This, of course, is not true. Samuel Redman, director of the public history program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told The Washington Post “that because exhibitions are planned over several years, they can actually feel behind to some scholars. “It’s such a large-scale operation that it’s not exactly intended to be this cutting-edge space.”” He warned these threats could have a chilling effect on Museums, which could lead to self censorship without Trump actually having to do anything, despite the fact that he doesn’t actually have the power to do anything. Not technically, at least. As we’ve seen, though, his power to pull whatever strings he wants to get Congress to bend to his will means he effectively has control over the budgets that many larger institutions rely on for a chunk of federal funding and grants. And because we don’t tax billionaires enough, a lot of the private money that museums rely on come from trusts and endowments owned and controlled by wealthy benefactors who have high incentives to fall in line with the Trump regime’s narratives in order to stay in his good graces and continue to get what they want out of him and other government actors.

According to the Smithsonian website quote “The Smithsonian Institution was established by an act of Congress in 1846 as an independent federal trust instrumentality, a unique public-private partnership that has proven its value as a cultural and scientific resource for more than 175 years. The federal commitment provides the foundation for all we do, and is especially helpful in attracting private support. We leverage our federal funding to enrich the lives of the American people and advance our mission for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”” Basically, the Smithsonian, which oversees 21 museums, 21 libraries, the national zoo, and numerous research centers, is an independent body overseen by a board of regents, which includes the chief justice of the supreme court and the vice president of the united states, plus 3 senators, 3 representatives, and 9 citizens, and is meant to be independent and non-partisan. It receives 62% of its funding from the federal government and the rest through private donations. The Smithsonian and its affiliated institutions received around 17 MILLION visits per year. Because it is meant to be an independent institution separate from the government, and it was created by Congress, technically it should be outside the reach of the executive branch and Trump unilaterally deciding to make changes or try to control it. Of course in Trump’s world that’s just a technicality, a mere suggestion.

The letter sent to the Smithsonian last week was signed by Lindsey Halligan, a senior associate staff secretary at the White House. Halligan was also the only administration official listed by name in the March executive order aimed at quote “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” She was, in fact, allegedly the one who gave him the idea to target the Smithsonian in the first place. But who is Lindsey Halligan? I love discussing the background of the various goons Trump surrounds himself with, and Halligan is no different. Born in Broomfield Colorado, she went to a private catholic high school before going to Regis University in Denver, a Jesuit University where she studied politics and broadcast journalism. In 2009 she made the semifinals in Miss Colorado USA, earning third runner up in 2010. She went to law school at the University of Miami, graduating in 2013 and going on to handle insurance law at a small South Florida law firm. And being a former beauty pageant contestant AND a conservative lawyer in South Florida perfectly positioned her to eventually enter Trump’s orbit. According to the Washington Post, she met Trump in 2021 at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. By early 2022, she was part of his legal team. She was on the ground in August 2022 when the FBI raided Mar a Lago for classified documents. She quickly became Trump’s mouthpiece on the issue. A pretty lawyer with a degree in broadcast journalism who knows how to smile for the cameras? Yeah listen we can criticize Trump all day but he knows what he’s doing. She made appearances defending him on Fox News, she sat in the front row of his box at the 2024 Republican National Convention, she was targeted by Iranian hackers trying to infiltrate Trump’s campaign, and once he got into the White House, he placed her by his side on the White House staff. She reportedly quickly gained Trump’s confidence. And so when a pretty woman who he holds in high regard came to him and said “Mr. President I went to some museums today and I didn’t like their narrative I thought it was woke” he was like awesome, you fix it.

After Trump’s tirade this week, and in the wake of last week’s letter to the Smithsonian, Halligan made an appearance on Fox News, the official mouthpiece of the regime, saying museums have an “overemphasis on slavery.” She went on to say “I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery. We should be able to take our kids, our students, through the Smithsonian and feel proud when we leave. There’s a lot of history to our country — both positive and negative — but we need to keep moving forward; we can’t just keep focusing on the negative. All it does is divide us. We want the Smithsonian to represent really what our country was founded upon: grit, resilience, perseverance.” Basically, the only feeling we’re allowed to feel towards our country is pride. Anything else is anti-American. We’ve seen this sentiment before, the whitewashing of history to enforce national pride above all else.

Nazis. It was the Nazis.

During the rise of the Third Reich and throughout the second World War, Nazis made a concerted effort to erase the history and cultural memory that did not align with the party ideology. They did this through the destruction of art, historical artifacts, books, and universities–anyplace where individual thought, expression, or preservation of history and facts thrived was up for either erasure or control by the Nazis. Nazi destruction and confiscation of art is generally pretty well-known. Anything that wasn’t destroyed was stolen from Jews, who had been legally stripped of their citizenship and as stateless people their possessions were considered up for grabs. There was an emphasis placed on the divisiveness of modern art. Hitler and the regime preferred classical realist art, simple art considered beautiful, positive, showed aryans in a good light, made the people feel proud of their country, none of this negativity in the modern art being created at that time, art that was critical of war, art that imparted communist or democratic ideology, art that was created by jews, gays, disabled people and more, or art that DIDN’T have a clear message, that left the people to interpret it, to feel their own way about it, that couldn’t fit into an easy and clean narrative. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, quote “In 1937, the Nazis confiscated thousands of modern artworks from German museums. They displayed many in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich.” The art was hung haphazardly, removed from frames, surrounded by critical slogans written onto the walls. Only people over 18 were allowed in, in an attempt to amp up the drama and signal that the ideas inside that exhibit were corrupt and inappropriate. Right next door to the Degenerate Art exhibition, the Nazis put on the Great German Art exhibition, meant to contrast the degenerate art with the kind of art that the Nazi regime approved of. Quote “The new Nazi aesthetic embraced the genre of classical realism. The visual arts and other modes of “high” culture employed this form to glorify peasant life, family and community, and heroism on the battlefield. They promoted such “German virtues” as industry, self-sacrifice, and “Aryan” racial purity. In Nazi Germany, art was not just “for art's sake,” but had a calculated propagandistic undercurrent.”

Over 2 million people lined up to view the Degenerate Art exhibition. Only half a million bothered to go to the Great German Art exhibition next door. But art was just one piece of the overall puzzle Nazi’s attempted to put together to achieve complete control of the cultural narrative in Germany and its occupied territories.

According to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, quote “One of the first objectives realized by the Nazis during the years 1933-1935 was the "cleansing" of the German universities of their Jewish students and lecturers. This purge was connected with the attempt to "coordinate" German academic life with the tenets of National Socialism.” Prior to the rise of the Nazi regime, German Universities benefitted from strict separation from the state–it was a central tenant of the university system that the government would not intervene in their curriculum and hiring practices. In the weeks after Hitler officially took over control of Germany in 1933, an official law was passed imposing racial and political criteria for academic positions at universities. Professors had to pass racial purity and loyalty tests in order to obtain university positions. Hundreds of university professors were fired. Nazis drafted new university curricula, and further cleansed the Jewish students and other “enemies of the Reich” from the ranks of the Universities.

Books were also on the chopping block immediately. The Nazi regime burned tens of millions of books. Those that weren’t burned were buried or left to rot in dingy basements. They did this everywhere they went, including in Poland where, according to The Washington Post, quote “there was a concerted effort to exterminate the entire country’s literary heritage.” Of particular concern were not only writers and scholars of Jewish descent, but also all other “enemies of the Reich” as well as ideologies that went against Third Reich doctrine–things like democracy and pacificism, all had to be destroyed.

Of particular concern for Hitler was the historical artefacts and memory of World War I, which was a particular sore spot given that Germany lost the war and was forced to pay steep reparations and endure years of political sanctions and other punishments for its activities during that war. According to Architect Magazine, in 2017 a document was discovered that was a directive from Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Quote “Dated Aug. 12, 1940, the document conveyed Hitler’s order to Germany’s Army High Command to destroy World War I memorials in occupied Belgium and France [1]. The monuments, in Hitler’s eyes, served to defame the army and perpetuate hatred against the nation. Their eradication was thus necessary to restore Germany’s reputation and protect it for posterity. … Here was clear proof that Hitler had directly intervened to transform not only the physical landscape of Europe, but the landscape of memory itself.”

Quote “Some memorials honored civilians who had been deliberately killed by German forces during the invasion of Belgium and France in 1914. Facing international outrage, Germany vehemently denounced accusations of atrocities committed by its troops as Allied propaganda. In August 1936, it condemned a national monument “to the memory of 23,700 civilian martyrs of Belgium,” inaugurated that month in the town of Dinant, as a “hate monument.” German foreign ministry officials objected in particular to the memorial’s provocative inscription, “Furore Teutonico” (Teutonic fury), which blamed the civilian massacres on German rage [2].”

In May 1940, when German forces invaded Belgium and France, they took their revenge, razing Furore Teutonico and other troublesome war monuments. Beyond historical revisionism, this willful destruction of war memorials constituted psychological warfare—in essence, an act of killing the dead. It also deprived communities of the bereavement rituals that, over the years, had brought survivors together in shared grief and memories.

The August 1940 directive from Keitel that conveyed Hitler’s order to Army High Command also alluded to “individual instructions” communicated previously for the destruction of specific memorials; Furore Teutonico was presumably among those. Unlike these targeted acts, Keitel’s directive laid out a path for a more systematic and widespread alteration of memory. Army units in occupied districts were to be instructed to survey their area of operations, including museums, and document WWI memorials and displays. So-called hate monuments were to be eliminated, German weapons displayed as war trophies were to be collected, and statuary, sculptural reliefs, and inscription panels were to be demounted and shipped to the Zeughaus (military museum) in Berlin. All of this was to be accomplished by Nov. 1, 1940.”

The confiscated WWI memorials were to be moved to Berlin to a museum that was to be constructed called Soldiers’ Hall. Quote “The design for Soldiers’ Hall, documented in published models, floor plans and drawings, featured a barrel-vaulted interior with a colossal Victor statue. Beneath this space lay a crypt housing the sarcophagi of German generals. In these dramatic surroundings, WWI memorials taken from occupied lands would have been recast in a new light, transforming former victors into losers, and former losers into victors.”

So yes, the Nazis hated museums too, and did everything they could to steal or destroy artefacts in order to hide the truth or rewrite history in their image. This is not new, it did not originate with the Nazis though they did it on a scale unprecedented in modern history, but it is a telltale sign of authoritarianism and, especially, fascism, when the regime wants to make sure every cultural output and institution conforms to a specific ideological worldview and is willing to step into institutions that are traditionally independent in order to control that narrative.

Now, more than ever, historical knowledge, passed down through banned books, persecuted intellectuals, and museums being combed over by the regime, is essential to hold on to, and to name it when this regime attempts to rewrite history to make itself look like the good guys, to instill unquestioning loyalty no matter what atrocities it commits. It is deeply effective propaganda. Many Germans supported Nazis and the Hitler regime even after the fall of the third reich and the end of the war. For those people, the ones for whom Trump could literally shoot someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue and they wouldn’t bat an eye, it’s too late for them. But for the rest of us, it’s essential that we do what we can to ensure that history is not rewritten, even as it’s happening. Support your local museums, read the banned books, read them to your children, keep your own journal to record what you see and hear, because it is our eyes and ears that they want us not to believe. And keep yelling out loud when you hear them lying, even if you start sounding like a broken record.

If you want to support my work, all these episodes are ad free over on Patreon, patreon dot com slash Leeja Miller.

Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Marc, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, R_H, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Wednesday about how marriage equality is on the chopping block.


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