Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt

JD Vance went for a walk about around Dachau, but he didn’t comprehend the experience. His takeaway was to demand Germany move past memory, and embrace the far-right AFD, which is rooted in Nazi ideology and history as a legitimate part of Germany’s future.

There is a phrase that is as well-known and familiar as are apple pie, ice cream and baseball in the United States.

The word is “firewall,” and it is means that no extremist or nationalist political party will ever be permitted to form a government in Germany again with the aid of any other competing political party in a coalition.

Here is how the AFD is described in a The Washington Post opinion essay by Lee Hockstader that does an excellent job fairly laying out the political dynamic in Germany ahead of the national elections on February 24th.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, so goes the quip attributed to Mark Twain.

The new German nationalists—an ascendant party called Alternative for Germany, or AfD—are not jackbooted thugs who dream of a thousand-year Reich that would subjugate Europe under Berlin’s diktat. They sympathize with Russia, dislike European unity, and vehemently oppose immigration.

Still, the rhyme is unmistakable. Today, a century after Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf,” prominent AfD leaders have minimized Nazi atrocities and repurposed Nazi tropes, symbols and slogans.

They include the party’s leader and candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, who has basked in the adoration of AfD crowds roaring “Alice für Deutschland!,” an unsubtle play on “Alles für Deutschland,” a Nazi slogan banned under German law.

Even as other right-wing European parties have moderated their rhetoric and policies, seeking mainstream votes, the AfD has remained insistently radical. After a prominent party official declined to label Nazi SS members as criminals, the AfD was expelled last year from a bloc of other right-wing parties in the European Parliament in Brussels.

This is the political party that Elon Musk has embraced, and now the United States government has elevated, through the direct intervention of the vice president, who demanded Europe embrace old furies as new gospels.

Three weeks ago, Donald Trump swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Last night, he posted the following on X:

He is a lawless man who is above the law, and edging into the territory where he will declare, “I AM THE LAW.”

JD Vance commented that he had read many books on the Holocaust before his first visit to Dachau, the oldest concentration camp, opened in 1933.

The experience did not pause his enthusiasms for the MAGA project which accommodates evil men and women who deny the Holocaust. It has created literal ecstasy across a cesspool of hate and extremist groups, including Nazi groups like the Patriot Front.

The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers released from prison are Trump’s thugs. They are his army of intimidation, and many of them are neo-Nazis.

Germans did not need to hear a lecture from a low man who coddles the worst scumbags in America about the necessities of forgetting the unfathomable within a lifetime of its happening, and the explicit promises of multiple generations to make sure it never did again.

The main purpose of JD Vance’s visit to Europe was to demand Ukrainian surrender and European appeasement of Russia’s illegal, immoral and criminal war of aggression on Putin’s terms.

The Vance speech was a repudiation of the most powerful military alliance in world history. It was a selfish declaration that a new era has arrived during which an American president no longer stands for values that unite free people and saved the world from the abyss. It was an affront to the memory of the dead and the living who survived the greatest calamity in world history.

There were many things that an American vice president could have talked about at a conference in Munich. He chose poisonous words. The Germans in the audience didn’t need a Scott Jennings to interpret what they meant and deny their plain meaning.

German ears are finely tuned for the song Vance was singing.

Let me tell you a different story about Munich.

It begins inside a mountain.

There is a tunnel bored into a mountain not far from Munich.

It ends under a bricked rotunda at a golden elevator that carries its occupants through the center of the mountain to a stone tea house at the top.

The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain came to this mountain. He walked into it down the long stone corridor that was lit by torches, and lined with members of Adolf Hitler’s personal security guard, the Schutzstaffel.

He rode the golden elevator to the top of the mountain and he carved up Czechoslovakia with Adolf Hitler. He declared to the world that he had delivered “peace for our time.”

The Czechoslovakians, like the Ukrainians of 2025, were cut out of the discussions by the great powers about the future of their nation. It was decided for them by others —and then the Nazis came.

I want you to know what it took for the European powers and the United States to repudiate the Munich Agreement. You should know the story of what happened to cause the allies to tear up Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler.

VP JD doesn’t seem to know the story.

In a week where he was rebuked by Pope Francis for menacing the gospels of Christ with his fascist dreck, it would be good if someone shared it.

There have been many meditations, studies and first-hand accounts around the catalysts for extraordinary acts of physical and moral courage.

In the end, what drives the most selfless acts is love.

There is a grass field with a gentle slope outside of Prague. A village called Lidice once stood there. Lidice became world famous in 1942 when the world learned what happened there. The Nazis wiped it off the face of the Earth, and killed every man, woman and child who lived there.

Most of the children would die by gas at the Chelmno extermination camp. There were no Jews in Lidice. Adolf Hitler personally ordered the destruction of the village and the salting of the earth as revenge for the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich, referred to as the “Butcher of Prague.”

Heydrich was the principal architect of the Holocaust. He was assassinated by a team of Czech and Slovak commandoes who parachuted into their occupied homeland from Allied planes that departed from London. They came to kill Heydrich, a ruthless war criminal and sociopath. They accomplished their mission.

The men of Lidice were lined up by the SS. They gave the village priest an opportunity to live by walking away. The priest chose to die with his flock. He was murdered with his parishioners.

The children of Lidice are memorialized in a monument that marks the evil and murder that stole their lives at the hands of the SS. It is among the most haunting monuments I have ever seen.

The Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, Lidice, Czech Republic

The Czech and Slovak paratroopers were hunted by the Gestapo and SS. They were betrayed by one of their own—a man named Karel Curda, who would be hung after the war for his treachery and treason.

The paratroopers hid in the crypt and loft of Saints Cyril and Methodius Church in Prague. They were given sanctuary by the Orthodox bishop, who would be martyred for his love and courage.

The paratroopers killed scores of SS as they fought to their last rounds and to the death. None were captured alive. Thousands of innocent people were murdered to avenge the life of the man, who six months earlier, had chaired the 90-minute meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the Final Solution was sanctified by Nazi law.

When the war ended, there was a Czech village that was liberated and briefly occupied by the American Army in 1945. The people of Susice watched the American Army depart and return to lines set in faraway summits. The Red Army took their place and snuffed out freedom for the next 45 years.

Before that happened – before the Russian jackboot fell – the people enjoyed a brief moment of freedom. They mourned the countless victims of Nazi murder, but they honored the acts of courage, sacrifice and death in the name of freedom.

The date on this flag marks the day Heydrich was killed, not the day the price was paid:

It was the day the world tore up the Munich Agreement. Czechoslovakia, enslaved, occupied, choked and strangled was brought back to life by an outraged world in awe of the courage and shocked by the cost.

The Nazis announced their crime, and in the end, they were destroyed at a cost that Winston Churchill foresaw at the moment of appeasement.

And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

Today, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are the Czech commandoes.

Courage is present in this moment as it was then. President Zelensky has demonstrated that all of the elements of strength, fortitude, love and wisdom necessary to defeat evil are very much present in Ukraine.

Those virtues must be seen, lauded and celebrated.

That is why the United States and the global alliance for freedom and democracy that she leads must not betray Ukraine.

There are two ways to win a fight. The first requires bringing an opponent to submission.

The second requires exhausting an opponent until they lose the ability to tell the difference between being unable and unwilling to fight.

Exhaustion is Putin’s plan. His military is corrupt, brutal, criminal and incompetent. The Russian Army is a poorly-led collection of thugs that is larger than that of their opponent.

Russia must not win the war in Ukraine. If Putin does he will stoke in Moldova, and next the Baltics, as the Atlantic Alliance collapses under the weight of its failure and the new era of appeasement led by Trump, Musk and Vance, the MAGA Crown Prince.

The United States has been the bulwark against global tyranny for more than 80 years.

There is no other choice.

The United States of America must remain the most powerful nation in the world for as far as the eye can see. World peace, stability and prosperity are utterly dependent on American power. This means the United States must remain the world’s preeminent power on land, at sea, in the air, in space and in cyber space. It means that the United States must be the dominant economic, innovative, exploratory, scientific, medical, research and entrepreneurial power on Earth.

It means that the United States must constantly lead a global alliance of free nations that believe that the rule of law, democracy, human rights and freedom are elemental bedrock requirements of a just society.

There will always be a challenge to democracy because power is foundational in any society. The attainment of power and the costs involved in taking it are at the root of so much suffering in the world. This has always been so.

Courage is what is required to defend freedom. Without it, freedom is extinguished.

The Nazi Party was born out of grievance, resentment, inflation, a shattered economy, hate and lies.

It took more than a decade for the spell-binding orator and antisemite to lead the party from the Beer Hall to the Reichstag. It took six months for the Nazis to extinguish democracy after they took elected power in 1932.

It took 10 more years after that before the meeting took place to plan the murder of every Jew in Europe.

What was special about 1942? Simple: the Nazis were winning.

They did everything they said they would do and more.

There was no lack of imagination about what happened by 1945, when a shattered world was briefly at peace.

It takes a long time to forget. We forget at our peril. At the beginning, the loss of freedom leads to places that are twisted beyond any depraved imagination. When people become the law, great evil follows. All around us are the reminders. Yet, the ball keeps rolling along.

The American role in the world is indispensable. It should combine idealism, humility and pragmatism. Without America, the powers that rise will be hostile to something that is at the core of the imperfect American experiment – human beings.

Democracy is what keeps all of us free from the jackboot. There is always someone willing to bring it down on the heads of children. Lidice is a reminder of what happens when the darkness doesn’t break, and the sun can’t rise.

JD Vance went to Dachau and then he met with the representatives of a political party who say that the SS is not a criminal organization.

What does that make JD Vance exactly?