Tears for fears

Monument to victims of Nazi massacre in St. Julien de Crempse

The Munich Security Conference may as well have been held in the infamous Berlin suburb of Wannsee given the way that our sterling Vice President stepped into the shoes of Reinhardt Heydrich as he told the assembled European security officials that his boss Donald Trump had come up with a solution to what he might as well have called the Ukraine Question: sell 40 million people off to Trump's murderous pal, Vladimir Putin, let him order a great big Bucha and be done with them.

Reports from the conference said the attendees were in shock as Vance told them that they couldn't count on the United States to stand by its NATO treaty obligations in defense of its European allies. Vance might just as well have called out “so long Article 5” to his stunned audience on his way out the door.

It was left to the Security Conference Chairman, Christophe Heusgen, to try to make sense of what had just happened. Calling what he had heard from United States spokesmen a “European nightmare,” Heusgen lamented that “This conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.” His voice breaking, the conference chairman could no longer continue. Beginning to cry, he walked away from the podium and embraced his wife in the front row of the audience. The conference attendees, who had begun applauding as Heugsen broke down in tears, fell silent.

Let me tell you why the tears of the Munich Security Conference Chairman did not shock me. It's because Europe is littered from North to South and East to West with the remnants and memories of the war that began 85 years ago and left not a town, not a street, not a building, not a human being untouched by the horrors wreaked upon a continent by one man with his insane prejudices and his army.

We all know of the American cemeteries filled with the white crosses and Stars of David that marked the graves of our fallen and the monuments that commemorate their valor. Our armies crossed an ocean to help conquer the Nazi hordes which sent millions to their deaths in concentration camps and killed millions more with bombs and rockets and artillery and machine guns and rifles. Millions of words have been written trying to make sense of what the Nazis did to the human beings and countries with whom they shared a continent and a history.

But the people who lived through that terrible time and suffered its bloody depredations -- the parents and grandparents of Christoph Heugsen and the other people who listened in abject horror to JD Vance and his threats and lies and the conference attendees themselves -- are all too aware of what happened to their relatives and their towns and their villages not so very long ago.

If you travel outside the typical tourist destinations like Paris and Amsterdam and Brussels and Rome, you will find more than the ruined castles and aqueducts and cathedrals of hundreds and even thousands of years ago. In the tiny village of St. Julien de Crempse in France's Dordogne region, you will find a monument with 45 names of men and boys who were massacred by Nazi soldiers in retaliation for an attack by the resistance on a supply train that was headed north to help reinforce Nazi defenders preparing for the invasion that would later occur at Normandy. A few miles to the north and west, in the town of Mussidan on one of its back streets near the railroad tracks and across from a small bar where men from the town drink beers and glasses of wine when they get off work, you will find another small monument to yet another massacre carried out by the Nazis in retaliation for yet another action by the resistance.

To the south and east of Bergerac, in a small village called Villefranche-du-Perigord, there is another monument commemorating yet another Nazi massacre, and in the nearby village of Mazeyrolles stands a small monument to those who were murdered by the Nazis at a time when drawing a breath as a French man or boy over the age of 10 was considered a crime by the Nazi occupiers.

One day in 1996 when we were driving down the road that ran alongside the Dordogne River on our way to lunch at a favorite restaurant in the next town, we were stopped by the outstretched white gloved hand of a uniformed Gendarme. As traffic piled up behind us, a bus pulled into view from the other direction and disgorged a band wearing French military uniforms. Carrying its instruments, the band marched into the field between the road and the river.

Shortly afterwards, two black Citroen cars pulled off the road across from us. Several Gendarmes wearing their distinctive caps and neatly pressed uniforms and white gloves helped three old men from the cars. They were wearing berets and black suit jackets with rows of medals adorning their chests. Walking with canes and moving very slowly, the old men made their way across the field and stood near the band. They were joined by several civilians wearing suits and ties, as a color guard marched onto the field and stood at attention next to them.

The color guard presented arms and dipped the French Tricolor as the band struck up “La Marseillaise.” One of the old men saluted. The others placed their hands over their hearts. When the band had finished playing the French National Anthem, the civilian officials handed each of the old men a bouquet of flowers which they ceremoniously placed on the ground against a small concrete obelisk. The French civilian officials shook hands with each of the old men, and they stood around talking for a moment, and then the Gendarmes escorted the old men back to the Citroen cars, and they drove away.

The color guard and the band marched back to the bus and put away their instruments and weapons and flags, and the bus pulled away. The civilian officials got into some other cars and they drove away. Only then did the Gendarme directing traffic allow us to proceed.

Driving back from lunch, we stopped along the roadside and walked into the field to have a look at the obelisk that had been the focus of the events we had witnessed earlier. I couldn't read the worn French inscription, so later that afternoon, I stopped at the Gendarme headquarters to ask them what the ceremony had been about. The desk sergeant went into the back and returned with one of the more senior officers who had been in attendance at the ceremony. He spoke a little English, and I spoke enough French to understand that the ceremony was to commemorate the landing by parachute of the first American OSS agent in that part of France. The old men had been members of the Maquis resistance, and one of them had been the escort who took the OSS man to a nearby farm where he had been hidden. He was there to train the resistance in methods of sabotage that would be used against the Nazi occupiers.

The same ceremony was held in the same field at the obelisk monument on the same day every year, and each time the old men from the resistance were honored for their service to France, and the role played by the Americans in helping to defeat the Nazis was remembered.

That is why the behavior and words of the American Vice President at the Munich Security Conference drew tears. Everyone at the Munich Security Conference knew that in walking away from NATO and taking the side of Russia against Ukraine, Donald Trump and JD Vance had dishonored the legacy and memory of those who had fought the Nazis and stood fast against the Soviet threat during the Cold War, and since then against the same totalitarianism represented by Vladimir Putin who is waging the first war of aggression on European soil since the terrible days of World War II.

Memory is not an academic exercise for our allies in Europe. It's an open wound that will never heal so long as Donald Trump is the President of the United States that is still remembered for having dropped an OSS agent into a field in Southern France to help the Maquis resistance defeat the Nazis.