Dave Defrosa was a teacher I had in high school. As a boy not understanding a word of German Dave was fascinated by the cadence of Hitler’s rally speeches. The words don’t matter. Just like Trump Rallies. Just like Trump, Hitler raged and threw stuff.

 This looks like the radio that stood in our dining room at 539 Blackhorse Hill Rd. In Coatesville, PA. Born in 1943 I could have heard Hitler’s speeches. I can visualize my older brother Joe,  born in 1938 feeling cantankerous and finding a Hitler speech on the shortwave dial. 

I could listen to “The Lone Ranger” & “Fibber McGee & Molly but not “The Shadow.” Bad Dreams. Joe did listen to “The Shadow.”

The radio still worked in 1960. I would play around with the short wave. Not much was in English except BBC. 

I think we left the radio when we moved out.

FROM:

Phil's Old Radios: 

The Secret of Hitler's Speech:

 

GO TO 4;51

Cassidy Hutchinson is like Trudy in “Downfall”

But what most defined Ms. Hutchinson’s swift ascent and sudden estrangement were her two superiors, Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump. Coming from a working-class and politically disengaged family in Pennington, N.J., Ms. Hutchinson was a college sophomore when she first attended a Trump rally in April 2017.

“I was maybe six rows from the stage,” she recalled, “and I was surrounded by all these people I felt I could relate to.” That included the president, whose coarse and boastful rhetoric sounded to her like her father, a self-employed landscaper and aficionado of “The Apprentice,” Mr. Trump’s long-running reality show.

Even today, Ms. Hutchinson seems somewhat at pains to understand how she fell so deeply in the sway of a president she now describes as “dangerous to our democracy.” To Jonathan Karp, the president of Simon & Schuster, which is publishing “Enough,” Ms. Hutchinson’s continued inner conflicts are understandable: “This book is about trauma, and about trying to overcome trauma. And it was written in the white heat of the moment.”

FROM:

The New York Times

Cassidy Hutchinson Reappears. She Has More Trump Stories to Tell.

“I would like not to be a hermit,” the former White House aide says upon the publication of a memoir about her journey down a political rabbit hole.

By Robert Draper

Sept. 23, 2023

In the mid-1960s I worked for a short time in a small furniture making shop in Hanover PA called Hans Koch Works. Hans was maybe 25 years old newly immigrated from Germany. Hans imported a carving machine from Austria. He offered to train me to operate it. It generated lots of dust and I have asthma. I refused the offer. 

The real expert cabinet maker at Hans Koch Works was Ferdinand Wolf. Fred was trained in the German apprentice system in pre-II World War Germany. 

Freddy made a scale model of a dresser I transferred from original size to a miniature size in a plan drawing. He pointed out that I got some of the transfers from metric to American wrong. He used mostly hand tools. 

Fred was an artillery man in Hitler's Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. He had one glass eye. A Russian put his eye out with his knife. He forced marched with others to be captured by Americans. Fred saw Hanover PA on the map and decided to spend the rest of his life in Hanover. 

Freddy said,  “Hitler was a bad man but he did some good things. He put people back to work.”

“During a trip to France in 2018, Mr. Trump told his chief of staff John F. Kelly, “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to the journalist Michael C. Bender, now a New York Times reporter, in a 2021 book on the Trump presidency. Mr. Trump denied making the remark.

According to another book on the Trump presidency, by Peter Baker, another New York Times reporter, and Susan Glasser, the former president also complained to Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, that American generals didn’t treat him as loyally as Hitler’s generals had. “Why can’t you be like the German generals” of the Third Reich, he demanded, the authors wrote.

This week, while confirming earlier accounts of Mr. Trump’s disparaging of America’s wounded veterans and war dead, Mr. Kelly called the former president “a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators.”

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Trump Escalates Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric With ‘Poisoning the Blood’ Comment

When asked about immigration in a recent interview, the former president used language with echoes of white supremacy and Hitler.

By Trip Gabriel

Oct. 5, 2023

Downfall (2004) - Clip 1: Steiner's Attack: