R. Sellner Reese lived under Hitler and Stalin, warns about socialism in America
I met R. Sellner Reese about nine years ago and found her story one of the most compelling and unusual ever. She lived under two of the most murderous socialist governments ever: Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
“I was born under Hitler, grew up under Stalin, and worked under communist dictators Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honnecker in East Germany,” she told me.
Few had more practical experience under socialism than she. She and her three children came to America in 1985 for political and religious freedom requesting political asylum. Her main message was this: “Socialism never worked under these regimes and it will never work in America either.” Even then, under Obamacare, she saw America falling into the same trap of repeated lies and false promises that duped her German friends and neighbors.
She spoke to my classes when I got to the section dealing with socialism. I introduced her as having lived under two of the three biggest tyrants in world history, with China’s Mao Tse Tung being the third. She vehemently objected to my using the term “communist” instead of “socialist.” She made it clear that there was no difference and that the distinction only existed in the West.
“We only used the term socialist,” she insisted. I never made that mistake again. I had tried to separate the two as though one was tolerable, the other the more violent of the same thing.
“Hitler promised National Socialism but gave us tyranny instead,” she said. “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”
Some warned the people, but the promises were so desirable and powerful.
“My friend’s father told other people, that Hitler is a liar and will bring Germany down. One evening, two men came to his apartment and took him in for questioning before the police. Five days later, the wife received a letter that he has passed away with a heart problem. The family was told his grave was at the city cemetery. The family was so afraid to ask questions, and nobody knew what the Gestapo had done. No paper concerning his death was ever found. I personally know so many people who have suffered in the Nazi time.”
A second Hitler promise was this: “Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”
The socialist promise that the government would take from the rich and give to the poor only made everyone poor and resulted in human suffering and death, and eventually war.
“In my school class of 40 children, only eight had a father after the war. Women had to take all the responsibility for family and their future.” So much for the socialist promises.
After the war, the Soviets held the eastern part of Germany where she lived, renamed East Germany, under socialism with Joseph Stalin.
“We had to learn how wonderful the Red Army was and that socialism will take over the whole world to make all people free,” she said. She remembered the fruitless promises of prosperity under Hitler. Socialism never delivered then or under Stalin.
“We had little food and I never saw a banana, and chocolate was only a dream,” she said. “We had to stand in long waiting lines for food. When I finally got to the counter, there might not be anything left. To buy a car, there was a 10-15 year waiting time. Of course, you must have cash!”
Still, even midst all this poverty, the message went out, “Socialism is the only truth on this earth!” But the real truth was that the people could not choose their education or occupation.
“The government had control over your personal life, our work, living place, childcare, school and the ‘STASI’ [Socialistic Secret Service] constantly watched us,” she said. “If you resisted, you ended up in prison, and your children could be taken from you and adopted.”
In 1982, a visit to Russia, the motherland of socialism, revealed the failure of the promise of socialism there as well.
“The citizens of Russia were so poor,” she said. “Bad housing, not enough food and clothing.”
In 1985, Reese was finally able to leave socialist East Germany and come to the United States under political asylum. What she sees here in recent years is too similar to the socialist worlds from which she escaped, she said. It frightens her that we are taking the same path of forced sharing the wealth and socialized medicine and so many other things, and she is forced to watch tyranny return one more time.
When she sees Congress having its own healthcare plan rather than taking the same one forced on the people, visions of privileged healthcare for the socialist leaders in East Germany come to mind. She experienced rationed healthcare when her mother was declared too old for an operation and died two years later because resources would be better spent on the young, but she knew that such would not be denied a government official.
”It can happen in America!” Reese warned. “What is happening in America right now is scary! I’d like to tell everybody, socialism will never work in America either.”
What would she now say with the Democratic Party openly promoting socialism?
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
How to submit an article, guest opinion piece, or letter to the editor to The Independent
Do you have something to say? Want your voice to be heard by thousands of readers? Send The Independent your letter to the editor or guest opinion piece. All submissions will be considered for publication by our editorial staff. If your letter or editorial is accepted, it will run on suindependent.com, and we’ll promote it through all of our social media channels. We may even decide to include it in our monthly print edition. Just follow our simple submission guidelines and make your voice heard:
—Submissions should be between 300 and 1,500 words.
—Submissions must be sent to editor@infowest.com as a .doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf file.
—The subject line of the email containing your submission should read “Letter to the editor.”
—Attach your name to both the email and the document file (we don’t run anonymous letters).
—If you have a photo or image you’d like us to use and it’s in .jpg format, at least 1200 X 754 pixels large, and your intellectual property (you own the copyright), feel free to attach it as well, though we reserve the right to choose a different image.
—If you are on Twitter and would like a shout-out when your piece or letter is published, include that in your correspondence and we’ll give you a mention at the time of publication.
So, I was away from St. George for barely 30 hours, and when I returned I must have fallen through a rabbit hole (my apologies to Lewis G. Carroll) into an alternate reality.
Mr. Harold Pease describes features of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia through a woman he invited to one of his college classes.
Some of the patterns within those countries she described were:
Making big promises but delivering little or nothing (like healthcare reform; fixing infrastructure 😉
Creating a false sense of nationalism (like White Nationalism).
Promoting and repeating big but simple lies over and over again (coal jobs, better healthcare, regulations on environment and climate control are bad).
A promise that socialism would “take from the rich and give to the poor” (like a tax break for the wealthy; bailouts for farmers; massive support for the military=industrial complex??).
Attempting to control the media (like the mainstream media is fake-news; no more press briefings, etc.).
Fruitless promises of prosperity in the midst of poverty and want (like bringing back coal jobs; refusing to raise long term static federal minimum wage; imposing restrictive tariffs).
I think he must have forgotten as least one more:
Creating scapegoats for the populace to vent their frustrations and hatred (like the “illegal immigrant invasion”).
He then concludes: What would she now say with the Democratic Party openly promoting socialism? SAY WHAT??
Well, that is an interesting twist (the rabbit hole) on all the above patterns. It is quite evident that what his guest described, and I assume he quoted and paraphrased, is almost exactly what our current Republican Administration is actually attempting to do.
I see the Democratic Party proposing social programs to benefit the vast majority of our population, not just the upper one percent. Currently the Republican Parts seems to be in favor of taking from the poor and giving to the rich; that sounds more like a repressive, totalitarian form of government.