Government was importing German scientists was never a secret. Known as Operation Paperclip, this presidential decision would allow more than one thousand former Nazis and Nazi collaborators to work in the United States. On September 3, 1946, President Truman had signed a top-secret order permitting German scientists into America to help develop the nation’s new rocket program. Instead of acknowledging a change of attitude about this matter, O’Reilly and Dugard project current prevailing attitudes onto the past, and assert that the rocket scientists had been brought to the United States secretly: ( K-H Karisch, Frankfurter Rundschau, 15 July 2009) Debus in particular had been an ardent member of the NSDAP and a literal Brownshirt. Wernher von Braun, the leader of the Peenemünde rocket team, and Kurt Heinrich Debus, who became the director of the Kennedy Space Center from 1962 to 1974, were both at least nominally members of the SS. This extreme portrayal of the SS requires a certain amnesia.įor example, the fact that some members of the German team of rocket scientists who put American astronauts on the moon were members of the Schutzstaffel is never mentioned in this book. As of 1 February 2019 it was still on the Hardcover Nonfiction list, at Number 15.įor purposes of virtue-signaling it was appropriate to portray Nazis and the SS as negatively as possible, so as to avoid any conceivable resemblance to or association with Republicans. Upon release in October 2018 it quickly topped the New York Times’s best-seller list, and remained Number One for some time. (Coauthor Martin Dugard was a corporate marketer before he became a published writer.) The obvious mistakes and half-baked arguments in the book strongly indicate that it was rushed.ĭespite some ridiculously obvious flaws, the book has been successful. This book could very well have been slapped together in two months to ride The Death of a Nation‘s modest wave of success just in time for the Christmas buying season. In that regard, the book is similar to Dinesh D’Souza’s execrable Death of a Nation, which appeared as a motion picture on 3 August 2018, just two months before Killing the SS appeared on 9 October. The book would also serve as a useful prop for anyone anxious to demonstrate that Republicans are not Nazis ( because look, Bill O’Reilly called them evil). With this book, on the premise that the SS epitomized evil, O’Reilly could present himself as an authority on the question of who is evil and who is not, and who is a Nazi and who is not, and that would be rhetorically useful. Goldberg goes beyond merely defending Trump and his supporters, and throws the hot potato to the other side by suggesting that campus leftists are the ones who resemble Brownshirts, and O’Reilly of course agrees (because, apparently, Communists have no reputation for censorship or violence).

The birth of the idea for this book may have occurred on The O’Reilly Factor, 9 March 2016 when Bill O’Reilly did a program with guest Bernie Goldberg, with the theme of debunking invidious comparisons that likened presidential candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and his supporters to Brownshirts. KILLING THE SS by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard is a book inspired by motives other than the quest for truth.

Kennedy with a former Sturmbannführer of the Allgemeine SS, Wernher von Braun

Vanguard pale moon 2018 release