People asking me today what they should do about American political rhetoric being so hateful and anti-immigrant, bring to mind how Germans have since tried to unwind Nazism. As just one example the Cologne section of an Alpine club has demonstrated their concerted effort, with the help of a historian, to confront an infiltration and degradation by hateful extremists.

They published “Antisemitism in the Rhineland-Cologne Section of the Alpine Club” (Der Antisemitismus in der Sektion Rheinland-Köln des Alpenvereins), which details exactly how Nazis did irreversible murderous harm to a sleepy recreational Cologne section of the German-Austrian Alpine Club.

Initially after its 1876 founding Jews were seen like any other members in the Cologne Alpine Club. In fact, 14% of founding members openly were Jewish and prominent citizens known for leadership, such as Moritz Seligmann. The infiltration of hate begins around the same time as the radicalized appropriation of the swastika by hate groups, around the 1890s. Vienna introduced a concept of “Aryan paragraphs” to deny membership based on racism alone. Then, due to the rampant antisemitism propaganda unleashed at the end of WWI to blame Jews for everything and anything, the Alpine Club failed to resist intensified racism. In Cologne, controversy erupted in 1921/22 when Jewish applicants suddenly were denied membership, which led to public protest by Moritz Bing and Ludwig Cahen. The club refused to admit it was about race, while making it about race. Then, when a few expelled Jews formed their own “Donauland” section as a means of compliance, it was attacked by Nazis in 1924 to force all Jews expelled as a group from the Alpine Club. After Hitler seized control and destroyed democracy in 1933, the Cologne section wrote its first “Aryan paragraph” in January 1934, and by 1936 it removed any exemptions, clearly denying club membership on race alone. Although some from the club who were Jews managed to flee Germany, others died in concentration camps, and some were murdered.

The modern German Alpine Club (DAV) acknowledges this history as their unfortunate role in progressively overt racism, a cultural group normalizing murderous violence against their own members. They offer documentation of the many wrongs over many decades as their expression of regret now.

The Cologne Alpine Club’s honest accounting of such a past demonstrates a helpful path forward through acknowledgment and documentation. They didn’t minimize their failures or hide within excuses of “different times” (although at times the tone used to describe Germans being persecuted sounds like a distant and extinct race, rather than just Germans). Instead, the club has meticulously documented individual stories and the institutional failures.

…the Alpine Club yielded to pressure from antisemitic sections and failed to protect its Jewish members and the non-Jewish members who supported them… In a time when xenophobia, violence and intolerance are again spreading in Germany, we must not only resist the beginnings. We must also honor the memory of all those women and men of the Alpine Club who became victims of exclusion, intolerance and persecution or who actively fought against such developments.

(…der Alpenverein dem Druck von antisemitisch eingestellten Sektionen nachgegeben und sich nicht schützend vor seine jüdischen und die sie unterstützenden nichtjüdischen Mitglieder gestellt… In einer Zeit, in der in Deutschland wieder Fremdenhass, Gewalt und Intoleranz um sich greifen, gilt es nicht nur den Anfängen zu wehren. Es gilt auch all jener Frauen und Männer des Alpenvereins würdig zu gedenken, die einst Opfer von Ausgrenzung, Intoleranz und Verfolgung geworden sind oder die tatkräftig gegen derartige Entwicklungen angekämpft haben.)

Their transformation path from inclusive and helpful in the 1890s to hatefully exclusive by the 1920s, and then genocidal by the 1940s, follows a simple pattern we should more easily recognize today:

• Infiltration at the margins – rotten ideas in specific sections (e.g. Vienna) can spread throughout the organization
• Exploitation of crisis – post-WWI economic drama spread with modern technology accelerating unregulated hate speech should have been blocked as inherently incompatible with timeless outdoor exercise, not rapidly embraced and interlaced
• Normalization – what was once totally unthinkable for an inclusive club became policy of exclusion
• Complicity through silence – even those who didn’t actively promote hate failed to oppose it as they should

Germany’s post-war reckoning with a Nazi past isn’t just about political change in government institutions, but about how our everyday innocent groups – from walking or book clubs to baseball games and parent meetups – also must resist complicity in enabling or causing mass suffering. The separation is purposefully evaporated by extremist groups forcing people to join or be killed, whether members like it or not. A comprehensive approach to accountability offers a model worth considering after the tragedy. However, sooner obviously is much, much better. An ounce of prevention… goes the saying, as any mountain climber knows well. It shouldn’t take decades to pass before meticulous investigators (historians) help climbers, of all people, to understand how holding a line (on human rights) prevents unnecessary deaths.

• Acknowledge even simple and fun organizations are highly vulnerable to ideological capture
• Recognize silence against extremism is a form of enablement
• Document and preserve evidence of extremism to prevent normalizing it
• Raise alarms with early warning signs of immoral exclusion
• Support those who raise alarms, like Bing and Cahen in 1921/22 who wrote a letter that forced a club meeting, and chairman Günther publicly disavowed antisemitism as official policy (even though unofficially he then allowed it to grow far worse)