Jakob & Irma Ehrlich

My father’s grandparents Jakob and Irma (my great-grandparents) lived in Austria in the 1900s. Jakob Ehrlich was a well established lawyer and politician, known for helping Jews in a bigoted society, and was prominent in the Zionist movement which led to the creation of Israel 10 years after his death.

In 1938, the Austrian Nazi Government raided their home while they were out, ransacked the place, and took their passports (in a coordinated raid that included Sigmund Freud’s house and others). Jakob refused to flee the country, believing in the work he was doing supporting his community. In her nineties, Irma told the story to a tape recorder. Here’s what she said about this moment:

> It is hard to revive the feelings and agonies of the next weeks. I was in complete shock. There was certain protective numbness, which made it possible for me to function reasonably well, and also an outrage. Suddenly you have been transformed from a respected citizen into a non-person. Dangers were all around. People were picked up in the streets and disappeared. Nobody knew what was going on and what would happen next. Any moment anything could happen. I thought the world would not allow it. That Roosevelt would stop it. There were ominous knocks on the doors in the dark hours. Prominent people, mostly Jews, but also Marxist and noted Catholics were arrested. I heard of friends, political allies, who disappeared. Who would be next?

Jakob was taken from his home, in front of his family. He was sent to Dachau. The closest Irma and their fourteen year old son Paul ever came to seeing him again was when his casket was returned two months later, sealed, hiding the beatings which killed him. The camp had been operating since 1933 to end political opponents, before being scaled up 100-fold in the Holocaust.

> Long after the funeral people visited Jakob’s grave as that of a martyr’s to pray and leave small stones, an old Jewish custom. I was told it was covered with innumerable tokes from these visits.

Irma stayed in Vienna in weeks of shock after that, until Paul asked one day “Everyone is leaving – when do we go?”. Their story out is a riveting one which I won’t detail here. One moment that stands to memory is when an old acquaintance comes back to help Irma escape through the Netherlands – someone whom she had spent an entire mountain hike with as he spouted hatred and death to Jews, before becoming quite abashed when Irma let him know she was one.

Irma and Paul ended up on one of the last flights out before the state-sponsored violence of Kristallnacht. Their bank accounts, property, and passports were seized by the government. They arrived in Britain, and later the US, penniless and stateless, but with their story. Irma spent the rest of the war as a traveling speaker to help get kids out of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Paul Ehrlich

After coming to the states, Paul served in the US army in WWII. Thanks to being multi-lingual and having obtained a chemistry degree, his job was to drive a jeep behind enemy lines as part of T-force, stealing German secrets before they could be destroyed by the Germans or captured by the Russians. In a stroke of luck, this re-assignment kept him out of the Battle of the Bulge.

In 1951, with a new PhD, he was working for the National Bureau of Standards and slated for a job designing new rocket fuels. That all changed when he was suddenly denied security clearance, and for decades he had no idea why.

Harvard professors saw the opportunity, and hired him there instead. He went on to do much interesting work - including research on the polymerization of polyethylene at very high temperatures.

Decades later, he put in a Freedom Of Information Act request. I am proud and unsurprised to learn from these documents that Paul was stubbornly against political persecution, and recognized McCarthyism for what it was, despite it being anti-communist, not anti-fascist.

He did not like communism, and he did not think communists should be working for the US government. But he did not discriminate, kept communist friends, and called out war crimes and propaganda when done by his own country. That was enough to cost him his job.

It appears that a pro-McCarthy grad student at University of Madison reported Paul to the FBI for the following:

* Had a friend who was a Communist, but declined to tell the name because he feared that might cause them harm.

* Commented on a photo of POWs killed by North Koreans that it was propaganda, that in a war all sides commit such acts.

* Thought the South Korean authoritarian government was unworthy of our support.

* Had a wife that did not support Communists in government, but also did not support “Hooverism” – spying on the American people (often in support of senator McCarthy) – which continues strongly to this day.

America 2025

Too much today feels like evil playbooks of the past are being used by those countries which sacrificed so much to defeat them. ICE is one small example - Stephen Miller’s starting point for what may be his vision and Trump’s vision of a police state. Their military helicopters pull people out of their homes in the night, and deport them en-masse - sometimes to offshore torture & concentration camps.

Deportation, and even denaturalization, is nothing new in the US – for example the Obama administration deported more than three million immigrants, where the focus was on those who had recently crossed the border, and were not yet embedded in US communities. Historically, courts have been very strict on denaturalization – limiting it to cases of fraud committed during the citizenship process.

The current administration’s approach is far more violent and direct, seemingly built to test the limits on what a US police-state could be. Even citizens are being rounded up and held, even without warrants (170 temporary detentions, by a recent count).

On Sept 25th, Trump issued a new directive to the three letter agencies, NSPM-7, (Also see: ACLU’s writeup and The Intercept’s). In it, the FBI’s ~200 task forces are directed to fight “terrorism”.

> This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include- anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity;- support for the overthrow of the United States Government;- extremism on migration, race, and gender;- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality

If one were to write about how the United States Government may be illegal, which I did, could that be seen as supporting the overthrow of the current U.S. government? So far, their work to expand powers on removing citizenship has been through exploiting naturalized citizens (such as Mamdani), but in their words, Homegrowns are next. How many will be stripped of their assets and deported, on threat of being sent to an offshore concentration camp?

Unfortunately, this is not unprecedented within the United States. 105 years ago, president and KKK supporter Woodrow Wilson unleashed the “Palmer Raids”, sending 4,000 American Citizens to prison because of “Hostility to American Values”. This was among a litany of abuses, including asking Americans to spy on one another (queue J Edgar Hoover), having postmasters ban magazines for being critical of the US, France, or Britain, and sending a competing presidential nominee to 15 years of prison. [Source: fee.org – The Palmer Raids: America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror]

Hope for the Mid-terms? That depends on us.

As these numerous outrages “flood the box” the one I keep coming back to is the simple fact – one which appears more likely every day – of the outright theft of enough votes to change the 2020 election outcome.

> I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.– Joseph Stalin

Many Americans – particularly Democrats – hold unshakable faith in the security of our voting systems. We push to the 2026 mid-terms to change the balance of power. But to do so puts total trust in voting systems which are almost certainly crooked.

In some of his latest work, journalist Scott Carney outlines a few things, including:

* The research-backed psychology behind cheating in politics. If every candidate is committing fraud, new participants have to play the game, or become pariahs. This can create a hedonistic downwards spiral, which we are now in.

* There are well known flaws in our voting machines, full stop. Published security vulnerabilities are well documented and have not been fixed. It is illegal for private citizens to test the security of our voting machines. This “security through obscurity”, an arguably flawed principle to begin with, has failed completely. At least one, if not both, of our main political parties have stolen both physical machines and their accompanying source code.

* The reaction of people when they learn of Carney’s work. Generally: anger at the messenger, and disbelief that fraud happens in the US, which it does. And then: despondency.

* In this video, he covers it all to a shocking (but not sensationalized) degree. With needing to discuss voter and vote manipulation, which is odious and rampant, there is enough scale of theft to potentially have changed the election outcome.

There’s so much more on this topic. We have increasing evidence from the Election Truth Alliance. In one example they did a hand recount of paper ballots in MN, and found significant differences from the automatic vote tabulators. And on Friday, they filed suit for election audits in PA.

And in the meantime, while we’ve seen most swing states using one brand of voting machine and potentially seeing significant fraud, the other main brand covering 27 states, Dominion, was just bought by former GOP rep Scott Leiendecker.

Israel’s Hypocrisy

When I was probably in my early teens, I had a book called Great Escapes. It had some pretty graphic stories:

It told stories of endurance of men and women walking thousands of miles to escape Siberian gulags, Nazi prisoner of war camps, cattle-cars filled with people and abandoned on sidings, and so on. People told of maulings by German Shepherds, and scrabbling on the floor in straight jackets, trying to eat potato skins.

I didn’t think I’d stumble on to another such example written about Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Aid volunteers, and by extension, certainly any Palestinian prisoner they get their hands on. The following quotes Greta Thunberg on a recent aid trip to Palestine, which was intercepted by the Israelis:

> At one point, around 60 people were put in a small cage outdoors, in the middle of the sun… Most of them did not have enough room to sit down… It was so hot, like 40 degrees [104°F]. We begged the whole time: Can we have water? Can we have water? In the end, we screamed. The guards walked in front of the bars the whole time, laughing and holding up their water bottles. They threw the bottles with water in them into the trash cans in front of us…

When people fainted, we banged on the cages and asked for a doctor. Then the guards came and said, ‘We’re going to gas you.’ It was standard for them to say that. They held up a gas cylinder and threatened to press it against us…

In the words of Israel’s National Minister of Security Ben-Gvir: “I will personally make sure that you are treated like a terrorist and that you rot in prison.”

Shame. This is not what Jakob Ehrlich died for.

Appendix | Films

Getting friends together for documentary & discussion of these issues has been one of the more cathartic ways to handle recent news. Here’s some favorites in case they’re interesting to you. (Comment yours below!)

- Winter on Fire – A Ukrainian Netflix documentary with terrific background on Ukraine, and the successful deposition of their Russian Puppet Leader 2014 via mass unrest.

- Good Night and Good Luck – on McCarthyism and how it was ended, in part, by journalist Edward Murrow.

- The Sound of Music – On the ascent of Austrian Nazi power, and the escape of political opponents

- Where’s My Roy Cohn – On the lawyer who worked for McCarthy and took Trump under his wing.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pehrlich.substack.com