Last July, the novelist Jerry Stahl contacted me with the idea of going on a Holocaust-centric package tour through East Germany and Poland. It was to be an immersive and deeply personal trip. Jerry had long been fascinated with the Second World War, he told me, and tagging along with a tour group to gawk at the sites of one of humanity's worst atrocities was sure to be a fitting—and bizarre—addition to the armchair research he had done over the years.
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At the time, Donald Trump had just been officially named the Republican presidential nominee, though he had clinched the nomination in June. While the trip wasn't inspired by Trump's upset win in the primaries, the rhetoric he was using against Muslims, Mexicans, undocumented immigrants, women, and other marginalized groups gave the assignment added relevance. What would it be like to go on a sightseeing tour of the remnants of history's most famous example of unchecked nationalism at a time when "America First" had become the unofficial campaign slogan of the Republican presidential nominee? The parallels were almost impossible to ignore—in Nazi Germany a line in the national anthem (removed after the war) read "Germany, Germany, above all, above all in the world." The trip was set for mid-September.In the weeks leading up to the tour, Trump had become something of a national joke. He was growing more erratic and angry, and he seemed utterly incapable of running a functioning campaign. The gaffes and anonymously sourced embarrassing stories piled up, and Trump's poll numbers plummeted. When Jerry left for the trip, the possibility of a Trump victory felt about as plausible as the crackpot theories suggesting Hitler escaped to Argentina after the war.And then, November 8.While the idea of embedding with a gaggle of international tourists on a macabre getaway such as this would be a fascinating read at any time, Jerry's account of this trip turned out to be especially prescient. This is a glimpse at the carcass of the Nazi regime at a moment when swastikas are popping up in American cities with an alarming frequency. It is a reminder of the hell unleashed by policies designedto benefit one group at the great expense of all others. It's especially urgent at a time when it feels like some of the lessons learned from that experiment have been forgotten, or at least disregarded.We will be presenting this six-part series, called A Tour of Hell, from Hell, as diary entries. You can read them in daily installments on our homepage, or dive in all at once here.Follow Jonathan Smith on Twitter.