There was once a Republican President who would have had marching Nazis shot or imprisoned.

This guy.

... the most interesting—although horrible—sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'

-- excerpt from Eisenhower's cable to George C. Marshall

It is a fact of history that Dwight David Eisenhower grew to hate Nazis so much after touring Ohrdruf concentration camp that his aides had to desperately try to prevent him from scheming to murder the entire German General Staff before the Nuremberg trials. He spent much time, effort, and command capital trying to find ways to exterminate as many Nazis as possible before the peace fully descended, with a maniacal focus that startled his closest friends.

At the beginning of the Ohrdruf tour he was accompanied by a full staff and the press; by the end, he was alone, having insisted on seeing every last nook and corner of the fresh horrors held in that place. George Patton could not follow him, nor could any of his aides after awhile. The experience marked Eisenhower with a murderous obsession that would stay with him until his death.

Had Eisenhower as president witnessed Nazi flags marching through any American town or city, it is not conjecture that his obsession would have led him to press with all administrative power to snuff out such an event with all possible brutality. In fact, I don't believe that any Nazi march in the United States during the first ten or fifteen years after the war would have survived the wave of angry combat veterans who would have certainly shown up armed and dangerous.

I have a soft spot for Ike because of this story. He wasn't perfect. But Republican or no, I kinda miss him.

Now more than ever.