Almost 40 years ago I spent the winter reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. One of the things I found intriguing about this work was the author himself. Shirer had been one of the war correspondents known as “Murrow’s Boys” a group that included such luminaries as Walter Cronkite, Eric Severaid, Charles Collingwood and a host of others. But at the end of the war he was the only one who was not offered a career in broadcasting by William P Paley the founder of CBS. Shirer would spend the next fifteen years chronicling the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party from captured Nazi documents, diaries of the Third Reich leaders, evidence from the Nuremberg trials and Shirer’s own reporting from Germany during that period, including interviews he conducted with Hitler. It is a chilling and horrifying account of the Nazi regime and its many crimes against humanity particularly the Holocaust. Most readers of this work took refuge in the belief that such an occurrence could never occur here.
Donald Trump’s Campaign to return to the White House is putting the lie to this belief. In his speeches Trump has adopted language utilized by Hitler and other Nazi leaders, calling his opponents “vermin” and that immigrants will “poison the blood” of our nation. He has similarly adopted language from the Stalinist era calling his political opponents and journalists “enemies of the people” in his naked attempts to persuade his followers to discredit their opinions. Some critics of Trump, that are still members of the Republican Party, dismiss his rhetoric by suggesting that they doubt he has read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. They may be correct in this assessment of him, but I would bet that Stephen Miller, Trumps human gargoyle, has not only read the book but modeled a future presidency on a return to the policies of the Third Reich.
On the subject of immigration Trump has promised his supporters that he will undertake the most massive round up and deportation of immigrants in the history of the United States. Miller has confirmed that plans are underway to construct giant detention camps to accomplish the roundup and detention of immigrants during a second Trump term.[1] The parallels this plan has, with those the Nazis carried out during the Third Reich, are unmistakable. Jews, Gypsies, the Gay community and Hitler’s opponents were herded into camps which over time were transformed into concentration camps, slave labor camps, and ultimately extermination camps. Anyone who doubts that this could be the end result of the Trump-Miller camps will find The Theory And Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogon[2] illuminating.
Trump has promised to re-enact his ban on Muslims entering the country and eliminating the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of Birthright Citizenship. Likewise “Chain Migration” in which naturalized citizens can sponsor relatives for admission to the United States is on the chopping block. The irony of this last promise is particularly rich, since it apparently didn’t apply to Trump’s in-laws.
These concepts of Trump are not novel. They had their origins in Germany beginning in 1933 when the Nazi Government began the denaturalization of Jews that had fled Germany and in 1935 when Reich Citizenship was enacted. This measure excluded Jews and stripped them of their right to vote or be civil servants. It was expansive in its reach, encompassing those who had Jewish grandparents, those who were half Jewish, if they belonged to a Jewish religious community, had a Jewish spouse or violated the miscegenation laws of 1935.[3]
On the stump, Trump has vowed to seek “retribution” for those who have opposed him. To carry out this agenda the Heritage Foundation and other organizations are formulating Project 2025 a plan to eliminate Civil Service protection for thousands of government employees so, like the Nazi Brown shirts, those most loyal to Trump can be appointed to carry out his designs.[4] It would dismantle the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, gut climate change regulations and promote fossil fuels and eliminate the departments of Education and Commerce.
Hitler, it will be remembered, embraced the dictators and war criminals of his time. He allied with Mussolini of Italy, Tojo Hidecki of Japan and had a mutual nonaggression pact with Stalin that ended when Germany invaded Russia. Trump continues to embrace Vladimir Putin of Russia, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Xi Jinping of China, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela, all of whom are autocrats that have oppressed their people.
Putin is in the midst of waging an unprovoked war on Ukraine. Kim Jong Un, Trump’s favorite “Bromance” partner, is supplying military hardware to Russia in its war on Ukraine while systematically imprisoning and starving his countrymen every day. Xi Jinping continues to oppress and imprison the Uyghur people in “re-education camps.” Rodrigo Duterte allowed a relentless campaign of extrajudicial killings of people suspected of drug activity. Nicholas Maduro, who Trump hosted at Mara Lago, has been accused of serious human rights abuses while attempting to circumvent the results of an election he lost, in true Trump fashion. Ignoring all of this, Trump has threatened to try and remove the United States from NATO suggesting that Putin and Russia could “do whatever the hell they want” to our NATO allies. The same allies who came to our defense after the September 11th attack, the only time that Article 5 of the Treaty calling for mutual defense has ever been invoked.
At the conclusion of World War II, the Nazi leaders were prosecuted for crimes Against Humanity and other war crimes. Many of them were sentenced to death and executed. Others received long prison sentences. The world breathed a sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that the example had been made and it could never happen again.
Well, it is happening again.
It is happening here.
It is happening now.
[1] “Trump’s Plan For Giant Detention Camps points to Brutal 2024 Reality,” By Greg Sargent, Washington Post, November 14, 2023.
[2] Farrar, Straus and Company (1950) and Berkley Medallion Edition (1960)
[3] The Citizenship of Jews in Nazi Germany, Library of Congress Law Library, July, 1993.
[4] “Why A Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” By Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, New York Times, December 4, 2023 updated December 7, 2023.