When AOC compared the illegal immigrant detention centers at our border with Mexico to concentration camps it outraged several Jewish leaders, some holocaust survivors and several Jewish organizations. Personally, I think they overreacted somewhat, but I can understand why the term ‘concentration camps’ conjured up reminders of the Nazi death camps.
President Trump has on numerous occasions made speeches or tweets in which he denounced illegal immigrants. In June 2015, while campaigning for president, he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
On May 15, 2018, he said, “We have people coming into the country or trying to come in, we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”
Neither statement was a good choice of words and “these are animals” was clearly offensive and uncalled for. While Trump’s condemnations of illegal immigrants may energize his base, they are also fodder for his Democratic enemies.
On August 5, New York Congressman Jerry Nadler appeared on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ program and said, that Trump’s “disgusting” rhetoric “reminds me of the 1930s in Germany,” thereby comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Let’s take a look at some of the things Hitler and other Nazi leaders said in condemning Jews.
Hitler Interview in the New York Staatszeitung, 1933: “Why does the world shed crocodile’s tears over the richly merited fate of a small Jewish minority? … I ask Roosevelt, I ask the American people: Are you prepared to receive in your midst these well-poisoners of the German people and the universal spirit of Christianity? We would willingly give everyone of them a free steamer-ticket and a thousand-mark note for travelling expenses, if we could get rid of them.” (Hitler was mocking the U.S. for refusing to take in Jews.)
Hitler’s Reasons for Nuremberg Legislation (Reich Citizenship Law, Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor): “The rights of Germans are thereby to be protected against destructive Jewish influences. … the Jews who formed less than one per cent. of the population tried to monopolize the cultural leadership of the people and flooded the intellectual professions, such as, for example, jurisprudence and medicine. The influence of this intellectual Jewish class in Germany had everywhere a disintegrating effect . For this reason in order to bar the spread of this process of disintegration it became essential to take steps to establish a clear and clean separation between the two races.”
Hitler’s Closing speech at the Nuremberg Party Conference, 1938: “When the question is still put to us why National Socialism fights with such fanaticism against the Jewish element in Germany, why it pressed and still presses for its removal then the answer can only be: Because National Socialism desires to establish a true community of the people…. Because we are National Socialists we can never suffer an alien race which has nothing to do with us to claim the leadership of our working people.”
Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag, 30 January, 1939: “Europe cannot find peace until the Jewish question has been solved. …One thing I should like to say on this day [the sixth anniversary of his being appointed Chancellor of the Reich] which may be memorable for others as well as for us Germans. In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet and have usually been ridiculed for it. … Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshivization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
Hitler’s Speech in Wilhelmshaven, 1 April, 1939: “Only when this Jewish bacillus infecting the life of peoples has been removed can one hope to establish a co-operation amongst the nations which shall be built up on a lasting understanding.”
Hitler’s Table Talk, October 1941: “From the rostrum of the Reichstag, I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds and thousands more. Let nobody tell me that all the same we can’t park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who’s worrying about our troops? It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”
Hitler’s speech in Berlin, September 30, 1942: “There was a time when the Jews in Germany also laughed at my prophecies. I do not know whether they are still laughing today, or whether they have been cured of laughter. But take my word for it: they will stop laughing everywhere.”
Robert Ley (Head of the German Labor Front): “We swear we are not going to abandon the struggle until the Last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead. It is not enough to isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind-the Jew has got to be exterminated.”
Das Schwarze Korps [SS Newspaper] 24 November 1938: “So, we are now going to have a total solution to the Jewish question. The programme is clear. It reads: total separation, total segregation! What does this mean? It does not only mean the total exclusion of the Jews from the German economic system… It means much more! No German can be expected to live under the same roof as Jews. The Jews must be chased out of our houses and our residential districts and made to live in rows or blocks of houses where they can keep to themselves and come into contact with Germans as little as possible. They must be clearly identified…. And when we compel the rich Jews to provide for the `poor’ of their race, which will certainly be necessary, they will all sink together into a pit of criminality. As this happens, we will be faced with the harsh necessity of eradicating the Jewish underworld, just as we root out criminals from our own orderly state: with fire and sword. The result will be the certain and absolute end of Jewry in Germany; its complete annihilation!”
Heinrich Himmler, 25 November 1939: “We won’t waste much time on the Jews. It’s great to get to grips with the Jewish race at last. The more they die the better… We want to put half to three-quarters of all Jews east of the Vistula. We will crush these Jews wherever we can. … Get the Jews out of the Reich… We have no use for Jews in the Reich. Probably the line of the Vistula, behind this line no more. We are the most important people here…” (Himmler commanded the the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Gestapo. He was the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.)
Statement by Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference, 20 January, 1942: “To take the place of emigration, and with the prior approval of the führer, the evacuation of the Jews to the East has become another possible solution. Although both courses of action [emigration and evacuation] must, of course, be considered as nothing more than … temporary expedients, they do help to provide practical experience which should be of great importance in view of the coming Endlösung (final solution) of the Jewish question.” (SS General Reinhard Heydrich was chief of the Security Service of the Reichsführer, the German Secret State Police and the Reich Security Main Office.}
Now will someone show us where Trump has said anything about Hispanics like Hitler and his henchmen said about the Jews. Calling illegal immigrants animals was awful, but nowhere has Trump called for the extermination of Hispanics.
Comparing Trump to Hitler is absolutely outrageous. I’ve had some experience with Nazi Germany, having lived under the Nazis for about four years from 1933 to 1936 when my parents and I left Germany for America. In 1934 my father was forced out of his executive position at Karstadt, a large department store chain with stores all over r Germany and western Europe, because the Nazis had ordered all non-Jewish owned businesses to be Judenrein. Both sets of my grandparents were deported into one of the Nazi death camps in Poland.
I personally observed Brown Shirts (storm troopers) humiliate and physically abuse some Orthodox Jews with their beards and long, uncut sidelocks in their dark overclothes and black hats on the street in Magdeburg.
I don’t know of any place in the U.S. where the authorities have treated Hispanics like the Brown Shirts abused Jews. I do not know of any American businesses that have been ordered by the Trump government to fire all their Hispanic employees. And where are the US government death camps for the extermination of Hispanics?
While Trump dehumanized Hispanics by calling the illegal immigrants animals, he has never in any way, shape or form come anywhere near calling for the expulsion and extermination of Hispanics like Hitler and his henchmen called for the Jews.
To compare Trump to Hitler is an outrageous new low. Both Beto O’Rourke and Nadler did that following the El Paso and Dayton shootings. Listen to the out rage of those Jews who condemned AOC … Can’t hear anything? Neither can I.
I suppose that since crackpot O’Rourke and Nadler are both Democrats, Jews are loath to say anything unkind about them. And since Nadler is Jewish they sure do not want to slam him like they did with AOC. Where there should be deafening outrage by the Jewish community, there is only deafening silence.
First and foremost, Nadler doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about when he compares Trump to Hitler. Being Jewish, he damn sure should know better. Nadler’s unabated hatred of Trump and his obsession with bringing down the President has warped his brain, making him ignorant and shameless. I say that as someone who has personally experienced Nazi Germany. Nadler disgusts and infuriates me a helluva lot more than AOC pisses me off.