Since the government’s operations started here in Minnesota, more than 3,000 agents have been sent to the state. Two Americans were killed by Federal agents last month – Renee Good and Alex Pretti, while thousands of others have been snatched off the streets with no regard for their citizenship or status, and held in often inhumane conditions in holding facilities all over the country.
With Minnesota being subjected to Operation Metro Surge from the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the use of terminology associated with the Holocaust – Gestapo, Concentration Camp, Nazi – has become a regular part of the vernacular from those opposing the government’s efforts.
The debate isn’t new – the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum warned about this in 2018. But are those who use them right? And is it OK?
“Until this moment, it’s been my preference – my practice – not to use comparisons to the Holocaust or the Nazi regime or the Gestapo, because it was and is a distinct moment in history,” said Beth Gendler, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and the executive director of Jewish Community Action. “And, that what we are currently experiencing echoes so plainly the experiences that my family had, the stories that I grew up with, the history that’s imprinted on my DNA.”
Phil Kibort, a retired physician, son of Holocaust survivors, and a teacher of adult education classes on history and the Holocaust, also balks at the comparative language. But said he’s seeing worrying tendencies.
“What I do fear is that we are seeing tendencies that I would construe as much more autocratic as a government,” he said. “But I’m seeing signs that had I been alive in Germany in 1932…wearing brown shirts, when I see them acting like thugs, I worry about similarity to early Germany, like the SA, not the SS.
“I worry about some of the manifestations of autocracy and sometimes, even early fascism here. Not Nazism yet. Yet.”
Susie Greenberg, the director of Holocaust education at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, acknowledges that the Holocaust has become the go-to comparison.
“You can understand why people are making correlations, why people are seeing parallels,” she said. “That being said, you can’t equate them.”
Greenberg said that part of why the JCRC teaches about the Holocaust is to recognize warning signs, but also to promote self-reflection, such as “What is my role and responsibility in society,” she said.
“When we use all the terminology that is equated to the Holocaust, we are really oversimplifying this complex history,” she said. “When we take current events and we equate them with what has happened before, it’s counterproductive. It demeans the history. It oversimplifies, overstates, and changes the experience that people had that was specific to that complex history, which is somewhat sacred in a lot of ways as well.”
Looking inward
Meira Besikof, a Holocaust education associate at JCRC, said that while what has been taking place in Minnesota or around the country with respect to ICE, it’s different by a matter of degrees.
“When something bad is happening wherever it’s taking place here, and what is happening here in Minnesota with ICE raids and having some ICE members behave unconstitutionally, it’s a horrible thing. So people immediately call them Nazis, Gestapo, whatever,” she said. “But what we’re looking at is a flawed system where people in power are acting in ways they shouldn’t. But what happened in the Holocaust? It was a totalitarian genocidal regime.”
Greenberg said that, by the dictionary definition, using the term concentration camp for the detention centers where many who are being picked by ICE and CBP officers, is not where we’re at.
ICE and Border Patrol agents on Nicollet Avenue following the shooting of Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026. (Photo by Chad Davis/Wikimedia Commons)
“People are using words interchangeably, but when you say concentration camp, you think Auschwitz, you think extermination, which is not where we are at,” she said. “And there needs to be that careful understanding of rhetoric and language.”
Rather than looking at 1940s Europe for inspiration, JCRC deputy executive director Ethan Roberts said there are plenty of examples from the United States throughout history.
“Are [detention facilities] not more akin to internment camps where we forced how many Japanese-Americans during World War II?” he said. “Is it not more like a reservation where [Native Americans] in our own state were forced to live? We don’t need to invoke Nazi Germany when we have plenty of examples from our own American history.”
It’s also well-documented that the Jim Crow-era laws in the American South were admired by the Nazi regime and were used as a basis for Germany’s Nuremberg Laws.
“I know there’s been a lot of conversation around what’s happening here in Minneapolis has echoes of the Gestapo and Germany, but it has echoes of slave patrols, of history from our own country here, that actually the Germans learned from,” said Jamie Beran, the executive director of Bend The Arc: Jewish Action, when she was in Minneapolis in late January. “There’s something about also actually knowing the way that history repeats and echoes and that progress isn’t linear, but we have to keep pushing and push through these horrific moments.”
Gendler said that jumping to the Holocaust comparisons is cheapened when everything becomes the Holocaust or everyone is a Nazi, which is why she has previously avoided the comparisons. But she said there are some chilling similarities.
“A lot happened, though, in 1930s Germany, before the death camps,” she said. “What is happening now in the good old U.S. of A, mirrors what was happening in Germany before the death camps: Children are being separated from their families. People are being pulled off the streets. People are being pulled out of their cars. People are being sent away to who knows where. All of these things happened. It’s the activities of the Gestapo. It’s right out of their playbook.”
Said Roberts: “It is not completely ridiculous to look at what’s happening in our country and see the signs of creeping, not necessarily Nazism, but authoritarianism.”
Sarah Crane, a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the scholar-in-residence at the Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center in Cincinnati, said most people don’t understand the way Germany’s civil society was broken down.
“The average person on the street obviously doesn’t understand the way in which Hitler democratically broke apart Weimar’s democratic constitution,” Crane said. “It was an emergency decree after the Reichstag fire, where he saw an opportunity. People were afraid but that emergency decree that basically gave him absolute power was voted on by the German parliament.”
Crane is concerned that as soon as the Holocaust comparisons are made, the conversation is shut down.
“If we go to the extreme, immediately people feel like there’s nothing to do or no reason to get more nuance,” she said. “As soon as the comparison is voiced, it becomes about that. And there are just no other follow-up questions,” she said. “And I think at their best, these kinds of echoes-of-history moments are encouraging people to question.”
Gendler said that one of her concerns about the comparisons is that it lets Americans off the hook for their own history.
“I believe that the danger in the Holocaust comparisons is not cheapening our history as Jews or as survivors or as family of survivors,” Gendler said. “It is looking away from our own country’s history of internment and oppression and racism. This is all very much from the American playbook, and we have to own that. We have to own all of it.
Facing Fear
Crane said that she often poses the question to students whether this language is helpful or not.
“We have people experiencing this phenomenon that’s hard to name, perhaps, but the people’s experience of this is a lot of fear,” she said. “There’s fear of (losing) constitutional rights. There’s fear of the dehumanization happening within communities, within government rhetoric, there’s fear of just isolation, fear of kind of what happens next. I think people are kind of struggling how to quantify these feelings that are happening without reaching towards Holocaust language because it kind of helps us understand, like, exactly what’s happening here.
“I think they’re trying to communicate is scale. That, yes, we’re feeling this. There’s fear, there’s isolation, there’s dehumanization, but it’s reached a scale where we can’t ignore it.”
At a late January press conference, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who wrote his Master’s thesis on Holocaust education and was a Balfour Fellow to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said: “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” he said. “Somebody is going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
ICE and Border Patrol agents on Nicollet Avenue on January 24, 2026. This follows the shooting death of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti. Photo by Chad Davis/Wikimedia Commons)
One Minnesota school has about half the students absent each day because of fears of being picked up by ICE. Brooklyn Park’s police chief talked about community members and off-duty officers being stopped by agents with guns drawn because of how they look. Social media posts in private Facebook groups document buses followed by a phalanx of SUVs with out-of-state license plates, profiling students as they get on or off the bus. And there are plenty of adults who are afraid to leave their homes, getting rent assistance and other necessities from mutual aid organizations that were quickly stood up to get through this situation.
“I have a good friend who has not left her home in five months,” Gendler said. “She is a green card holder. She is here legally, but because she’s brown, she’s been afraid to leave her home. You see her children peeking out of their windows and not going to school because they’re afraid. And when you have children whose parents are snatched away at bus stops…the fear is, not manufactured, and it’s not an overblown comparison at all.”
Crane, who has ties to Minnesota, said a friend who teaches in a school district southeast of the Twin Cities metro area routinely has half of her high-level science class absent.
It wasn’t a first-time reference to Holocaust-related verbiage from Walz; last May, he called ICE agents a “modern-day Gestapo,” which drew condemnation from the JCRC. Walz’s statement about Anne Frank drew condemnation from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the antisemitism envoy, but not from local Jewish groups.
“The context matters,” said the JCRC’s Roberts, citing the more than 3,000 ICE agents in the state and the timing of his comment – a couple of days after the killing of Alex Pretti and a couple of weeks after the killing of Renee Good. “I wish the governor wouldn’t use those analogies in part because we don’t think they’re accurate, but also because it becomes a distraction.”
Keeping focus
Roberts said the debate over language removes the focus from insisting ICE end its surge of agents into the state.
“Anything that removes focus from why are we not following court orders or the fact that people are being held in detention centers under horrific conditions in violation of numerous constitutional amendments and statutes, is a distraction that we don’t have the luxury for,” he said. “And what we have always seen as the JCRC is that when political sides invoke the Holocaust to try to show how angry they are about what they’re angry about, we spend a lot of time debating the appropriateness of that comparison and not actually talking about the thing they want to talk about.”
Roberts said he isn’t surprised at the way the community has stepped up to help.
“It’s our tradition,” he said. “How many times is ‘welcome the stranger’ mentioned in the Bible? It’s not hard for us to have empathy for others because we are a tiny, tiny people, and we know what it’s like to be persecuted.
Besikof said she believes most of the Jewish community is helping because they recognize the immigrant experience.
“My mom and my grandparents came in the 1950s, and we know the immigrant experience,” she said. “I recognize they came here for safety and for freedom, and we know the benefit of that and the importance of that. We sympathize with people who are coming for those same reasons.”
Gendler pointed out that the Jewish community has stepped up in a big way – she said most synagogues she knew of were doing some sort of mutual aid work.
“I think the more that we exceptionalize our experiences and get super-precious about it, the more it divides us from our communities and from our allies,” she said. “The Minnesota community is meeting this moment, and the Jewish community is absolutely a part of that. And I’m so very proud of what I’m seeing.”
Jews fearing the Left voted for Hitler and his party. Jews were also among the Left. Yes, do follow the money. Comparisons of the full history are warranted especially when ICE acts with bad warrants and displays Brown Shirt actions (not yet Aktion, see the German term). Some recent “legal” actions are neither legal nor moral but courts are supposed to decide and ours are either manipulated or take too long or both, and that is a REAL problem. The historic path is there stretched out before us (Germany like the US always had dread of the “other” and treated them badly, remember the Rhineland during the Crusades), comparison is reasonable and necessary, but the shibbolethic terms do need Americanization and, remember, “shibboleth” comes from Jews v. Jews! We have our own issues internally as our communities split. Heal ourselves to help heal others. Life is not just about money.
I am not Jewish but I have Jewish friends. I love them and I love the Jewish community and want to weigh in here.
The best time to have stopped Hitler was the EARLY 1930s. There are professed Hitler lovers in the MAGA movement. They even call themselves Nazis. What are called “detention centers” now will later be called concentration camps. Why wait for the proof? Stop this now.
I agree with the comments about our history of oppression right here in America. When I hear chants of “from the river to the sea” I answer “from The Atlantic to the Pacific!”
In my opinion this is an academic inquiry that has little or no bearing on what is taking place. The language used in any discussion or debate about ICE won’t have any effect on ICE or the way it carries out its mission. The time spent in a discussion such as this would be much better spent spent taking action to push back against what is happening in Minnesota now. This includes peaceful demonstrations and organizing and turning out the vote this fall. The vote, not academic debate, is how people end this.
sad you are so very ignorant, Arguments Against the Comparison: Many argue that comparing ICE actions to the Holocaust cheapens, minimizes, and demeans the memory of the actual genocide. Critics, including some Jewish organizations, argue that it is historically inaccurate and dangerous to equate modern border enforcement with the systematic, industrial murder of six million Jews.
This is a nuanced and difficult subject, which Lonny handled well. As someone who is active nearly daily in keeping an eye on ICE, I do think the language is appropriate.
While there are no death camps now, and Ethan correctly states that there are just as many parallels to the Japanese internment camps. the parallels to what occurred before the final solution was implemented are too much in alignment to ignore.
When you see the fear in the eyes of people when you walk into a store in a primarily latino neighborhood because you are caucasian and could be ICE, when you hear stories of families who have not left their house in weeks because of fear of being picked up, when you see (as I did yesterday) people being pulled over leaving their house and forced to show their papers to prove their citizenship simply because their skin tone is too dark, the comparison to Nazi Germany prior to the final solution cannot be ignored.
Is it there yet? Of course not. But it needs to be stopped now before it reaches that point. Using the language comparing the current regime’s actions to Nazi Germany forces the audience to pay attention.