When I started teaching a course at the University of Michigan on the history of the Holocaust about 13 years ago, I introduced a segment I called “The Holocaust in the News.”
Every lecture would discuss an item from the previous week’s headlines dealing with the Holocaust or Nazism in general. They tended to be non-controversial stories aimed at helping the students recognize the continued relevance of the topic and the long-term reverberations of the Holocaust in our own society: an elderly survivor who had become a pillar of her local community passing away; a missing piece of art stolen during the war that was restored to its rightful Jewish owner; a new Holocaust museum opening its doors in Eastern Europe; a Hollywood film featuring an inspiring story of heroism from the Holocaust; or an independently released foreign film exposing a story of collaboration.
Occasionally, a politician, public figure, or local school board would make the news, opening up space for deeper discussions. For instance, in 2015, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders encouraged Americans to vote by alluding to Hitler’s rise to power. That allowed us to talk about the German elections of 1932.
In June 2019, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described the Trump administration’s border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” raising questions about the variety of Nazi concentration facilities.
In February 2022, Whoopi Goldberg asserted on the talk show The View that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” opening up space for a discussion about Nazi racial policies.
I could handle all these discussions constructively without betraying the tone of political neutrality that I believe is important to maintain in the classroom.
No longer neutral
The Holocaust, though, is no longer politically neutral. This was perhaps made most evident when Elon Musk raised his right arm and gave what his apologists called a “Roman salute” on the stage on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
I wasn’t teaching the course at the time, but I would have been hesitant to use it as an introductory anecdote. Whether you believe that it was an innocent gesture politicized by the Left to discredit the new head of DOGE or a megalomaniacal fascist celebrating the destruction of American democracy, most will agree that the moment represented a new low in the politicization of the Holocaust.
The situation was only intensified a few days later when Musk urged Germans to “be proud of German culture and German values” and “to move beyond” what he characterized as “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
Even before that salute, Hitler and the Holocaust had become relevant in new ways in American politics. Vice President JD Vance, who had once derided Trump as “America’s Hitler,” was selected as the vice presidential candidate.
“I was wrong about Donald Trump,” he told CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan during the vice presidential debate in October 2024.
I’m not sure which was worse – the fact that this wasn’t enough to remove Vance from Trump’s consideration for running mate or the fact that it wasn’t enough to sink his campaign for the presidency. In reality, it meant very little.
Normalizing Nazi symbols
Since then, the Trump administration has continued to normalize Nazi symbols. Most recently, the United States Coast Guard revised its workplace harassment policies so that the swastika would no longer be considered a hate symbol.
This newfound tolerance of hate would have been welcome to the group of young Republicans whose leaked Telegram messages revealed them joking about gas chambers and confessing, “I love Hitler.”
In a misguided attempt to rehabilitate his party and his own reputation, Sen. Lindsey Graham responded to the leak by reassuring the Republican Jewish Coalition that “I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party.”
It’s not just Republican politicians who seem drawn to Holocaust references. In a controversial December 2023 article in The New Yorker, Masha Gessen compared Gaza to “a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany” and the war in Gaza to a German Aktion: “The ghetto is being liquidated,” she wrote.
The analogy only served to obfuscate rather than illuminate the very real horrors taking place in the region. Living conditions can be unbearable without being equivalent to those in the Warsaw Ghetto. Gessen is by no means alone in drawing such analogies: Graffiti and memes equating the war to the Holocaust have become common currency.
Certainly, comparisons and analogies can increase our understanding of the present and the past, provided they emphasize both similarities and differences. But historical equations that seek to understand one set of events by implying they are identical to a completely different set of events are rarely helpful.
Distorting Holocaust memory
Jewish responses to October 7 sometimes followed a similar dynamic by emphasizing continuities between Hamas’s attack and the Holocaust. It was, indeed, “the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” but the constant repeating of that phrase could be seen as drawing an overly simplistic continuity between these two disparate events.
Hamas is neither Amalek, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have it, nor are its followers “modern-day Nazis” as Gilad Erdan, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, put it.
Hamas is its own distinct form of political organization, and any attempt to understand it as something else impedes our ability to defeat it. In this case, it also distorts memory of the Holocaust and hinders our ability to teach it for future generations to remember.
As former second gentleman of the United States Doug Emhoff said when President Donald Trump dismissed him from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, “Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous – and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”
As International Holocaust Remembrance Day approaches this month, it is vital to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, but not at the expense of turning it into a game of partisan politics.■
Jeffrey Veidlinger is director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Michigan.