February 3, 2026Guest blog: My Father Went to Europe to Fight the Nazis. Now They Are Here in America.
Blog Post
When my father was 20 years old in 1943, he signed up for the U.S. Army along with sixteen million other young American men and women. They were compelled to land on the shores of Normandy and defeat a Nazi regime that had swept through Europe, creating a reign of terror that would eventually kill more than 50 million people. My dad was especially motivated to fight because the Nazis had scapegoated European Jews as the cause for all the frustrations Germans felt for the economic deprivations and lack of security in their lives. His parents had also recently come to America to escape pogroms in Romania, while my mother’s family had fled Poland from murderous raids by Cossacks.
While he, like most people, did not know about the concentration camps and the “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews and other non-Aryans, he did know about the paramilitary thugs known as the Brown Shirts in Hitler’s Germany and the Black Shirts in Mussolini’s Italy who terrorized, arrested and killed people in the streets. Their strategy was to create a permanent atmosphere of fear among the people.
At the same time, the official propaganda machine of the Third Reich pumped out hateful narratives that people not of the Aryan, white supremist race were vermin and garbage and deserved to be eliminated for the betterment of the Fatherland.
Major corporations in Germany were cowed into compliance and decided to collaborate with the Nazi regime to stay in business. Many German corporations even took on slave labor to better compete in the marketplace and lower their costs. Some companies, like IG Farben, were huge winners, since they not only employed slave labor to build their chemical factories by also provided the poison gas that killed millions of Jews and others in concentration camps across Poland, Germany and other occupied territories.
The story of this Holocaust was branded into my psyche growing up. The mantra for my generation was “never forget that this happened… and never let it happen again”. I grew up reading Elie Wiesel and Victor Frankl and learning how an entire people can be manipulated into a frenzy of murder and treating people unlike them as “expendable”.
Over the last year, I have watched in horror as a similar authoritarian regime has seized power in America. Instead of the Brown shirts we have ICE, a masked and unhinged paramilitary force that has massive funding and a mandate to terrorize American cities. We have corporations that have fallen in line and abandoned any programs that address the racism that continues to plague our society. We have banks that have completely abandoned the climate-related risks to their business. We have universities that have paid off the regime with blood money to be left alone. The concentration camps are set up far from public view in Sudan and El Salvador, while permanent detention centers are being built across the South. Science has been abandoned for conspiracy theories. Social media platforms, the new weapons of mass deception, are owned by billionaires aligned with the regime. Many of the social safety net programs established over the last two generations are being dismantled.
Even the highest people in the government are openly espousing Nazi memes. Last month, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem proclaimed at a news conference. “One of ours. All of Yours”, replaying the Nazi strategy of killing hundreds of innocent citizens if one Nazi solider was killed by the resistance. It is widely reported that many ICE recruits are neo-Nazis. And to top it all off, we have an old white man drunk on his dream of total power who regularly calls non-white people and immigrants “garbage”. This is the reality we are now facing…and they are just getting started.
Part of the Congressional package that gave immigration agencies $170 billion, more than any military in the world except China and the United States, is massive funding for state-of-the-art surveillance technology. Anyone living in America will be able to be tracked via face recognition, drones, tax returns, drivers’ license and social media. The regime has redefined “domestic terrorism” in such a broad and overarching way that virtually anyone could be deemed a terrorist if they express criticism of the federal government.
We know where this story ends up. It includes a police state that depends on terror to stay in power. It leads to a regime that either manipulates elections or calls them off permanently because of “a state of emergency”. It means that any dissenting voices get attacked, sued, jailed, or killed. The attitude of this current federal government is best summarized in a quote from Stephen Miller at Charlie Kirk’s funeral: “We are the storm…They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.” The metaphor of “the storm” is exactly what Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, used to describe the power of the Third Reich.
During the Nazi era, once people got over the “shock and awe” stage of their assault, there were a million acts of small and large resistance. People hid their threatened neighbors in attics. Others helped refugees escape across the Alps to Switzerland. When the Nazis required all the Jews in Denmark to wear yellow stars, millions of Danes wore them as well in acts of solidarity. Some enlightened business leaders funded children to escape to Britain and America. Over time, massive resistance movements were built in France, Holland and other occupied countries. The depravity of the regime was eventually exposed for all the world to see.
In America today, we are seeing signs of resistance growing stronger. Thousands of Minneapolis residents are protesting against ICE and using whistles to alert their neighbors when ICE thugs are invading various communities where immigrants reside. There is increasingly organized opposition to companies that provide the flights, housing and staging ground for ICE and Border Control agents. The last No Kings Day resulted in the largest demonstration in American history, with 7 million people coming out to protest across the country. People who have never participated in social movements are filming the brutality of ICE agents and sharing them with millions of people on social media. The opposition to a Nazi future for our country is growing daily.
As I continue to watch in rage at the spectacle of masked, fascist paratroopers in the streets of Minneapolis, I am reminded of the famous quote by Mohandas Gandhi:"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it – always”.