It is a profoundly discomforting way to wake up. Wondering, as if thrown into an unsettling thought experiment, who would I shoot if I had a gun, Donald Trump or myself? I am not an assassin, or a suicide, and I hate what guns do in a society addicted to them, but I am an historian, and my field is the history of the present so almost everything thrown up in the present points me to the past.
This morning it was news from the United States that ICE, which to all Americans now means Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would soon have access to the tax records of ‘undocumented’ immigrants. Which desperate migrant, hounded by Trump and Musk, might not have the horrifying thought of reaching for a gun?
There’s no secret or incitement here. Everyone knows that thousands – no, millions – of Americans talk in hyperbolic terms about assassinating the elected and unelected sociopaths responsible for so much grief. A somewhat smaller number think seriously about the similarities of Trump’s America to Nazi Germany. I thought of Herschel Grynszpan, and Krystallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, and then went to Wikipedia. I urge you to do the same.
Expelling foreigners
In 1938, the unwanted foreigners in Germany were Polish Jews. Hitler, then not a mass murderer but the ‘Make Germany Great Again’ leader of his day, decreed at the end of October that they be expelled. Thousands were deported to the Polish border at short notice and dumped. Poland, arguing that these people were no longer Polish citizens, left more than 8,000 of them to live in makeshift camps at the border.
A desperate couple named Grynszpan messaged their son Herschel in Paris asking him to help. Herschel was 17. He bought a pistol and ammunition, then went to the German Embassy, pointed his gun at a not particularly Nazi diplomat named Ernst vom Rath, and fired five times.
In Herschel’s pocket, when he was arrested by French police, was a postcard to his parents: “May God forgive me…I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I will do.”
The road to genocide
The German government immediately forbade Jews from possessing any weapons, barred Jewish children from state schools, and closed down all Jewish newspapers. But the greater repercussions followed after vom Rath died of his wounds.
It was 9 November, as Hitler and the Nazi leadership were commemorating their most sacred event, the sacrifices made at the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. When the news of vom Rath’s death broke, Goebbels seized the chance to create a ‘spontaneous’ mass protest throughout the Reich. Brownshirts were unimpeded as they smashed the windows of Jewish stores and watched Germany’s historic synagogues go up in flames.
The holocaust of Jewish culture and property marked the transition to the openly violent genocide of the Holocaust. How many Jews were physically assaulted was not recorded, nor were all the hundreds of suicides as family futures were destroyed.
The destruction was compounded by the insurance for their losses being diverted to Reich coffers, ‘as damages to the German Nation’ – on top of the 20% ‘atonement contribution’ on all Jewish property, a collective fine of more than a billion dollars.
Spreading the moral rot
As a further cynical exercise in hostage-taking, 30,000 Jewish men, especially those who could be ransomed by their firms or families, were dragged off to concentration camps. They were the first to be arrested and transported away as Jews, the first of millions.
The Nazi assault on moral norms was then extended across the whole German population by the forced ‘aryanization’ of businesses, the artificially low price corrupting the buyer even as the unwilling ‘seller’ was forced into poverty or emigration.
Less than a year later, when Hitler launched the second world war – again at the Polish border – all hope of escape by emigration was cut off. Under cover of wartime Europe’s Jews, children, women, men of all nationalities, would be murdered.
There can be endless hypotheticals about the crime not being possible without a war, or without the antisemitic prelude. The fact remains that the spark igniting the Holocaust, only months before the war, came from Herschel Grynszpan’s revolver.
Trump’s ‘wartime’ measures
Another fact generally agreed is that the shot which grazed Donald Trump’s ear helped return him to the White House, and that once there he has proceeded to wreak vengeance on all who ‘stole’ the presidency from him in the 2020 election.
He lost no time in declaring the US was “at war” with the “very evil people” – the undocumented migrants his government has characterised as gang members, killers and rapists – who had “invaded” the borders of the United States. He has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime measure which allows him greater powers to detain or deport citizens of an ‘enemy’ nation without the usual processes.
The staged publicity of the first deportations, to specially erected camps, whether adjoining countries wanted them or not, began a show of force at home and abroad scarcely imaginable months before.
Time to raise the alarm
It is not necessary to imagine developments as horrific as the events that unfolded in Nazi Germany. The degree to which Trump’s America might become fascist is not the point of this history. Rather it is the actuality of an authoritarianism with open hostility to legal norms and constraints that must alarm us.
I do not add my voice to the alarm because I am also a child of parents expelled from their homeland in 1938. (They had to queue in more orderly fashion outside Adolf Eichmann’s Vienna office, before he was called to yet more ruthless —and routine— duties.) I raise the alarm as any observer, any of us, should raise it.
We all sense enough history to know we ignore a reign of spite, lies, and deprivation of livelihoods, a regime glorifying force and terror, at our peril.
