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Comparing Trump to Hitler? Can any rational person compare what Hitler did when he initiated the most disastrous war in history to what the former president accomplished during his four years in office?
By: Dr. Alex Grobman
“Hitler’s ‘career’ was truly astonishing,” observed historian Ian Kershaw. He was “an absolute nobody” throughout the first half of his life. During the second half, he forced the world to wait in fear and trepidation for his every move. The devastation he caused in Europe was “unmatched even by Attila the Hun.”
Equating former President Donald J. Trump to Hitler is an outrageous distortion of history. In what way is the former president like Adolph Hitler? That we are not told. Only that he is an evil man, a fascist, and an existential threat to our democratic way of life. How we are not told.
Perhaps a brief examination the destruction Hitler wrought will demonstrate why the analogy is so absurd, and nothing more than a dangerous and pernicious canard.
Hitler ushered in “a significantly new era, one in which the extermination of human life in guiltless fashion became thinkable and technologically feasible,” declared Father John T. Pawlikowski, Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
“It opened the door to an age in which dispassionate torture and the murder of millions became not just an action of a crazed despot, not merely an irrational expression of xenophobic fear, not just a drive for national security, but a calculated effort to reshape humanity supported by intellectual argumentation from the best and the brightest minds in a society.”
Industrial murder has added a new dimension to the age old massacres and wars that have been part of human civilization observed historian Omar Bartov. Until the Holocaust, one associated industrialization with progress and development, a new found sense of freedom, energy, and anticipation of how the latest innovative technologies would improve our lives. We had not foreseen the sinister side of industrialization that could be harnessed to murder more people, with greater efficiency and in less time than ever before.
“The light shed by the Holocaust on our knowledge of bureaucratic rationality is at its most dazzling once we realize the extent to which the very idea of the Endlösung der Judenfrage— the final solution to the Jewish Question] was an outcome of the bureaucratic culture,” asserted Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. The Holocaust is “so crucial to our understanding of the modern bureaucratic mode of rationalization,” Zygmunt believed, “not only, and not primarily, because it reminds us … just how formal and ethically blind is the bureaucratic pursuit of efficiency.”
For Jews, and especially Holocaust survivors, comparing President Trump to Adolph Hitler is an egregious affront, because it demeans and diminishes the horrific experiences the Jews of Europe endured, and the murder of the Six Million.
The notion that the Jewish people should be completely annihilated “was not a tactically motivated threat,” German historian Peter Longerich said, “but the logical consequence” of the belief which “dominated” the entire National Socialist agenda, “that the German people were locked in a life and death struggle with their mortal enemy—international Jewry—in which their very existence as a nation was in peril.”
When asked what would the world say and how would they react to the indiscriminate murder of the Jewish people, Hitler responded: “When [Operation] Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment,” noted Gideon Hausner, who as Attorney General of Israel, prosecuted Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
The Jews were not merely victims, as historian Yehuda Bauer points out. They are a people, a community and a nation, “which was in some significant ways, central to the self-understanding of European and not just German society.” This is why the Jews became the focus of an unprecedented assault that has transformed the western, and progressively also the non-western word’s “perception” of itself. The essence of National Socialism is not its bureaucratic culture or “modernistic structures”—which clearly contributed—but an ideological commitment to abolish not just a government or a political system, “but the basic order of the world.”
Can any rational person compare what Hitler did when he initiated the most disastrous war in history to what the former president accomplished during his four years in office?
A Final Note
If we are to learn from the past, we must be concerned about objective truth, with transmitting what actually ensued and not allowing those with their own particular agenda or ignorance to obscure our understanding of what occurred.
Apparently Eberhard Jäckel’s prediction about Hitler was prescient. “It is important to note,” he said, “that even the dead Hitler will always remain with Germans, with the survivors, with their descendants, and even with the unborn. He will be with them, not as he was with his contemporaries, but as an eternal monument to what is humanly possible.”
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew university of Jerusalem. He lives in Jerusalem.
