What Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Day Can — and Cannot — Teach Us About Power, Language, and the Fragility of Democracy Today.
On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated the concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz. At that time, around 7,000 people were still on the site. No other place symbolizes the crimes of the National Socialists as Auschwitz does. Between 1940 and 1945, at least 1.1 million people were murdered there.
German lawmakers gather today and each year on Jan. 27 for the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism. The rituals are familiar: somber speeches, names read aloud, survivors’ voices amplified in a chamber built atop the ruins of a shattered republic. Yet the purpose of the day is not ritual alone. It is vigilance.
Germany’s culture of remembrance rests on a core insistence: the Holocaust was not an aberration that descended suddenly upon a civilized society. It was the result of choices — rhetorical, legal, cultural — made over the years. The lesson Germans are taught is unsettling precisely because it is transferable.
That lesson has gained renewed urgency as the United States confronts its own period of democratic strain, political radicalization, and the return of Donald J. Trump to the center of national life. Comparisons to Nazi Germany provoke understandable discomfort. History, after all, demands precision. But remembrance, as Germans understand it, is not about declaring equivalence. It is about recognizing patterns early — before institutions collapse and cruelty becomes policy.
The seduction of spectacle
In 1936, Nazi Germany hosted the Olympic Games. The regime temporarily removed antisemitic signs, eased public violence, and presented a carefully curated image of modernity and order. The spectacle worked. International audiences were reassured. Dissent was drowned out by pageantry.
The United States today is not orchestrating deception on that scale. But under Mr. Trump, political power has increasingly been fused with spectacle — mass rallies, militarized ceremonies, flag-draped sporting events — all designed to project strength and unity while defining who belongs inside the nation’s symbolic boundaries.
Sports, in both eras, function as more than entertainment. They become stages for national identity. When dissenting athletes are denounced as unpatriotic, or when symbols of the nation are used to police belonging, spectacle shifts from celebration to enforcement.
Detention as policy, cruelty as routine
No comparison invites more outrage — or more misunderstanding — than that between Nazi concentration camps and U.S. immigration detention facilities.
They are not the same. Nazi camps evolved into a system of forced labor and mass extermination driven by racial ideology. ICE detention centers do not exist to annihilate a people.
Yet Germany’s memorial culture insists on confronting the uncomfortable truth that concentration camps did not begin as death factories. They began as sites of mass detention, justified by “law and order,” normalized through bureaucracy, and shielded from scrutiny by distance and euphemism.
Under the Trump administration, the United States expanded a detention system that separated families, confined migrants without criminal convictions, and subjected them to conditions documented by courts and human rights groups as abusive and, at times, deadly. The detainees were overwhelmingly portrayed not as individuals seeking asylum, but as threats — criminals, invaders, contaminants.
The warning embedded in Holocaust remembrance is not that all camps lead to genocide, but that systems built on dehumanization rarely self-correct.
Criminalizing identity
The Nazi regime did not merely persecute Jews socially; it transformed Jewish identity into a legal offense. Citizenship was revoked. Rights were stripped. Arrests were framed as law enforcement.
In Trump-era America, undocumented immigrants are not being targeted for who they are, but for their legal status. That distinction matters. Yet the rhetoric surrounding immigration policy has often blurred it, suggesting criminality is inherent rather than circumstantial.
Calls for mass deportations, raids, and sweeping detention powers echo a familiar logic: that public safety requires the removal of an entire category of people. History shows that once identity becomes inseparable from suspicion, the rule of law bends toward collective punishment.
Language that corrodes
If there is one area where historians see the clearest continuity across authoritarian movements, it is language.
Nazi propaganda described Jews as vermin, parasites, and disease — metaphors that rendered violence not only acceptable, but necessary. The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words that made killing imaginable.
Donald Trump has repeatedly used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants and minorities, speaking of “infestations,” “animals,” and people “poisoning the blood” of the nation. These are not policy arguments. They are moral cues.
Language does not merely reflect intent; it shapes public tolerance. When leaders strip groups of their humanity, institutions follow.
Moral panics and the policing of identity
The Nazi persecution of LGBTQ+ people is often overshadowed in public memory, but it was central to the regime’s vision of social purity. Queer existence was framed as degeneracy, a threat to children and to the nation’s future.
In contemporary America, LGBTQ+ people — particularly transgender individuals — have become focal points of political panic. Under Trump and allied movements, protections were rolled back, and rhetoric increasingly framed gender nonconformity as dangerous or unnatural.
The comparison is not about scale; it is about structure. Authoritarian movements often define themselves by identifying internal enemies who allegedly undermine social order.
What travel reveals — and conceals
Travel and tourism have long functioned as instruments of selective vision, shaping what outsiders are encouraged to see — and what they are permitted to ignore. In Nazi Germany, international tourism and the 1936 Berlin Olympics offered visitors a carefully managed portrait of a cultured, orderly nation, one that helped blunt foreign criticism and normalize a regime already engaged in systematic persecution.
The United States, of course, occupies a radically different moral and historical position. Yet here, too, tourism can soften realities. FIFA is approaching, and the U.S. is preparing to welcome visitors from around the globe, even from the 75 countries on its “do not admit” list.
Immigration detention centers are deliberately located far from major cities and tourist corridors; border enforcement is rendered invisible to most visitors; national parks and patriotic landmarks coexist with systems of confinement few travelers ever encounter.
Germany’s postwar insistence on memorial tourism offers a contrasting model. Schoolchildren and visitors are brought to former camps, prisons, and sites of state violence not to assign collective guilt, but to cultivate democratic responsibility. The message is clear: comfort must never come at the expense of truth.
By directing visitors to memorials, former camps, border regions, and sites of injustice, tourism makes abstract policies human and visible. It counters denial, disrupts sanitized national narratives, supports local truth-telling institutions, and reminds travelers that democracy requires attention, empathy, and historical literacy — not distance or distraction.
What remembrance demands
Germany’s Holocaust memorial day does not ask citizens to scan the world for new Hitlers. It asks them something more difficult: to recognize how ordinary people, democratic institutions, and legal systems can be repurposed toward exclusion and cruelty.
“Never again” is not a promise about outcomes. It is a discipline of attention.
The United States is not Nazi Germany. But democracies do not fail by imitation; they fail by complacency. The danger lies not in drawing comparisons irresponsibly, but in refusing to draw them at all — in waiting until history feels familiar enough to be undeniable.
On this day of remembrance, Germany offers the world a sober lesson: authoritarianism announces itself long before it reveals its final intentions. And even something as ordinary as where we travel — and what we choose to see when we get there — can either dull our democratic conscience or sharpen it.
A troubled world
On this remembrance day, honoring past victims must also sharpen our attention to present ones, when dehumanization and repression are unfolding now, in real time, before the world’s eyes.
Several countries are consistently cited by the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch for serious human rights abuses. These include Iran (violent repression of protests, executions), China (mass detention of Uyghurs, censorship), Russia (political imprisonment, war crimes allegations), North Korea (totalitarian control, prison camps), Syria (mass civilian killings), Saudi Arabia (suppression of dissent), Myanmar (ethnic cleansing of Rohingya), and Israel/Palestinian territories (civilian deaths, detention practices under occupation). The severity and nature of abuses vary and change constantly, but all involve systemic violations of basic human rights.
