Mandel’s rants about COVID trivialize Holocaust
Current debates raging in Ohio about mask and vaccine mandates are replete with claims and analogies linking government actions to the Holocaust.
These analogies are wrong, harmful and illustrate clearly the lack of understanding of the events and experiences of the Holocaust. Yet, they still use the Holocaust as the frame of reference. False analogies that invoke symbols like yellow stars, the Gestapo and deportation trains are not just manipulations of historical memory for political purposes.
Such analogies trivialize the genocide of European Jewry, tarnishing the memory of millions of victims murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices.
These analogies play upon public understanding that the Holocaust was one of the most horrific events in human history. By appropriating it and its symbols for their own ends, they infer that their current situation is akin to the Holocaust.
When the Third Reich mandated that all Jews ages 6 and up in Germany wear a yellow star in September 1941, it marked them for persecution and extermination. It was a prelude to the Nazi deportation of Jews eastward into ghettos and, by 1942, into extermination camps.
When protestors don this symbol, they are claiming that our government is marking them for death.
This is simply not true, and yet it persists in public discourse.
Josh Mandel, a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, recently criticized President Joe Biden’s stance on vaccine mandates. He characterized these actions as anti-freedom and implied that the Gestapo would show up at people’s doors.
The Gestapo, the German secret state police, engaged in roundups of Jews and others branded as enemies of the state (Roma/sinti, homosexuals, Afro-germans and Jehovah Witnesses).
The U.S. government is not sending police to people’s homes to arrest them and intern them indefinitely without cause. On the contrary, the government is responding to the current pandemic, trying to keep its citizens safe. Yet by cynically invoking the Gestapo, Mandel is raising suspicions of government motives.
Earlier this year, Mandel linked vaccine passports with the Nazi registration of Jews and warned Biden about sending in the Gestapo.
To reiterate, the Gestapo were members of a political police force operating without legal limits to enforce Nazi law. They often acted on tips and denunciations that served to reinforce a climate of state-sponsored terror.
When people today use Gestapo instead of a different historical analogy — such as the Soviet secret police (NKVD), which was also rounding up thousands of people who had committed no crime and interning them in camps in the 1930s — they are banking on a basic public understanding of history and fomenting a lack of trust in “big government.”
Such inflammatory rhetoric, comparing mask or vaccine mandates to Nazi German policies enforced by a secret police, seeks to brand anti-maskers as victims of genocidal state violence.
Indeed, claiming kinship with Jews persecuted by the Third Reich based on false and dangerous analogies is a form of antisemitism and supersessionism, also known as “replacement theory.”
This distortion of what occurred during the Holocaust is Holocaust denial. If any political agenda can invoke the memory of the Holocaust to its own ends, the facts of what did occur during World War II will become distorted and questioned, eventually eroding memory.
Using the Holocaust to score political points trivializes the systematic persecution and murder of Jews across Europe.
Those who engage in such rhetoric and symbols reduce the Holocaust to a convenient point of comparison, appropriating the magnitude of its genocidal horror to bolster their claims.
This diminishes the very real oppression that Jews endured. It also underscores why teaching about the Holocaust well and truthfully should be an essential component of school curriculum.
Laura J. Hilton is a professor of history at Muskingum University. She co-edited “Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (2020)” with Avinoam Patt. Patt is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Connecticut, where he serves as director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. He most recently authored “The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt (2021).”