In 1944, my father was arrested in Berlin for the double crime of being half-Jewish and a Hitler opponent. He was imprisoned and enslaved in the infamous Buchenwald camp, where he barely survived the Nazis’ brutal program of "extermination through labor," and had been scheduled for involuntary sterilization. To his great fortune — and mine — American troops liberated Buchenwald one day before that scheduled procedure.
I have dedicated my life to defending free speech because history demonstrates that it is the most essential engine for securing human rights. But if CBS's "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan had been correct, when she claimed last week that "free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide" in Germany, that would be a powerful argument for censorship. Sadly, she was wrong.
In fairness to Brennan, she was repeating an all too common assumption: that the Nazis rose to power during Germany’s Weimar Republic because of its tolerance of their hateful rhetoric. But the historical record belies this assumption, which is why it is often called the "Weimar fallacy."
In fact, there were laws criminalizing hateful, discriminatory speech in Weimar Germany. These laws were strictly enforced, including against leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Julius Streicher, and even Hitler himself. Hundreds of Nazi agitators were found guilty of group libel, incitement to "class" violence, and insults to religious communities. Similar bans on Nazi radio programs, newspapers, rallies and speeches led to countless prosecutions.
CBS host Margaret Brennan says free speech caused the Holocaust. (Screenshot/CBS News)
No matter how positive their intentions, these German hate speech laws backfired into a public relations coup for the Nazis, who claimed they were being punished for speaking truth to power. For example, Streicher’s virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer became more popular the more it was confiscated.
The speaking ban on Hitler led to posters depicting him as a free speech martyr, with his mouth taped shut and the text complaining that "He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany."
What’s worse, once the Nazis seized power, they used these very same laws to silence and jail their opponents. This experience illustrates an inherent flaw of any restrictions on so-called hate speech: because that concept is inescapably subjective, the enforcing authorities are given the power to suppress essentially any speech — and as a result endangering any speech that is unpopular with powerful interest groups.
Sadly, we need look no further than Germany itself for examples of contemporary hate speech laws predictably going awry. Recently, six German police officers conducted a dawn raid of a man’s house because of his mocking tweet about a government official’s hypocritical conduct — a classic example of dissenting speech that is the lifeblood of any democratic government. In 2024, pro-Palestinian rallies were shut down over concerns about the potential for hate speech — even though the suppressed messages were in a foreign language.
Especially troubling is Germany’s regular punishment of any message that contains so-called "hateful speech," even if the message satirizes and condemns it. For example, in 2021, the Cologne public prosecutor initiated proceedings against Cologne’s mayor and a member of its Jewish community because of their tweets sharing a photograph of an anti-Semitic poster.
The intention was to decry the ongoing problem of anti-Semitism, which is why the tweet’s accompanying message read, "Anyone who thinks that way has no business in Cologne or anywhere else in our society." Still, the public prosecutor said it was his duty to investigate because German law absolutely bars any distribution of hate speech, regardless of its intent.
Likewise, Germany’s strict Internet censorship law, which went into effect in 2018, was swiftly used to punish not only anti-immigrant tweets by leaders of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, but also tweets by journalists and human rights activists that satirized and criticized them.
The speaking ban on Hitler led to posters depicting him as a free speech martyr, with his mouth taped shut and the text complaining that "He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany."
The steady rise of the AfD party in political support and power, despite Germany’s strict censorial regime, tragically mirrors the events of the Weimar period: Censoring the hateful, hated messages doesn’t suppress the underlying ideas. In fact, they may even amplify them.
I literally owe my life to the end of the Holocaust. If evidence showed that censorship could have averted it, I would support censorship. But there is no such evidence.
Rather than attempt to censor speech we loathe and whose consequences we fear, all of us who oppose bigotry and discrimination have a moral duty to raise our voices vigorously against it. We cannot suppress hatred by silencing its expression. We must confront it head-on. There are no shortcuts.