The Trump administration realizes it made a mistake with its immigration raid on a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia. However, that the raid even happened is among the mountain of evidence undermining the administration’s claims that it is targeting the “worst of the worst” undocumented criminals. In fact, it’s really just going after immigrants generally.
The disconnect between the administration’s words and its actions fits a pattern of how authoritarians have historically attempted to conceal campaigns of terror against minorities by claiming they are cracking down on crime, even when many or most detainees have done little or nothing wrong.
It is important not to casually draw comparisons between current events and the Holocaust, let alone to suggest that something similar is happening now. I am not suggesting that it is so. However, as someone currently writing a book on the topic, I cannot help but notice that this discrepancy between the administration’s rhetoric and behavior has parallels in how the Nazis thinly disguised as an anti-crime campaign what was actually broad-based persecution of the Romani people.
The Third Reich classified Roma — the ethnic minority often pejoratively called “Gypsies” — alongside Jews as a “foreign” race and additionally as “antisocial,” a broad category that included the homeless, alcoholics, the work-shy and prostitutes. But only Roma fell into the antisocial category based on their race rather than their personal conduct. A 1938 article in the newspaper Hamburger Fremdenblatt expressed the regime’s view of antisociality as an inherent characteristic of Roma, stating of Romani children that “extensive experience has proven that the antisocial nature of the Gypsy race can in no way be eliminated through educational institutions.”
Of course, such ideas led to the murder of as many as 500,000 Roma — something for which there is clearly no parallel today. But what is parallel is the claim that the regime was only targeting Roma whose behavior was criminal or “antisocial,” even though in truth all Roma were the target.
Heinrich Himmler’s decree ordering the deportation of Roma to the so-called Gypsy Family Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau contained several exemptions, including for those considered “socially adapted” or with permanent employment. Based on the letter of the law, you might think that a Roma with a job would be safe. However, these exemptions were meaningless in practice. As the concentration camp headquarters’ translator and stenographer Pery Broad wrote after World War II, the clause providing exemptions was “a mere formality and was never observed. It was precisely the settled Gypsies who were the easiest prey, and so they formed the largest percentage of the camp inmates.”
Thus, even Roma with “a solid background of steady and efficient work suddenly found themselves in a concentration camp as prisoners with shaved heads and in blue-white prison clothes, their prison number tattooed on their arms.”
Again, in pointing out this parallel, I do not mean to compare current U.S. political conditions to those of Germany at that time, or to suggest that any sort of genocide in the U.S. is currently ongoing or imminent. But the parallel authoritarian deception is indeed there: Crime or other undesirable behavior as is being used as a pretext to justify persecuting minorities, with the administration demonizing Latinos especially. In such situations, the claim that this is only affecting the “worst of the worst,” and that the innocent need not worry, is typically a lie.
Alaric DeArment is a medical journalist in New York currently writing a book about the role of physicians and social scientists in the genocide of the Roma during the Third Reich.