JANUARY 28, 2026 – Last Sunday, in addressing abuses by ICE agents in Minnesota, Governor Walz compared ICE agents’ treatment of children in Minnesota to the experience of Ann Frank. His exact words:
We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. [. . .] Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.
The next day, the Holocaust Museum in Washington issued a statement sharply criticizing Walz’s remarks. The Museum’s exact words:
Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism [sic] surges.
I take strong exception to the Museum’s perspective—a perspective, by the way, shared by the Trump Administration, the sincerity of which I’ve learned to question universally. Note further, that the governor’s masters thesis was about Holocaust education.
In history, there are no mathematically perfect “equivalencies”; only approximate parallels and similarities of varying relevant proximity to one another. But the lessons to be learned from history can be razor sharp, even when obscured by contextual differences and the passage of time. In the case of the Holocaust, we ignore those lessons at our own peril.
When our sons were in high school, their history/social science courses presented the Holocaust with graphic depictions, including a riveting talk by a Survivor. The intended effect was achieved: our sons and their schoolmates were duly disturbed. I wondered, however, how much they’d learned about what had led to the Holocaust. On that question, there was far less interest or clarity. I tried to explain that by the time people were herded into the gas chambers, it was way too late to alter the outcome. The “Final Solution,” had been fully devised and codified under Nazi law, and the extermination camps were in full operation.
Watching documentaries about the main camps—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Soibor, and Treblinka—where 2.7 million people perished, was far more riveting and impressive than studying the legal, political and economic conditions in Germany that allowed the Nazis to emerge from relative obscurity and for their leader to be appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933. To grasp the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in their totality, one needs to work through history starting with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. To extract “razor-sharp” lessons from the unspeakable horror of the camps, one needs to know step by step, how Germany slid into the abyss, starting with the elections in the year or two before 1933.
For years, people critical of Trump cautioned against his authoritarian tendencies. As these tendencies evolved into methods straight out of the standard authoritarian playbook, historians such as Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, and Heather Cox Richardson started ringing the alarm bells and pointing out disturbing parallels between German after January 1933 and the point of no return—Munich? Anschluss? The Blitzkrieg? Now enter the ICE raids, particularly here in Minnesota; the cruel and unlawful attacks, not only on allegedly “illegal aliens” but on American citizens, and detention of unknowable numbers of people behind opaque barriers under undiscoverable conditions—followed by deportations . . . to where?
To date, here in Minnesota two people have been killed by ICE agents. Terror among some and tension among most of the rest of us have now become the norm here, driven by ever growing reports, and videos of disturbing ICE incidents—and notices of writs of habeas corpus filed on behalf of an expanding list of detainees.
However tragic the loss of a single innocent and however troubling the violation of rights among Minnesotans targeted by ICE, it would be absurd to “equate” the scale of these condemnable acts with the scale of the Jewish genocide during the Holocaust. There can be no disagreement that six million is a larger number than two. But that completely misses the point, the lesson. To go take it to the next step, as the Holocaust Museum has, and claim that any comparison with the Holocaust is “deeply offensive,” is itself, deeply troubling. Implicit in the Museum’s condemnation is that unless and until the earth well beyond Minnesota is completely scorched, we’re morally proscribed from drawing parallels between the terror of a five-year-old child in Minnesota in January 2026 and the terror experienced by Anne Frank from June 12, 1942 to August 1, 1944. In each case the source of the terror is the same: brutal secret police working for a repressive regime. Although we know the outcome—the “Final Solution”—in the case of Anne Frank, we do not yet know where things in Minnesota, as well as the country at large, will land. If we wake up to the parallels between Germany in the 1930s and Minnesota in the 2020s, we can avoid a redux of Germany—and the world—in the 1940s.
But how can we “wake up to the parallels” between then and now if we’re not even allowed to identify what it was about “then” from which we must draw critical lessons? What is the point of knowing and studying the past if we’re not allowed to benefit from such examination?
The logical extension of the Museum’s stance is that the scale—the unimaginable scale—of injustice, suffering, and attempt at the “Final Solution” consigns the memory of the Holocaust to an impenetrable figurative museum; to a place accessible only to people who already know the lessons to be learned. But those aren’t the people most likely to repeat the horrors. It’s the people who don’t know anything but sketchy generalities; people who by their ignorance, complacency and political naivete, are from the same mold as Germans of the 1930s.
On point is a conversation I had last week with our son Cory. He’d just had an encounter with acquaintances of his who were ardent “Trumpers.” The latter were unfamiliar with the many videos capturing ICE excesses. When Cory remarked that their tactics were no different from the Gestapo, one of the Trumpers said, “But the people ICE guys are catching aren’t being sent to the gas chambers yet.”
When I heard this, I was as horrified as Cory was.
No, Anne Frank is not Liam, the five-year-old separated from his father, who was carried off roughly by a group of masked men with no identification. And as far as we know, neither Liam nor the father is headed for the gas chambers—yet. But if they’re sent back to Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela or Rwanda(!) and flung into the hands of gang members or into a prison that has no keys for the locks, will the Holocaust Museum maintain its post on X that the mere mention of Anne Frank in the present context is “deeply unacceptable”?
The Museum has it exactly backwards. To honor the timeless courage of Ann Frank; to give her astonishing character and inspiration continued meaning and purpose, not in the exercise of a middle school literature assignment, but in the guidance of our morals and actions as we navigate through these seriously dangerous times, we must invoke her name and yes, we must remember her awful, unforgivable death.
Without being deputized by others, I can speak only for myself. And what I can tell you about Anne Frank—and all the Holocaust victims—is that in these times, I draw from their terrible fates, the courage to resist the current regime. Again, in scale, we are “not there yet”; we are not “Germany 1935”—the year the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. But given the unseemly people occupy the West Wing of the White House and the Department of Justice—the Stephen Millers, the Pam Bondis, the Kash Patels, the Kristi Noems . . . and, of course, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance . . . are we “Germany 1934,” one year in from the outset of the Nazi regime and headed to the horrors of the rest of the 1930s and 40s? We don’t know where all this is headed, but we’ve witnessed enough “up close and personal” here in Minnesota to know that complacency is not a morally acceptable option. But taking a stand is not risk free, as we’ve already seen, not only with the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, but with the assaults, harassment, arrests and detention of other citizens.
As I reported in my January 12 post, I’ve long been a student of the Holocaust—its causes, its horrific details and its lasting effects. But before ICE descended on Minnesota, I had always approached the Holocaust in its historical setting. Until the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, outside of Mao’s China, the scale of the Holocaust was never approached. When brutally excessive ICE methods were unleashed right here in Minnesota, however, the lens through which I’d viewed the Holocaust provided a whole new perspective. As I watched the collaborators in the movie Betrayed round up Jews in Oslo in 1942, the Holocaust was no longer an historical abstraction. And I asked myself, if I should be questioned by ICE about immigrants I might know, how would I respond? Would I follow the example of the Norwegian Resistance or the Norwegian Quislings—if my own life and liberty were suddenly in the balance? I wanted to be sure that under pressure, I’d do the right thing without hesitation—and without knowing how this real life “movie” ends. I realized that by now viewing the Holocaust from this perspective, I could improve my moral conditioning.
At every sizable anti-ICE protest I’ve joined, more than several signs bearing the name of Anne Frank have been held and waved. Again, speaking for myself, these signs in particular have given me added courage and inspiration. I know her story. I’m aware of the numbers and the scale of the Holocaust. I’ve read extensively about Germany in the 1930s and 40s. I can’t begin to fathom the suffering and death of six million people of any race, color, creed or nationality, but I know that as a human being, I have a duty to be vigilant against the rise of fascism—before it’s too late to resist effectively. Why such a duty? Again, as a human being, to atone for the Holocaust, and so that the heirs to our world and times don’t have to atone for my complacency and cowardice. When I see those Anne Frank signs, I’m ever more motivated toward courage and resistance against fascism.
And by the presence of those signs, I know I’m not alone.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
