Recently I was startled by a disturbing image. A man I’d never seen before but who declared himself to be a candidate for California governor had taken a selfie in front of the entrance to Auschwitz I.
He stood under the famous iron wrought gate through which 1.1 million people passed but never exited and posted a photo of himself grinning with the caption “My 0% Unemployment Plan.”
I gasped. I know what the German phrase on the gate says and this man clearly does too. Instead of being horrified by its message, he is supporting and promoting it.
For context, I write about public lands and promote them through a monthly newsletter that features a Park of the Month. Not long ago that park was the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which preserves the site and history of the largest and most deadly concentration camp overseen by German Nazis. (I have to specify “German” Nazis because there are so many other Nazis these days, like this apparent American Nazi running for governor of California.)
I wrote about the Auschwitz iron gate in my newsletter, because the gate’s text proclaims the German phrase “Arbeit macht frei,” a favorite Nazi slogan. The phrase translates to “Work makes one free” and was the message that German Nazis wanted to convey to those entering their “labor” camps.
On the surface the phrase seemed like a message to motivate workers, offering them a hope that their labor could earn them freedom. But for German Nazis the phrase had a different connotation: the only way for their prisoners to escape their torment was to work themselves to death. Death was the only freedom.
This man stood underneath the most famous occurrence of that Nazi phrase and declared that he too would love to work people to death.
This candidate will not win, is only known nationally for this one horrifying social media post, and I will not bother to say his name. But let me be clear: his belief in reinstituting concentration camps does not make him an outlier in his political party.
The Republican Party just passed a bill that spends $45 billion on new immigrant detention centers and a $29.9 billion increase in ICE funding for detention purposes. The president’s border czar Tom Homan has announced that he aims to fill these detention camps with at least 100,000 people. At least 70% of those immigrants already imprisoned in these camps haven’t been convicted of any crime.
According to Britannica.com, a concentration camp is a prison in which prisoners are placed “on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial.” The Trump Administration is detaining and deporting immigrants without hearings or trials and is limiting their access to legal counsel.
To be clear, the immigrant detention centers popping up across America meet the definition for concentration camps.
The tech-right billionaires deeply imbedded in America’s government are also currently trying to use public lands to create “freedom cities,” which is essentially a branded name for mini-kingdoms where CEOs would rule their workers with no laws or regulations. In other words, they could work people to death, just as the Nazis intended.
Far-right American politicians and the billionaires that fund them claim that other people are falsely labeling them Nazis, but they are openly promoting Nazi ideology and enacting Nazi policies.
Whether these politicians and tech-billionaires are actual Nazi acolytes or are only using neo-Nazi messaging to gain wealth and power, they are still promoting an old and destructive form of hate.
When the German Nazis ordered blacksmith Jan Liwacz to build the gate at Auschwitz I, he added the “Arbeit macht frei” phrase as they requested, but, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, he ordered his workers to intentionally flip the letter “b” upside down. It is believed that this was an act of protest and an implicit alert to those entering the concentration camp not to believe the messaging they were being fed.
When I first posted my Auschwitz-Birkenau Park of the Month newsletter, a descendant of Holocaust survivors complained that I was politicizing her family’s grief by including Jan’s story of protest. I feel compassion for her pain, but I disagree. I am not the one making Nazis relevant again.
I am not responsible for bringing Nazi doctrine into modern politics–modern politicians and their tech benefactors are.
When we don’t understand history, we are destined to repeat it. That is not just a trite notion we history buffs offer as a warning; it is a reality that we are seeing play out right in front of our eyes.
The way to stop evil is to call it out. The way to prevent repeating history is to understand it so that we can accurately label repeat offenders when they rise up.
The man who posted his Nazi selfie was doing it to impress the far-right tech bros and white supremacists who have adopted Nazi ideals as their own. These American Nazis are rising in power.
We can be like Jan Liwacz and choose to disrupt Nazi messaging, or we can choose to ignore, allow, or even promote it.
But the time to do something, anything, is now. They are making their message clear. What are we going to do about it?