By Steve Huntley | March 30, 2025

I’m old enough to remember when Hitler personified incomparable, bottomless, merciless evil. These days he’s mostly used by the left as a cudgel to hammer, ineffectively, Donald Trump. In doing so, Democrats risk trivializing and even sanitizing Hitler.

What sets Hitler apart from other monstrous 20th century dictators — such as Mao Zedong and Stalin — was his all-consuming Jew hatred, his unprecedented Jewish murders, his factories of death and extermination that slaughtered 6 million Jews.

Mao and Stalin (himself an antisemite) each killed more people than Hitler, yet the German fuhrer is recognized as the worst tyrant. The reason is clear — the Holocaust.

There have been other genocides, such as those of Turkey against the Armenians and the Hutus against the Tutsis in civil war in Rwanda.

But in none was genocide as central to a regime’s core and purpose as in Hitler’s Germany. None of those other murderous campaigns erected a massive industrial complex of death camps devoted to the annihilation of one people.

You can’t separate Hitler from his pathological loathing and mass murder of Jews.

If someone is likened to Hitler, it’s inescapable that this person must be a rabid Jew hater.

To invoke Hitler without his murderous antisemitism is to homogenize him as another one of the 20th century’s dictators, just the most infamous.

In doing so, Democrats purge him of his singular crime against humanity.

President Trump is Hitler, shout progressives.

That would be the same Trump whose grandchildren are Jewish. The same Trump who is described by Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of the Jewish state, as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”

Some Hitler.

A similar whitewashing is going on with Democrats hurling Nazi insults at Trump’s supporters.

Hitler made the Nazi party in his image. Hitler planted antisemitism, persecution of Jews and Jew slaughter at the heart of the Nazi movement.

No daylight intruded between the Nazi party and the persecution of Europe’s Jews. The Nazi SS enforced Hitler’s racial policies in occupied Europe and ran the extermination camps. In pre-war Germany, the SS joined with the SA storm troopers in inflicting the pogrom against Jews known to history as Kristallnacht.

You can’t be a Nazi without Jew hatred.

Yet, the left paints Trump supporters as Nazis.

Some of those progressives say they are themselves Jews, as was the case with a big pro-Hamas demonstration inside Trump Tower in New York recently.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who’s Jewish, invoked the Nazis in attacking Trump. He claimed he didn’t bring up “the specter of Nazis lightly.”

Pritzker and others try to clean up their smear by saying that they are only talking about how Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany. Hitler seized power to what end? Kill Jews and conquer Europe.

“I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now,” Pritzker said. “The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. I just have one question: What comes next?”

We know what came next with Hitler and the Nazis.

Pritzker appears to be drawing some sort of a parallel between Hitler sending innocent Jews to concentration camps and Trump deporting illegal aliens. The left calls them “migrants” but these foreigners broke U.S. law by entering our country without permission.

Europe’s Jews did nothing, but suffered mass murder. That was a crime against humanity.

Illegal aliens thumb their noses at the law and thus face the consequences of being sent back to their home countries or some other destination. That’s called justice.

These illegal immigrants mostly are trying to escape the miserable economies of their native countries.

There is no comparison to the desperate Jews of the 1930s and ‘40s fleeing a regime intent on killing them, their children, their parents, all their relatives, everyone like them — for the singular reason that they were Jewish.

The Hitler and Nazi attacks from Democrats also gloss over an uncomfortable truth, for them, that a 21st century version of Nazism is bringing new misery for Jews in particular and the civilized world in general.

That would be the radical Islamism.

It’s a powerful, fanatic, barbarian movement within Islam and it commands the loyalty of millions of Muslims. Many terrorist gangs, such as the al-Qaeda responsible for the Sept. 11 atrocities, kill in Islam’s name. They kill indiscriminately but never fail to single out Jews or to target them.

Maniacal Islamists rule Iran. They openly advocate the extermination of Israel and seek a nuclear weapon to that end.

Just taking notice of the crimes of Islamism can bring an accusation of Islamophobia from its many sympathizers on the left, in so-called elite universities, in progressive media and at the United Nations.

We must not let the smear of Islamophobia keep us from recognizing and speaking out about the Islamist threat to Western civilization.

The Islamist terrorist gang most often in the news these days is Hamas, guilty of the most horrific atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust.

In their Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Hamas savages slaughtered 1,200 people, raped women and teen-age girls, burned and mutilated the bodies of young and old, and took 250 hostages back to the Gaza Strip. Among those hostages were babies, toddlers, Israelis over age 80 and dead bodies.

The terrified captives, including women still bloody from sexual assault, were paraded before jeering and taunting crowds of Palestinians in Gaza. Hostages, including at least two children, were murdered during captivity.

When a cease-fire was finally realized and some Jewish hostages freed, Hamas thugs again paraded them before jeering and taunting masses of Palestinians.

We are no longer surprised by the depths of depravity, cruelty and savagery that Palestinian terrorists and mobs will sink to. Palestinian and Islamist culture and society constitute our era’s version of Nazi Germany’s culture and society.

And we can see troubling signs in our own society — notably widespread antisemitic demonstrations and intimidation of Jews on prestigious college campuses. The Anti-Defamation League found that antisemitic attacks in America surged by 200 percent in the year after the Hamas attack.

It’s surely no coincidence that these soaring assaults against Jews come at a time when Democrats are whitewashing Hitler with their frivolous attacks on Trump and Republicans.

This sick tendency to sanitize Hitler also occurs on the right.

Prominent podcaster Tucker Carlson gave a forum to a “popular historian” who promotes crackpot theorizing that the “chief villain” in World War II was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not Hitler.

We should never forget what set Nazi Germany apart, why Hitler represents unparalleled evil.

We should never forget who Hitler was.

Volumes have been written about him. Among the most intriguing was Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil by Ron Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum examined many of the theories and explanations about Hitler.

After doing so, he cautioned that explaining Hitler can carry a potential downside.

We should remember, he said:

“To resist the way explanation can become evasion or consolation, a way of making Hitler’s choice to do what he did less unbearable, less hateful to contemplate, by shifting responsibility from him to faceless abstractions, inexorable forces, or irresistible compulsions that gave him no choice or made his choice irrelevant.

“To resist making the kind of explanatory excuses for Hitler that permit him to escape, that grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh.”

Are the Democrats’ frivolous invocations of a Hitler without the Holocaust opening another avenue to grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh?

-30-

 

Steve Huntley, a retired Chicago journalist now living in Austin, Texas, has contributed other pieces to johnkassnews.com from an examination of the secret jail for Christopher Columbus and other politically problematic public art to an essay on Americans suffering from Joe Biden gas pain.

For almost three decades Huntley spent most of his career in Chicago journalism at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages.

Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military.