What The Hell America!

As the granddaughter of German Jews persecuted under Nazi rule, I see terrifying echoes of my family’s past in the Trump administration’s assault on civil institutions, academic freedom and human rights.

Throughout the first 100 days of the second Trump term, news of his administration’s attacks on scholars, leading thinkers and academic institutions, the caving of these institutions such as universities, hospitals and law firms to this pressure, and unlawful detentions and deportations hold unbearable corollaries to my family history.

Such civic institutions played a key role in the persecution of my great-grandfather Prof. Dr. Max Flesch, a German doctor, author and academic of Jewish descent who lived in and near Frankfurt. As a “Semite,” he was stripped of the right to practice medicine, teach and publish. These assaults were enabled by academic and medical institutions which voluntarily, and sometimes enthusiastically, complied with Nazi mandates. 

A prolific author, Max Flesch never published in Germany again. The German National Academy of Sciences ejected him as a “non-Aryan” in 1938, although he is memorialized at their headquarters now. These academic, free speech and professional restrictions began a full nine years before he and my great-grandmother Hella were taken from their home and deported to the Terezin concentration camp, 30 miles north of Prague in the Czech Republic.  

I think often about Max’s thoughts about losing his rights in those nine years, laid down in an unpublished memoir entitled Pariah that he wrote during that period. I think about Max and Hella’s increasing isolation as fewer and fewer friends or even family members visited, an isolation sharpened after both their children fled the country halfway through that decade. I wish I could walk and talk with them as one courageous niece did, forbidden by her “half-Aryan” family members to visit her full Jewish elders, but who visited nonetheless, even at a holding camp just before their deportation east.

Attacks on perceived enemies by Nazis immediately began when Hitler assumed power by taking away their jobs, their rights and their freedom of speech.

The parallels are chilling.

The Firing of Government Employees

Day 67, Hitler: The Nazi term Gleichschaltung means “synchronization” or “bringing into line.” The Nazis aligned all aspects of German society with their ideology and goals. Gleichschaltung enabled the regime to “remove their opponents, whether real or imagined, from public service,” according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia … including in academia.

Day 1, Trump: The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) removed swaths of government employees, even whole departments from federal public service, including by force at independent agencies.

Restricting Students’ Rights

Day 76, Hitler: In April 1933, newly passed anti-Semitic legislation ordered K-12 schools and universities to exclude Jewish professors and students.

Day 54, Trump: The administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding restrictions to student rights, academic freedom and free speech. Shortly thereafter, Columbia expelled, suspended and revoked the degrees of dozens of students, allegedly for their participation in campus protests in the prior year. The American Association of University Professors called these actions “an outrageous assault on freedom of speech” and “condemn[ed] in the strongest possible terms any university that would sacrifice its own students to the demands of an authoritarian government.”

Detention Camps

Soon after Hitler assumed power, security forces removed people from their homes, jobs and the streets to detention camps. 

Day 51, Hitler: Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, or SA, (storm troopers) opened one of their first detention centers, or concentration camps, in Oranienburg, a Berlin suburb. One hundred days later, Hans Flesch, my grandmother’s first cousin (an innovator in the then-new field of radio) was arrested and imprisoned in the Oranienburg camp, his arrival documented in a photograph now shown in Holocaust museums across the world.

Day 48, Trump: Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University scholar and U.S. green card holder, was arrested at his home in New York for his support for an end to the war in Gaza. His moving letter from a detention center in Louisiana was read aloud at protests on campuses across the U.S. Over a month later, Khalil remains in detention. 

Seventeen days later, Rumeysa Öztürk, a graduate student with a valid student visa at Tufts University, was abducted on the street in broad daylight by masked men in Somerville, Mass., then sent to a detention center in Louisiana for co-authoring an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper. Following a federal court order, Öztürk has since been released from ICE detention in Louisiana and returned to Massachusetts on May 10.

Every day when I wake up, and before I go to bed, I think of Mahmoud and Rumeysa, and I think of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father, and Andry Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist, wrongly deported without due process into hellish conditions in Salvadoran internment camps—Hernández Romero’s brutal treatment, confusion, terror and despair upon arrival documented in photographs I can’t unsee. 

I think about my great grandparents Max and Hella, seized from their home, their lives and agency no longer their own, transported to two interim detention centers, then the horrific train ride east and finally, Max’s passing, described in a letter after the war by a fellow barracks inmate, alone after Hella’s death seventeen days before, unspeaking, disoriented.

In Germany in 1938, the Nazi regime extended its civil service bans to academics married to Jews. My grandfather Albert Kruse was told if he did not divorce his wife Ilse Flesch Kruse he would lose his teaching job. Instead, the couple escaped Nazi persecution shortly before the outbreak of World War II by emigrating to the United States with their two young sons.  

Mandatory Sterilization in Nazi Germany

In Nazi Germany, civic institution participation enabled large scale atrocities quickly. The medical profession was arguably the first major civil society sector to actively and voluntarily comply on a mass scale with Nazi horrors targeting minorities:

Day 142, Hitler: The “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases,” a mandatory sterilization law targeting those with disabilities, went into effect. German doctors and hospitals collaborated on a mass scale, forcibly sterilizing 62,400 people with hereditary disabilities in the law’s first year alone and hundreds of thousands in subsequent years—an achievement the government could not have carried out without mass civil society participation. Eighty-nine percent of those who appealed their sterilization that year to “hereditary health courts” chaired by a judge and two doctors were denied and forcibly sterilized anyway.  

Subsequent history is well known. Sterilizations were followed by large-scale murder in gas chambers of people with disabilities in Germany. These tactics were later utilized on massive scale in concentration camps in Germany and occupied territories against a broader swath of undesirables.

We don’t know now what our collaboration with the Trump administration will lead to. In Germany, we know it ended in tragedy. As I did last month for Hella, last week, I I lit a Jahrzeit candle for my great grandfather Max Flesch, to commemorate his death 82 years ago in the Terezin camp in occupied Czech territory.