Walz’s Reckless Language Dishonors Memory of the Holocaust

On Jan. 25, two days before the world paused to observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stood at a podium and compared the children of his state to Anne Frank.

“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said, speaking at a press conference about an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.” (RELATED: Governor Walz: Getting Minnesotans Killed)

Anne Frank was a 13-year-old Jewish girl who spent two years confined to a secret annex above an Amsterdam warehouse. She could not go to school. She could not walk outside. She could not speak above a whisper during daylight hours, for fear she and her family would be discovered and sent to a death camp. Tragically, she was eventually found and sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she was murdered. She was 15 years old.

To invoke her name in the context of an immigration policy does real harm, because it asks the Holocaust to do work it should never be asked to do: serve as a rhetorical device for a politician.

This is not a new problem. In 2019, when debates over border detention facilities were at a fever pitch, comparisons to concentration camps became a kind of currency on the political left. Critics described holding cells as analogous to the machinery of genocide. Some pointed to detainees drinking water from fixtures near toilets and drew a straight line to Auschwitz, apparently unaware that the prisoners of actual concentration camps would have wept for the mercy of a toilet, or a cup of water, or one more hour of life. The comparison was not illuminating. It was obscene.

And here we are again.

Governor Walz is a former teacher. He is, presumably, familiar with the history of the Holocaust, which makes his remarks all the more troubling because they suggest that even those who know the history are willing to strip-mine it for political effect. (RELATED: Some Obvious Truths From Minnesota)

There is a word for what happens when the Holocaust becomes a unit of political measurement, when it is deployed to win a news cycle or land a talking point. The word is trivialization. Every time a politician reaches for Auschwitz or Anne Frank to describe something that is, by any honest accounting, categorically different from industrialized mass murder, the actual horror of the Holocaust recedes a little further from collective memory. The edges blur. The scale collapses. The thing that must remain singular gets absorbed into the ordinary churn of partisan argument. (RELATED: Trafficking in False Comparisons to the Holocaust)

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum noted in its swift and pointed rebuke: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable.”

That statement should not have needed to be issued. The fact that it did tells us something uncomfortable about where we are.

And where we are, it should be said plainly, is a moment of genuine and alarming antisemitism. The ADL’s most recent audit found a 344 percent increase in antisemitic incidents over the past five years, and a staggering 893 percent increase over the past decade. Synagogues have been vandalized. Jewish students have been harassed on university campuses. Jewish communities across the country have had to hire armed security for their houses of worship. This is not a metaphor. This is the lived experience of American Jews right now. (RELATED: ‘Globalize the Intifada’ and the Evils of Left-Wing Political Violence)

My message to Governor Walz is this: The Holocaust is not yours to use. It is not a metaphor. It is not a rhetorical escalation. It is not a way to signal the depth of your concern about a policy you oppose. It is a singular event in the history of human cruelty, one that we invoke with the phrase “never again” precisely because nothing before or since has matched its systematic, industrialized annihilation of a people.

Never again is not a slogan. It is a vow. And that vow is dishonored every time the Holocaust is reduced to a political prop. The children of Minnesota deserve compassion and thoughtful policy. The memory of Anne Frank deserves to be left in peace.

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