I am a history professor. For about 30 years, I have been studying, researching, writing and teaching about what happened in Germany in the early and mid-20th century — the rise and fall of Hitler and the National Socialists. Because of this professional specialty, people frequently ask me about parallels between that time and place, and ours.
Historical comparisons are tricky things. In the whole complex mess of events that bombards us every day, how should we pick out what is essential to understand, and how should we relate it to events from the past? Error or bad faith, often derived from the urgent desire to make a political case, present other dangers.
On the other hand, all we really know about what human beings are capable of — and about what certain kinds of situations or actions might lead to — comes from history. Without history we have no guide at all. So it is important to try to draw lessons from our collective past, and I believe historians have a duty to do so.
ICE
One kind of comparison that recent events suggest involves Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All evidence, including two murders, countless assaults, abductions of children and violations of private spaces, suggest that what we have here is a particularly brutal and legally unrestrained police force. Most of us, if we reach for a paradigm example of such a police force, will think of the Nazis’ Gestapo (an acronym for the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police). So is ICE really comparable to the Gestapo?
There are some superficial similarities. The Gestapo’s repression and brutality was particularly directed to racialized targets, especially Jews. Strikingly, it eventually absorbed Germany’s border police. The regime always dismissed allegations of brutality against the Gestapo as nothing but “Marxist Jewish propaganda,” much as MAGA denies allegations against ICE as left or “antifa” disinformation.
As a citizen, I am no fan of ICE. I own one of those whistles, in case they show up in my neighborhood. I detest their brutality, their racism, their cruelty to the vulnerable and frightened, their contempt for the constitution. Those officers who have committed murder and other acts of violence, as well as the people who command them (I am looking at you, Secretary Kristi Noem) need to be brought to justice and punished.
But they are not the Gestapo.
The Gestapo
The first reason is about scale. Historians have stressed that the Gestapo was a very small force, a “thin black line,” relative to the German population and far smaller than its East German successor, the infamous Stasi (another acronym). Historian Robert Gellately tells us that at its peak in 1944, the Gestapo employed about 32,000 people, although about 13,500 were employees who had little to do with the imposition of terror and violence. Let’s say there were about 20,000 Gestapo police officers. Germany at that time, after the annexation of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland, had a population of about 80 million.
Trump and his associates lack the kind of sweeping ideological goals that animated the fascists of the past.
The Unites States presently has a population of nearly 350 million. For ICE to be numerically proportional to the Gestapo, there would need to be about 88,000 ICE officers. Homeland security tells us there are presently about 22,000. Even though they get support from officers of Customs and Border control (there are about 20,000 CPB agents, not specifically assigned to airports and borders), they don’t get close to the kind of coverage the Gestapo had of Germany. And the Gestapo’s coverage was so thin that it could do little investigating on its own: Historians like Gellately have shown us that Gestapo officers mostly sat in their offices and waited for denunciations to roll in. Denunciations may have been the origin of over half of the cases they opened.
The Gestapo did not, therefore, make a practice of patrolling the streets looking for some random person they might arrest. It was also very different from ICE in the manner of recruitment and training of its officers. Gestapo officers were generally experienced, professional detectives. Many started their careers in the criminal police and transferred over, willingly or unwillingly. They very often had at least some university-level education; some, including many of the most murderous, had doctorates, especially in law. This created a very different profile (though not a morally different one) from the kinds of people who have been scooped up in ICE’s over-hasty expansion and who have been put through a cursory training program. It was reported last fall that over one third of ICE recruits could not meet the standard of doing 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups and running a mile in 14 minutes.
Brownshirts
There was another Nazi organization that did have a few points of similarity to ICE, though again also with some significant differences. That organization was what the Nazis called the Sturmabteilungen (SA), the infamous “storm troopers” or “Brownshirts.”
The SA was the Nazis’ private paramilitary force. During the years in which Hitler was rising to power, the SA’s job was to get physical control of territory so that the Nazis could dominate it politically. Usually, this meant engaging in a kind of gang warfare with the paramilitary groups of rival political parties, especially those of the Communists.
After Hitler came to power, the role of the SA changed. Many Brownshirts were made auxiliary police officers, although they had no training for such a role. The Brownshirts, in fact, tended to recruit their personnel from relatively uneducated and unskilled working or lower-middle-class young men who, amid the chaos of the Great Depression, had few other career options.
We need to recognize the very different scale of violence and oppression that the victims of Nazism faced from the beginning of Hitler’s rule.
In 1933 and 1934, armed with these new police powers, the SA were turned loose on German streets, delivering a horrifying though often somewhat random level of violence. A part of their mission was to round up defined opponents of the Nazis, especially Social Democratic and Communist activists, and secondarily, Jews. Such opponents were routinely subjected to imprisonment, beatings, torture and often murder. In those early days of the Nazi regime, the SA opened large new facilities called concentration camps in which to imprison their victims. Often enough, though, the SA just beat up whomever they found on the streets.
So when it comes to the pattern of recruitment and training, the method of operations (marauding patrols while wearing military style uniforms), the brutality and lack of legal restraint, the claims of total immunity from prosecution, and the way violence was concentrated on designated targets, ICE looks similar to the Brownshirts. Here again, though, there a very important difference of scale.
In 1933 and 1934 SA membership was between 3 million and 4 million in a country which (before the later annexations) had a population of about 66 million. Again, to make a valid comparison to the United States today, we would have to imagine 16 million to 21 million ICE agents inflicting violence and terror on American streets, not the 22,000 currently on American streets.
A Different Social Response
There are also broader points we should consider when we think about comparisons to Nazi Germany. One is the very different social response. As the Nazis sent millions of storm troopers into the streets, as they consolidated their Gestapo and arrested thousands of opponents, there was virtually no opposition. We should not be self-righteous about this. There is obviously a relationship between the scale of repression and the scale of resistance. It was very clear to Germans right from February 1933 that the personal cost of resistance activity would be exorbitant.
But in America in 2026 we have seen something very different, especially in the last few months. I have contended for years that American society is not organically fertile soil for authoritarian rule. I think we are seeing practical corroboration of my theory. There were some early straws in the wind, like the pushback that greeted the attempted cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk and comedy show. More importantly, the peaceful but extremely well-organized resistance to ICE operations in Minneapolis has shown us all the way, and in so doing, said something important about the United States. Authoritarian rule is always partly a confidence trick. I think now, like Dorothy, we are seeing the hollow little man behind the imposing façade of Oz. Trump is weaker than he was a year ago, and he will grow weaker still.
As the Nazis sent millions of storm troopers into the streets, as they consolidated their Gestapo and arrested thousands of opponents, there was virtually no opposition.
There is another point, too, one that has been made effectively by the distinguished historian, author and professor Timothy Snyder. Snyder argues that Trump and his associates lack the kind of sweeping ideological goals that animated the fascists of the past: Their goals don’t extend much beyond ensuring endless flattery for themselves while they loot the treasury as much as possible. To cement fascist rule, says Snyder, they would need to launch a global war and compel millions to die for them. They show no sign of wanting to do so.
We need to understand the differences not just to understand exactly what sort of predicament we are in right now. We need to recognize the very different scale of violence and oppression which the victims of Nazism faced from the beginning of Hitler’s rule. Not to respect that different scale, to make overwrought comparisons between our situation and theirs, is not only factually incorrect. It is more than a little self-dramatizing and inadequately respectful of what Nazism’s victims really had to suffer.
If there is a lesson here, it is to do what the people of Minneapolis have done: Stand by your neighbors, and show Trump, ICE and their ilk the door
