In certain ways, this autumn in the US has recalled the autumn of 1938 in Nazi Germany, when mass deportation of undocumented people was one of Hitler’s most ambitious coercive policies before the start of World War II. In the US, too, the connection between domestic repression and foreign aggression is coming into focus.
That fall, the German police and SS rounded up 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship and dumped them across the border into neighboring Poland. This set off a chain of events which provides a useful perspective on where the US is now. A family was deported; a desperate refugee took revenge; the government organized a pogrom and reorganized its police; war followed.
The family was the Grynszpans. The father and mother had moved to Germany in 1911 from the Russian Empire. Their children were born in Germany, spoke German and saw themselves as Germans. Their son Herschel had left to stay with relatives in Paris, where he faced a series of disappointments with his documentation, including the loss of his citizenship.
Denied permanent residence in France in the summer of 1938, Herschel Grynszpan was hiding in an attic to avoid deportation when a postcard from his sister arrived: “Everything is finished for us.”
Herschel Grynszpan took revenge. On Nov. 7, 1938, he walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot the diplomat Ernst vom Rath. A policy of mass deportation had led to a reaction that, although unpredictable in its details, was not surprising.
In Berlin, the Nazis saw an opportunity. Joseph Goebbels invoked a conspiracy and conflated the actions of one person with the responsibility of a group, and Hitler allowed Goebbels to organize a nationwide pogrom — Kristallnacht — two days later. The Sturm Abeilung, the SS and the Hitler Youth, joined by many other Germans, destroyed Jewish businesses, burned Jewish books, desecrated Torah scrolls and invaded Jewish homes — 91 Jews were killed and hundreds died by suicide. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.
Nine decades later, no one could foresee exactly what would happen when the administration of Us President Donald Trump made deportation of the undocumented its basic policy, with the National Guard deployed in Los Angeles and Washington — cities that should be seen as “training grounds for our military” and “war zones,” but it was predictable that there would be some consequence. It arrived in the form of the shooting of two National Guard soldiers patrolling in Washington. One subsequently died from her wounds.
The accused is a refugee from Afghanistan who had assisted the US war effort in his homeland. Like Herschel Grynszpan, he is someone who experienced trauma and dehumanization. Having fought and killed for a foreign government in his own nation, the assassin had reason to expect some sort of shelter after he and his family were evacuated from Afghanistan to the US. It appears he faced only a series of disappointments.
His experience, as reported by the New York Times, was eerily similar to Herschel Grynszpan’s. While “it was unclear what exactly triggered” the attacker, a volunteer who worked with the family “sensed part of it was his frustrations with the uncertainty of America’s immigration process” and his family’s fear that they would be “deported to Afghanistan as his application for a Special Immigrant Visa dragged on.”
This is not an excuse for a horrible act. It is a fact that is necessary to understand the structure of the historical moment.
It was foreseeable that Trump would seek to exploit such violence. He announced his intention to target “Third World countries,” blamed all of the US’ problems on migrants and called Somalis “garbage.” Trump expressed his desire to deport millions of people and to denaturalize — strip citizenship from — Americans whose values he disparages or whom he deems incompatible with “Western civilization.” Life will be made even harder for non-citizens in the US.
What comes next?
For the Nazis, the mass deportation and pogrom of autumn 1938 were steps toward creating a centralized national police agency, the Reich Security Main Office, the following year. In the US, something similar is unfolding with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — initially tasked to carry out deportations, ICE has taken on espionage roles, provoked citizens and been reinforced by soldiers of the National Guard. In these respects, it is becoming something like a national police force, with ideological propaganda and links to the armed forces.
In one way, mass deportations and Kristallnacht advanced the consolidation of the Nazi regime, but this kind of instability was unpopular in Germany — much as ICE raids are unpopular in US cities. The radical next steps were possible only under cover of war. That would be the classic next step in the regime change that Trump seems determined to carry out in the US. War is the easy way to eliminate internal enemies by identifying them with an external enemy.
For Trump, starting a war with Venezuela (or another nation) would be the next logical move in advancing regime change at home. It is not hard to see that Trump understands this, given his escalating provocations since the summer, when the US began attacking alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea, including shipwrecked survivors killed in an obvious breach of international law.
The past never repeats, but it does instruct — and it instructs everyone. The people who want authoritarianism in the US know that seizing on the emotions associated with political belonging can lead to turmoil and regime change, and the people who want democracy in the US can see the pattern and, by naming it, take the crucial first step toward bringing the process to a halt.
Timothy Snyder, the inaugural chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, is the author or editor of 20 books.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS