Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz lately sparked controversy by way of evaluating U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Nazi Germany’s infamous secret police, the Gestapo.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Walz stated all over a Might 2025 speech on the College of Minnesota Legislation Faculty’s graduation rite.
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared,” Walz added.
ICE, tasked with implementing immigration insurance policies, has dramatically higher the choice of national arrests of immigrants since President Donald Trump returned to administrative center in January 2025. ICE’s arrests of immigrants have greater than doubled in 38 states since then.
In fresh months, different Democratic politicians, together with U.S Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, have additionally when compared ICE to the Gestapo, or Adolf Hitler’s “secret police,” as Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts stated in April.
However do ICE’s techniques in truth resemble the ones of the Gestapo?
As a result of I’m a student of recent Germany and the Holocaust, other folks continuously question me if this analogy is correct. The solution is sophisticated.
The Gestapo arrests a gaggle of Jewish males hiding in a cellar in Poland in 1939, in what was once most likely a staged German propaganda photograph.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Pictures
Working out the Gestapo
The Nazi regime established the Gestapo, quick for the German word Geheime Staatspolizei, which means secret state police, quickly after Hitler turned into chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Amongst different obligations, the Gestapo was once tasked with investigating political crimes and tracking opposition job. It later enforced racial rules in Germany and throughout occupied Europe.
As a part of its day-to-day paintings, the Gestapo known and monitored the regime’s political enemies. It arrested, interrogated, detained and tortured suspects and despatched others to focus camps. To spot suspects, it incessantly depended on nameless denunciations that got here no longer best from zealous Nazis, but additionally from disgruntled neighbors or trade competition who tipped off the Gestapo to Jews and people.
Whilst the Gestapo was once rather small with regards to team of workers, it projected a picture of being, as one student wrote, “omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.”
It enforced the regime’s will and suppressed dissent no longer thru sheer manpower however by way of making a pervasive sense of worry. This air of mystery of threat and terror has lengthy outlived the Nazi regime itself.
ICE’s operations
ICE, with round 21,000 officials and team of workers running in a rustic of greater than 340 million, is smaller each in absolute phrases and on a in step with capita foundation. At its top between 1943 and 1945, the Gestapo had between 40,000 and 50,000 team of workers in a rustic of 79 million.
ICE is ready to extend its paintings in the following few years with an extra US$75 billion in investment that Congress appropriated in July as a part of Trump’s tax and spending invoice.
And whilst ICE specializes in immigration, the Gestapo had a extra expansive position. It was once answerable for suppressing all kinds of political dissent, no longer simply violations of immigration legislation.
ICE operates with massively extra complex applied sciences that didn’t exist within the Forties, together with facial reputation and social media tracking.
There may be technically extra transparency round ICE’s paintings than the Gestapo’s, since ICE is a federal company this is matter to its paintings and data being reviewed by way of politicians and the general public alike. However in June 2020, the primary Trump management reclassified ICE, which is a part of the Division of Native land Safety, as a “security/sensitive agency.” This designation makes it tougher for other folks to request and obtain details about ICE’s paintings thru Freedom of Data Act data requests.
Just like the Gestapo, ICE can appear performative in its paintings, like when it performed a dramatic July raid of a hashish farm in California wherein balaclava-wearing officials used tear gasoline in opposition to protesters.
The Gestapo in lately’s global
Since International Struggle II and the autumn of the Nazi regime, the time period Gestapo has turn into shorthand in the USA to explain police repression.
The use of the phrase Gestapo to explain the worst conceivable authoritarian oppression has been popularized in widespread motion pictures in the entirety from the 1943 movie “Casablanca” and “The Black Gestapo” in 1975 to “Inglourious Basterds” in 2009 and “Jojo Rabbit” in 2019.
Walz’s remarks in Might, although provocative, have been additionally a ways from remoted in politics. Politicians from all sides of the aisle, in addition to political observers, continuously use Gestapo and Nazi metaphors to assault their combatants.
In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia famously puzzled the time period Gestapo with gazpacho soup in a gaffe that went viral. “Now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress,” she stated.
In 2024, Trump accused President Joe Biden of working a “Gestapo administration” because the Justice Division prosecuted Trump for making an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Total, mentions of the phrase Gestapo in social media higher by way of 184% between 2017 and 2024, in keeping with the nonprofit team Basis to Struggle Antisemitism.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is without doubt one of the organizations that experience condemned making comparisons to the Holocaust and the Nazis for plenty of causes, together with their ancient inaccuracy and since they’re insulting to other folks whose households stay scarred by way of the Holocaust.
A Paraguayan lady whose relative was once detained by way of ICE brokers scuffles with officials within the halls of an immigration court docket in New York Town on July 16, 2025.
Spencer Platt/Getty Pictures
What ancient comparisons in reality say
Analogies can also be helpful for clarifying advanced concepts. However particularly after they stretch throughout a long time and massively other political contexts, they possibility oversimplifying and trivializing historical past.
I imagine that evaluating ICE to the Gestapo is much less a ancient judgment than a mirrored image of recent nervousness – a terror that the U.S. is veering towards authoritarianism paying homage to Nineteen Thirties Germany.
If politicians and different public figures are in search of ancient comparisons to trendy legislation enforcement companies that use critical techniques, there may be, sadly, no scarcity of choices: the Soviet Union’s secret police companies NKVD and KGB, Iran’s former secret police and intelligence company SAVAK or East Germany’s Stasi, to call only a few.
All of the ones organizations denied suspects due procedure and grossly violated human rights so as to offer protection to political regimes – however they don’t essentially simply evaluate to ICE, both.
Nonetheless, politicians and political observers alike maximum incessantly flip to the Gestapo and different Nazi references as a substitute.
In the end, the Gestapo, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust function an impressive, shared cultural reference level. The catastrophes of International Struggle II epitomize the worst conceivable results of evil left unchecked.
They have got turn into the grasp ethical paradigm and a moral compass for the sector lately. In an age of polarization, International Struggle II and the Holocaust stay the reflect wherein American citizens read about their provide.
