Arkansas bishop draws comparisons in U.S. societal dynamics to Nazi Germany

Bishop Anthony Taylor, drawing on personal family losses in the Holocaust, is warning against parallels to Nazi Germany in U.S. society.

Little Rock, Arkansas, Bishop Anthony Taylor issued a statement comparing the “moral decline of our country” to the events that gave rise to Nazi Germany.

Taylor said in the statement that “the moral decline of our country is real” and stressed that “we are doomed to repeat failures of the past if we are not willing to remember and learn from them.” While the U.S. is not Nazi Germany and President Donald Trump is not Hitler, Taylor said, troubling parallels are emerging.

“Polarization and partisanship are poisoning the social fabric of our country,” he said. “In this there are many obvious parallels with [the] 1930s, and that should give us pause.”

The Arkansas bishop’s statement came two days before the internationally recognized date for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Political parallels

“My grandfather lost 20 first cousins in the Holocaust, and so I admittedly tend to view troubling things in today’s world through the lens of 1930s Germany,” Taylor said. “Lest anyone dismiss the remainder of my statement as hyperbolic, I want to be clear that the current times are not identical, and Trump is no Hitler.”

“In Hitler, Germany had an eloquent speaker who was able to tap into the understandable fears and anger of people in the wake of their country’s catastrophic losses in World War I and the financial meltdown at the end of the 1920s,” Taylor continued. “These people longed for their beloved homeland to be great once again, and many disaffected people resonated with Hitler’s talk of ‘real’ Germans, the Aryan race, and his mockery and demonization of those who were different racially or religiously or didn’t share his views.”

Germany’s democracy in the 1930s “was still young” and lacked proper checks and balances, Taylor said. Politicians were “too quick to go along with whatever direction the leadership pushed for,” he said, and those who attempted to oppose Hitler were first silenced by “intimidation and threats,” then later shipped off to concentration camps.

“In that decade, German society moved away from respect for human dignity, peace, and moral restraint,” he said. “I fear that the same dynamics are now happening in our country with the decline of civil discourse.”

Migration

Immigration was “a big issue in the 1930s,” Taylor said, noting that while Germany “was glad for minorities to leave,” due to the Great Depression and rising global tensions, many countries refused to take refugees.

“For instance, the German ocean liner MS St. Louis carrying 937 Jewish refugees was famously denied entry by Cuba, the United States, and Canada and had to return to Europe,” he said. “Some European countries accepted some of those refugees, but about a quarter of them perished later in the Holocaust — a painful reminder of the real human cost of closing borders to legitimate refugees and of inhumane immigration policies.”

The Arkansas bishop recalled how this dynamic impacted his own family, noting that his grandfather’s cousins had attempted to flee Poland in 1939 but were turned away at the border and forced to return to their village in Galicia. “This sealed their fate,” he said. “In July of 1943, they were all caught up in a mass deportation and shipped to the extermination camp at Belzec where they were gassed and cremated.”

The bishop noted that “today our borders remain largely closed for those who are in greatest danger and must flee persecution or poverty” and that U.S. foreign aid has been largely discontinued. Taylor, who recently finished two terms on the board of directors of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) said: “I have a clear understanding of the negative impact” of the funding freeze.

“This is a pro-life issue,” he said. “And it will remain a pro-life issue so long as millions of people continue to live lives trapped in desperate circumstances, where countries with means refuse to help.”

Global policy

After dismantling and weaponizing Germany’s legal system and assuming dictatorial powers, Taylor said, Hitler was able to grow in power until “the now-silenced opposition was powerless to stop him.” The bishop noted how Hitler attacked and invaded other countries “until with Russia he bit off more than he could chew.”

Hitler’s global policy “Germany Over All” (“Deutschland Über Alles”), the bishop said, “had no respect for the sovereignty of other nations, no respect for their established borders, and no respect for the will of the people who lived in those countries.” Rather, the German dictator justified his actions with false reasons, that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s problems, and that Poland had invaded Germany first.

Taylor encouraged Catholics to read Pope Leo XIV’s Jan. 9 address to the Diplomatic Corps in which the pontiff reflects on political themes within St. Augustine’s “City of God,” warning of “the grave dangers to political lie arising from false representations of history, excessive nationalism, and the distortion of the ideal political leader.”

“My hope and prayer is that, along with Pope Leo, we might strive towards peace as a good in itself. And if we think we are powerless to do anything to change the minds of our leaders, well, that’s exactly what many told themselves in Hitler’s time,” Taylor said. “But aside from our political situation, I pray that we will begin to look at the immigrants and refugees in our midst not as enemies or as ‘other.’ Not as different in color or in accent. Not as dangers or risks. But as created in the image and likeness of the same true God — as the stranger in our midst — as Jesus (Mt 25:35).”

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