Arnold Schwarzenegger compared the US Capitol riot last Wednesday to the Kristallnacht pogrom as he shared “painful” memories of growing up in post-war Austria.
In a video released on Sunday, the vocal Trump critic and former Republican governor of California, 73, urged members of the public to rally behind President-elect Joe Biden, who will take the oath of office next week.
The violence in Washington was “America's Night of Broken Glass", he said about the series of pogroms carried out in November 1938 against thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, shuls and homes.
He compared Kristallnacht perpetrators to the Proud Boys, a far-right group founded in 2016 and whose members were pictured at the riot. President Donald Trump was forced to condemn the group last year after initially failing to do so during a presidential debate.
My message to my fellow Americans and friends around the world following this week's attack on the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/blOy35LWJ5
— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) January 10, 2021
"The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol but the mob did not just shatter glass, they shattered the ideas we took for granted.
"They did not just break down the doors of the building that houses American democracy, they trampled the very principles on which our country was founded," Mr Schwarzenegger said.
The former bodybuilder was born in Austria two years after the end of the war, and his late father Gustav was a police chief who joined the Nazi party in 1938.
In his video, he opened up for the first time about the physical abuse suffered at the hands of his father, who died in 1972.
“I grew up in the ruins of a country that suffered the loss of its democracy. Growing up I was surrounded by broken men, drinking away that guilt over their participation in the most evil regime in history.
“Not all of them were rabid antisemites and Nazis. Many just went along, step by step, down the road. They were the people next door.”
His father, he said, “would come home drunk once or twice a week, and he would scream and hit us and scare my mother.”
