The bad faith of these accusations was as palpable as the absurdity of so exact a comparison. They were both wrong and insulting. But let’s spool on five years to find another public figure being criticised for Hitler comparisons. In 2014, while on a visit to Canada, the then-heir to the throne was overheard telling a well-wisher that the pretext for the Russian annexation of Crimea reminded him of Hitler’s various late 30s territorial grabs. This apparently was an unbecoming thing for the future King to say.
In Charles’s case, however, what he said was absolutely true. In fact, it was truer than even he knew. He did no disservice to the history, nor was he in any way diminishing the eventual full horrors of Nazism. He merely illustrated where such aggression can end up.
I took Lineker’s tweet to suggest that the language in which some people — including members of the government — have couched their hostility to those arriving in boats is dangerous. And in his tweet he used the example with which people are more familiar. He did not reference the Holocaust, though some people have argued that given we know how the story ended, he must have intended a comparison.
However, the literature of the 1930s is clear enough. At the time — lamentably — almost no one believed or wanted to believe that the language of “human vermin” culminated in physical extermination. The governments of the democracies didn’t believe it. Most Germans didn’t believe it. Most Jews didn’t believe it. Indeed, as Bernard Wasserstein’s excellent new book about his family reminds us, as late as mid-1939, the Nazis were frantically deporting displaced Jews back over the Polish border because they were about to lose their Polish citizenship.
So Lineker’s reference to language, though not really appropriate (though “invasion” is, I think, a highly inflammatory word) can’t be taken as some kind of reduction of the Holocaust.
There is the other point I want to address here. If we agree that Jews have a greater interest in an accurate understanding of the Holocaust, then I don’t agree that the same is true of Nazism or even of German racial nationalism. For example, the Nuremberg Race Laws applied to mixed race and black Germans as well as to Jews and Roma.
In 1937, a sterilisation programme was aimed at the mixed-race adolescents, mostly the children of German women and French troops who had occupied the Rhineland, and nearly 400 were forcibly sterilised. Not the Holocaust, for sure, but something all the same. My point? Jews don’t own the Nazis. Everyone does.
