My German family history makes us current events that can be observed aging

As a granddaughter of German Jews who were persecuted under the Nazis rule, I see terrible echoes of the past of my family in the attack of the Trump government on civil institutions, academic freedom and human rights.

In the first 100 days of the second Trump concept ,, News about the attacks by his administration on scientists, leading thinkers and academic institutions, compliance with these institutions such as universities, hospitals and law firms for this pressure as well as illegal prison terms and deportations are unbearable Korollarchen for my family history.

Such citizens' institutions played a key role in the persecution of my great -grandfather Prof. Dr. Max Flesch, a German doctor, author and academic Jewish descent, who lived in and near Frankfurt. As a “Semit”, he was robbed by the right to practice, teach and publish medicine. These attacks were made possible by academic and medical facilities that voluntarily and sometimes enthusiastically adhere to the NS mandates.

Max Flesch, a productive author, was never published again in Germany. The German National Academy of Sciences emitted it as a “non-ass” in 1938, even though it is now remembered in its headquarters. These academic, free speech and professional restrictions began nine years before he and my great-grandmother Hella began out of their house and deported to the Terezin concentration camp, 30 miles north of Prague in the Czech Republic.

I often think about Max 'thoughts about the loss of his rights in these nine years, which were defined in an unpublished memoir with the title pariah that he wrote during this time. I think of the increasing isolation of Max and Hella, when fewer and fewer friends or family members were visited, an isolation that had sharpened after both children had fled the country this decade. I wish I could go with them and talk to them as a brave niece who was forbidden by their “stalks” family members to visit their full Jewish elders, but they also visited east in a holding camp shortly before their deportation.

Attacks on perceived enemies of Nazis began immediately when Hitler took over power by taking her work, her rights and your freedom of speech away.

The parallels are shaken.

The dismissal of government employees

Day 67, Hitler: The Nazi term awesome circuit means “synchronization” or “in the row”. The Nazis identified all aspects of German society with their ideology and their goals. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, also in science, “its opponents, be it real or imaginary, was able to remove the regime from the public service”.

Day 1, Trump: The new Ministry of Government (Doge) has the swaths of government employees, even entire departments, removed from the federal public service, including violence in independent agencies.

Restriction of the rights of the students

Day 76, Hitler: In April 1933, the newly adopted anti-Semitic legislation ordered K-12 schools and universities to rule out Jewish professors and students.

Day 54, Trump: The administration sent a letter to Columbia University, in which restrictions on student rights, academic freedom and freedom of speech were requested. Shortly afterwards, Columbia sold the dozens of students who were allegedly involved, suspended and revoke the dozens of students in the previous year for their participation in Campus protests. The American Association of University professors called These actions “an outrageous attack on freedom of speech” and “condemn[ed] According to the most possible dimensions, every university that would sacrifice their own students to the demands of an authoritarian government. “

Prison camp

Shortly after Hitler took over power, security forces removed people from their houses, jobs and the streets in detention.

Day 51, Hitler: Hitler's storm labeling or SA (Storm Troopers) opened in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin, one of her first detention centers or concentration camps in Oranienburg. A hundred days later, Hans Flesch, my grandmother's first cousin (an innovator in the new radio field at the time), was arrested and locked up in the Oranienburg camp.

Day 48, Trump: Mahmoud Khalil, a university scientist from Columbia and Us Green Card owner, was arrested in his house in New York for his support for the war in Gaza. His moving letter from a internment camp in Louisiana was read to protests on campus in the USA over a month later, Khalil remains in custody.

Seventeen days later, Rumeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student with a valid student visa at Tufts University, was kidnapped on the street on the brightly daily light of masked men in Somerville, Massachusetts, and then sent it to a detention center in Louisiana to have a mission in the student newspapers. According to a Federal Court of Justice, Öztürk has been released from ICE in Louisiana since then and returned to Massachusetts on May 10.

Every day when I wake up and before I go to bed, I think of Mahmoud and Rumeysa, and I think of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father and Andry Hernández Romero, the gay make -up artist, incorrectly deported without proper procedures in Hellish conditions in Salvadoran's internship -Hernándezröm -Anungslager – Hernándezr. Photographs that I cannot remove.

I think of my great -grandparents Max and Hella, who were no longer confiscated by their house, their life and their agency, to two preliminary detention centers, then the terrible train journey to the east and finally Max 'death, which was described in a letter after the war by a mit -barrack's death, seven days before seventeen days, unhealthy.

In Germany, the NS regime expanded its bans from the public service to academics in 1938 who were married to Jews. My grandfather Albert Kruse was said that if he did not divorce his wife Ilse Flesch Kruse, he would lose his teaching job. Instead, the couple escaped Nazi persecution shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, by emigrating to the United States with their two young sons.

Mandatory sterilization in Nazi -Germany

In Nazi Germany, the participation of the bourgeois institution quickly enabled major atrocities. The medical profession was probably the first major civil society sector to actively and voluntarily aimed at a mass scale with Nazi horrors: minorities:

Day 142, Hitler: The “Law to prevent descendants with hereditary diseases”, an mandatory sterilization law that aimed at those with disabilities. German doctors and hospitals worked together on mass standards and sterilized only 62,400 people with hereditary disabilities in the first year of the law and in the following years hundreds of thousands – a service that the government could not carry without the participation of civil society without mass civil society. 89 percent of those who introduced their sterilization this year against “hereditary health courts”, chaired by a judge and two doctors, were denied and sterilized anyway.

The subsequent story is known. After the sterilizations, large murder of gas chambers of people with disabilities in Germany followed. These tactics were later used in a massive extent in concentration camps in Germany and in the fields against a wider part of the unwanted bars.

We do not know now what our cooperation with the Trump administration will lead to. In Germany we know that it ended in a tragedy. As I did for Hella last month, I glowed a season for my great -grandfather Max Flesch last week to remind his death 82 years ago in the tierzin camp in the occupied Czech territory.