Thread by @DrO_aorzoff

Some thoughts about Trump policy, based on an admittedly dire but increasingly obvious precedent: Nazism, before it had fully committed to what we now understand as the Holocaust. A few examples by way of illustration:

Concentration camps are frequently associated with the imprisonment of Jews. That's not fully accurate before Kristallnacht in Nov '38. The camps were built for political prisoners and the "asocial,"

or the ever-widening, usefully flexible category of Germans who weren't on board with Nazi values. They were also a response to street violence between political factions in the early months of Nazism.

Concentration camps were initially **improvised** and local. They were gradually standardized and brought under SS control (not getting into SA-SS conflicts here). Over time they were specialized (creating women's camps, for example) and expanded,

to "reeducate" different groups of "subversives." The point of the camps wasn't initially to murder, though they were always violent. They only became a component of the Nazi murder apparatus once war broke out.

But the camp system and the SS standardized and grew in importance together -- initially ad hoc violence begat a bureaucratized application of that violence, which helped normalize the violence.

Another example: euthanasia ("good death"), a set of murder programs aimed at the disabled. (won't address definition of the term here) First intended victims were disabled babies and toddlers. Program grew, killed kids 5-17, then disabled institutionalized adults.

Sloppily instituted. Families became aware their loved ones had died under suspicious circumstances. Religious leaders denounced program from the pulpit. Hitler publicly ended it in August 1941, quietly changed the program title, kept killing.

Euthanasia continued until the war's last days, killing a total of 200K, including the aged, Jewish non-disabled kids, foreign forced-laborers). Public outcry only changed program's degree of secrecy.

last example: early deportation of Jews. October 1939 Nisko Plan: idea to create a "reservation" of Jews in SE Poland. (Americans, note the term? Nazi social scientists carefully studied our own racism, past and present...but I digress)

Nisko was a swampy region between two rivers, near Lublin. Assumption was that Jews would die faster due to climate. No plans were made for their arrival: innocent people were just dumped w/their suitcases beside railway lines.

Domestic, international press reported on this. Luxemberger Wort, 11/39: "Sometimes trains drive on for forty kilometres beyond Lublin and halt in the open country, where the Jews...have to find themselves primitive accommodation in the surrounding villages."

Nisko Plan was abandoned due to logistical issues, administrative infighting, but also outcry. Later ghettoes and death camps were created in occupied East, kept far from press.

My points: a) The Nazis were not brilliant in their evil. They learned over time. Cruel, ad hoc policy was a system feature, not a bug: it provided useful information about the policy itself, about its intended audiences, about its victims.

b) Nazi policy only evolved in two twinned directions: it became more secret and more effectively destructive. c) multiple possibilities were explored at once. as the regime's goals became clearer, even to itself, so did the paths toward achieving them.

Note, please, that I am NOT SAYING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ARE NAZIS. I'm noting a frighteningly parallel methodology of useful sloppiness, useful cruelty, that amounts to (possibly unplanned) experimentation.

so, I'd expect the administration to roll back the part of its current policy that has attracted the most outcry: asylum-seeking families will probably be kept together from now on. But they'll still be treated like criminals, in violation of international law.

I predict the administration's efforts to criminalize all immigration will not change. But it may well become more secret and harder to fight. New initiatives to reopen and reinvestigate naturalization cases, to arrest/deport green card recipients, make that clear.

They will devote more resources to deporting individuals, rather than concentrating groups in facilities which might attract protesters or provide uncomfortable photo-ops. You get the idea. They'll learn, and their would-be successors will learn too.

Historians of Nazism used to bat away comparisons between the present day and Nazi Europe. It's such an extreme analogy that it has to be used with great care (as I have tried but no doubt failed to do here), as precisely as possible, hedged very specifically.

But perhaps it's time to go public with the analogies we have been making amongst ourselves, #twitterstorians. Historians (especially of the Nazi period) have been profoundly worried about Trump's rhetoric from the moment his campaign began.

Now his policy is bearing out our concern. It'd be flip to say "we know how this ends" -- history as a discipline doesn't get to rerun the same experiment, even if we wanted to. And we don't in this case. But we know one way this kind of thing ended, once.