Americans Keep Saying, “This Feels Like Nazi Germany"
That Is Not Quite Right.
We have a habit in this country of looking at the monsters of history through a telescope, convinced they are a world away. When we see the heavy boots of the state — the raids, the cages, the Department of Homeland Security’s shadow falling over the vulnerable — we cry that it looks like the Gestapo. We say we are “becoming” Nazi Germany.
But there is a far more terrifying truth: Hitler didn’t build his hell from scratch. He didn’t have to. He looked across the Atlantic, and he saw us.
See, the road to the Holocaust did not begin in Berlin. It passed through lecture halls, grant committees, and the Ivy league institutions of America.
Long before 2026, America had already proven that they believe some lives are worth less than others through eugenics programs, laws targeting Native Americans, and Jim Crow laws. In the early 1900s, Yale stood at the center of American eugenics, helping seed the ideology that led to the executions of millions of people.
The Holocaust was not a sudden rupture in human morality. It was the logical endpoint of ideas that had already been rehearsed, funded, and validated in America. At the time, these were neve reviewed as radical ideas, and the danger was in the fact that they were considered respectable. They were the ideas of "important" men in high places.
The History Books Lied: The Century-Old Roots of America’s Nazi Problem
In school, we are taught a sanitized version of America. We are taught that America has always been the good guy. The freedom fighter. The country that steps in when things get bad because freedom matters to us more than anything. If you do not stand for freedom, you are not an American.
That same framing shows up when we learn about the Holocaust. We are taught that America ultimately stepped in to save Jewish people from Hitler’s terror. I remember being in seventh grade watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I remember the class talking about how shocking it was that America did not step in sooner.
That was the only criticism we could have. That we waited too long. We were never taught the full story. Most people still are not.
The Nazi race laws (Nuremberg Laws) were created based off of American sterilization statutes, segregation policies, and academic eugenic ‘theories’ that had already been tested on Black Americans, disabled people, Indigenous communities, the mentally ill, and the poor. There is no speculation here, only Hitler's own words. Writing in Mein Kampf, he praised the United States as the sole nation moving toward the 'volkisch' (racial) state he envisioned for Germany.
It started way back to when Hitler was a child. As a child, he loved the novels of Karl May. These were tales of a white pioneer named Old Shatterhand who conquered the American West. In those pages, Hitler did not see a tragedy of indigenous displacement. He saw a success story.
He viewed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the ‘internment camps,’ and the reservation system as the ultimate proof of concept for his own expansion. Hitler often cited this as his justification for Lebensraum.
When Hitler read about the Trail of Tears, about families collapsing in the mud, children starving behind military lines, entire nations reduced to mass graves, he did not recoil in disgust. Instead, he used it as the foundation for his own genocide. His words.
And when the Third Reich began to codify its hatred, it looked at American law. A Nazi lawyer named Heinrich Krieger studied the United States with academic precision. He reported back to Berlin that America possessed the ‘most advanced’ race laws in the world.
Hitler called Madison Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, his “Bible” because it promoted white supremacy and eugenics. He also idolized Henry Ford, praising him in Mein Kampf and using Ford’s antisemitic pamphlet, The International Jew, as Nazi propaganda. Hitler even kept a portrait of Ford in his office and was inspired by his industrial success.
The Nazis admired how America had forbidden interracial marriage. And they were fascinated by our one drop rule. This was a legal mechanism so extreme that even some Nazis initially worried it might be too harsh for the German public. So many do not realize that as of 2026, it’s only been 59 years since interracial marriage became legal in all 50 U.S. states.
We held the Nuremberg Trials to punish an ideology we had refined in our own courtrooms. We put the world on trial for using our script, but we never held a Jim Crow Trial.
There is a hope for a reckoning in 2026 — people are calling for the American Nuremberg trials for the deaths of detainees and Americans at the hands of DHS — a hope that the scales will finally balance.
But the scale was broken long ago by a paperclip. Operation Paperclip. When America brought the Reich’s scientists home and gave them new names and new labs, we didn’t just save their lives — we saved their logic. You don’t put yourself on trial after all.
We never had a Jim Crow Trial for the same reason we will never have an American Nuremberg — we decided long ago that certain ‘truths’ were too profitable to prosecute
And these ideologies and laws that the Nazis loved? They didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They were dreamed up by the ‘smartest’ people in America. While Jim Crow was happening in the streets, the ‘science’ behind it was being taught in the classrooms of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
The Nazis didn’t look at America as a backwards country; they looked at us as a teacher. They saw that our most prestigious universities and our richest families — like the Rockefellers and the Carnegies — were already spending millions to prove that some lives were worth more than others.
All of this supported by the very men who got rich during the ‘industrial revolution’ and made millions from world war II.
The Production of Non-Persons
American eugenics normalized the logic of murder by wrapping it in paperwork, credentials, and science. The Nazis did not begin with Jews. They began with the disabled, the institutionalized, the poor, and those already deemed unfit to live. By the time genocide reached its most visible victims, the moral groundwork had already been laid.
While the world saw the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution as beacons of progress, these organizations were bankrolling eugenics.
They didn’t just fund “research”; they funded the infrastructure of human culling.
The Rockefeller Foundation poured millions into the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany. This wasn’t a secret. They were intentionally funding “Racial Hygiene.” They paid for the salaries and the microscopes of men like Otmar von Verschuer, who would later mentor Josef Mengele, often called the ‘Angel of Death’ of Nazi Germany because of the sheer amount of deaths under his watch.
Even after the Nazis took power in 1933, Rockefeller continued funding German eugenicists like Ernst Rüdin, the architect of Hitler’s required sterilization laws.
To these men, humanity was just a corporate ledger, and the “weak” were a line item that needed to be deleted to ensure a “purer” profit. This was also the curriculum of the elite. Professors at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton taught that social problems like poverty or “feeblemindedness” were ‘biological crimes.’
They created the term “Life Unworthy of Life” (Lebensunwertes Leben), but the concept was refined in American lecture halls. By labeling human beings as “defective,” these Ivy League academics gave the Nazis the ‘scientific’ permission to stop seeing people and start seeing ‘waste.’
In 1927 Virginia, America ran a facility specifically to house and sterilize the "unfit." This is where Carrie Buck was sterilized, leading to the Supreme Court case (Buck V. Bell) where Justice Holmes infamously declared,
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
Around the same time, American doctor named Dr. Harry Haiselden allowed "defective" babies to die and advocated for their elimination. He often refused to perform needed surgery for children born with severe birth defects and allowed the babies to die.
J.P. Morgan? Yep, he was involved, too, and his influence went far beyond banking and into institutions his family controlled, especially the American Museum of Natural History under his nephew Henry Fairfield Osborn. The museum became a hub for eugenics and hosted major congresses in 1921 and 1932 that sold the ideology to politicians and the public as “science.”
The Carnegie Institution also funded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. It run by two men named Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin. Their goal was to create a "registry" of the American bloodline and systematically prune it.
If you’re anything like me, Palantir just came to mind. Their modernized version of this is ImmigrationOS which also creates entire networks of families.
The Carnegie Institution walked so that Palantir could run.
And yes, even “euthanasia” was America’s idea, as the 1911 Carnegie-funded report from that Island explicitly proposed “lethal chambers” to eliminate those deemed a burden to the ‘national germ-plasm.’
Harry Laughlin, the man running the show on Long Island, drafted something called the "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law."
It was a template for states to use. When the Nazis wrote their own "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" in 1933, they modeled it closely on Laughlin’s version. The Nazis were so grateful for Laughlin's work that Heidelberg University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1936 for being a "pioneer" of racial hygiene.
Laughlin accepted it proudly.
And all of this matters because the Holocaust didn’t start with Auschwitz.
It started with a “mercy” request for a child. In 1939, the parents of a baby named Gerhard Kretschmar wrote to Hitler, asking for permission to have their son — who was born blind and missing limbs — legally “put to sleep.”
Hitler saw this as the perfect opening. He dispatched his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to authorize the killing, effectively making the state the final arbiter of who deserved to live. This single case became the spark for Aktion T4. The first, although less often talked about, genocide of the Nazis.
The Nazis established a "Committee for the Scientific Registration of Hereditary and Severe Diseases."
They forced midwives and doctors to report every baby born with "defects," and then, under the guise of "specialized medical care," the state began taking these children from their families.
Parents were told their children were being sent to elite clinics for revolutionary treatment. In reality, they were being sent to killing centers.
The Nazis used the exact “economic burden” logic championed by that ERO office on Long Island. They calculated the cost of “feeding the unfit” down to the last pfennig, convincing the public that killing these children was an act of fiscal and biological responsibility.
Families knew that when the ‘grey busses’ arrived, they would never see their loved ones again. But they didn’t stand up against it. Which just shows us how fascism slowly creeps in.
When the children arrived at these clinics, they were murdered by starvation or lethal injection. When that became too slow, they developed the first gas chambers using carbon monoxide — the literal prototypes for the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
By the time the Nazis began the mass deportation of Jewish families, they had already murdered 70,000 to 300,000 of their own “unfit” citizens — the children, the mentally ill, the homeless, the addict. They didn’t have to invent a system of genocide; they just had to apply the “science” of eugenics, which had been peer-reviewed in America, to a new target.
When Nazi doctors were finally put on trial at Nuremberg for their eugenics and genocide programs, they didn't plead insanity. They simply read the American laws aloud. They cited Buck v. Bell. They pointed to California and Virginia and asked, "How is our crime different from your law?"
To them, it was all the same, it was simply the killing of the “non-person.”
How the Truth Was Buried in American History Books:
But wait, why were we told otherwise? Well, because the elites wanted it that way.
Before the U.S. even entered World War II, the Rockefeller Foundation who quietly funded eugenics, also secretly funded the Council on Foreign Relations to plan the postwar world in secret. The project, called the War and Peace Studies, existed because the U.S. State Department did not have the staff, money, or long-range planning capacity to do this work itself. So a private, elite ‘think tank’ stepped in and effectively performed the job of government.
Between 1939 and 1945, a small group of experts quietly wrote plans for what the war was supposed to accomplish and what the world would look like afterward. Funded by Rockefeller money, they designed institutions like the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank in private, and the U.S. government later used those plans with little public input.
If you don’t know what those are:
The IMF controls countries by loaning money only if they cut basic services.
The World Bank locks poorer nations into Western corporate systems through “development” projects.
The United Nations decides who gets sanctioned, punished, or invaded.
The real point is that these systems were privately designed by the privately owned Council on Foreign Relations with Rockefeller Foundation money, adopted into our government without our say, and have spent decades since moving decisions about money, war, and survival out of public reach and into elite hands.
Because these "rules" were built into the very foundation of global law and money, the system now runs like an automated machine that protects elite interests regardless of who is elected or who is still alive.
And after the war, the Rockefeller Foundation went a step further. In its 1946 annual report, it openly stated that it funded a “History of World War II” through the CFR. The purpose was not neutral scholarship.
The report actually explicitly says the goal was to prevent a repeat of the post–World War I period, when journalists and historians challenged official narratives and exposed profiteering, imperial motives, and diplomatic failures.
In other words, they wanted to get ahead of the narrative.
We spend our days looking for the ghost of the Third Reich in the heavy boots of the state, terrified that we are becoming something foreign, something monstrous. But the ultimate horror isn’t that America is turning into Nazi Germany; it’s that the machinery of the Holocaust was built with American parts, tuned by American intellectuals, and fueled by American law.
Hitler didn’t infect us; he was our star pupil who proved that our own ideas could be scaled to industrial slaughter. So when we look at the cages, the raids, and the silent complicity of 2026, we aren’t witnessing a democracy sliding into a new fascism. We are witnessing a history that has finally circled back to its source. The darkness hasn’t invaded us — it has just come home.
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This is literally what I was feeling. I just saw a guy in his car that posted a video saying, “Is this Germany?” Thank you SO MUCH for this post. It needs to be said.
We set the blueprint and we’re out here doing it again. Hitler admired our Civil War tactics. I’ve said it before when comparing the Trump/ Epstein relationship or Trump/ Putin, “It’s like the devil admiring his own reflection.” This repeat in history is literally just that, the admiration of evil in reflection.
Your writing just keeps getting richer and better with each well-researched article. This is a phenomenal and scary part of our national history, largely erased from view by the powers that be. When we say about the horrors of the immigration deportation actions, "this is not us," yes, it us, we have been exceptional at cruelty throughout our existence, basing our actions on our exceptionalism. That is white male supremacism. Keep writing. Thank you