Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz lately sparked controversy by evaluating U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Nazi Germany’s infamous secret police, the Gestapo.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Walz stated throughout a Might 2025 speech on the College of Minnesota Regulation College’s graduation ceremony.
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared,” Walz added.
ICE, tasked with implementing immigration insurance policies, has dramatically elevated the variety of nationwide arrests of immigrants since President Donald Trump returned to workplace in January 2025. ICE’s arrests of immigrants have greater than doubled in 38 states since then.
In current months, different Democratic politicians, together with U.S Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, have additionally in contrast ICE to the Gestapo, or Adolf Hitler’s “secret police,” as Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts stated in April.
However do ICE’s ways truly resemble these of the Gestapo?
As a result of I’m a scholar of recent Germany and the Holocaust, individuals commonly ask me if this analogy is correct. The reply is sophisticated.
The Gestapo arrests a gaggle of Jewish males hiding in a cellar in Poland in 1939, in what was presumably a staged German propaganda photograph.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Photographs
Understanding the Gestapo
The Nazi regime established the Gestapo, quick for the German phrase Geheime Staatspolizei, that means secret state police, quickly after Hitler grew to become chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Amongst different tasks, the Gestapo was tasked with investigating political crimes and monitoring opposition exercise. It later enforced racial legal guidelines in Germany and throughout occupied Europe.
As a part of its each day work, the Gestapo recognized and monitored the regime’s political enemies. It arrested, interrogated, detained and tortured suspects and despatched others to focus camps. To determine suspects, it usually relied on nameless denunciations that got here not solely from zealous Nazis, but additionally from disgruntled neighbors or enterprise rivals who tipped off the Gestapo to Jews and different individuals.
Whereas the Gestapo was comparatively small when it comes to personnel, it projected a picture of being, as one scholar wrote, “omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.”
It enforced the regime’s will and suppressed dissent not by way of sheer manpower however by making a pervasive sense of concern. This aura of menace and terror has lengthy outlived the Nazi regime itself.
ICE’s operations
ICE, with round 21,000 officers and workers working in a rustic of greater than 340 million, is smaller each in absolute phrases and on a per capita foundation. At its peak between 1943 and 1945, the Gestapo had between 40,000 and 50,000 personnel in a rustic of 79 million.
ICE is ready to broaden its work within the subsequent few years with an extra US$75 billion in funding that Congress appropriated in July as a part of Trump’s tax and spending invoice.
And whereas ICE focuses on immigration, the Gestapo had a extra expansive function. It was accountable for suppressing all types of political dissent, not simply violations of immigration regulation.
ICE operates with vastly extra superior applied sciences that didn’t exist within the Nineteen Forties, together with facial recognition and social media monitoring.
There may be technically extra transparency round ICE’s work than the Gestapo’s, since ICE is a federal company that’s topic to its work and data being reviewed by politicians and the general public alike. However in June 2020, the primary Trump administration reclassified ICE, which is a part of the Division of Homeland Safety, as a “security/sensitive agency.” This designation makes it tougher for individuals to request and obtain details about ICE’s work by way of Freedom of Info Act data requests.
Just like the Gestapo, ICE can appear performative in its work, like when it carried out a dramatic July raid of a hashish farm in California through which balaclava-wearing officers used tear gasoline in opposition to protesters.
The Gestapo in right now’s world
Since World Warfare II and the autumn of the Nazi regime, the time period Gestapo has turn out to be shorthand in america to explain police repression.
Utilizing the phrase Gestapo to explain the worst doable authoritarian oppression has been popularized in widespread motion pictures in every little thing from the 1943 movie “Casablanca” and “The Black Gestapo” in 1975 to “Inglourious Basterds” in 2009 and “Jojo Rabbit” in 2019.
Walz’s remarks in Might, although provocative, have been additionally removed from remoted in politics. Politicians from either side of the aisle, in addition to political observers, commonly use Gestapo and Nazi metaphors to assault their opponents.
In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia famously confused the time period Gestapo with gazpacho soup in a gaffe that went viral. “Now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress,” she stated.
In 2024, Trump accused President Joe Biden of working a “Gestapo administration” because the Justice Division prosecuted Trump for making an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Total, mentions of the phrase Gestapo in social media elevated by 184% between 2017 and 2024, in response to the nonprofit group Basis to Fight Antisemitism.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is among the many organizations which have condemned making comparisons to the Holocaust and the Nazis for a lot of causes, together with their historic inaccuracy and since they’re insulting to individuals whose households stay scarred by the Holocaust.
A Paraguayan lady whose relative was detained by ICE brokers scuffles with officers within the halls of an immigration court docket in New York Metropolis on July 16, 2025.
Spencer Platt/Getty Photographs
What historic comparisons actually say
Analogies could be helpful for clarifying complicated concepts. However particularly once they stretch throughout many years and vastly totally different political contexts, they danger oversimplifying and trivializing historical past.
I consider that evaluating ICE to the Gestapo is much less a historic judgment than a mirrored image of recent anxiousness – a concern that the U.S. is veering towards authoritarianism paying homage to Nineteen Thirties Germany.
If politicians and different public figures are searching for historic comparisons to trendy regulation enforcement businesses that use extreme ways, there’s, sadly, no scarcity of choices: the Soviet Union’s secret police businesses NKVD and KGB, Iran’s former secret police and intelligence company SAVAK or East Germany’s Stasi, to call just some.
All of these organizations denied suspects due course of and grossly violated human rights to be able to defend political regimes – however they don’t essentially simply examine to ICE, both.
Nonetheless, politicians and political observers alike most frequently flip to the Gestapo and different Nazi references as a substitute.
In the end, the Gestapo, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust function a robust, shared cultural reference level. The catastrophes of World Warfare II epitomize the worst doable outcomes of evil left unchecked.
They’ve turn out to be the grasp ethical paradigm and an moral compass for the world right now. In an age of polarization, World Warfare II and the Holocaust stay the mirror through which People look at their current.
