Given his boyhood in Nazi Germany, one of the most obvious questions Charles Klotzer can be asked concerns the parallels he may see between that time and place and what is happening in the United States today. His answers are somewhat encouraging.
Klotzer acknowledges he is surprised by the degree and speed with which President Donald Trump has been able to consolidate power. “I never thought the democratic impulses (in the United States) would decline as much as they have already,” he said.
Congress and the Supreme Court have yielded to the Executive Branch, he said, amidst little protest from the old-time (Republican) elite. “Their silence (the Bush/Reagan Republicans’) is partly responsible for the emergence of the Trump tsunami,” he said.
But on the whole, he said, he is still “confident” that what is happening now in the United States is only “a passing phase.” Klotzer acknowledges he is optimistic by nature.
People on both the left and right in the United States, he said, profess loyalty to the Constitution, “the backbone of American values. And I think there are enough people who (really) are loyal to it. … Even some of the judges he (Trump) appointed oppose some of the things he does.”
The American free press, Klotzer noted, also stands in stark contrast to the information environment in Nazi Germany, where Hitler used the Reichstag fire of February 1933 to terminate press freedom. In the United States today, the decline of local newspapers is “another dismal aspect of everything,” but strong national media institutions have done “a reasonably good job” of standing up to Trump, Klotzer said.
Finally, the U.S. economy is immeasurably stronger than the crushed economy Hitler used to help him take power.
All of this means the environment in the United States today is very much different from the one in Germany in the 1930s.
“In Germany the whole population was caught up in the hypnotism,” Klotzer said. In contrast, Trump has made himself so unpopular that Klotzer thinks the Democrats will do well in the 2026 election if it is free and fair — and the likelihood, he thinks, is it will be. By 2029, he adds, a Democrat could well be back in the White House.
On a related topic, Klotzer also doesn’t see anti-Semitism in the United States as remotely comparable to what it was in Germany.
Of course there is anti-Semitism in America, he said, but it “cannot be compared to the infiltration of the poison throughout Germany” during the Nazi period.
The Israeli government’s war policies in Gaza have contributed to the rise in anti-Semitism here, he added in an interview in September, a month before the recent cease-fire. Those policies have been “unacceptable,” he said, and entirely contrary “to what Judaism represents, at least what it represents to me.”
