Nazi comparison

Nazi comparisons are comparisons of events, people or institutions with those of the time of National Socialism . This also includes Nazi comparisons , Hitler comparisons , reductio ad Hitlerum , Goebbels comparisons or comparisons with other leading figures of the Third Reich .

Use of terms

After the linguists Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, the term Nazi comparison was introduced as a neologism by the mass media in the 1980s and has since appeared again and again, especially in press comments. The term describes a discursive practice that violates conversation maxims and deliberately misuses the cognitive role of comparison . In this context it is often used as a so-called fallacy or murder argument and is also misused in political debates to defame the political opponent. The historian Jürgen Kocka, for example, describes the equation of the GDR with the Nazi regime (both “equally criminal , both to the ' empire of evil '”) as an “abusive argument from manslaughter”. It must be distinguished from scientific comparisons in this regard. However, as the example of the Freisler comparison shows, Nazi comparisons do not necessarily serve illegitimate purposes in every case , but can also serve legitimate purposes , as with the Freisler comparison in the context of a legal dispute .

According to the political scientist Norbert Seitz , "the Nazi analogy [...] has been an effective manslaughter arsenal in political disputes since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany". He distinguished between three phases of use: in the Cold War by equating “ real-life socialism ” with the Nazi state as an anti-communist propaganda tool for the political right; in the 1960s, the left was criticized by the APO due to moral outrage towards behavior in the Federal Republic with the Nazi past. Finally, the NS comparison was used after the so-called Historikerstreit 1986 as a result of the “growing scandalization of politics” and the “dehistoricization of the Holocaust ”.

According to Seitz, however, the comparison is not a purely German phenomenon, since many criminal dictators and political leaders around the world are compared with Hitler, such as, for example, since the 1990s: Saddam Hussein , Slobodan Milošević , Jassir Arafat , Osama bin Laden . At the same time, the Shoah appears as a metaphor in the Kuwait Desert Storm campaign in 1991, during the Kosovo war in 1998 and after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or in the fight against the Taliban as an "equivalent to Hitler's SS". The Holocaust has long been used internationally as a metaphor for “absolutely evil ”. According to the social psychologist Harald Welzer, the past would be de-historicized and could be used as a “legitimizing label in the fight against evil states and dictators”.

NS comparisons, in particular to the Holocaust such as " Babycaust " (abortions), are therefore also criticized as relativizing the crimes of National Socialism . In particular, such comparisons were often used in the Catholic Church and the environmental and peace movement after the term Holocaust was discovered in Germany in 1979 by the television series of the same name as a new "horror word" and served as a warning of a nuclear danger . According to Stötzel and Eitz, a past that had not been mastered became a “mastery of the present”. Events that are historically unique in the general understanding would be put into perspective by comparisons and would be used “for the purpose of instrumentalization in today's disputes”. By contrast, right-wing extremist terms such as “ bomb holocaust ” served to “set off”.

The French linguist Marie-Hélène Pérennec noted an accumulation of Nazi comparisons since the end of the 1990s and said that “the political discourse has become so radicalized for a decade that such derailments can happen to almost all speakers and that it is difficult to to differentiate between provocation and awkwardness. ”To explain the increase, she refers to Harald Welzer's presumption of attention:“ You always get attention when you play the Nazi card. ”But Pérennec suspects:“ In the meantime, people have got used to these insults and heed them they hardly anymore. ”The most important consequence of this process, however, is“ the trivialization of the crimes of the Nazis, ”which is caused by getting used to Nazi comparisons.

Examples

• The German Federal Minister of Justice, Herta Däubler-Gmelin , was not reappointed in 2002 after she was accused of bringing the policies of George W. Bush close to those of Adolf Hitler .

• On May 3, 2005 Michael Wolffsohn published an essay on the so-called grasshopper debate in the Rheinische Post with the name “On May 8”, the 60th anniversary of the end of the National Socialist dictatorship :

“60 years 'later' today people are again equated with animals which - this implicitly resonates - must be destroyed as a 'plague', 'exterminated'. Today this 'plague' is called 'locusts', back then ' rats ' or ' Jewish pigs '. Words from the dictionary of the monster , because humans are denied being human. "

• Several German daily newspapers, including the Frankfurter Rundschau , were faced with demands for pain and suffering before Russian courts in 2009 after they were alleged to have compared the “ Naschi ” youth movement with the Hitler Youth .

• In his All Saints sermon 2009 Cardinal Joachim Meisner drew parallels between the views of Richard Dawkins and those of the National Socialists by writing: “Similar to how the National Socialists once saw in the individual human being primarily only the bearer of the genetic material of his race, also defines the forerunner of the new godless , the Englishman Richard Dawkins, the human being as 'the packaging of the only important genes', the preservation of which is the primary purpose of our existence ”.

• At a Christmas party of the doctors' association in 2012 its chairman presented Andreas Köhler , the unification of Europe on a par with the conquest of the Nazis:

“ Julius Caesar , Charlemagne , Napoleon , Adolf Hitler, Angela Merkel - the list of statesmen who tried to unite Europe is very long. And the efforts always failed because of the following: Nobody can imagine living together in one and the same house in Europe. "

• When in 2012 the ethical justifiability of religiously motivated circumcision of underage boys was discussed in German-speaking countries, Ariel Muzicant commented in the Kleine Zeitung that a ban on circumcision "would be equivalent to an attempt at another Shoah, the annihilation of the Jewish people - only this time with spiritual means ”.

• After corresponding allegations by the Turkish government against Germany and the Netherlands due to the cancellation of election campaign events by Turkish politicians in March 2017, Holocaust survivors in the International Auschwitz Committee "with increasing indignation and bewilderment rejected the absurd Nazi comparisons by Turkish politicians" as attempts to discriminate and intimidate European democracies .

• In April 2017, the press spokesman for the White House, Sean Spicer, caused a sensation when he found the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to be more despicable than Hitler because of the use of poison gas he had ordered in the Syrian civil war , who had refrained from using poison gas in the Second World War. Although he gassed the Jews, Assad gassed his own people. A Los Angeles Times critic pointed out that Spicer was thereby constructing a historically false distinction between Jews and the German people. His designation "Holocaust centers" instead of extermination camps also shows great ignorance.

• In a decision of May 31, 2017, the Munich Higher Regional Court decided that it could be in the pursuit of legitimate interests to compare a judge with Roland Freisler , provided that this is done in the context of pending court proceedings and the legal argumentation does not take a back seat in the battle for the law .

• After the Democratic Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described the refugee camps on the southern border of the USA as concentration camps , a debate arose in the USA about the admissibility of such comparisons. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum published a statement in June 2019 that rejected all analogies to the Holocaust as fundamentally inadmissible. Over 500 scientists, including Omer Bartov , Timothy Snyder and David Abraham , turned against this in an open letter and described the museum's attitude as "deeply ahistorical". It is the "essence of Holocaust education to warn the public of dangerous developments that promote human rights violations , pain and suffering. Pointing out similarities in other times and spaces is essential for this ”.

See also

• Godwin's law
• Fascistoid
• Red Herring (rhetoric)

literature

• Thorsten Eitz, Georg Stötzel : Dictionary of " coming to terms with the past " . Olms, 2007, ISBN 978-3-487-13377-5 .
• Frederik Weinert : Nazi Comparisons and Political Correctness . An analysis of language and communication studies . Baden-Baden, 2018, ISBN 978-3-8487-5468-7 .
• Wolfram Wette : A Hitler of the Orient ? Nazi comparisons in the war propaganda of democracies . In: trade union monthly books , vol. 54 (2003), 4, pp. 231–242.

Web links

• Documentation. Nazi comparisons keep causing scandals. In: FAZ.net , September 20, 2002 (collection of known Nazi comparisons 1979–2002).
• Pieke Biermann : Why Nazi comparisons are rhetorical bullets
• Marie-Hélène Pérennec: Nazi comparisons in today's political discourse. On the dangers of wrong analogies (PDF; 959 kB). In: Lylia , issue 16, June 2008 ( University of Lyon ).
• Norbert Seitz : Not without my Nazi. Koch, Kohl, Däubler-Gmelin: Why Germans keep getting entangled in Nazi comparisons. In: Die Zeit No. 52, December 18, 2002 (essay on the occasion of the federal election campaign 2002 ).
• Bernd Ulrich : Always with the club: Why the Germans are being covered with Nazi comparisons again - and how they should deal with them. In: Die Zeit No. 5, February 2, 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christoph Studt (ed.): "Servant of the State" or "Resistance Between the Lines" ?: The role of the press in the "Third Reich". Lit Verlag 2007, p. 49. Preview in the Google book search
2. ↑ Thorsten Eitz, Georg Stötzel: Dictionary of coping with the past. Georg Olms Verlag, 2007, p. 489.
3. ↑ Marie-Hélène Pérennec: Nazi comparisons in today's political discourse. On the dangers of false analogies ( Memento from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 959 kB). In: langues.univ-lyon2.fr , June 2008 (Lylia, issue 16).
4. ^ Jürgen Kocka: National Socialism and SED dictatorship in comparison . In: same: unification crisis. To the history of the present. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1995, pp. 91-101, here p. 92.
5. ↑ Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Hitler's Revenant . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1991, pp. 26-28 ( online ).
6. ↑ Norbert Seitz: Not without my Nazi In: Die Zeit , No. 52/2002.
7. ↑ Gerd Korinthenberg: "Not coped with": speaking about the Nazi era . In: ORF.at , December 19, 2007.
8. ↑ Marie-Hélène Pérennec: Nazi comparisons in today's political discourse. On the dangers of false analogies ( Memento from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 959 kB). In: langues.univ-lyon2.fr , June 2008 (Lylia, issue 16), p. 10.
9. ↑ Harald Welzer: The Herman scandal: "Nazi card secures attention" ( Memento from January 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). In: Stern.de, October 10, 2007.
10. ^ ^{A b} Marie-Hélène Pérennec: Nazi comparisons in today's political discourse. On the dangers of wrong analogies (PDF; 959 kB). In: langues.univ-lyon2.fr , June 2008 (Lylia, issue 16), p. 11.
11. ↑ Michael Philipp: Personally, I have nothing to reproach myself with. Political resignations in Germany from 1950 until today. Süddeutsche Zeitung Edition, 2007, ISBN 978-3-86615-485-8 Review buchtest.de ( Memento from July 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).
12. ^ Iraq crisis: Däubler-Gmelin, Bush and Hitler. In: spiegel.de. September 19, 2002, accessed August 2, 2017 . 
13. ↑ welt.de: SPD and Greens outraged by Wolffsohn's Nazi comparison .
14. ↑ netzeitung.de ( Memento from March 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).
15. ↑ Meisner compares biologists Dawkins with Nazis . In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , November 1, 2009.
16. ↑ Andreas Köhler: Medical chief puts Merkel in a row with Hitler . In: WELT.de from December 20, 2012 (accessed December 25, 2012)
17. ↑ Sonja Hasewend, Monika Schachner: Circumcision: "Prohibition is like extermination of the Jews". In: kleinezeitung.at. July 25, 2012, archived from the original on July 30, 2012 . 
18. ↑ Circumcisions: Villagers for prohibition, Burgstaller against. In: derstandard.at . July 25, 2012, accessed May 7, 2013 . 
19. ↑ The Netherlands reprimand Turkey , n-tv.de from March 11, 2017, accessed on March 12, 2017.
20. ↑ Ambros Waibel : Worse than like Hitler . In: taz from 13./14. April 2017, p. 14.
21. ↑ Constantin Baron van Lijnden , acquittal before the Higher Regional Court Munich: lawyer was allowed to call the Senate worse than Roland Freisler
22. ↑ Dorothea Hahn: US debate on the Holocaust comparison: A question of framing . taz.de , July 4, 2019, accessed October 19, 2019.
23. ^ Statement Regarding the Museum's Position on Holocaust Analogies . ushmm.org, June 2019, accessed October 19, 2019.
24. ↑ “The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task. " An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum , nybooks.com , July 1, 2019, accessed October 19, 2019.