Eighty years ago this spring, my father was an officer in the Third Army when it entered Dachau concentration camp, not knowing exactly what it would find. What my father found was horror, including dozens of boxcars, most of them still padlocked, containing the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who had been left to die of thirst. Inside the barbed wire, there were piles of corpses and bones, the remains of vibrant, innocent lives taken before their time by their murderous captors.
Recently, I saw footage of that very same Third Army entry into Dachau. I already had my father’s letters to my mother and the Brownie snapshots he took at the camp as it was liberated, so I had some idea of what to expect. What the footage shows confirms my father’s account, and what it shows is sickening. My reaction is similar to what my father expressed in his letters: “My God, how can human beings have done such a thing?”
And yet they did, and on an even greater scale and with more raw brutality, or what the Nazis called “efficiency,” at other concentration camps. And the fact that it happened under what some now view as an aberration, a bizarre political leader who seemed at times almost a parody of himself, is no guarantee that it will not happen again. In fact, it is already happening again and has been happening for some time, notably at the Chinese concentration camps, with an estimated two million prisoners and on a smaller scale in North Korea.
We have no practical means, short of war, of halting these atrocities, but we can exert economic pressure abroad against totalitarian states and attempt to prevent them in our country and in others that we influence. At the end of the war in Europe, Allied commanders ordered that German civilians be walked through the camps to show them what their leaders had done with the hope that in this way, the atrocities would be prevented in the future. By the same token, the best way to prevent a holocaust on our shores is to “walk” Americans through the atrocities so they can see the effects of antisemitism and other forms of racial or religious hatred. We can encourage family and friends to view footage similar to what I have seen in hopes that they will never forget the horror of the Holocaust.
Education of this sort is needed, and it should be part of every high school and college course on modern history. Antisemitism is not dead — in fact, there is evidence that antisemitism rose in the U.S. and around the world following the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel and that it has continued to rise. One recent report demonstrated that antisemitism has “made its way to the very center of society, often by means of social media.”
It is crucial to prevent the violence of the past from being repeated, but it appears that many in our society are oblivious to current political repression. According to my Microsoft Co-pilot, “as of now, there are no known large-scale concentration camps like those from [the Nazi] era.”
As events in China show, my Co-pilot is wrong. China now has a vast number of Uyghurs and other minorities, religious “extremists,” and political “enemies” incarcerated in concentration camps. Indeed, according to xinjiang.amnesty.org, “since 2017 the government of China has carried out massive and systematic abuses against Muslims living in Xinjiang. The human suffering has been immense.” The same site documents extensive psychological and physical torture, persecution, and murder in the Chinese “re-education” camps.
There are a number of compelling accounts of conditions in these camps, including Nuri Turkel’s No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs, Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp, Tahir Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, and Gulchehra Hoja’s A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs. These accounts portray the indoctrination, forced labor, beatings, rapes, and executions, along with lack of proper food and shelter, that exist in the camps. By learning about these conditions, we in the West can help to ensure that China is not rewarded for its brutal behavior and that Chinese leaders will perhaps hesitate before expanding their repression. We cannot directly change what happens inside China, North Korea, Russia, or other totalitarian states, but we can urge our government to resist it, and we can see that it never happens here.
But it has happened here. From the start, the Biden administration employed the DOJ, FBI, IRS, SEC, and other powerful agencies to investigate and prosecute its political enemies, often without grounds. The only difference between anti-constitutional progressive attacks in this country and Chinese or North Korea repression of “enemies” is the level of physical violence. Biden’s lawfare was employed for the same reasons and essentially in the same way as China’s unfounded jailing of political and religious opponents. Given free rein, Biden’s repression of opponents would likely have gone much farther, to the extent not just of raiding the personal residence of his political opponent, but of hauling off tens of thousands on the flimsiest of charges.
As for indoctrination without incarceration, it has existed for a century but most pervasively since the rise of social media that impose progressive views on the public — writing those views into the search engines and censoring the very same opponents whom Biden’s administration attacked. What happened in Nazi Germany and what is now happening in China and North Korea is also happening in America, and Americans must recognize it and reject it.
Again, the antidote is education. There are hundreds of valuable books to read on the subject of the repression of liberty and countless internet articles and videos. We should not forget what has happened or turn our backs on what is happening still. I will never forget what happened at Dachau and other Nazi camps, and I won’t stop working to end today’s political violence at home and abroad. What happened at Dachau and what is still with us has no place in a civilized world.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture.
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