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Fascism Doesn’t Always Arrive by Force. Sometimes It Comes as Law
Fascism Doesn’t Always Arrive by Force. Sometimes It Comes as Law
A visit to the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam showed me how changes in the law were used by the Nazis to push their agenda. It’s a warning from history we must heed before it’s too late.
by Kim Wehle
September 27, 2026
ZETEO
Trump signs executive orders on his first day back in office on Jan. 20, 2025. Photo by Jabin Botsford /The Washington Post via Getty Images
The word “fascism” is a frightening one, bringing to mind images of Nazi-controlled Europe during World War II. One dictionary definition describes it as “a populist political philosophy … that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”
In Poland and many other countries, the Nazis infamously cordoned off sections of cities, known as “ghettos” or “Jewish residential quarters,” where Jews were held in horrific conditions, food was rationed, and forced labor was compulsory. In Warsaw alone, almost 500,000 Jews and Romanis were crammed into a confined space and subjected to German police and SS (i.e., the Nazi paramilitary, or “Schutzstaffel”) control before their deportation to concentration and extermination camps.
Although the U.S. federal government now has upwards of 65,000 people in detention camps – over 70% of whom, including children, have no criminal record, and thousands of whose names have been wiped from federal databases – the notion that the Trump administration could one day round up, confine to concentration camps, and even kill disfavored citizens remains unfathomable. Fascist? America? Not possible.
But the Nazis did not just use ghettos to impose fascist control. In places like occupied Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, they also did it by operation of law.
In the United States, Trump has already signed at least 285 executive orders and 184 presidential proclamations during his second term, plus numerous additional presidential memoranda and other directives, including ones that attempted to end birthright citizenship and take over nationwide elections (both efforts stalled in the Supreme Court); targeted law firms, agency personnel and private individuals for their supposed “weaponization” of government under the Biden administration and other “harmful activity”; and, perhaps most chillingly, directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces and other federal agencies to disrupt and investigate individuals and organizations purportedly involved in “domestic” terrorism, including any exhibiting “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” unacceptable views on immigration, race and gender, and hostility toward “American values.”
The National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, which I toured last year while on a Fulbright grant in the Netherlands, poignantly tells the story of how changes in the law quietly operated to justify mass murder. It is housed in the former Hervormde Kweekschool – a site from which hundreds of Jewish children were secretly passed to the resistance from an adjacent daycare building where they were awaiting transfer to the Nazi death camps (many more were ultimately murdered). The school sat between the daycare center and the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater used by the Nazis as a processing center from which tens of thousands of adult victims were sent to killing sites.
A photograph taken at the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam on March 5, 2024, shows box files containing the names and other details of Jewish people in the Netherlands that were delivered to Dutch bureaucracy and to the Nazis. Photo by Nick Gammon/AFP via Getty Images
One of the museum’s rooms is covered with a bespoke wallpaper consisting of the text of hundreds of laws that the Nazi-occupied country imposed from May 10, 1940 – the date Hitler invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Luxembourg – to January of 1945, when the final evacuation of surviving prisoners from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp began. The exhibit coldly displays how Dutch Jews were surgically and methodically stripped of their legal rights and freedoms, and ultimately their lives, over time.
One of the museum’s rooms is covered with a bespoke wallpaper consisting of the text of hundreds of laws that the Nazi-occupied country imposed from May 10, 1940 – the date Hitler invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Luxembourg – to January of 1945, when the final evacuation of surviving prisoners from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp began. The exhibit coldly displays how Dutch Jews were surgically and methodically stripped of their legal rights and freedoms, and ultimately their lives, over time.
The Parallels to Today
Some of the parallels with contemporary America are, of course, necessarily imperfect – limited, approximate, and in some respects quite inexact. The circumstances are in no way equivalent, and the historical comparisons hardly establish that the United States today is repeating the horrific history of Nazi-occupied Europe. But certain features of the rhetoric and sequence of events graphically pasted across the museum’s walls were sufficiently striking to warrant serious pause and reflection today. Consider, for example, the following:
Trump’s DC Invasion
When he announced on Aug. 11, 2025, that he was temporarily taking control of the Washington, DC, police department and deploying 800 National Guard troops to engage civilians, Trump justified his actions by claiming that the city was overrun by “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth.”
According to historians, in February 1941, “[p]rotected by the German authorities and with a show of violence, Dutch Nazi paramilitary groups paraded through Amsterdam, provoking resistance from gangs of Jewish youths and communists.” The Reich commissioner for the occupied Netherlands reportedly used the incident as a “pretext for sealing off the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam on February 12, 1941, at 6 a.m—not even doctors were allowed to leave.”
Crackdown on Free Speech and Free Press
Trump has taken an unprecedented number of steps to clamp down on free speech and the media, including threatening Democrats in Congress with investigations, punishing law firms that represent his perceived political enemies, arresting student protesters for Palestinian-related speech, stripping funding for public broadcasting, censoring government websites, banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House, and suing the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, the New York Times, CNN, BBC, the Washington Post, and Paramount/CBS News for “defamation.”
On the first day of the Nazi occupation, Jewish journalists in the Netherlands and members of the national press corps were fired, followed by bans on the employment of Jews in government service and a general ban on Jewish newspapers.
As early as June 6, 2025, Trump cracked down on protesters gathered outside a federal building in downtown Los Angeles demanding an end to immigration raids. According to ABC News, “[v]ideo footage shows protesters vandalizing the building, heckling police and throwing bottles in and other objects at officers who used shields to protect themselves. Police in riot gear are seen confronting protesters with batons and what appeared to be tear gas launchers.” The next day, Trump signed a presidential memorandum authorizing deployment of roughly 4,200 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines to “address the lawlessness.” The city’s mayor and state’s governor objected.
On Feb. 22 and 23 of 1941, Dutch historian Frank Van Vree writes, “German police troops picked up 427 Jewish men from their homes and the streets around the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, in the heart of the Jewish quarter. The men who had been arrested were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; it did not take long for the first reports of their deaths to reach Amsterdam.” Two days later, a mass strike was held in protest. “The Germans broke the strikes with violence and intimidation, in the course of which nine people were killed and dozens wounded. Many of the strikers were arrested and the towns where protests had taken place were subjected to heavy fines. Later, this was followed by the execution of several strike leaders, most of them communists, and other resistance fighters.”
Mass Deportation
On March 15, 2025, Trump sent 238 Venezuelan nationals to a mega-prison in El Salvador, claiming they were gang members and terrorists who now fell outside the jurisdiction of the United States and the U.S. Constitution. They were later returned to Venezuela on July 18, reporting that they experienced torture during their months-long imprisonment in a third country at the behest of the United States.
In January of 1942, a decision was made by the Nazis that “it was time for the next step: the total extraction of the Jewish population from Dutch authority, their estrangement from the national community and, subsequently, their deportation as ‘non-citizens,’ first to transit camps in the Netherlands, beyond the sight of non-Jewish citizens, and subsequently to the recently conquered regions in Eastern Europe.” In March, the most senior SS officer in the Netherlands “announced that the Jews no longer fell under the authority of the Dutch government, meaning that they were de facto stripped of all their civil rights.”
Van Vree explains that “[a]ll subsequent measures were seamlessly linked to this strategy, such as the comprehensive travel ban for Jews (5 June), the ban on shopping outside certain hours (12 June), the introduction of a curfew (12 June), and the ban on telephones and the ban on visiting non-Jews (6 July).”
Trump stated at a press briefing alongside Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele: “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places.”
Within a year of declaring Jews outside the protections of Dutch civil rights laws, “93,000 citizens from the Netherlands whom the Nazis had identified as ‘Jews’ were transported to the extermination camps; 20,000 of them had been taken away from labor camps, hospitals, institutions, and other social organizations.” That number eventually climbed to 107,000.
Crackdown on Education
On April 23, 2025, Trump issued an executive order titled “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education,” which is ostensibly designed to “hold accountable” any “institutions seeking accreditation” that engage in unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. The order focuses on any diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements by accreditors and threatens to suspend or terminate the accreditors’ status if they continue to utilize DEI policies.
On Sept. 15, 1942, Jewish professors and students were barred from schools and universities. When Professor Rudolph Cleveringa, Dean of the Faculty of Law at Leiden University, made a speech denouncing the dismissal of Jewish colleagues on Nov. 26, 1940, he was arrested and imprisoned.
On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” It directs federal agencies to identify all federal funding streams – grants, contracts, and other funding – that directly or indirectly support or subsidize instruction on “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” in K-12 curricula, teacher training, certification, licensing, and employment. Schools or education agencies found to be supporting that instruction could have federal funding pulled.
In September 1940, a commission was established and tasked with “‘cleansing’ (i.e., censoring) school textbooks of anti-German passages or passages that could be understood as potentially detrimental to the occupation authority, such as those praising the House of Orange [the Dutch royal family] or those written by Jewish authors.”
Crackdown on Immigration
On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” as part of his effort to crack down on what he described as a “flood of illegal immigration.” The same day, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded a Biden-era policy protecting churches, schools, and hospitals from immigration enforcement, giving ICE agents authority to take action in any of these spaces using “common sense” – a “common sense” that apparently means masked plainclothes agents abducting, killing, and injuring both immigrants and U.S. citizens. (It’s worth noting what Polish writer Cezary Jan Strusiewicz wrote last year: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement is nothing like the Sturmabteilung, a.k.a. Hitler’s Brownshirts.” The Brownshirts “wore brown shirts,” after all. “ICE? Not so much. No official uniform, no clear identification, nothing that says, ‘I am a recognized member of a government agency, and what I am doing is legal.’”)
In addition to domestically imprisoning tens of thousands, the Trump administration has deported more than 25,000 people to at least 29 “third” countries unknown to them — including El Salvador, South Sudan, Uganda and Eswatini (an absolute monarchy) — that human rights groups and lawyers have flagged as unusually dangerous due to conflict, notoriously harsh prisons, or poor human rights records.
On Sept. 15, 1941, an order was issued in the Netherlands banning Jews from public pools, parks, libraries, and museums, and confining Jewish artists to performing only for Jewish audiences on “Jewish premises.” The authorized venues included Hollandsche Schouwburg – the theatre later used to traffic tens of thousands to their deaths. The Nazis renamed it the “Jewish Schouwburg” in October.
Will We Learn From History?
It is easy to wonder how this could possibly happen under the noses of so many well-meaning – but relatively safe and secure – Dutch citizens. Van Vree writes of those early stages of the Dutch occupation:
[T]he dominant theme was one of “magnanimity”; there seemed to be no reason to panic. Dutch officials clung to statements made by individual German authorities, who said that they could see no “Jewish question” in the Netherlands. All the same, those who were sensitive to them could not fail to notice the signs: the seemingly limited administrative measures that nevertheless revealed the true nature and intentions of the occupying regime.
In 1905, Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Years later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an axiomatic expert in U.S. law and the Constitution, penned the following in a private letter: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
It’s time to pay heed to history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kimberly Wehle, Zeteo’s legal contributor and author of ‘Constitution in Crisis,’ is a constitutional law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Follow her on Bluesky.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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