Who Is Hitler Today? (The answer might surprise you.)

What do Mamdani, Trump, AOC, Boris Johnson, Tucker Carlson, Ilhan Omar, Bibi, George W., King Henry VIII, Angela Merkel, FDR, Giuliani, Napoleon, Attila the Hun and innumerable others have in common?

They have all been compared in print to Hitler. Expanding the list to include oral, private insults, explodes the quantity from innumerable to infinite.

My dear friend Elie Wiesel incessantly pointed out comparing anyone to Hitler, or Nazis, simultaneously trivializes Hitler while advertising the speaker’s ignorance of the Holocaust.

And yet, it never stops. Putin (frequently compared to Hitler) claimed Russia invaded Ukraine to “de-Nazify” it (though its president is Jewish.) Seinfeld (not yet compared to Hitler, but give it time) labeled an inflexible proprietor “The Soup Nazi.” Gore Vidal, debating William F Buckley on national TV, called him a “Crypto-Nazi.” (After Buckley threatened punching him, he generously changed it to “Crypto-Fascist.”)

Border patrols, gerrymanders, arresting shoplifters have all been characterized as “Gestapo-like tactics.” My late uncle, a doctor who operated the Auschwitz Jewish infirmary, hearing a politician decrying fingerprinting welfare-recipients to avoid fraud as “Gestapo-like”, quipped “Yes, that’s precisely what I feared most about the Gestapo.”

If someone is a “fascist”, they’re Hitler. Whenever I hear the “fascist” label applied, I ask the insulter to define the term. They usually can’t. If they know it means “Dictatorial”, I ask if their object is a dictator. Almost never.

We use “fascist” to vilify any enemy. The official name of the Berlin Wall was “The Anti-Fascist Protection Wall”, i.e., it was built to keep the West German fascists out of East Germany.

If sharing an unusual characteristic with Hitler makes one “Hitler-like”, then the list should also include McCartney and da Vinci, vegetarians like him, Einstein and Groucho, mustached like him, Warren Buffett and Gandhi, teetotalers like him, Isaac Newton and Mother Teresa, who died virgins like him.

What defined Hitler is not his fascism, aggression or even his Judea-hatred, but his death-camps. Auschwitz, where both my parents were incarcerated, efficiently exterminated 100,000 Jews every month. Kommandant Rudolph Hoss joked “The only way a Jew leaves here is through the chimney.”

Death-camps, which exterminated 6 million Jews, is the Sine qua non of the Holocaust, distinguishing it from World War II.

If everyone is Hitler, his name means nothing. He’s just another historical bad guy.

The truth is, no one is Hitler.