The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum partnered with Arizona State University and Republic Media Monday to host a discussion about how Nazism was covered in Arizona during World War II, with panelists drawing parallels to today’s political divisions.

The event was held as part of an exhibit that will be unveiled next year for the Washington, D.C., museum’s 25th anniversary. 

The exhibit, called “History Unfolded: U.S. Newspapers and the Holocaust,” is a crowd-sourced project intended to help educate people on how their local community reacted to and was affected by, the Holocaust. 

Monday’s event, titled, “Americans and the Nazi Threat: What Did Arizonans Know?” was held on ASU’s Tempe campus, where panelists discussed how local media viewed the Nazi regime and how the state reacted to it.

Mi-Ai Parrish, Republic Media president and publisher of the Arizona Republic, moderated a panel that included three historians: Donald Fixico, a professor of history at ASU; Edna Friedberg, a historian at the museum; and Michael Rubinoff, a lecturer of Leadership and Interdisciplinary Studies at ASU.

Fixico focused heavily on the impact the influence the United States’ treatment of the Native American population in Arizona and elsewhere may have influenced the Holocaust.

He said Hitler drew inspiration from their mistreatment, which he learned about through books written by famous German author Karl May.

“When Hitler writes his 1925 ‘My Struggle,’ then some of the ideas of the treatment of Jewish people and imprisoning them comes from the U.S. government imprisoning American Indians and putting them on reservations,” he said. “There’s a very striking parallel.”

The panelists noted other parallels, comparing the rise of the Nazi regime and eventual Holocaust to today’s American politics.

Friedberg said the United States didn’t have a refugee policy in the 1930s and ’40s, when many people were seeking to escape from Nazi Germany. The country’s immigration policy largely was driven by racism and xenophobia, Friedberg said.

“This set of laws … allowed entry to people only on the basis of country of origin,” Friedberg said. “So we had quotas, how many people were allowed to come from Germany, from Austria, from France, from countries outside of the Western Hemisphere, on a country-by-country basis.”

That approach, she said, mirrors the immigration policies promoted by President Trump since his inauguration, designed to ban people from certain countries from entering the country.

Friedberg said rescuing the Jews was never an American priority during WWII.

Rubinoff said most Arizonans were practically blind to anti-Semitism when the Holocaust began. He said it was practically non-existent because there were numerous Jewish communities across the state.

“People in the West didn’t quite see what this was all about,” he said. “We know Jews, we have them right here in Bisbee, we have them in Douglas, we have them in Prescott — how are you objecting to it?”

While Arizonans may not have understood the anti-Semitic hate, they were nearly unanimously in favor of anti-Japanese movements after the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941, according to Gallup polls.

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. decided to move American citizens of Japanese ancestry, as well as Japanese immigrants, inland and put many of them into internment camps, including Arizona camps.

More: Arizona’s internment camp: Poston Memorial Monument

A poll from the National Opinion Research Center in March 1942 asked, “Do you think we are doing the right thing in moving Japanese aliens (those who are not citizens) away from the Pacific coast?”

An overwhelming 93 percent of Americans said yes.

Fixico said many soldiers in the U.S. military were Japanese-Americans who had parents in Arizona’s Japanese internment camps.

“When they came back to see their parents, they hugged their parents through the barbed wire of the internment camps, then literally gave their lives on the battlefield,” he said. “So you have this kind of treatment of Japanese-Americans who, like American Indians, were very much behind the United States.”

Fixico said this unfaltering patriotism was not enough to overcome the massive phobia Americans had of people of color, and it is something the country still needs to overcome.

Friedberg said she finds the parallels between the Nazi regime and the current state of American politics troubling.

“When I became a historian, I never imagined or hoped that my job would feel so relevant as it does today,” she said.

Friedberg said the Internet has created a time in which people no longer feel like they should censor their thoughts. It’s now acceptable to publicly hate other people and simply shut down opinions we don’t agree with.

READ MORE:

Roberts: Holocaust survivor’s final request: Don’t forget

Rep. Paul Gosar pushes far-right conspiracies on Charlottesville, George Soros

5 things to know about Arizona’s World War II internment camps

Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/2yv8eHh