The US Holocaust Museum offered a strongly worded rebuke to comments comparing immigration enforcement tactics to Anne Frank being turned over to a concentration camp. While the Museum did not specifically name Minnesota governor Tim Walz in its rebuke, the governor did draw criticism from others for comments he made at a press conference where he criticized President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti. “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” he said. “Somebody is going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Walz’s master’s degree focuses on Holocaust education. Frank and her family hid during Nazi raids for over two years before being captured and taken to concentration camps. She died at the age of 15 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

In a post on X, the museum condemned such comparisons. “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” it wrote. “Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.” Others criticized the comparison as well. “Ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust. Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law,” wrote Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, President Trump’s antisemitism envoy. “She was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration, fraud, and lawlessness plaguing Minnesota today. Our brave law enforcement should be commended, not tarred with this historically illiterate and antisemitic comparison.”

Holocaust comparisons abound when it comes to critics of immigration enforcement. Detention centers are often referred to as “concentration camps,” while ICE agents are called the “Gestapo” or “Nazis.” Supporters of immigration enforcement call the comparisons dangerous, with the intention of inciting violence against ICE agents. “When Nazism becomes a general synonym for ‘bad politics,’ the Holocaust becomes a moral prop rather than a historically specific catastrophe,” warned Jewish outlet Forward. “If every abuse is Nazism, then nothing is Nazism, and the lessons of the Holocaust — foremost among them the necessity of vigorously combatting antisemitism in our society — are lost.”