Anti-vaxxers and the GOP Steal a Page from Hitler's Playbook

The most prevalent rhetoric of the Covid anti-vaxxers is that government requirement vaccine mandates are fascist. In fact, allusions to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust are rampant in their rhetoric. What these protestors don’t understand is that the GOP’s extremists like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, as well as the screwball crew at Fox News, are taking a page straight out Hitler’s playbook.

How?

Because the Nazis were anti-vaxxers, too.

Before the Little Corporal became Der Fuhrer, Germany had a long history of compulsory vaccination. In 1847, after a smallpox epidemic killed tens of thousands of Germans in Prussia, the government ordered all newborns and military recruits vaccinated against the scourge as well as other diseases.

The German vaccination programs were quite successful. But in the waning years of the democratic Weimar Republic, an antivaccination movement took root. Called the Lebensreform, or Life Reform Movement, it advocated replacing vaccines with healthier lifestyles such as getting more sun and eating special diets.

The Life Reform Movement was also anti-Semitic. According to its adherents, vaccines were part of a global Jewish conspiracy to harm the German people. This isn’t too far from today’s antivaxxers who claim the Covid vaccines are unsafe (instead, they advocate taking a horse dewormer or drinking bleach) or that the vaccines inject tracking devices into our bodies (while they all carry cell phones by which they actually can be tracked).

Fearing protests, the Weimar government loosened its vaccine policies. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, they did not issue mandates for vaccination and what mandates were still in effect were largely ignored. In fact, like today’s GOP, they went out of their way to appease the Life Reformers. In 1935, Hitler’s Reich interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, said, “the popular character of the health laws, which must appear to be absolutely desirable in the National Socialist state, is better served if unnecessary restlessness is avoided in the implementation of the laws in the population.”

In other words, don’t rock the boat. German vaccination requirements under the Nazis became voluntary.

The Nazis’ nonchalance toward vaccination wasn’t just politically convenient. It had a more sinister side. Hitler and his cronies knew that the Germans they considered less desirable—Jews, gypsies, the mentally and physically handicapped—were also less likely to get vaccinated and, therefore, more likely to die. As the black shadow of Nazism spread across Europe and Russia, the party’s antivaccine policies became an even bigger genocidal weapon.

 According to Hitler’s Table Talk, a compilation of Der Fuhrer’s droning monologues, this was the Nazi leader’s ideas on vaccines and public health in the occupied countries: “Their conditions of life will inevitably improve under our jurisdiction, and we must take all the measures necessary to ensure that the non-German population does not increase at an excessive rate. In these circumstances, it would be sheer folly to place at their disposal a health service such as we know it in Germany; and so—no inoculations and other preventative measures for the Natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!” (Emphasis added.)

Is this so different from the sentiments of the far-right extremists of the GOP or the anti-vax “reporting” of Fox News? They know the Covid vaccines aren’t dangerous. Most of them­—hell, probably all of them—are vaccinated. We know the talking head yo-yos at Fox News are vaccinated—it’s a company mandate. They also know Covid is dangerous; at this writing, at least seven anti-vax and anti-mask conservative activists have died from Covid and its complications.

So why all the antivaccination rhetoric?

Could the GOP extremists be taking a page out of the Nazis’ antivaccine playbook? They know Covid deaths are highest among those they don’t consider desirable voters—the poor, people of color, the elderly—people who don’t normally vote Republican. Have the Republicans become so power hungry they are willing to sacrifice their own voters—who are, in fact, dying in droves from Covid—in order to “cleanse” the nation of those they don’t want to cast votes by trying to, in Hitler’s own words, “to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!”?

Just asking.