In November 2005, Fritz Stern received an award for his life's work on Germans, Jews and the roots of National Socialism, presented to him by Joschka Fischer, then the German foreign minister. With a frankness that startled some in the audience, Stern, an emeritus professor of European history at Columbia University, peppered his acceptance speech with the similarities he saw between the path taken by Germany in the years leading up to Hitler and the path being taken by the United States today. He talked about a group of 1920's intellectuals known as the "conservative revolutionaries," who "denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture," and about how Hitler had used religion to appeal to the German public. In Hitler's first radio address after becoming chancellor, Stern noted, he declared that the Nazis regarded "Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life."
Stern was of course not suggesting an equivalence between President Bush and Hitler but rather making a more subtle critique, extending his idea that contemporary American politics exhibited "something like the strident militancy and political ineptitude of the Kaiser's pre-1914 imperial Germany." At 80, Stern has just published a sprawling memoir, "Five Germanys I Have Known," (Amazon.com, Amazon.de) and as with that speech, he does not file away his experiences of Nazism in a geographical or temporal box.

Outraged by the facile interpretations of Nazism floating around in the 1950's — "all the tomes and slogans about Germany’s inevitable path 'from Luther to Hitler'" — he charts his own, more subtle interpretation of what caused the Third Reich. Over the years Stern protests the ways radicals abuse the memory of Nazism to support their present-day political agendas, whether the 1960's students who called authority figures fascists and Nazis, or those today who compare foreign leaders they dislike to Hitler and cry "Munich" at every diplomatic gesture.
Yet the value of Stern's work is precisely that it has refused to keep Nazism safely on the other side of a historical and geographic chasm. His first book, "The Politics of Cultural Despair" (1961), is one of the durable masterpieces of 20th-century history because it seems to locate the roots of a peculiarly modern malaise. As he explained in a later edition of the work, "I attempted to show the importance of this new type of cultural malcontent, and to show how he facilitated the intrusion into politics of essentially unpolitical grievances."

"The trivialization of the Holocaust has been going on for quite a while," Foxman said. "If that period of time is to have any impact … [we must] keep accurate that which is horrific and that which is a poor joke or ignorance."

In one especially notorious incident, Schröder's justice minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, reportedly compared President Bush's tactics toward Iraq to those of Hitler: "Bush wants to divert attention from his domestic problems. It's a classic tactic. It's one that Hitler also used." In another instance, Ludwig Stiegler, a member of Parliament from Mr. Schröder's party, likened Mr. Bush to an imperialist Roman emperor bent on subjugating Germany. (Embarrassed by these incidents, Schröder relieved both of his colleagues of their jobs in the postelection period, but by then the damage had already been done.) If further proof were needed that the climate had turned nasty, it was provided by Rudolf Scharping, Schröder's former defense minister, who reportedly stated, at a meeting in Berlin on August 27, 2002, that President Bush was being encouraged to go to war against Iraq by a "powerful-perhaps overly powerful-Jewish lobby" in the United States. In Scharping's formulation, reminiscent of older, far-right claims about excessive Jewish power, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism come together as common bedfellows.

sick and tired of Americans, Europeans and others comparing their political opponents to Nazi's. It is rampant in the blogosphere, it is rampant in political advertising, it is rampant in the MSM and it is absolutely disgusting.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to promote his upcoming autobiography - Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion)- Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass made the shocking admission that as a youth he had joined the Waffen SS. (...) One reason why there has been such a public outcry over this is that Grass has always presented himself as some sort of moral authority: he is always the first to castigate the United States for its moral lapses.