Read This Before You Compare What's Happening in the US to Nazi Germany

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a Q&A series from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Find more here.

It’s more than likely that you have asked yourself in the early parts of this new year, “What am I supposed to do?” As we watch the country slip further into the abyss of “papers please,” and witness Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents operating as though they are a death squad, it’s fair to feel overwhelmed; it’s fair to wonder if anything can be done at all.

Sometimes, the best thing to do during times of authoritarian rule is to pause and reflect. When we do this, we realize two things: First, there are many ways, both materially and emotionally, to support those who are being targeted by a regime. Second, although we, like the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, may wonder if we are “one untimely born,” our existence is perfectly timed for this moment.

A resource to help those of us looking to pause and reflect so that we can take action is Hanna Reichel’s new book, For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional. Reichel is trained as a theologian and has extensively studied German history, with special attention to Nazism and the theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. The book, Reichel explains in the introduction, “is meant for regular people who—regardless of our position on this or that policy that a current government may be advancing, and regardless of our vocation and standing in life—feel uneasy about the rising authoritarian tendencies.”

That being said, one of the things I most appreciated about both the book and the ensuing interview is that Reichel is not arguing that history is repeating itself. Instead, Reichel is simply seeking to point to different historical examples—not just Nazi Germany—in hopes that we can learn from them as we work to preserve democracy in the face of an authoritarian regime.

Reichel’s book is meant to be read in community: book clubs, Sunday School, or a church small group. Although Reichel is a scholar, For Such a Time as This is accessible and geared toward regular, everyday people. Overall, the book is refreshingly practical. We won’t defeat fascism in one day, so how can we do it bit by bit? How can we create networks of mutual aid that can be easily accessed during our time of crisis?

I spoke with Reichel in November 2025, but as you will see, our conversation remains as relevant as ever.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Who are you and what do you do?

Hanna Reichel: I teach systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. The idea behind systematic theology is that this is the enterprise of faith seeking understanding, where we try to make sense of the meaning of the faith claims in this Christian tradition. Not to resolve, but to get a better understanding of the core tensions between our experience of the world and our belief in God, and who we are in the midst of that.

You are a scholar and theologian, so what inspired you to write For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional?

How we pray, worship, and live together—that the spiritual, liturgical, political, and social are so deeply intertwined and mutually inform one another—is what inspired me. Very concretely, it was the week that President Donald Trump assumed office for the second time and issued the slew of executive orders.

Any one of these individual orders can have devastating effects. I found myself just reeling, as a person who is maybe not immediately endangered but within the Venn diagram of who this regime considers an enemy, and seeing other communities and people that I care about being directly affected. Everything was happening so quickly, and this was actually part of the strategy to paralyze and overwhelm and engender this feeling of inevitability.

As someone who has studied 20th-century German history and theology, there were uneasy resonances with the history I knew. This is out of an authoritarian playbook. Obviously, we knew that already from the first Trump administration; many people have been drawing parallels to Weimar Germany and then to Nazi Germany.

There’s limited use to these kinds of parallels because often they have a rhetorical function, right? They frame whoever gets tagged with the “Nazi” label as the incarnation of evil. In that sense, I actually am hesitant to draw these kinds of parallels because I don’t think they are very fruitful.

But then, on a separate level, these are actual histories with actual political, social, and economic analysis. And in that sense, there can be a certain analytical traction on some of these categories, like authoritarianism or fascism, that we, unfortunately, can’t deny that there are strong resonances with some of these histories. Scholars of history have been making these points.

In the devotional, I’m not trying to make an argument. It’s not an academic book, it’s not a history book, it’s not a political analysis. What I’m trying to do is let a cloud of witnesses from my faith tradition speak into the current moment.

Hopefully, other people are doing this with other resources that they have inherited, too. I want there to be a Latin American version of this book where liberationist colleagues explain how they’ve seen the CIA dismantle democracies. I want people who have studied Eastern European regimes and the emergence of dictatorships in other parts of the world to offer their lessons.

The double motivation in this moment was, one, my own existential sense to look for wisdom and to feel like I needed a different kind of grounding. And then also intellectually and practically, what are we to think? What are we to do? Where can we look for wisdom? So that was my own existential moment. And the other [motivation] was literally students coming up to me and saying—like, I vividly remember the student coming up to me and saying, “So, we’ve read Barth and Bonhoeffer, is this not what you’ve been preparing us for?”

As a person who mostly works in an academic mode and can, to some extent, get lost and hide behind the complexity of these industries, arguments, and theologies, it’s also part of my responsibility in this moment, as in the old-fashioned sense of doctor of the church, to say, “What do these things mean in our present moment? What is it we can learn from them?”

Can you unpack why you think it is that we need to be careful when drawing a parallel between the modern U.S. and Nazi Germany?

I was actually born and raised in Germany. In that context, it’s one of the parallels that gets handled with the utmost caution. In the kind of collective German memory, Nazism figures as the epitome of evil. So, you don’t just use the Nazi card to frame an opponent or something like that.

So that caution is just very ingrained in me. It’s a caution that serves well in this political moment, where we see that rhetoric being used on all sides. Ironically, this is one of the insights of historians who study fascism—they say fascism is an aggravated logic of “us and them.”

One of the lessons in my book is also about the use of language. If we as theologians, if we as Christians, are mindful of the ways that words generate reality, then we have to be mindful of the way that we use language to create relationships and worlds that we want to live within.

But we can see there are certain things, in hindsight, that made way for the worst atrocities of history to happen. And as we spot things that seem eerily reminiscent of Nazi Germany, could these moments serve as warning flags for us so that we do not live a similar history again?

There are also deep dissimilarities between Nazi Germany and the U.S. now. To name just two, which are really salient for our conversation: Germany did not have a long history of democracy at all. It was a very recent experiment for them, and it broke down really quickly. There were no longstanding institutions and practices of democratic culture that we have in the States—and that I hope we can continue to have here. 

The second big dissimilarity is the role of the churches and the Christian faith. While Germany was also a majority Christian culture, it was very strongly formed by a kind of state-church system where the institutions of state and church worked very strongly in tandem. It was really hard for Germans to dig into their tradition to come up with alternative theologies that would actually undermine that alliance.

In the U.S., there are a lot more traditions for thinking about the Christian faith as a subversive force, as a force that is deeply critical of national ideologies and state institutions at large. We have greater awareness and more resources in that vein. We are able to move a bit quicker and beyond what the Confessing Church was able to do in its moment.

I think that the strongest parallel for me between Nazi Germany and the U.S. today is specifically the scapegoating of immigrants, Muslims, Palestinians, Jews supporting Palestinians, and LGBTQ+ people, specifically trans people. There’s the scapegoating aspect, and then there is the secretive nature of ICE agents. The way ICE is being used to intimidate and detain people brings to mind the Gestapo.

I totally agree. The bigger cultural transformations are much more interesting here than the similarities between historical personalities or lack thereof.

In both contexts, there was the distinctive blaming of sexual and gendered minorities. This is one of the discernible stages of early authoritarianism. Usually, because these are small minorities and it’s easier to scapegoat them, it’s easy to draw on sentiments of disgust or other forms of worry about purity. This can have religious overtones, it can have cultural overtones. These sentiments obviously have racial and fascist overtones. They go hand in hand with this larger project of creating some sort of “purified national identity.” In that vein, the pathologizing, dehumanizing, and targeting of sexual and gendered minorities is one of the first steps.

We also have the warmongering, the assertion of national boundaries, and the ejection of the “impure” elements within. This is not just about economic policy and jobs or anything else.

The secrecy of ICE is really worrisome. We don’t know what is happening to people who have been grabbed off the street. It happens outside of the sphere where there can be legal or journalistic accountability or insight into what is actually happening. It becomes opaque. That creates more fear. This is intentional. This is not accidental. It undermines the division of powers and mutual checks and balances that would otherwise mark the democratic culture that we have. And it generates more fear, which generates more authoritarian power grabs.

The secrecy of ICE is really worrisome. We don’t know what is happening to people who have been grabbed off the street. It happens outside of the sphere where there can be legal or journalistic accountability or insight into what is actually happening. It becomes opaque. That creates more fear. This is intentional.

Some of these things are happening in broad daylight, and they’re also very intentionally broadcast—staged even—in a way that further increases the fear. That climate creates a sense of unaccountability.

READ MORE: ‘Abolish ICE’ Is the Cry of the Prophets

This has already been cited a lot in our context now, but there’s this poem by Martin Niemöller: First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t say anything because I was not a Communist. And then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t say anything because I was not a Jew. And at the end, they also came for me. And there was no one left to say anything.

I find it very ambivalent. Because there’s actually true insight here about authoritarian moments. There’s an escalation of encroachment. We see a routine targeting of weaker groups, smaller groups, and then repression gets applied more broadly.

But there is a logic to this poem that suggests, even if I only care about myself, then I should care about what is happening to undocumented immigrants. Because it will not stop there. Then it’s the documented immigrants. Then it’s people who don’t have their passports at hand. Then it’s people who look foreign. Then it’s people whose opinions we don’t like, because if you speak for Palestine, you are now un-American. So, even if I only care about myself and those who are like me, I should also care about undocumented immigrants, and I should also care about trans kids.

This is where I hope we can go beyond the Confessing Church. I don’t want to just expand the logic of self-preservation, and this is where I have been deeply inspired by the Belhar confession. The Reformed church in South Africa took a confessing stance against Apartheid—partially inspired by people like Bonhoeffer, partially inspired by the Barmen declaration—declaring it is not about our self-preservation, but it is about following a God who cares deeply about justice, who cares deeply about the most disenfranchised. If we claim to be the church, then we belong to God, and we must stand where God stands.

To what extent is it important for nonviolent Christians to wrestle with the fact that Bonhoeffer suspended his pacifist convictions because he knew the threat of fascism was so great?

Bonhoeffer, within the Protestant imagination, is probably the closest thing to a saint that many of us have. But they also immediately become our projection plan for whatever it is that we’re doing. When we look at historical figures, what we get is that it’s usually more complicated and messy. He is not the liberationist freedom fighter that some people want him to be.

He’s very conservative, socially for sure, and also theologically. That’s not a derogatory term for me. It’s just that he doesn’t very cleanly fit into any of the kinds of categories that we often tend to use, which actually makes them more interesting.

Everyone who reads Bonhoeffer will be struck by—it’s not so clear cut for him. First, he doesn’t understand it as a heroic act at all. He understands it as a deep form of complicity, of becoming guilty. It’s one of the temptations for the Christian, to want to preserve a kind of moral and spiritual holiness. But, because of his Christology, he comes to the conclusion that you don’t get to do that. Because God incarnates in history, we don’t get to wash our hands and stay out of it. If we have no part of history and its messiness, then we have no part of Christ. He even thinks about Christ actually dying as a criminal, also not a heroic act. Christ is not a liberatory hero who fights against the Romans and therefore gets executed. Although part of why he gets executed is that he’s read that way, that’s not how he acted. Christ actually took upon himself the guilt.

What stands out for me, more than the question between pacifism or heroic action, is the importance of discernment. The deep wrestling and the letters from prison.

One of the things Bonhoeffer wrestles with throughout these letters and writings is, when is the moment for submission? When is the moment for resistance? And that we can’t know in advance. It has to do with listening for the command of God, and that can only be discerned in the complete historic moment. It’s not an abstract principle. If we lean on abstract principles, we will fall short of what is required of us; we cannot just do whatever we want. There is such a thing as a concrete command. But it takes a lot to try and discern that.