Minnesota Gov. Walz Slammed Nationwide for Anne Frank Remarks
As the world observed Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, the casual use of words such as Holocaust and Nazi have cheapened the horror of what happened in Nazi Germany. Leaders of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., are calling out Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota and 2024 vice presidential candidate, for comparing Anne Frank hiding from Nazis in Germany before dying in a concentration camp to the plight of illegal immigrants in the United States.
“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” the museum stated on X. “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.”
Although his post from the museum didn’t mention Walz’s name, it came one day after the governor said children in Minneapolis are “hiding in their houses” because of President Donald Trump’s effort to enforce immigration laws through Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.
“We have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” he said at a press conference after the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
READ: 130,000 missing immigrant children located by Trump DHS
Walz was widely panned for the comparison to Frank, who, at just 15 years old died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Critics seized on the remarks, with some national commentators calling the analogy “historically illiterate” and pointing out the stark differences between government genocide and U.S. immigration enforcement. Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the Trump administration’s antisemitism envoy, said that Walz’s comments had “nothing to do with illegal immigration” and warned that “ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust.”
The White House rebuked Walz as “a truly disturbed, unstable individual.” Walz’s analogy also drew sharp criticism from conservative editorial boards and opinion writers, who contended that invoking Anne Frank’s story in debates about border policy was “dangerous” and “profoundly irresponsible.”
Walz appeared to at least partly capitulate to the White House when he spoke with the president by phone. According to Trump, the Minnesota governor said he wanted to “work together” on the situation.
“Governor Tim Walz called me with the request to work together with respect to Minnesota,” he said. “It was a very good call, and we actually seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Gov. Walz that I would have [border czar] Tom Homan call him and that what we are looking for are any and all criminals that they have in their possession. The governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future.”
-Dwight Widaman
