- Arnold Schwarzenegger described how his father felt like a "loser" after serving in the Nazi Party.
- The former actor and Californian governor made an impassioned video warning about antisemitism.
Arnold Schwarzenegger described how his father was "broken" by guilt after the fall of Nazi Germany, in an impassioned video warning about the rise of antisemitism.
The actor and former governor of California published a 12-minute address on YouTube on Tuesday, saying: "I don't want to preach to the choir here."
Instead, he said, he wanted to address people who might be straying into antisemitic conspiracy theories and other forms of hate.
"I want you to know where that path ends," he said.
For his father, it ended with a lifetime of guilt and anguish, he added.
Schwarzenegger's father, Gustav, served as a member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary, colloquially known as the brownshirts. He ended up as one of "the broken men that I was surrounded by when I grew up in Austria after the Second World War," Schwarzenegger said.
"You know, they drank to numb their pain," the Terminator actor continued. "Their bodies were riddled with injuries and shrapnel from the eve of war, and their hearts and their minds were equally riddled with guilt."
"But besides the guilt and the injuries, they felt like losers," he said.
"In the end, it didn't really matter why they joined [the Nazi Party]. They were all broken in the same way."
Schwarzenegger's video comes amid multiple warnings of a rise in antisemitism and other forms of hate in the US.
A survey by the American Jewish Committee in fall 2022 found that 82% of American Jews say antisemitism has increased in the last five years. Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League noted a 34% increase in antisemitic incidents in the US in 2021, PBS reported.
Schwarzenegger has previously drawn on his father's dark history. After the January 6 Capitol riot in 2021, he appealed to extremists to avoid his father's fate. In August 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to ravage the US, he wrote an op-ed that scolded people for comparing mask and vaccine mandates to fascism.
And soon after Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Schwarzenegger made a direct appeal to Russian citizens. Drawing comparisons with WW2, he urged them not to fall for Kremlin propaganda in the same way his father was taken in by Hitler and his allies.
Schwarzenegger, who was a bodybuilder before becoming an actor and politician, visited the Auschwitz concentration camp last year. After his visit he said that "the weight on your back hits you at the very beginning, heavier than any squat I've ever done."