- Trump's allies have been comparing the FBI to the Gestapo following a raid on his Florida home.
- The Auschwitz Museum told Insider such commentary isn't even worth reacting to.
Congressional Republicans and conservative commentators have been comparing the FBI to the Gestapo and Nazi Germany after the agency searched former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
"This should scare the livin' daylights out of American citizens," Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said of the FBI search. "The way our federal government has gone, it's like what we have thought about the Gestapo and people like that," Scott added.
Steve Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist under Trump, told Fox News that "the FBI right now is the Gestapo" in reaction to the raid.
GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado called the raid "Gestapo crap."
The Gestapo — Nazi Germany's brutal secret police — played an intricate role in the deportations of Jews to ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps (also referred to as extermination camps or killing centers) during World War II. The methods and tactics of the Gestapo were notoriously ruthless and violent.
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 9, 2022
Organizations that educate people on the Holocaust have long warned against comparing modern-day events to the crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany.
When asked by Insider whether likening the FBI to the Gestapo risked trivializing the Holocaust, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum said such commentary wasn't even worth reacting to.
"In our eyes having to comment on such type of allusive ascents is in fact unworthy of any person who understands memory, history, and the victims' dramas," Bartosz Bartyzel, a spokesperson for the Auschwitz Museum, told Insider.
When asked the same question, Raymund Flandez, a communications officer for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, told Insider that the museum has "issued a number of items over the years about why comparisons of contemporary issues to the Holocaust are inaccurate and offensive to Holocaust survivors."
A statement on the museum's website reads: "Nazism represented a singular evil that resulted in the murder of six million Jews and the persecution and deaths of millions of others for racial and political reasons. Comparing contemporary situations to Nazism is not only offensive to its victims, but it is also inaccurate and misrepresents both Holocaust history and the present."
"The Holocaust should be remembered, studied, and understood so that we can learn its lessons; it should not be exploited for opportunistic purposes," the statement adds.
Similarly, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, in a tweet on Tuesday said, "A number of right-wing officials are comparing the FBI's executed warrant on Trump's home to police tactics in Nazi Germany. Let's be clear: it's never appropriate to make such comparisons to the Holocaust--doing so demeans the memory of six million murdered Jews. This must stop."
The FBI raid was reportedly in connection to boxes of documents — including classified material — Trump brought with him to Florida when he left the White House.
The raid has prompted uproar among Trump's allies, who've reacted with incendiary rhetoric about civil war and vehement criticism of the FBI.