‘Deeply Offensive’: Holocaust Museum Rebukes Tim Walz Over Anne Frank Comparison

(AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

The U.S. Holocaust Museum on Monday called out American politicians for comparing ICE and Border Patrol raids in Minnesota to Anne Frank being captured and sent to a concentration camp by Nazis — one day after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) did exactly that.

“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” the museum posted on X. “Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable.”

It continued, “Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”

The Washington, D.C.-based museum has 383,000 followers on X.

Its post follows Walz referencing Frank while urging President Donald Trump to withdraw federal immigration agents from his state after the shooting death of Alex Pretti. 

Walz said kids who are either in the country illegally or are the children of illegal immigrants are terrified of going to school because of Trump’s raids — and that history will judge his administration harshly for it.

“Allow our children to go back to school. We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

Critics would point out there are some holes in Walz’s comparison, like the fact that Frank was a German citizen before Adolf Hitler’s government stripped her and other Jews of their citizenship. And of course, there are no immigrants being sent to death camps on cattle trains in the U.S.

Frank and her family were living in the Netherlands when they went into hiding to avoid the occupying Nazis; they were discovered and captured in 1944, and Frank died in a concentration camp at the age of 15 a year later. Her diary from her time in hiding was published a few years after World War II and became one of the defining accounts of living under harrowing Nazi occupation.

This was not the first time Walz has compared ICE to Nazi Germany. He called it Trump’s “modern-day Gestapo” last year, and other Democrats have made similar claims.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) last October compared Trump’s ICE raids to Nazi stormtroopers rounding up Jews and other minorities.

“This is how authoritarian regimes do it. They create these kind of fake ideas that there’s an enemy out there and it could be sitting next to you at one of these tables. So just somebody sitting at your table that you don’t like might be one of those enemies,” Pritzker said at the time. “So let’s round them up, let’s make sure they are the subjects of the laws that we’re passing, because we don’t like who they are. That is what authoritarian regimes do.”

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