Is Trump a Nazi? I asked a former Senator, and the son of a Nuremberg lawyer, that key question
His answer may surprise you
The Nazis murdered more than 11 million people during their 12-year reign over first Germany, and then much of the rest of Europe. Between 1933 and 1945, the right-wing extremists targeted Jews, Poles, Romani, Serbs, disabled people, political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the LGBTQ community and the Black community in a mass genocide known as the Holocaust. Led by Adolf Hitler, the chief Nazis behind the Holocaust included Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg and Albert Speer.
Unfortunately for the justice-loving world, Hitler committed suicide before he could be tried for his crimes, and Eichmann managed to elude authorities for a decade-and-a-half. The other five men on that list, however, were all captured and held accountable at the famous Nuremberg trials from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. It was perhaps the single greatest occasion in all of human history in which tyrants were punished in accordance with the rule of law. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) — which was convened by the United States, United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France — ultimately tried 199 defendants, resulting in 161 convictions and 37 death sentences (by hanging). In the process, the Nuremberg trials did more than bring justice upon the perpetrators of the Holocaust; they established a precedent for dispensing that justice in accordance with a rule of law.
This history comes with a fascinating twist: Throughout the entirety of the Nuremberg trials, future United States Senator Thomas J. Dodd was present.
As chronicled in his 2007 book “Letters from Nuremberg: My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice,” Senator Christopher J. Dodd writes about a seminal moment in the career of the Senator Dodd who came before him. Before the pair were known as two of Connecticut’s most powerful Democrats, the latter was a wee child and the former was the grandson of Irish immigrants. Dodd’s law enforcement experience ranged from an unsuccessful attempt to capture bank robber John Dillinger for the FBI to several successful prosecutions of the Ku Klux Klan for the Justice Department, yet nothing compared to his work fighting literal Nazis.
By the time the trial was over, Dodd was so heavily involved that he had interrogated every one of the major Nazis leaders listed earlier in this article — Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Rudolf Hess — except for the pair of “Adolfs.” For anyone who wants a play-by-play account of the Nuremberg Trial as it happened, “Letters from Nuremberg” offers this through a combination of the father’s letters to his wife and the son’s retrospective analysis more than six decades later.
Yet I wanted to understand the relevance of the Dodd experience to contemporary politics. That is why I asked Dodd how his father would feel about President Donald Trump's and the actions taken by his administration that seem to be pro-Nazi. These include supporting Germany's AfD party, giving power to Elon Musk after he gave a Nazi salute at the 2025 inauguration and defending American neo-Nazis after the 2017 Charlottesville far right riot.
As it turns out, Dodd did not agree with this author’s deliberate implication that the Trump administration’s behavior should be compared to the Nazis. Dodd described that language as “hyperbole.”
“I think it's important to focus on the decisions that are being made and the harm that could cause the country and individuals,” Dodd argued. He then reviewed how his father was directly involved in the first of the many Nuremberg trials, “when the hierarchy of the Nazi regime, those who were still alive and left, were tried some 21 or 22 of them. [It was 22.]”
At the same time, Dodd did agree that Trump’s administration is ignoring one of the most important legacies of the Nuremberg trials — respecting the rule of law.
“I think they're making a huge mistake not to appreciate what we were able to achieve at Nuremberg, particularly when it came to the rule of law, which was the central ingredient that they really wanted to protect and preserve,” Dodd said. “And that's why you had four nations with prosecutorial teams, judges representing all four countries, in a very detailed trial of the 20 21, 22 defendants at Nuremberg.”
Dodd then referred to a June 1946 letter that his father wrote to his mother, near the end of the trials.
“There is a great satisfaction in doing one’s job, particularly a job like this. It really is of great importance to everyone and Lippmann says some day it will be recognized as a great landmark in the struggle of mankind for peace,” Dodd wrote. After elaborating on how this was “the highest calling of the legal profession,” he added “I will never do anything as worthwhile again — nothing will ever really be as important. Someday the boys will point to it, I hope, and be proud and inspired by it.”
“When I first read that letter back in the early 1990s, I had to put the letters down,” Dodd recalled. “It was moving.” Looking back all of these years later, he never would have dreamed, “never anticipated we'd have a president of the United States [we’re] really having to bring to court on an hourly basis to protect the rule of law.”
The younger Senator Dodd added that the elder Senator Dodd taught his children to memorize a line from Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who presided over the trials.
“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
While Dodd and I may not agree about whether Trump has descended to the level of literal Nazis (more on my thoughts here, for which Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt singled me out as “disgusting”), I certainly share his belief that Jackson’s comments “set the tone” which allowed the Nuremberg trials to ultimately create an international rule of law. No president who brazenly ignores the rulings of judges, whether because they say he lost an election or deny him the right to deport immigrants, can do so without undermining all of our freedoms.
Even if Trump is not a literal Nazi yet, what is to stop either him or any other politician from becoming one if they become untethered by the law, unaccountable to anyone but themselves?
“My father always felt it was the rule of law that was so important,” Dodd said. “And to the extent we can adopt rules of law on matters like this [the horrors of the Nazi regime], maybe we can avoid them in the future. So I appreciate your question.”
Back Seat Socialism
Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.
Twitter (X) @MatthewWRozsa