The Trump administration is under fire for using two phrases that critics say reflect Nazi slogans.
The Trump administration has been under fire from critics in recent days for reportedly echoing Nazi sentiment in slogans used by both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Labor (DOL).
The criticism comes amid ongoing pressure campaigns by the Trump administration, including an experimental balloon to take over Greenland, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and an increase in violent ICE operations against Americans.
Tom Morello, the guitarist for the band Rage Against the Machine, denounced the Trump administration in a social media post on Monday. He claimed that the slogan on the DHS lectern, “One of ours, all of yours,” was a Nazi slogan.
In his post, Morello said the slogan was “coined when an SS officer was killed and the Nazis murdered all the male residents of the village in retaliation,” referring to the Lidice massacre in 1942.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the massacre in a small Czech town took place on Hitler’s orders as a “retaliation for the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich, a prominent Nazi official.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stood behind the lectern at a news conference at the World Trade Center on Jan. 8, a day after ICE officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.
Benjamin Hett, a history professor at Hunter College whose work focuses on Nazism, said Newsweekthat the origin of the formulation is not entirely clear. He noted that he could not confirm that this slogan was used in Lidice.
Peter Fritzsche, a history professor at the University of Illinois, wrote in an email Newsweek among other things: “I know the discourse around Lidice quite well, and I have not encountered anything specific like ‘One of ours, all of yours,’ but the expression certainly captures the essence of the German hostage policy in World War II, which was reiterated many times by Hitler.”
The news agency Associated Press reported that the city had been “razed to the ground,” citing announcements on the radio in Berlin. The population was given as 483, and the village was accused of providing shelter and support to Heydrich’s “murderers”.
A second slogan has also sparked controversy after the Department of Labor posted on X on January 12: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.”
“The Nazi slogan was ‘One People, One Reich, One Leader’—One People, One State, One Leader. So there are differences, but there are also similarities. I wouldn’t say that those differences make the use of the slogan any less disturbing,” Hett said.
Fritzsche noted that the expression “is a typical ‘dissolve’ in which one collective noun presupposes the other: the Nazi slogans ‘One people, one empire, one leader’ or ‘One people, one empire, one faith’, in which each part follows logically from the other to legitimize the unity and purity of the people, the government structure, the belief system.
“The slogan of the Department of Labor, if indeed it is their slogan, is not sequential in the movement from popular essence to political structure, but repetitive: There is only one people, one kind of people, because there is only one fatherland, one heritage that is not only recognizable, lasting and incontestable, but also must be defended, hence the saying or slogan to strengthen the will and identification.” (This article was created in cooperation with newsweek.com)
