A strong correlation between Nazism and Trumpzi fascism

I became an Austrian citizen before I ever set foot in that country.
Echo New York Times essay by Jessica Grose

In 2020, a law went into effect that allowed descendants of Austrians persecuted by the Nazis to apply for citizenship. The process was incredibly smooth for me, because my family had a detailed testimony of my maternal ancestors’ oppression.

The University of Vienna has records of my grandparents’ expulsion from medical school in 1938, the year Jews were stripped of their citizenship after the Anschluss. 

My Opa was able to leave soon after, and my Oma followed in early 1939. My grandfather had tutored an American boy in the early ’30s and secured a coveted visa because that family sponsored him.

The Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance had the information about my Opa’s parents. They were deported from Austria, along with nearly 1,000 other Jews ✡️, to a ghetto in southeastern Poland in 1941. It is unclear how they died — whether they withered from illness or malnutrition, whether they were among the hundreds shot in the ghetto, or whether they managed to make it to a concentration camp before they perished in late middle age. All we know is that the ghetto was liquidated in 1942, and they did not survive the war. 

My Oma’s parents were able to flee to Switzerland and got out just in time.

In spite of all of this, my grandparents loved Vienna. They spent the majority of their lives as American citizens and were grateful to build a life here, but they considered themselves Austrian until they died. Oma and Opa even took offense if you insulted or misperceived their homeland. This always confused me. I wanted to ask: How could they defend a place that tried to destroy them? A country that dragged its heels in making amends? Unlike Germany, it took Austria until the 1980s before it began to meaningfully reckon with its role in the Holocaust. But I never pressed. Like many refugees, my grandparents did not want to talk much about the past.

I wished that my grandparents had been alive for me to ask for their blessing in receiving citizenship as a kind of reparation. I wanted this gift from the Austrian government to mean more than a dark-red passport printed in a language I don’t understand. I have been thinking about all of this unceasingly since this past summer, when my parents sold some land my grandparents owned and, with it, the worldly connection to them in America.

The only answer to any of these questions came from an oral history my brother did with Oma in 2005. She was willing to talk about her pain in this context, knowing it would be kept for posterity. Oma did not seem bothered by the fact that she never got to finish medical school. Opa, who was a year ahead of her, served as a doctor in the U.S. Army and became a family physician, supporting his wife and children well.

“Between the First and Second World Wars was a wonderful time to grow up in Vienna,” she told my brother. My Oma said it was intellectually stimulating, exciting and bohemian — the city of Freud, Mahler and Kraus. The Alps are only about an hour from Vienna, and we have grinning photos of them hiking and skiing in the ’30s. “It really was antisemitic, but somehow it was gemütlich,” she said, using the German word for cozy or comfortable.

Success Can Make You a Scapegoat

Why did Vienna feel like home to my grandparents, when their own parents had not even been born in the city❓ When I read the historian Douglas Smith’s new book, “The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna,” I began to understand my grandparents’ relationship to their home country more deeply.

Through the diaries, letters and family history of Mignon Langnas, a Jewish nurse and mother of two who was one of a few thousand Jews to remain in Vienna through the Nazi occupation, Smith traces how Jewish life came to flourish in the city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Under Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, legal discrimination against Jews was abolished in 1867. Waves of antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe around this time meant Jews in my great-grandparents’ generation flooded into Vienna, which was already a multiethnic center made up of Hungarians, Croatians, Italians, Slovenians and Poles. “The empire’s Jews felt safe and secure,” Smith writes. Some historians, like Smith, posit that Jews were the “only true ‘supranationals,’” in Vienna because, unlike the Poles or the Slovenians, Jews had no national homeland “distinct from and predating the empire.”

Smith explains how successful Jews were in Vienna. They assimilated into Germanic culture — in my teen years, my Oma gave me a dirndl that had been my mother’s — and made up a bulk of the city’s physicians, financiers, journalists and artists. 

Jews✡️ fought valiantly for the empire during World War I, and some became decorated war heroes despite the loss. Austria was hacked out of the larger empire in the aftermath of the war, creating a tiny alpine state that “nobody wanted,” with an economy in free fall, Smith writes.

Because they had so successfully integrated into Viennese society, many Jews thought the Nazis would not be able to take over the country. A new constitution had been enacted in Austria in 1934 that gave Jews equal protection under the law. My Oma’s relatives assured her that Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor, would keep them safe. “He’ll straighten everything out. Nothing is going to happen,” they said.

Though there were many poor and struggling Jews ✡️ in Vienna — my grandfather’s family among them — Jews’ outsize success compared with their raw numbers made them an easy scapegoat for Austria’s woes. “They were accused of stoking unemployment, of taking jobs from the native-born Viennese, of worsening the scarcity of food and fuel, and of turning a housing shortage into a crisis,” Smith writes.

In the end, Hitler was able to easily trample over von Schuschnigg, annexing Austria in March 1938. “The city’s non-Jewish inhabitants had changed in an instant,” Smith’s book recounts. “The world had been turned upside down. Life had become new and terrifying. ‘You felt like a rat,’ Karl Gruenwald, ten years old at the time,” said.

One of the things my Oma talked about with my brother was how painful it was when her Catholic friends looked through her on the street. Her so-called friends turned away when Jews were beaten and humiliated. She felt scared of her own shadow. In 1938, when my grandmother was in her 20s, she witnessed her own elementary school being turned into a prison where thousands of Jewish intellectuals and professionals were tortured.

When Freud, who thought he would be safe in Austria until the very end, was forced to leave for London, he summed up the refugee experience this way: “The feeling of triumph on being liberated is too strongly mixed with sorrow, for in spite of everything I still greatly loved the prison from which I have been released.”

This Place Should Be Gemütlich

After reading Smith’s book, I came to feel that my grandparents’ love for Austria was a form of resistance. By refusing to concede their Viennese identity, they were insisting that they belonged. By accepting the gift of citizenship, I am digging out my dirndl and saying: I belong too.

This insistence is particularly resonant in this moment in the United States. Comparisons to Nazis are often used recklessly. But after reading Smith’s book, I find it hard not to see parallels with how popular right-wing “intellectuals” think it’s fair game to discuss “the Indian question” and whether it’s a “problem” that South Asians are going to the University of Texas and thriving there, cheering on the football team while wearing cowboy hats. “Some Republican state officials have repeatedly accused immigrants of taking jobs from Americans,” my newsroom colleague Amy Qin notes in an article about rising racism toward the South Asian community.

This dangerous rhetoric, which suggests that white Christians are the only true Americans, is not used just against Indian immigrants. You hear it when Vice President JD Vance says that Angie Nixon, who is running for U.S. Senate in Florida, should “get the hell out” of the United States if she is a socialist, adding, “You don’t belong in America if those are your views.”

You see it used against Muslims, especially those who are critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinian cause. 

Donald Trump has repeatedly gone after Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat in Michigan, calling him “Mohammed” and claiming that he is a “RADICAL Extremist, Terrorist Sympathizer.” You see it in ICE aggression and Trump’s desire to end birthright citizenship and the administration’s attempt to build a case against Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota in the hopes of denaturalizing and ultimately deporting her.

And there has been a resurgence of bald antisemitism in the past decade. Most recently, young Republican activists in several states have had group chats leaked that reveal sympathy for Hitler and vile anti-Jewish sentiments. 

Antisemitism exists on the left as well. Jews are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than any other group, despite our tiny numbers overall.

As the economy shows few signs of improving, and Trump enters the back nine of his presidency, we should note the historical precedent. Any whiff of the great replacement theory should be roundly condemned. We are all Americans; no group belongs here more than any other. Put another way: This place should be gemütlich.

End Notes

I do not usually believe in signs from the universe, but I received a sack full of my grandparents’ letters and documents the week that Smith’s book came out. My Opa wrote these letters to my Oma during World War II. The documents include everything from my grandparents’ grammar school records to my Oma’s attempts in the 1990s to get reparations for the property the Nazis stole from her family. I’m going to continue to go through this material over the next several months, and I may relate those explorations in this newsletter. 

A few years ago, I visited Vienna and attempted to write about receiving Austrian citizenship. But I abandoned it because I kept sounding like I was stoned — What even is a country, man? — because borders shifted so much in that pre- and postwar era. But I read many fascinating books as I was trying to work through my ideas, including “I Belong to Vienna,” by Anna Goldenberg, whose Jewish ancestors, like Mignon, were able to remain in Vienna throughout the war. Another essential read if you are interested in Austrian history is Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday,” a memoir of growing up in Vienna under the Hapsburg empire. And, finally, don’t miss my Opinion colleague Sarah Wildman’s beautiful “Paper Love,” about her Viennese Jewish grandfather and the love he left behind when he fled Austria.

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The New York Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

Emergency! Where are mothers to go? Birthing Centers are closing. Women and babies will die.

You Can’t Be Born Here. You Can Only Die.

Echo opinion report published in The New York Times by Jessica Grose:

When Bonner General Health stopped providing labor and delivery services in 2023, the families of Sandpoint, Idaho, were devastated. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that back in 2014, she had planned on a home birth, but it was not progressing, and her midwife took her to Bonner General, where she had a C-section. It went so well, she became friends with her obstetrician.

If you’re a pregnant woman in Bonner County, in the northern panhandle of the state, your options for receiving prenatal and postpartum care and giving birth are quite limited. If you want to get an ultrasound, you are probably driving nearly an hour to Coeur d’Alene, or over an hour to Spokane, Wash. That’s in good weather. But try navigating a bumpy dirt road and mountain passes, which sometimes close, in an ice storm, while in labor.

As a result, many pregnant women in the area are either opting for planned home births with midwives, or, if it’s possible, they are booking short-term rentals or staying with family near hospitals with obstetric units. If a planned home birth goes sideways, fast, some of these women may end up in Bonner’s emergency room, which no longer has obstetricians nor pediatricians to manage neonatal resuscitations. Some of them are buying helicopter insurance in case they need to be airlifted.

Quintano, who is a progressive activist, gathered birthing stories from other community members when Bonner closed its labor and delivery unit three years ago.

Without having Bonner’s obstetric care available, “I likely never would have tried to start a family knowing that all my prenatal appointments were over an hour away,” a woman named Jonell said as part of the collected stories.

The closure of rural labor and delivery units is not just a northern Idaho problem. According to a 2024, report on maternity care deserts from the March of Dimes, “In 1,104 U.S. counties, there is not a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician.” 

This is also not solely a recent problem, though it will be worsened by cuts to Medicaid by the Trump administration. The federal Rural Health Fund, which seeks to modernize ailing country hospitals, among other improvements, will not offset these cuts by much.

I’d describe it more as a slow-rolling disaster that is picking up speed across the country.

The existential pain of losing birth services

While reporting this article, I heard from mothers, physicians, nurses, midwives and doulas living in rural areas from Maine to Oregon.

They described the same interwoven set of dynamics making it hard to keep rural labor and delivery units open. The first issue is the aging population of rural America, which means fewer babies, and less revenue. Rural hospital administrators say that if a labor and delivery unit drops below 200 births a year, its financial viability is endangered, and it may no longer be able to guarantee the safety of its maternity care.

Maternity care tends to be a financial loser at urban hospitals, too, because insurance reimbursement rates for it are not great. But higher-volume procedures compensate for the losses. And if a city hospital ends labor and delivery services, a prospective patient’s travel time to another hospital tends to be far shorter and less perilous.

Over 130 rural labor and delivery units have closed since 2020, per the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a nonpartisan policy organization. Women who live in rural areas (that are not adjacent to urban areas) without hospital-based obstetric care are more likely to have preterm births and less likely to receive adequate prenatal care, according to a 2018 investigation published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They are more likely to give birth in emergency rooms that are not set up for obstetric emergencies.

I have now heard stories from across the country of women giving birth on the side of the road or in their cars because they did not make the long journey to the hospital in time.

Still, when any hospital loses obstetric services, it puts pressure on the closest hospitals. 

Patients now wait longer to see providers, and I heard anecdotes about women having to give birth in the hallways of hospitals because there was no bed for them.

Richard Leidinger is the medical director of surgical specialists at Northern Light Health in Presque Isle, Maine, part of Aroostook County. Half of the county’s obstetrics departments have closed in the past 10 years. So Leidinger’s hospital, which has one of the two remaining units in a county larger than Connecticut, is seeing women who “have had no prenatal care and arrive in active labor on our doorstep with no warning.”

Keeping staff at rural hospitals is a huge problem in many medical specialties, because doctors and nurses often prefer to be closer to the amenities of more populous areas. Elizabeth Khan, a primary care physician who was formerly based in sparsely populated Mendocino County, California, and also gave birth while living there, said that the closest obstetrician to her hospital “was an hour-and-a-half drive through the mountains from us” while some of her patients have to drive four hours to San Francisco, where she now lives, to see a neurologist.

Katy Backes Kozhimannil, a co-director of the Rural Health Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told me that when a community loses its labor and delivery unit, that loss is about so much more than just some medical procedures — it becomes existential. We all have a story of where we were born, she told me.

“What does it mean to live a good life in a place❓” Kozhimannil mused. “It feels like there is a deep loss in a community if you can’t be born there — you can only die.”

Cutting red tape, increasing reimbursements

The good news is that there are many common-sense, bipartisan policy solutions to this problem, and there is both state and federal legislation in the works aimed at some of the obstacles to rural women’s getting quality care.

“The simplest solution is for health insurance plans (both commercial insurance and Medicaid) to pay adequately for labor and delivery services. ‘Adequately’ means enough to cover the lowest feasible cost of delivering high-quality care in that community, not some amount that might be adequate, on average, for large hospitals,” said Harold Miller, the president and chief executive of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Because there are fewer deliveries at small hospitals, there needs to be a higher payment per delivery to keep them afloat.

Miller also explained that ideally hospitals should be receiving what’s called a standby capacity payment from each health insurance plan, a payment that would “support the minimum fixed costs of maintaining labor and delivery staffing in that community regardless of how many births there are.” After all, he said, we don’t fund fire departments based on how many fires there are every year.

There is a bill sitting in Congress called the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act that would provide grants to rural hospitals for equipment and emergency obstetric training for physicians. I heard from many family medicine doctors who said that it would be useful to have additional obstetrics training, since they are providing cradle-to-grave care in many hospitals in rural America. This doesn’t fix the problem of keeping staff in rural areas, but it’s something.

Another policy solution, which some states have already taken steps to institute, is unbundling Medicaid payments for prenatal, birth and postpartum care. In many states, Medicaid reimbursement is a one-time payment for everything. In practice this can result in a delay in reimbursement or in hospitals potentially seeing no money at all if someone receives prenatal care from their obstetricians but delivers in another setting. By reimbursing on a fee-for-service plan, small rural hospitals can see more funding for what they are providing.

There also needs to be better reimbursement for and easier access to midwives and doulas, who are providing essential care to rural women. I spoke to Sara Fichtenbauer, who is planning a home birth for her third child in Chippewa Falls, Wis. She told me she is paying $6,000 out of pocket for midwife care, and she isn’t sure she’s going to get reimbursed — she’s still filling out paperwork. California recently passed a law that cut some of the red tape for midwife-run birthing centers to help ease the burden of maternity deserts. This isn’t a cure-all, though, because midwives cannot perform C-sections, and sometimes infants really need a NICU, and fast.

The babies are going to keep coming whether there’s a labor and delivery unit to care for them. 

There is no shortage of ideas, nor of passion for fixing this problem. The issue is the political will and the slow pace of legislative solutions.

Leidinger, the hospital medical director in Presque Isle, told me that he served at a combat surgical hospital in Iraq, and he also treated patients in rural Guatemala. What he is seeing now in Maine makes him think that we’re headed in the direction of those levels of medical care.

This shouldn’t happen in the richest country in the world, Leidinger said. Exactly❗ And I couldn’t agree more.

Donald Trump and maga Repubiicans must demand for RFKjr to be fired because he is incompetent - Attention Senator Susan Collins

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jessica Gross:

RFKjr's Vaccine Mess:

In June, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations about the childhood vaccine schedule, claiming the move would “restore public trust in vaccines.” The new panel was assembled quickly, and five new members were added earlier this week, days before A.C.I.P. met on Thursday.

When you set fire to institutional knowledge and quickly hire a bunch of people, some of whom have a history of vaccine skepticism, you get an ad hoc mess — not the “gold standard” science Kennedy and his team keep promising. At one point, the A.C.I.P. member Dr. Cody Meissner abstained from voting on an insurance coverage question because, he said, “I’m not quite sure what I’m voting for,” which captures the level of confusion on display, and also Dr. Meissner’s admirable 🙏commitment to doing his job despite the disorganization.

Perhaps as a result of this chaos, on Friday morning A.C.I.P. decided to postpone a planned vote on the hepatitis B vaccine. On Thursday, the committee rescinded the use of the M.M.R.V. vaccine, which combines immunizations for measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox (varicella), rather than having separate shots for M.M.R. and chickenpox — but only for the first dose of the M.M.R.V. shot, which has been given to children at 12 to 15 months old. The second dose of the M.M.R.V. vaccine is given after a child is 4, and that is still recommended.

News reports confirmed that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated in a 2012 deposition that a parasitic worm had entered his brain, "ate a portion of it and then died". The diagnosis occurred in 2010 after he experienced severe memory loss and mental fog.

But, the A.C.I.P. also voted to continue paying for the first M.M.R.V. shot through the federal Vaccines for Children program.

If this sounds bizarre and confusing, that’s because it is — and the committee voted again on the same topic Friday morning, reversing the initial decision. As of this writing, the panelists were still arguing about whether Covid-19 vaccines work at preventing infection, which feels like a Twitter thread from 2021.

Kennedy’s (crazy❗😜💢) ideology looms over so much of this.

In a separate hearing on Wednesday, the ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Susan Monarez (Ph.D.) said that Kennedy told her “there was no science or evidence associated with the childhood vaccine schedule,” and that if she wouldn’t agree to changes to the schedule without having seen them first, he would fire her. Though the outcome of this week’s meetings wasn’t as bad as many expected — there was concern that the hepatitis B vaccine might be delayed — Kennedy’s antipathy toward the regular childhood vaccine schedule seems clear.

Last week Senator Bill Cassidy called for Kennedy to publicly encourage parents to have their children get the pertussis vaccine, which he has not yet done, despite the fact that in the past year alone at least four infants — two in Kentucky and two in Louisiana — died from pertussis. Neither the infants nor their mothers were vaccinated in the Kentucky cases. And as I have said before, as long as Mr. Kennedy remains in office, his presence will signal to many parents that vaccines are not to be trusted.

That message is percolating, especially among younger parents, who are so far removed from the reality of pre-vaccine outbreaks that they may not understand the peril. A poll released earlier this week from KFF and The Washington Post noted, “Parents under age 35 are also less likely than older parents — particularly those ages 50 and older — to say they are either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat confident’ that routine vaccines are safe for children.”

We definitely need to restore America’s trust in vaccines, but the amateur hour A.C.I.P. display isn’t going to do it.

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.