Trump's Nominee for Ambassador to Germany Says Atonement for the Holocaust is a "Sick Mentality"

Interviews with Retired Army Col. Douglas Abbott Macgregor, the Trump Administration’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Germany, revealed Macgregor expressing anti-immigrant views and criticizing Germany for fixating on the Holocaust.

In a 2018 interview on Conservative Commando, Macgregor criticized the German government for spending money on “unwanted Muslim invaders,” and went on to describe the German cultural concept of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung — confronting the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, or literally translated to ‘coping with the past’ — as a “sick mentality.” 

"There's sort of a sick mentality that says that generations after generations must atone sins of what happened in 13 years of German history and ignore the other 1,500 years of Germany. And Germany played a critical role in central Europe in terms of defending the serving Western civilization. So I think that's the problem.”

Macgregor’s approving comment that Germany “played a critical role” when it came to “defending…Western civilization” was evocative of a line from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who famously warned that Jews would “destroy German culture.” Goebbels and the Nazis used this as justification for removing Jews from academic and cultural institutions, and later, rounding up Germany’s Jewish population and sending them to concentration camps.

Claims of “defending Western civilization” are not new for Trump, his allies, or the broader Republican Party. In 2019, Trump ally Matt Schlapp called Jewish philanthropist George Soros “the architect of the destruction of western civilization.” In 2018, white nationalist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said in an interview, “If we don’t defend Western civilization, then we will become subjugated by the people who are the enemies of faith, the enemies of justice.” Not long after that, King infamously gave another interview that later prompted his removal from all congressional committees, after he said: “white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”