A demonstrator carries a placard with an image depicting U.S. President Donald Trump dressed in a Nazi uniform during a No Kings protest in New York City on Oct. 18.Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Timothy Snyder is the inaugural Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

In certain ways, this fall in the United States has recalled the fall of 1938 in Nazi Germany, when mass deportations of undocumented people was one of Adolf Hitler’s most ambitious coercive policies before the start of the Second World War. In the U.S., too, the connection between domestic repression and foreign aggression is coming into focus.

That fall, the German police and SS rounded up 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship and dumped them across the border. This set off a chain of events that provides a useful perspective on where the U.S. is now. A family was deported; a desperate refugee took revenge; the government organized a pogrom and reorganized its police; war followed.

The family was the Grynszpans. The father and mother had moved to Germany in 1911 from the Russian Empire. Their children were born in Germany and saw themselves as Germans. Their son Herschel had left to stay with relatives in Paris, where he faced a series of disappointments, including the........

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