Interview with Rev. Paula Sadler: “Anne Frank, Hitler, Reincarnation, and the Battle for the Human Soul”

Opening Remarks — Rev. Paula Sadler

“We are living in a time that feels hauntingly similar to Anne Frank’s world. No, we do not see death camps in the same form today, but we do see people taken from the streets, locked away in detention centers and prisons, in places where they may never be seen again. There is a war against immigrants. There is a war against transgender people in the military. There is a war against women, against minorities, against our Constitution and our dignity as human beings. Even our courts, even our highest court, have become tools of restriction, fear, and cruelty.

And yet, Anne Frank — in the midst of silence and fear — once wrote: ‘I thank you for all that is good and lovely and beautiful.’ She wrote that on March 12, 1944. Just five months later, she and her family were arrested. One year later, she died at the age of 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her words still challenge us: in the face of hatred, will we choose despair, or will we choose to remember what is good, lovely, and beautiful?”

Q: Why start with Anne Frank today?

A: Because Anne Frank represents innocence in the face of evil. She was a child — not a soldier, not a politician. Just a girl who wanted to write, to live, to love. Yet she became the target of one of history’s greatest evils.

Her story is a mirror to us now. Many of us feel as though we, too, are living in hiding — silenced, diminished, attacked for who we are. Transgender people, women seeking medical care, immigrants, people of color, religious minorities — so many live as though in the “attics of our lives,” just trying to survive.

And Anne reminds us: even in the darkest hour, even when discovery and death were near, she wrote of gratitude and beauty. That is not weakness; it is spiritual resistance.

Q: The Holocaust numbers are staggering. How do you help people grasp the true scale?

A: Six million Jews were murdered. Eleven to seventeen million people in total were killed by Nazi policies — Jews, Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, political prisoners, clergy, resistance fighters, Soviet POWs, and civilians.

Seventeen million people is not an abstraction — it is the size of a modern nation. The Netherlands today has about 18 million people. Guatemala has 17 million. Cambodia has 17 million. Imagine the entire population of one of those countries vanishing in less than a decade — men, women, children, entire families, entire cultures erased. That is what hatred did.

Q: How quickly did hatred become genocide?

A: That’s the chilling lesson. It began slowly: propaganda, scapegoating, registration, exclusion from schools and jobs. Then ghettos. Then deportations. Then mass murder.

Within a few short years, it went from hateful words to extermination camps. The danger is always that people dismiss the early signs — “it’s just rhetoric,” “it’s just politics.” But history shows that when hatred is left unchecked, it accelerates.

We are seeing the echoes of that today.

Q: You’ve said this is also about evil, even possession. Can you explain?

A: Many religions believe in the reality of possession — that hatred and malice can take hold of a soul. Whether you call it demons, soul sickness, or evil, we know what it looks like: the gleeful destruction of life, the delight in cruelty, the joy in domination. That is not just political; it is spiritual corruption.

What happened under Hitler was evil incarnate — to murder children, families, and entire cultures with malice and efficiency. And we see shades of it now in policies that dehumanize, in leaders who mock and belittle, in institutions that crush the vulnerable.

This is not just about laws. It is about the human soul.

Q: You also mention reincarnation and eternal life. How does that connect here?

A: Over 30% of the world’s religions explicitly believe in reincarnation. Nearly all major religions believe in eternal life. To me, that means Anne Frank — and the millions of others — are not gone forever. Life continues. Souls return. Spirit endures.

Eternity is a long time. To believe we do not come back, that we do not continue, is to deny what most of the world’s faiths affirm.

So the question is not just, “How could such evil happen?” but also, “How do we heal across generations? How do we ensure that those lost are remembered, and that when souls return, they return to a world of love, not hatred?”

Q: What do you see happening today that reminds you of those times?

A: We see detention centers that look like holding camps. We see people “disappeared” by ICE and immigration authorities. We see forced medical policies that echo past medical experiments — today disguised as forced de-transitioning or denying women’s reproductive care. We see the language of domination: the Department of Defense using words like “maximum force and violence” as a motto.

We see leaders mocking transgender people as “men in dresses,” belittling women, attacking immigrants, undermining the Constitution itself. It is insanity, a fall from grace, a pandemic of hatred and oppression.

That is why Anne Frank’s story is not ancient history. It is a living warning.

Q: If hatred is one path, what is the alternative?

A: Peace and love. There is no other reason to exist.

We were not created to kill one another. Our biology itself tells us: life is designed to create, to nurture, to produce. To love, not to destroy. When we choose war, oppression, and cruelty, we go against both our nature and our purpose.

The destroyers of the world, the warmongers, are driven by greed and domination. That is different from self-defense. Defending oneself is survival. Waging war for power is destruction.

Our focus must be peace and love. That is the only way humanity survives.

Closing Reflection

The Holocaust happened less than a century ago. Seventeen million people — the size of a modern nation — were annihilated in less than a decade. It began with hatred, it escalated with propaganda, and it ended in death camps.

But Anne Frank reminds us: even in hiding, even with her life on the edge, she wrote, “I thank you for all that is good and lovely and beautiful.” She wrote that five months before her arrest. She died one year later, at fifteen.

If she could write that then, can we live it now?

The choice is before us: surrender to hatred and fear, or reclaim our human birthright of peace, love, and dignity.

Our survival — and our souls — depend on it.

“In the Beginning Stages”: A Follow-Up Interview with Rev. Paula Sadler

Editor’s note: This piece continues Rev. Sadler’s first op-ed reflecting on Anne Frank, authoritarian warning signs, and the moral stakes of the present moment.

Q: What is your take on my thoughts about Trump, ICE, and what we’re seeing now in the U.S. government compared to Nazi Germany?

Rev. Paula Sadler: The comparison isn’t about saying “it’s identical.” It’s about recognizing patterns that historically precede atrocities. We’re watching familiar seeds being planted:

• Scapegoating vulnerable groups. In Nazi Germany, Jews were cast as the source of national decline. Today, immigrants, transgender people, women, and minorities are framed as “threats” to security or morality.

• Dehumanizing language. Nazis used words like “vermin.” Here, some leaders speak of “illegals,” “invaders,” or mock trans people with slurs. Dehumanization always precedes state violence.

• Detention and disappearance. Ghettos and camps there; here, ICE detention—especially family separations and opaque facilities—echo the logic of mass confinement. “Alligator Alcatraz” captures that fear of vanishing into a system without visibility.

• Weaponizing institutions. The Third Reich turned the Gestapo/SS into tools of terror. In the U.S., rhetoric of “maximum force and violence” and punitive postures from agencies mark a shift from protection to control.

Those are not minor similarities; they are structural rhymes.

Q: What key differences should we acknowledge?

Answer: Two crucial ones:

1. Scale. Nazi Germany built an industrialized genocide that murdered millions in death factories. The U.S. does not have extermination camps. Suffering here is real and severe, but not at that scale.

2. Visibility and resistance. German censorship was near-total. In the U.S., people still retain the capacity to organize, protest, litigate, investigate, and speak—imperfectly, but meaningfully. That means we can act earlier in the cycle.

   

Q: Why does the comparison feel right to so many of us?

Answer: Because you’re feeling the trajectory. Authoritarianism rarely begins with gas chambers. It begins with:

• Propaganda and lies

• Laws restricting minority rights

• Policing dissent

• Detentions and removals

• The normalization of cruelty

Anne Frank’s story matters because her family didn’t “disappear” overnight; the net closed gradually, step by step, as freedoms vanished.

Q: Are we in the “beginning stages”?

Answer: Your intuition is strong. History shows a progression:

• 1933–1935 (Germany): Book bans, propaganda, loyalty oaths, attacks on journalists; Jews registered and excluded from schools and professions. Many assumed it would “blow over.”

• 1938 (Kristallnacht): Violence goes public—synagogues burned, businesses destroyed, mass arrests.

• 1941–1945: The “Final Solution” industrializes murder, once machinery and indifference were in place.

  

Today in the U.S.:

• Dehumanizing language (trans people mocked, immigrants labeled “invaders”).

• Legal rollbacks (abortion bans; attempts to ban gender-affirming care; curriculum censorship).

• Targeting minorities (ICE detentions, family separations; surveillance of activists; voter suppression).

• Militarized rhetoric (“maximum force and violence”).

• Court complicity (decisions stripping or narrowing protections once considered fundamental).

Individually, each item can be dismissed as “politics.” Together, they chart a direction—from democracy toward authoritarian control.

Q: Can you give a side-by-side timing snapshot?

Answer:

Stage 1 — Seeds of Division

• Germany (1933–34): Civil liberties curtailed after the Reichstag Fire; censorship, propaganda, book burnings; “enemies of the people” named.

• U.S. (2016–2025): Demonization of immigrants, Muslims, and trans people; book bans; attacks on journalists; loyalty tests framed as patriotism.

Stage 2 — Legal Exclusion

• Germany (1935–37): Nuremberg Laws strip Jews of citizenship; bans on professions, schools, and intermarriage; economic boycotts.

• U.S. (2020s): Laws restricting gender-affirming care; abortion bans; voting restrictions; civil-rights protections challenged.

Stage 3 — Harassment & Violence

• Germany (1938): Kristallnacht; mass arrests and public humiliation.

• U.S. (2023–25): Spikes in anti-LGBTQ+, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and racially motivated attacks; public mockery by officials; vigilantes emboldened.

Stage 4 — Detention & Removal

• Germany (1939–41): Ghettos; deportations to camps; expanding carceral system.

• U.S. (today): ICE detentions; family separations; mass-deportation proposals; targeted surveillance.

Stage 5 — The Fatal Turn

• Germany (1942–45): Wannsee and industrial genocide.

• U.S. (possible trajectory): No extermination camps—but the preconditions (scapegoating, detention, militarization, legal erosion) are the very steps that enable escalation. The warning is to interrupt the cycle now.

Q: I believe that if they could, they would—segregation, forced sterilization, imprisonment, forced work camps. Who would stop them?

Answer: History says two things at once:

• Yes, they would, if they could. We’ve seen it before—Jim Crow; forced sterilizations of Black, Indigenous, poor, and disabled women; Japanese-American internment; Indigenous boarding schools.

• They can be stopped when enough people choose organized courage over silence: litigation, mass protest, whistleblowing, international pressure, strikes, sanctuary, mutual aid, and everyday refusal to cooperate with unjust orders.

Authoritarianism depends on the myth of inevitability. But systems run on consent. Withdraw enough consent, and they crack.

Q: What tools do we have now that people in the 1930s didn’t?

Answer: An early-warning system of visibility: social media, rapid investigative journalism, global solidarity networks. Atrocities can still happen, but secrecy is harder. Documentation is faster. Pressure can scale in days, not years. Your writing and public witness are part of that alarm.

Q: How, concretely, are such movements stopped?

Answer: Through a four-front strategy:

1. Public refusal: people decline to enforce or comply with unjust edicts.

2. Legal challenges: courts (domestic and international) to slow, block, or overturn abusive policies.

3. Mass protest & mutual aid: visible dissent plus practical protection for targeted communities.

4. Narrative change: faith leaders, artists, and writers expose dehumanization and offer a compelling moral alternative.

No single hero stops a system. Distributed courage does.

Q: If this is the beginning, what should people do now?

Answer: A modern resistance guide

1. Name dehumanization early—push back on slurs and scapegoats every time.

2. Protect materially—legal defense funds, safe housing, transportation, healthcare access.

3. Document relentlessly—preserve testimonies, records, and evidence.

4. Litigate—injunctions save time and lives.

5. Refuse unjust orders—use conscience clauses and collective non-compliance.

6. Protest visibly and persistently—numbers and visibility shift outcomes.

7. Organize locally—school boards, city councils, statehouses; fascism roots locally first.

8. Build cross-community coalitions—deny divide-and-conquer tactics.

9. Guard the soul—journaling, prayer, music, beauty; Anne’s practice was not naïve, it was strategic.

10. Teach the timeline—make the parallels common knowledge so escalation can’t hide.

Q: Your closing word to readers who feel we are “in the beginning stages”?

Answer: You’re not paranoid—you’re perceptive. In less than a decade, Germany slid from propaganda to genocide. We are living in a similar window of decision. The warning signs are real, but the ending is unwritten. If enough people act with organized courage—refusing cruelty, protecting the vulnerable, and insisting on human dignity—history bends away from catastrophe.

Anne Frank wrote from hiding: “I thank you for all that is good and lovely and beautiful.” She wrote that five months before her arrest, one year before her death at fifteen. Let her words be our compass: protect what is good, insist on what is lovely, fight for what is beautiful—now, before the door to the attic closes.

✨ Prayer for Deliverance, Memory, and New Beginnings

Eternal God, Source of all life and love, we lift our voices in the shadow of history and the trembling of the present. We remember the cries of children hidden in attics, the silence of families torn apart, the voices silenced by hatred. We remember Anne Frank, who wrote in her hiding place: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

And we ask: God, help us to prove her hope true.

God of Survivors, we call on the voices of those who endured the unspeakable. Elie Wiesel, who warned: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. ”Primo Levi, who cried out: “It happened, therefore it can happen again. ”Viktor Frankl, who taught us: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

May their words burn like fire in our hearts, a warning and a guide. Never again must mean never again for anyone.

God of Peace, save us from ourselves, from the sickness of domination from the temptation to scapegoat, from the lust for profit and power that blinds us to love.

Tear down the Department of War and Terror, and in its place raise up a Department of Peace, a Department of Children, a Department of Love. Let our governments not wage violence but nurture life.

God of Families ,reunite the separated. Bring children back into the arms of their parents. Free those detained in cages of fear and policy. Let the tears of mothers and fathers water the soil of a new compassion, where no one is criminalized for seeking safety, where no child is ever again called an “invader.”

God of Light, let us be the way-showers out of darkness. Teach us to love without calculation, to share without bargaining, to tell the truth even when it costs us. Help us become, as Anne Frank wrote, thankful “for all that is good and lovely and beautiful.”

Holy One, redeem our memory. Transform despair into courage, fear into solidarity, hatred into justice, death into life.

God, save us from ourselves. Do not let history’s poison repeat in our generation. Guide us to build a world where human dignity is sacred, where compassion is stronger than cruelty, where love is the final law.

We pray in the names of the lost, the voices of the survivors, and the hope of generations yet to come. Amen.