On Thursday of this past week, Vice President JD Vance visited the site of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, making him the latest in a string of American public officials to visit a former Nazi camp. The visit, timed to coincide with Vance’s trip to Germany for the Munich Security Conference, comes a year after Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and newly-installed most powerful person in the United States, visited Auschwitz last January.
It’s worth recalling the circumstances that led to Musk’s visit to Auschwitz a year ago. The visit came after months of antisemitic statements, including using his social media platform X to boost conspiracy theories accusing Jews of “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities”; threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League for being the “biggest generators of anti-Semitism”; and accusing Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros of attempting to “erode the very fabric of civilization” because he “hates humanity.”
Finally, in the wake of a threatened advertiser boycott with the potential to harm Musk’s bottom line, he did what any wealthy celebrity accused of antisemitism does these days: he made a ritualized visit to a concentration camp or Holocaust museum to have his sins of bigotry washed clean. (In Musk’s case, he also made a similarly ritualized visit to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who, of course, has a long history of giving kosher passes to far-right antisemites in exchange for their support for the most right-wing elements within the Israeli government.) Musk’s brief trip to Auschwitz was enough to win instant forgiveness for his sins of antisemitism.
Except, of course, Musk was not radically, instantaneously transformed by his time at Auschwitz. He was not magically cleansed of his antisemitism. In the year after his trip to the infamous Nazi concentration camp, Musk reinstated the accounts of Holocaust deniers and praised a Holocaust revisionist historian. In just the past month alone, Musk infamously performed a Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally; joked about the Holocaust; told supporters of the German far-right party Alternative for Germany that Germany needs to “move beyond” its historical guilt for the Holocaust; and reinstated a briefly-fired 25-year-old government employee who had bragged about being “racist before it was cool” and called for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Because the truth is, a trip to Auschwitz or Dachau isn’t some instant cure for antisemitism. It does not wipe away years of bigotry and far-right sympathies in some blinding flash of moral enlightenment. In fact, Musk didn’t even take his trip to the death camp particularly seriously. According to the partner of an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who was the guest of honor for Musk’s visit to the site, Musk “did not care” about the trip at all, and was “unmoved by the experience.”
Art Spiegelman, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, and himself the child of Holocaust survivors, has noted that despite the Jewishness of the Holocaust, most of our cultural narratives about the atrocity are actually Christian in nature, because they see suffering as providing a path to moral enlightenment; as Spiegelman writes: “that notion of suffering is a very Christian notion, that somehow you’re ennobled by it.”
Spiegelman is correct, but I would argue that he doesn’t go far enough. Not only are our narratives about Holocaust suffering narratives of Christian redemptive suffering, but our Holocaust memorial sites have become Christian sites of instant redemption. We see the symbolic visit to Auschwitz or Dachau as a sort of Christian pilgrimage, a way to receive penance and be cleansed of one’s sins, in the same way that Christians speak of the conversion narrative of accepting Jesus and being forgiven.
For Jews, in contrast, repentance or teshuvah isn’t something to be granted based on a singular conversion experience, it’s a lengthy and arduous process that entails taking responsibility for one’s actions and making genuine steps to become a better person. In other words, precisely what Elon Musk has not shown himself capable of doing. Of course, not all Christians feel this way about repentance, and many do the hard work of atoning for sins based on their Christian principles. But the cheap grace offered by someone like Vance reflects a certain strand of Christian nationalism on the rise in the United States for quite some time.
Like Musk, JD Vance has a deep history of support for bigoted, far-right politics, a history that includes his own support for the German far-right party with a history of Holocaust minimization, his lies about Haitian migrants eating people’s pets (lies which have, incidentally, been compared to the age-old antisemitic blood libel, and which have led to increased neo-Nazi activity), and his administration banning governmental observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, supposedly in the name of fighting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. That’s not to mention his long and well-documented history of hostility to refugees and the queer community.
If Vance truly wanted to do teshuvah and atone for his history of bigotry and hatred, he would need to start by apologizing to all of the vulnerable communities he’s insulted and harmed, and proceed to demonstrate his commitment to change by challenging President Trump to adopt a less hateful stance toward migrants. That would be an example of genuine repentance.
But Vance won’t do that, of course. He visited Dachau and offered a few canned remarks about how inspired he was by the stories of the “unspeakable evil” he witnessed, and how he was “really moved by this site.” Then, when his trip to Europe concludes next week, he’ll return to the United States to continue overseeing the construction of internment camps to house migrants. He will proclaim himself morally enlightened before going right back to his bigotry.
And that, in the end, is the final insult to the memories of the Jews murdered at Dachau. It isn’t enough that they were murdered for being Jewish, but now the sacred site of their deaths has been used as a site of Christian pilgrimage, where the hard work of repentance and repair is replaced by easy, cheap penance and the instant cleansing of their manifold sins of bigotry. A Catholic politician has gone to Dachau, appropriated the site of Jewish mass murder, and will incorporate it into a Christian penitential logic of immediate forgiveness.
In the end even Dachau and Auschwitz have been colonized by the Christian nationalists—a new, if less obvious, form of supersessionism.
