At Everglades detention camp, we have let evil in. Now the question is, ‘How far will evil go?’

Funny thing about evil. Although an absolute, evil sneaks up on you. It sidles up to you slowly, slouching, conditioning you to its presence, so before you know you have crossed a line, the damage has been done.

On a break from academic research in Germany, we took a trip to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp outside Berlin. Sachsenhausen was not a death camp, like Auschwitz or Dachau, but a work camp for the first wave of those whom Nazis deemed “enemies of the state.” Like other sites, preserved by the German government as a cautionary lesson for the world, Sachsenhausen encourages visitors to ask: how did this happen? The lesson here is not about the “final solution” but how things start.

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reminds us, the Nazi party formed in 1920 under a 25-point program that outlined an ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic agenda. Once they seized power, a violent, multi-pronged media campaign against fabricated threats would pave the way for atrocity. Nazis did not set out initially to kill six million Jews. The process built gradually, starting with detention camps.

Sachsenhausen’s precursor, in Oranienburg, was the first, opening on March 21, 1933. Three years later, forced laborers built the new camp, just outside of town. Between 1936 and 1945, roughly 200,000 prisoners lived and died here. Communists, Soviet POWs, Polish educated elites, Czech university students, Catholic priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, people of Roma and Sinti descent, and increasingly, Jews.

Sachsenhausen today sits oddly adjacent to a peaceful, suburban neighborhood. Steps from modest bungalows, dozing sidewalk cats, and lovingly maintained lawns filled with hydrangea, periwinkle, and soccer goals, tourists enter a walled compound through iron gates that bear the iconic phrase, “Arbeit Macht Frei”—work makes you free.

To monitor prisoners, Nazis laid out the compound as a wedge, with bunkers fanning out from the gate and central guard tower. More towers dot the perimeter: a 12-foot-high, barbed-wired-lined wall.

Inside and to the right were the barracks for Jewish detainees. Cards in German and English explain the atrocities. The food (and starvation); the bunks (and sleep deprivation); the striped uniforms (and badge codes); rules for toilets (twice a day); basins for washing feet (and drowning prisoners).

The display in a far tower, looming over the compound, describes guard life. Originally volunteers from the infamous Schutzstaffel (SS), later guards were local men, mostly middle-aged and unemployed, drafted into service. The work was steady and the pay, solid. Camp life brought community: game nights, bowling alleys, dancing, extra food and alcohol.

The stories feel both foreign and familiar. One camp leader, Rolf Höß (or Hoess), described his “nice little home on the Sachsenhausen housing estate.” His wife gardened and filled her vases with flowers. “Our life together as a family at Sachsenhausen passed peacefully and uneventfully,” Höß explains, “nothing out of the ordinary happened.”

The psychological conditioning ran deep. Any state can indoctrinate its citizens to turn a blind eye to evil, even cooperate. Former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening explains (in a 2015 Politico profile) how guards came to see their victims: “They were our enemies.” President Donald Trump today uses the same language, branding immigrants as “murderers” and labeling political opponents as the “enemy within.” When elected officials, whether from Nazi Germany or the present-day United States, uses this language, we must step back and think.

Commentators have noted the parallels between then and now. “Surreal cruelty,” the Guardian describes the Everglades detention facility. “Don’t call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’” MSNBC writes, “call it a concentration camp.”

Jewish groups asked us to tread lightly with these comparisons. The Holocaust Memorial and Education Center of Florida cautions us not to trivialize a Nazi death camp. “At the same time,” the Center states, “Dehumanization was central to the Holocaust. Jews and other targeted groups were portrayed as less than human, denied their rights, and subjected to systematic violence …. To remember the Holocaust is to stay alert to those warning signs.”

U.S. history reminds us of this need to “stay alert.” Evil has snuck up on our nation before. Slavery. Indian removal. Chinese detention. Japanese and Aleut interment. All of these, objectively evil. The same evils that Governor Ron DeSantis wants to expunge from our history curriculum. Now weigh the Nazi propaganda against White House rhetoric: “President Trump is Removing Killers, Rapists and Drug Dealers from Our Streets“.

Where do we draw the line? For starters, with ethnic incarceration. When a state rounds up immigrants and puts them into camps, it’s time to measure who we are against what happened somewhere else.

During a concentration camp tour, most people will reach their own limit, checking out at some point. A detail, an instance of mass violence, or a sadistic embellishment will overwhelm the day-tripper. For Julie, it was the “Execution Trench,” a cobblestone-paved ramp leading to below eye-level. On the executioners’ side, a heavy door; on the other, a bank of logs to absorb the bullets. Outside the trench stands a line of photographs of people who presumably died there. Julie looked each victim in the eye, then had to leave.

The morgue hit Tom. Concentration camp “physicians” performed perfunctory autopsies, mostly bureaucratic cover for death by murder, starvation, or disease. Today the tiled inspection tables remain, with drains to catch the bodily runoff. To the side, a staircase leads to a tiled crypt. What does mass death smell like, decades later? Like sweetened calcium over fading urine. The taste sticks to the back of your throat.

The U.S. has not reached the point of Auschwitz or Dachau. We are early Sachsenhausen. Creating an ethnic “other.” Silencing questions in classrooms and in the media. Rounding people up, criminalizing “enemies of the state.”
As a quick rule of thumb: when governments build detention camps, they have crossed a moral line.

We have let evil in. Now the question. How far will evil go?

Julie Buckner Armstrong and Thomas Hallock teach English at the St. Petersburg campus of the University of South Florida. They are currently co-editing a two-volume anthology of Florida literature.

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This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2025.