I don’t disagree, and I’m not trying to paint all Americans or all Germans with the same brush. The migrants were here legally, and they deserved due process and protections of the Constitution, even as noncitizens, especially their rights to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” which could be interpreted as freedom from undue interference in their way of life and livelihood as legal migrant workers. That’s not to say that they weren’t subject to immigration/border controls, but the system as such was only just becoming formalized when these events occurred. Historically, the southern US/Mexico border was open and not really regulated much at all just years before these events transpired.

The events of World War 2 undertaken by Germany and other countries, individuals, and groups directly influenced the creation of the United Nations, leading to the drafting, approval, and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and the later International Bill of Human Rights in 1976. It’s thanks to the United Nations also we have a formal definition of what constitutes genocide.

We’ve come a long way, and have farther still to go, but “we shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, paraphrasing Theodore Parker. Yet we must also remember the words of John Stuart Mill, often paraphrased and misattributed to Edmund Burke:

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”