This parallel was not confined to those around Germany. Second World War parallels were breaking out throughout Europe. In Denmark migrants were already pouring across the Øresund bridge to Sweden by train. They did not need passports because there was no border. But not everyone found this to be a powerful enough image. During the war, when the Nazis ordered the deportation of Jews from Denmark, local Danish resistance to the Nazis famously and heroically spirited nearly all of Denmark’s 8,000-strong Jewish community across the water to neutral Sweden in the dead of night. And so it was that in September 2015 a 24-year-old Danish politician by the name of Annika Holm Nielsen began transporting migrants in her yacht across the five-mile stretch of water between Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmö. A man called Abdul who had come up from Germany and whom she met in Copenhagen’s Central Station was ferried by her across the choppy waters in a trip that was inevitably compared in the media to the actions of the Resistance in 1943. Nielsen herself denied that this was something ‘symbolic’ and insisted that it simply seemed ‘the safest thing to do’.4

Never mind that Abdul’s onward journey to Sweden would have been safer, swifter and more comfortable if Ms Nielsen had simply allowed him to get on the train to Malmö like everybody else, during September 2015 ‘gestures’ like this fitted the narrative. It was a narrative that many people forming the welcoming parties at the train stations of Germany stated explicitly: that this was in some way a remedy for what had happened in the 1930s and 1940s. The almost hysterical behaviour of the crowds radiated a sense of not just relief but ecstasy – that here were people migrating into Germany rather than migrating out of it. Instead of being a country people fled from because their lives were in danger, Germany had become a place where people escaping war and persecution were actually fleeing to.

Of course, there were several very serious problems with this. The comparison between the migrants of 2015 and the Jews of the Nazi era breaks down in several places. Firstly, the Jews who fled Hitler were desperate for any other country to live in. Germany’s 2015 arrivals had walked through numerous countries – including European ones – before arriving in Germany. Secondly, although large numbers of Syrians, among other migrants, certainly were fleeing for their lives, to compare all of these migrants – including the economic migrants – with the Jews of the 1930s was not just to diminish the suffering of the exiles from Hitler’s Germany. It was to insist that Europe had absolutely no choice other than to take in everybody who wanted to come. To not do so was to be a Nazi.