From Berlin agreement to Auschwitz reflection: Global police leaders reframe their duty

Catherine Szkop, a Holocaust researcher, had just left a diplomatic function at the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum on May 21, 2025, when she heard what she later described as “an insane amount of popping.”

At first, she thought it might be fireworks. But the sound didn’t stop.

Remembering something a Marine friend once told her — “You’ll feel the bullet before you hear it” — she instinctively checked herself for injuries. There were none. Then she ran.

Realizing she was exposed and moving in a straight line, she dove beneath an SUV. From there, she heard the gunfire that killed two of her colleagues, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky. Sarah had been shot 11 times while trying to crawl away.

Eyewitness testimony meets police leadership

Nearly a year later, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, more than 130 police executives attending the 2026 March of the Living — an annual international program that brings participants to Holocaust sites in Poland to reflect on history and its modern-day implications — heard Szkop recount that moment.

They had spent days confronting the horrors of the Holocaust. But this account was not from a survivor of Nazi Germany. It was a young woman describing life in Washington, D.C., in 2025.

It wasn’t an isolated story. The delegation also heard firsthand accounts from victims of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre, the Manchester synagogue shooting on Yom Kippur and other recent attacks on the global Jewish community.

A former research fellow at Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Center) in Israel, Szkop told the assembled law enforcement leaders that she resists comparisons between today and 1930s Europe because “law enforcement has been supporting the Jewish community and saving people during these attacks.”

That distinction is critical. The same institution, 81 years later, but with a different moral compass.

From symbolism to institutional commitment

That shift was not only symbolic; it was institutional.

Immediately before arriving in Poland, many of the same leaders gathered in Berlin to launch a multinational initiative focused on democratic policing and community protection. The moment was notable not only for its scope, but for its symbolism: law enforcement leaders from across Europe and North America convening in a city once central to authoritarian power to reaffirm policing’s role in safeguarding democratic values.

As delegation Chair Paul Goldenberg put it, “In Berlin, senior police leaders from across Europe and the United States came together to make a clear professional commitment: ‘Never Again — Not On Our Watch.’ This was not symbolic.”

For the first time, a broad coalition of major police associations from both continents participated together, signaling a level of international alignment rarely seen in the profession.

The delegation’s presence at the March of the Living built directly on that foundation, linking historical reflection with a coordinated, forward-looking commitment to prevention, legitimacy, and the protection of vulnerable communities.

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Turning “Never Again” into operational reality

Deputy Director of the Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience at Rutgers University, Goldenberg launched this initiative to operationalize “Never Again” in 2023. This year’s program moved beyond memorial participation and ad hoc reflection toward operational relevance for police and sheriffs.

Goldenberg worked with delegation Vice-Chair Marvin “Ben” Haiman, executive director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Public Safety and Justice, to structure the experience as a moral-sequencing exercise.

Before walking under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, participants spent days confronting law enforcement’s role in genocide, the fragility of democratic institutions, and the conditions that normalize cruelty. Christophe Buche’s session on Hannah Arendt and “de-pluralization” resonated deeply. Democratic collapse, they were reminded, does not begin with camps. It begins with the erosion of shared reality, dignity, and compassion.

The moral question at the center of policing

Holocaust survivor Allan J. Hall crystallized these themes. Recalling his time in the camps as a ten-year-old carrying his two-year-old brother, he posed a question that cuts to the core of policing:

“Yes, you have to enforce the law. But is the law right?”

He described police standing by as Jews were beaten and killed, and later actively participating in deportations. The uniformed state had shifted from indifference to instrument of terror.

But Hall also offered a counterexample: a trolley conductor who disguised him as his son and walked him out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Authority, Hall’s story suggested, can enable cruelty — or courage.

When the police become the system

That contrast echoed in the reflections of Jochen Kopelke, chair of the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (German Police Union), representing more than 200,000 German police officers. “Nobody could call the police, because the police were the system,” he said.

Kopelke pointed to Police Battalion 101 as a case study in how ordinary officers become agents of extraordinary violence. The issue, he argued, is not only ideology but culture: how brutality becomes imaginable, then routine, then procedural.

The program forced participants to see Auschwitz not as distant history, but as a lens for contemporary threats in Washington, D.C., Manchester, Bondi Beach, and beyond.

“We have to be more than police,” Kopelke said. “We have to be human beings with values.”

Rebuilding trust between police and community

That ethos carried through the delegation.

At several points during the march, the connection between police and citizenry became tangible. Young participants, marchers from the officers’ jurisdictions, and descendants of survivors approached officers along the route. They warmly greeted, thanked, and posed for pictures with them. In those moments, the distance between uniform and community melted, replaced by recognition, trust, and a shared understanding of responsibility.

Moved by the spontaneous attention from the crowd, David Rausch, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, affirmed that “Police are not an arm of any government. We are the keepers of safety in society.”

Similarly touched by the support and what she witnessed in the Auschwitz exhibits, Tasha Bryant, assistant chief in Washington, D.C., put it more directly: “We must always practice just and constitutional policing.”

For Bryant, the experience reinforced a forward-looking responsibility: “We are now the gatekeepers for those voices.”

Sheriff Jim Skinner of Collin County, Texas, who commanded his share of attention from photo seekers, connected the lessons of the Holocaust to the modern threat environment. For his part, National Sheriffs’ Association Executive Director Justin Smith emphasized culture: building organizations where such abuses are unthinkable.

A threat environment that starts before violence

That culture-before-crisis framing was central to the program’s design. Its impact was not just educational. It was operational.

Today’s threat environment made that clear. Yoni Finlay, who survived a synagogue shooting in Manchester on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews, warned that antisemitism does not begin with violence.

“It isn’t confined to words,” he said.

The attack that nearly killed him emerged from a broader ecosystem of rhetoric, online amplification, and normalization. That’s where grievance, identity, and hate can scale long before violence occurs.

“This is not only about antisemitism,” Goldenberg noted. “It is about the broader protection of fundamental freedoms. It’s the ability of communities to assemble, to pray, and to safely attend houses of worship without fear.”

Marc Spigel, of the Wellfleet (Cape Cod) Police Department, distilled the fragility of civil order: “Everything was normal. And then it wasn’t.”

Across countries and contexts, the lesson was consistent: democratic order is more fragile than it appears, and policing plays a central role in sustaining it.

What prevention looks like in practice

If the earlier phases of the program confronted history, its final effect was more practical: forcing leaders to define what “Never Again” requires in their own agencies.

For Prefect Valko Vaher of Estonia, the answer begins with training and community-based policing, anchored in prevention. Officers, he argued, must understand the communities they serve — and that responsibility cannot be siloed. It must extend from patrol to leadership.

He also pointed to a gap in digital engagement. Many agencies communicate online, but few truly interact where communities are active.

That emphasis on prevention was echoed across the delegation. Rui Neves of the Portuguese police force made the point directly. “We are trained to respond when something happens,” he said. “But the real issue is how often we ignore what comes before, such as patterns of discrimination, dehumanizing language, intimidation.” Those signals may not cross a legal line, but ignoring them, he added, “is not neutrality; it is a failure in prevention.”

That perspective extended beyond Europe and North America. Virginia Nelson, assistant commissioner of the Queensland Police Service, emphasized that “the people piece is really the role of leadership,” underscoring the importance of compassion and connection in maintaining public trust.

Alvince Osura, chief inspector of the antiterrorism unit of the Kenyan Police, pointed to resilience and community partnership. Working closely with Jewish communities in Nairobi, he noted that sustaining trust with vulnerable populations is a core policing responsibility.

Accountability inside the ranks

Others turned inward.

Chris Davis of the Boise (Idaho) Police Department emphasized active bystandership within the ranks, challenging unethical behavior regardless of position. Preventing abuse, he argued, requires ethical leadership and accountability at every level.

That principle was reinforced during an unplanned moment in Krakow, when members of the delegation heard a racial slur directed at one of their own. Dehumanization begins with words that are tolerated or unchallenged. For police, the question is not only how to respond to major incidents, but whether they are prepared to act in these smaller moments.

At the organizational level, Joseph Lankford, a captain with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, stressed the need to reinforce core values, including fair treatment, the rejection of bias, and resistance to dehumanization. That work, he noted, requires not just training, but education: understanding how policing was misused in the past and applying those lessons to modern democratic practice.

Even in custodial settings, the lessons carry weight. Keri Adcock, a major with the Denver Sheriff Department who works in a jail setting, reflected that while modern corrections operate within legal and human rights frameworks, the experience of Auschwitz reinforced the obligation to preserve dignity in all circumstances.

Bob Davits of Antwerp (Belgium) placed these ideas within a broader ethical frame. “Police officers should engage with remembrance education as part of their professional ethics,” he said, emphasizing awareness of bias and the importance of acting with humanity and restraint.

The responsibility going forward

Communities will continue to call police when they are most vulnerable, whether at a celebration, a place of worship, or a public gathering.

As Vice-Chair Ben Haiman of the University of Virginia summarized, “‘Never Again’ is not a slogan — it is a standard of responsibility for modern police leaders.”

In the end, “Never Again” depends less on how police respond to violence than on whether they act in time to prevent it.