After all, Hitler and the Nazis did other things besides run death camps.

Bishop Joseph McFadden of Harrisburg has attracted criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and others for comparing the monolithic nature of the public education system to the education systems of 20th-century totalitarian regimes.

“In totalitarian governments, they would love our system,” the bishop said last week as he discussed his support for voucher legislation. “This is what Hitler and Mussolini and all those tried to establish a monolith so all the children would be educated in one set of beliefs and one way of doing things.”

Bishop McFadden defended his remarks after the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director said they trivialized the suffering of victims of the Holocaust.

As Bishop McFadden points out, totalitarian regimes -- including that which ran Germany from 1933 through 1945 -- try to take control of education in order to indoctrinate young people with loyalty to their ideology, and seek to guarantee that competing educational institutions are co-opted or destroyed. Recognizing that the Nazis used this technique does not minimize the evil that was the Holocaust -- it paints a fuller picture of the malignant nature of the Hitler regime.