The weight of what Arnold Schwarzenegger experienced during a visit to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was “heavier than any squat I’ve done before,” the actor and retired professional bodybuilder said in a video released Tuesday directed at the rising tide of antisemitism seen heralded by the likes of Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving. In the 12-minute video, Schwarzenegger talks directly to those “who might have already stumbled into the wrong direction,” urging them to dismiss conspiracies surrounding Jewish people, along with race, gender and sexual orientation. “I’ve seen enough people throw away their future for hateful beliefs,” Schwarzenegger says, before referencing his Nazi father, Gustav Schwarzenegger, who he watched “broken” as a child growing up in Austria after the Second World War. “They felt like losers... they fell for a horrible, loser ideology,” Schwarzenegger said of the men he was surrounded by as a kid. “They were lied to and misled into a path that ended in misery… they bought into the idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse... It breaks you… it is the path of the weak… there has never been a successful movement based on hate.” Schwarzenegger echoed comments about his father in March 2022 in a video plea to Russians to end the war in Ukraine, revealing Gustav was a German soldier during the siege of Leningrad.
