I wasn't yet born during the 1930s and '40s, but I'm beginning to wonder if we're hearing more Hitler references and Holocaust rhetoric this election cycle than voters did when Franklin Roosevelt was on the ballot.

Whether the topic is national security, gun safety and regulation or immigration, Republican presidential candidates can't stop alluding to Nazi Germany. Sometimes it's explicit, other times, it's more subtle.

In an interview with Yahoo News Tuesday, Donald Trump expounded on the security state he envisions to combat terrorism. "Yahoo News asked Trump whether this level of tracking might require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion," reporter Hunter Walker writes. "He wouldn’t rule it out." Trump's response was: "We’re going to have to – we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely." A database and special identification? That sounds uncomfortably like a higher-tech version of mandating that Jews wear yellow badges. What's next, mandating that Muslims live in ghettoes?

"And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy," Trump told Yahoo News. It can't happen here used to be a warning that it really can if we're not careful – not a campaign promise that it will. Indeed, Trump's simultaneous declarations that he supports "unthinkable" levels of surveillance in mosques and even shuttering their doors looked tame in comparison.

In any normal election, a candidate even entertaining such ideas would be subject to bipartisan disgust from all corners of the country – north, south, right, left, down from the heavens; this sort of talk would be a candidacy-killing disqualifier. But in 2016, it's just a variation on the theme of candidates displaying a strange penchant for filling policy platform holes with predictions that the U.S. could turn into Nazi Germany.

Ben Carson supported his position on Second Amendment rights by arguing that German citizens could have prevented the Holocaust were it not for gun-control laws. He's repeated the line in multiple interviews, despite public rebukes from his own advisers that he should "find better examples." More generally, Carson has warned that Nazi Germany may be coming to America, suggesting to supporters last month that a Hitler-esque person may already hold power in the U.S.

Over the summer, Mike Huckabee equated the historic nuclear deal with Iran to taking the Israelis and "march[ing] them to the door of the oven." The comparison pleased Trump, who said he was "OK with" Huckabee's analogy and that it "made people think a bit."

Fault over this Hilter-obsession doesn't lie entirely with the candidates themselves. After The New York Times Magazine asked readers whether they would kill baby Hitler if they could have, the question became a mainstay of interviews with the presidential hopefuls. For the record, Carson would not abort baby Hitler, while Jeb Bush would enthusiastically kill baby Hitler in his crib.