Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 85 million people were killed. And that’s a conservative estimate.
Not every massacre was recorded, either. In all likelihood, the headcount is much higher.
For example, the Nazis did not just kill Jews in concentration camps.
The scale of the killings attributed to the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads of the SS, is still subject to debate.
The mass shootings at Babi Yar, outside Kyiv (33,700), Ponary (28,000), in Lithuania, and Latvia’s Rumbula Forest (70,000) are a small part of an estimated 3.5 million killed by the Gestapo units.
Though they may not have rivalled the ovens of Auschwitz, soldiers can still execute enormous numbers of civilians.
Despite the fact that Russian civilians suffered in far greater numbers – an estimated 19 million were killed during WWII – the savagery visited upon European Jewry came to symbolise fascism.
This is why, seventy-nine years after the Second World War, we continue to tremble when we speak of far-right politics.
Between 1922, when Benito Mussolini first took power, and 1945, when Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, the ideology was cover for evil, of the worst kind.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t other kinds of apocalyptic politics to contend with.
If you’re an environmentalist or a Marxist, it’s not hard to analyse market-driven, industrialised societies and draw parallel conclusions.
The issue with fascism is that it never died.
In Europe, where the ideology was born, pundits and politicians have repeatedly predicted its return since the end of the Cold War.
1989 was never the democratic moment it was portrayed to be.
As communist regimes began to collapse en masse in Eastern Europe, many Westerners feared they were still functionally authoritarian states.
Pointing to the race riots in the former DDR, in cities such as Rostock, and the collapse of Yugoslavia into a sea of genocidal politics, there was even more reason to be dubious.
Not to mention that the European Union and NATO member states were also contending with their own anti-democratic political currents.
One of the most successful such parties today, France’s Rassemblement National (formerly called the National Front), was founded in 1972, not 1989.
While it has never won a French election, it has gotten close, losing in runoffs three times since 2002 and slowly increasing its representation in the National Assembly and European Parliament.
Austria’s governing Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ, or Freedom Party of Austria) was founded in 1955 and was Europe’s first successful populist party, first entering government in 1999.
During the 1980s, Jörg Haider took over the FPÖ, moulding it into a more coherent, far-right force that would become a blueprint for far-right populists: Racist, nationalist and Eurosceptic.
Both parties were initiated by ex-Nazis and have maintained the same politics since their founding despite getting rebranded national conservative and, of course, populist.
Not to be outdone, the Mussolini-loving media mogul Silvio Berlusconi – Europe’s first populist premier – logged nine years in power between 1994 and 2011.
In each of his coalitions, Berlusconi included retro-nationalist parties: the fascist-descended National Alliance and the anti-migrant, regionalist Lega Nord (now the Lega per Salvini Premier).
Under his wing, Il Cavaliere (The Knight) cultivated the careers of Lega chief Matteo Salvini and Fratelli d’Italia head Giorgia Meloni, whose coalition he would later join as a junior partner.
It is impossible to understand Italy’s far-right turn without Berlusconi’s patronage. He didn’t just enable it. The oligarch helped set its ideological parameters.
Indeed, it would be hard to imagine Meloni and Salvini’s insistence on rehabilitating the fascist era without Berlusconi.
Barely a line of their efforts differs: Mussolini got most things right. He only erred by partnering with Hitler.
Hence, Meloni’s alignment with Ursula von der Leyen and arming Ukraine.
But it wasn’t until the 2008 financial crisis that predictions of a formal return to fascism started getting made at the European level.
Some of it was PR spin. And some of it was real.
The re-emergence of the German far-right in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis should have taken no one by surprise.
Originally founded as a Eurosceptic party, Alternative für Deutschland quickly morphed into a pro-Russian fascist party, opposed to immigration and diversity and liberal democracy.
The AfD first began to court international controversy in 2016 when then-party head Frauke Petry said police should feel free to shoot illegal migrants trying to cross the border.
The racism such statements expressed was shocking. But it was part of a deliberate strategy to detoxify hate speech and make it safe for far-right parties to incite against minorities.
The next step would be to remove the stigma of the Nazi genocide. In 2017, Thuringia AfD chief Bjorn Höcke did just that.
At a speech near the Berlin Holocaust memorial, he said Germans are “the only people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital”.
Höcke followed it up by demanding a “180-degree turn” in the country’s “politics of memory”.
In 2018, former party co-leader Alexander Gauland continued the assault by calling the Third Reich mere “bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history”.
While the AfD leadership has made hundreds of equally, if not more, inflammatory proclamations, these calculated statements set the party’s tone and helped codify its messaging.
The AfD would raise the bar once again when German investigative platform CORRECTIV published a scoop about its plans to “remigrate” the country’s immigrant-born population.
Unfortunately, the revelation came too late, and the protests were useless.
Though hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate (some estimates put these numbers at 2 million), the AfD prevailed in the polls as Germany’s second most popular party.
However, this regression would not be confirmed until the 2024 EU elections.
For the first time, Alternative für Deutschland beat the ruling Social Democrats to become the second-largest German party in the European Parliament.
Having lived in Berlin for over a decade, where I covered the AfD’s rise, these results were no surprise. They’re a disciplined party that made the long march through Europe’s institutions.
This is the context for War By Any Other Name and John Foster’s tireless analyses of far-right politics in the European Union.
Since launching The Battleground in March 2019, Foster has repeatedly returned to the topic with dedication and depth unequalled in EU journalism.
Whether the subject is Spain’s Vox, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, or Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, Foster’s overview is intimate and relentless.
John Foster has been a friend and colleague for nearly forty years. We first met as college student deejays in the United States, and I have always been in awe of his cultural breadth.
Inspecting an LP he’d pulled for his radio show – the first Napalm Death album, Scum – I knew this guy was serious and would have much to say in the future.
War By Any Other Name is forthcoming from Battleground Books.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
