By now, it’s self-evident that fascists have found a way to circumvent or dismantle the barriers set up in the wake of World War II, weaponising the power of the internet to transform the eccentric and depraved interests of radical individuals into international communities of feeling.
Given how unlikely the future mainstreaming of authoritarian ideology seemed at the end of the Cold War, explaining how it happened only gets us so far.
A lunatic fringe of true believers survived the collapse of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. There will always be people who hold extreme views. That’s not the issue.
Our focus should be on normalisation, how extremism begins to seem like a reasonable response to a world gone horribly wrong.
That’s not the first conclusion I reached after a recent experience online. But it’s the only one likely to deal with the root cause of the problem.
When I’m feeling worn out, I check out videos recommended to me by YouTube’s algorithm. Sometimes I know exactly why they appear in my queue. Those videos interest me less.
What draws me in is the content I wasn’t expecting to see, which seeks to bridge the gap between my taste preferences and content that falls outside of their scope.
That’s how I found myself clicking, recently, on a video titled “Real life in Nazi Germany [UNCENSORED].”
In my sleep-deprived state, the voiceover narration didn’t make much of an impression at first. Instead, I was concentrating on the “documentary” character of images, which showcased different aspects of everyday life in the Germany of 1937, but in an idealised manner reminiscent of Leni Riefstahl’s famous films Triumph of the Will and Olympia.
Given the degree of censorship exercised by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, I was surprised neither by what the camera documented nor by what it assiduously avoided. The culture produced under a totalitarian regime requires reading between the lines.
After a few minutes, however, the repetitive, mechanical quality of the narration became too grating to ignore. Although the male, middle-class English accent itself sounded human, the text it was reading reeked of AI-generated prose.
What surprised me wasn’t the posthuman quality of the narration, which is sadly common these days, but the claims it made. In trying to explain why the German people supported the Third Reich, the voiceover was making a disturbingly forceful case for fascism.
It also didn’t seem to match up with the images on screen. Instead of describing what was being shown at a particular moment, it repeatedly made the same general points.
Over a long shot of farmers harvesting hay in the mountains of Bavaria, the narrator declares, “For the ordinary German in 1937, the impact of these changes was immediate and transformative.”
As the film cuts to a close-up of hands digging potatoes from the soil, the narrator goes on, noting that “a steady job meant not just wages, but a return to dignity. It meant the ability to provide consistent, nutritious meals for their children. To replace worn-out shoes and to heat their homes”.
We then see a bearded farmer lighting a rustic pipe as the narrator begins, “The omnipresent anxiety of unemployment, the shame of dependence,” before another cut shows us this same man laughing.
As we register the happiness on this man’s face, the sentence continues, “had largely been replaced by a sense of purpose and contribution. Life returned to a rhythm of work, routine, and—for many—a degree of security they had not experienced in over a decade.”
A medium shot of the hay harvesting takes us to the end of this segment as the narrator reaches a conclusion he has already reached before: “This profound economic turnaround, the tangible evidence of daily life improving, became the most powerful argument for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. They had delivered on the most fundamental promise: jobs. They had restored order to a chaotic economy and instilled a sense of national pride that resonated deeply after years of humiliation.”
Because I spent a year in the Bundesrepublik as an exchange student a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I have personal experience of older Germans making this kind of argument. One kindly grandmother extolled the virtues of the Third Reich’s public works programs before confiding in me that the movement was undermined from within.
“Hitler was an Austrian Jew. A lot of the top Nazi leaders weren’t real Germans. Just look at them.”
When I was a university student studying German, I liked to share this anecdote because I had experienced in the wild such an over-the-top example of the desire to preserve positive memories of the Third Reich, the sort of behaviour that comedians of that era were fond of ironising.
Revisited through the lens of this YouTube video, however, it has a different impact. For Germans like this grandmother, who had suffered badly during the worst years of the Great Depression and then lost her husband on the Eastern Front during the war, the mid-1930s were a comparatively happy time, one which they remembered with increasing fondness as it receded into the past, in spite of the fact that the monstrous Nazi regime was held responsible for unprecedented crimes against humanity.
That fondness represented a retroactive version of American political advisor James Carville’s declaration, “It’s the economy, stupid,” combined with nostalgia for an era when it wasn’t necessary to apologise for patriotism.
After ten more minutes of watching this video, I had to fast forward to determine whether the same positive depiction of the Third Reich was sustained until the end. Although there was some acknowledgement of the price Germans had to pay for supporting the regime, it felt like an afterthought.
Remembering that the beginning of the video had mentioned that the footage was shot by American filmmaker Julien Bryan, I did some research.
Commissioned by the Third Reich to complete a documentary about the country, as he had recently done for Turkey, Bryan took full advantage of the resources put at his disposal to film as much as he could. But he also violated his contract by capturing evidence of the regime’s persecution of Jews.
The director went on to make a short film for The March of Time series, which, although acknowledging that the Nazis’ popularity was bound up with Germany’s rising economic fortunes, also made it clear that this improvement was inextricably bound up with their racial ideology, expansionist mindset and violent suppression of dissent.
Bryan was hoping that his film would prod his countrymen to take decisive action towards containing the Nazi threat. Unfortunately, despite the sensation it caused, the isolationist mood in the United States was still too strong to overcome.
Returning to the YouTube video, I saw that it had repurposed Bryan’s footage to make the sort of propaganda the Nazis had hoped to create by hiring him. Particularly frightening is the way it foregrounds the kind of images the Third Reich wished to disseminate while ignoring the counterpoints he had taken such pains to include.
But then I had a profound realisation.
Whether the shadowy operation that produced this video intended to make a propaganda film or merely stumbled into one by using AI to create a script, the way it rewrites history helps to explain why fascism is resurgent today.
Even though nobody in power seems willing to make a connection between the Great Depression and what’s happening today, the majority of people throughout the developed world have been caught in a downward spiral since the global economic crisis of 2008.
Whatever is going on in the world’s stock markets, whatever experts say about the economy, all but a few lucky individuals have been experiencing a personal depression: having to make do with less, panicked about losing their jobs, forced to degrade themselves to make ends meet.
The voiceover’s description of how the Nazis delivered for the German people doesn’t just undermine the historical record. It also emphasises the degree to which the democratically elected governments of today have failed to do so.
If people of today find the video’s message appealing, the fault lies primarily with leaders who continue to act as though it’s still business as usual when anyone who isn’t totally delusional can tell that we passed that point a long time ago.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
