Nazis…
Nazis Nazis Nazis…
It seems like there are so many angles with these guys that others have done already.
Sometimes even on this channel.
However, the term Neo-Nazi is especially prevalent today, and so let’s talk about them.
This is the story of the Nazis…
AFTER World War Two.
Hi, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
So after the Nazis did what Nazis do and lost the Second World War, their… charming ideas
about hating pretty much anyone who isn’t them did not die out.
Neo-Nazis have been around since the end of the war, trying to harass or kill people slightly
different, taking immense pride in things they have literally no control over like race
or nation, and trying to rebuild the fourth Reich through violence and cosplay.
Neo-nazis are all over the world, and there’s a story behind their presence in many countries.
Because this is a Youtube video and not an encyclopedia, I used my viewership analytics
and after a history of the overall movement will talk about it in the 5 countries that
have the most Step Back viewers.
So, Germany, Australia, The UK, Canada, and the United States.
Naziism as a concept was in trouble after the second world war.
The official Nazi party’s last leader was Martin Bormann, a close confidante of Hitler
who had been with him for the final days before his death.
The Soviets killed him during the Battle of Berlin, but for a long time, they didn’t
tell anyone, so the fate of Bormann was a mystery for many years.
Around this time, Hitler also bravely committed suicide, and his body was burned was to either
not suffer the same fate of Benito Mussolini's body, torn apart and dragged through the street,
or to prevent there being a place for him to serve as a martyr.
Because of this, there is no body of Hitler.
One documentary went to the old Soviet archives and might have found a fragment of a skull
that belonged to him, but it's hard to verify.
Russian archives are… hard to navigate.
Because of this, conspiracy theories began to flourish that Hitler somehow escaped and
was in hiding somewhere in South America.
Hitler’s successors were Karl Donitz and Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk.
The only job these two men had was to write and sign the articles of surrender, ending
the Second World War in Europe officially.
By October, the Nazi party had been dissolved officially by the occupying government, finishing
what we can call Old Nazis.
Germany was in ruins, and denazification programs after the war made it pretty tough to be a
racist git in Germany.
The allies also ran the Nuremberg trials and killed pretty much any prominent nazi left.
Most veterans and party members just gave up and tried to return to a healthy life.
I say most, but there were a few hardcore holdouts.
Some attempted to join the German conservatives in the British Occupied Zone.
Remember this when Dinesh D’souza tells you that the Nazis were left wing.
Either way, they left and formed another party called the Socialist Reich Party.
Pretty soon after though, many European countries beginning with Austria banned Nazi parties.
Some of the former Nazis joined a nationalist party in Germany and even tried to start their
own version of the Hitler youth, getting only about one percent of the popular vote throughout
the 1950s.
Naziism then started to become even more weird.
People began writing weird books calling Hitler the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, and wrote
about paganism in a big way.
The old Nazis played with this, but these new Nazis dug in.
This is partly why Nazis tend to co-opt pagan symbols like the volks knot, or the Black
Sun symbol.
They started proposing weird things like building secret colonies under the polar ice caps.
Oh, and that Aryans might be from another galaxy...
In East Germany, a party called the National Democratic Party of Germany tried to make
a stab at mobilising old Nazis into a political force.
Weirdly enough the National Democratic Party of Germany’s goal was to prevent these former
Nazis from becoming Nazis again.
Nazis also began to pop up outside of the German world.
Groups in the Uk and the US tried to move the focus away from specific Aryan aspects
and expand the definition to all whiteness.
They would oppose racial progress happening in the mid-20th century, and try to leverage
anti-communism to blame the Jews.
There was also an explosion of Holocaust denial.
A movement of people trying to make the claim that the six million Jews who died in the
holocaust didn’t die.
They just magically disappeared somehow.
This subculture flourished, and their works tend to help fuel Neo-nazi movements to this
day.
It’s a way to try to soften the Nazis in the eyes of the world and give Nazis a chance
to be legit again.
Nazi movements also found receptive audiences after the collapse of the communist world
in the 1990s.
It was an easy go-to for those that didn’t like the communist system they lived under
but had internalised the hate of liberal capitalism over the years.
Nazis… the third way.
You can also tie it to pain over the loss of territory by the Russians.
This includes the apparently immune to Irony National Bolshevik Party, which tries to marry
Soviet nostalgia and Nazi symbology into some horrific nightmare that is indeed the worst
of both worlds.
You can even label the Greek Golden Dawn Neo-Nazis who were growing in prominence a few years
ago to this phenomenon.
It’s almost as if no matter what you add nationalism to it turns to shit.
Funny that.
So how does it play out in the countries that like Step Back the most?
Well, I kinda told the story about Germany, but since the Second World War, there have
been far-right groups virtually indistinguishable from Neo-Nazis, they just can't use the term
because being a Nazi is illegal there.
These parties have had a few surprising successes starting in about 2004.
They’re estimated to number approximately 25,000.
They’ve attacked the homes of refugees, vandalised synagogues and Jewish cemeteries,
occupied a small village called Jamel and somehow won a seat in the 2014 European parliament
elections.
Down under, a few Aussie Nazis…
Naussies?
Auzis?
Have sprung up over the decades.
Some Aryan prison gangs have become prominent.
Most recently though there has been a rise in a group called the United Patriot’s Front
based out of Victoria operating on a platform of anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism,
and open Islamophobia.
They’ve shown friendship with the Golden Dawn neo-nazi party in Greece, and their leader
Blair Cottrell has connections with Neo-Nazis.
He even wants pictures of Hitler in classrooms, and for every child in school to get a copy
of Mein Kampf.
Don’t worry, classical liberals will still deny he and this group are neo-nazis.
I just call everyone I disagree with a Nazi because they just happen to want a picture
of Hitler in every classroom.
In the UK, there was already a prominent Fascist organisation in the 30s.
The cycle since seems to be bouncing between being a small part of the Conservative party
or forming their own minor political parties.
Their main causes were preserving the empire, and when that turned out to be impossible,
banning non-white immigration, keeping northern Ireland British, opposing the European Union,
and supporting Apartheid in South Africa.
There were race riots, there were Nazi punk skinheads, and there was Nick Griffin.
A far-right politician who led a group called the British National Party until a BBC documentary
exposed him as a racist.
He resigned in 2014, and the party fell into obscurity afterwards.
The UK to this day has a lot of far-right groups espousing open racism, but maybe not
directly advocating Nazi beliefs.
These days they tend to leverage anti-Muslim hatred to elevate conspiracy theories about
Muslims.
There is the group National Action, which has been active since 2013 and declared a
terrorist organisation since 2016.
The first Canadian Nazi party was called the…
Canadian Nazi Party.
They founded in 1965, and neo-nazi movements sprung up around the country, some domestic
and some imported from the US.
In 1977 there was a Nationalist Party that merely said they wanted to defend western
heritage and culture but was full of antisemites, neo-nazis, and racists.
Another attempt was a group called the heritage front, but Neo-nazi groups have had a hard
time here.
Neo Nazi groups today are mostly disorganized and small.
And lastly, we come to the United States.
Naziism in America could almost be a video in and of itself.
The most prominent group to date is the National Socialist movement, but there are groups like
the National States’ Rights Party, and the American Nazi Party as well.
Because of the first amendment, these groups experience a lot more freedom than they do
in other countries.
They even got permission to march in a Jewish part of Chicago by the supreme court.
The most prominent holocaust denial organisation, the Institute for Historical Review also comes
from America.
Whether or not giving Nazis this sort of latitude is something people are talking about a lot
these days.
Heck, the ACLU even fights for the Nazis’ freedom of speech.
What do you all think about this?
In Canada, we have laws against hate speech, and it might be why there aren’t so many
Nazi groups.
Let’s have a chit chat in the comments.
If you remember my Fascism video from October, you will remember my talk about pain points
and the way fascism takes root in different contexts.
These cases show how a German identitarian movement can mutate in various places to represent
different forms of colonialism, white supremacy, and hatred depending on the tensions in the
country at the time.
Truly terrifying.
Alrighty, well if you liked that video you should click the subscribe button down below.
To not miss a single video or live stream, click that bell notification right beside
it.
Also, if you already have, notification squad I wanna see you all report in in the comments.
If you don’t spend a ton of time on Youtube, I do have a mailing list you can find a link
for in the description.
To help step Back and see videos early, go to Patron.com/StepBackHistory and pledge as
little as a dollar a month.
The theme song is by 12 tone and come back next time for more Step Back.