Here Come the Nazis

In elementary school, we were slowly introduced to the fact that Nazis once roamed the world, and that their ideas must never again take hold. In 5th grade, I recall writing a book report on The Diary of Anne Frank. Then in 7th grade, I remember being given an assignment to create an illustration for The Hiding Place. The book was written by Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman who ended up in the concentration camp Ravensbrück for hiding Jewish people in her home.

Movies and television shows I grew up with also reinforced the idea that Nazis and their goals were reprehensible. There were re-runs of Hogan’s Heroes, and old films like The Sound of Music and Casablanca. Movies that came out when I was a teen, such as The Blues Brothers (1980) and Indiana Jones (1981), included scenes celebrating the rejection of Nazis and their propaganda. One of my favorite scenes in The Blues Brother’s ends with John Belushi muttering, “I hate Illinois Nazis.”


By middle school we understood that the Nazi goal of preserving a “pure” or “master” Nordic or Aryan race led to a genocidal campaign against Jewish people. We learned that this goal included imprisoning, brutalizing and murdering those from many other groups as well– Roma people (“Gypsies”), people who were gay, people with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. Among the first to suffer at the hands of the Nazis were the Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists who opposed Nazi ideology. By high school we understood that Nazism was a form of fascism that fed off extreme nationalism.

Jump ahead to 2016 when the New York Times runs a puff piece on the fashion make-over of “white nationalists” (neo-Nazis) like Richard Spencer.

By 2017 propagandists like Spencer were booking lectures promoting white nationalistm at public universities like Auburn University in Alabama. The argument that the “real Nazis” are the people opposed to giving white nationalist ideology any quarter gained popularity on social media.

In 2017 “white nationalists” (KKK, neo-Nazis, etc.) organized online and descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia where cell phone video captured them chanting things like “Jews Will Not Replace Us”, and chasing and beating women and black men. One man was filmed literally shooting into the crowd of protesters (miraculously not hitting anyone). That gathering ended with a neo-Nazi running down more than a dozen people who were protesting against fascist and racist ideology. Five were critically injured; one woman died. The attack was captured on film by bystanders. Even after viewing that, a growing segment of the U.S. proclaimed that “both sides” were at fault and simply needed to learn to get along.

Today, there are a number of self-described Nazis and white supremacists running for state and national office in the U.S. (for instance, do an online search for Arthur Jones of the American Nazi Party, or Corey Stewart, or Russell Walker).

Certainly, there have been neo-Nazi groups in the U.S. for many decades –there were even references to them in popular films. The difference was that when the Blues Brothers ran a parade of “Illinois Nazis” off of a bridge in the 1980 movie, audiences cheered.

Back then, we knew Nazis were not “very fine people.”

*First published as a column by Quest Lakes in the MVN in July of 2018.