The Nazis still have a strong hold on us – in daily news stories, in bookshops and cinemas, even on the streets of Europe. But how has thinking about the Third Reich changed over the decades? And does it exert such a grip because it represents racism in its most extreme form?
Richard J Evans
The Guardian - Friday 6 February 2015
hy are we still so obsessed with the Nazis? Hardly a day goes by without a television programme or a newspaper article about them. Movies featuring them continue to pour out of the studios, from Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds to Polanski’s The Pianist. The Nazis’ crimes continue to haunt us. One current manifestation is the vast number of artworks they stole or forced out of the possession of their original Jewish owners; thousands of these cultural objects remain in galleries and museums across the world, waiting for the heirs of those who lost them to turn up and claim restitution. There is even still the occasional prosecution of an ex-Nazi for war crimes – only this week, the date was set for the trial of 93-year-old Oskar Groening, the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, for being accessory to more than 300,000 murders in the camp.
Across Europe, political protest in some deprived or crisis-ridden areas seems increasingly to be taking on neo-Nazi characteristics, whether it is the Greek Golden Dawn movement, with its swastika-like logo and its penchant for violence; or the antisemitic thugs of the Azov battalion fighting in eastern Ukraine under a banner that looks even more like a swastika than the Greek one; or the Hungarian Jobbik party, with its ultra‑nationalist demands for the return of huge swaths of territory from the surrounding states, taken from Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
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