1945 Was Not the End: Neo-Nazis, Europe and Moscow

They called it the House of Sunflowers, after the enormous sunflowers painted across its façade. It was an apartment block in Rostock, in Germany, home to, among others, Vietnamese workers. In August of nineteen ninety-two, on the third night of a siege by far-right extremists, someone threw Molotov cocktails at the building. It caught fire, with about a hundred people still inside, who escaped by making it to the roof. Down in the street stood roughly three thousand of their neighbors. They did not run to help. They applauded. Forty-seven years had passed since the defeat of Nazism, and Europe believed it was finished with it for good.

It had every reason to believe it. The Allies had occupied Germany, Nuremberg had put the regime's leaders on trial, and the swastika had become a forbidden symbol. But an ideology cannot be executed by a court. In nineteen fifty-one, six years after Hitler's suicide, a party founded by former officials of the Nazi regime won about eleven percent of the vote in the state elections in Lower Saxony. The Germans did not wait to see how far it would go. In nineteen fifty-two the Federal Constitutional Court dissolved it: it was the first party ever banned in West Germany. They knew very well what had happened the last time they waited.

In nineteen twenty-eight, the Nazis had won two point six percent of the vote. They were a fringe voice, the kind serious people don't take seriously. Then came the crash. Unemployment in Germany, which had been around one and a half million, passed five million within four years. In nineteen thirty, the Nazis took almost one voter in five. In the summer of nineteen thirty-two, more than one in three. They hadn't suddenly become persuasive, and no collective madness had seized the people. The world had collapsed beneath their feet, and someone was showing them whom to blame.

And yet even then, they never won a majority. In November of nineteen thirty-two they lost votes, and for a moment it looked as if the wave was receding. It wasn't, because the people with the power to stop it preferred to use it. Conservative politicians and members of the establishment persuaded the aging President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor, believing they could tame him: they would keep him inside the government, under their control. On the thirtieth of January, nineteen thirty-three, Hitler took office. Twelve years later, Europe lay in ruins. The idea that you can use a force like that without being swallowed by it is one of the costliest mistakes politics has ever made.

The defeat of Nazism, in nineteen forty-five, took away its parties, its armies and its state, but not all of its believers. Nazism survived on the margins: in small organizations, at concerts, in groups that met in secret. And when the Wall came down and, within a year, East Germany ceased to exist, the neo-Nazis took to the streets again. Rostock, where we began, was only their most visible moment. Within three days, hundreds of far-right extremists had besieged a refugee reception center and the building next to it, and on the third evening the police withdrew their forces from the scene.

Remember what was most disturbing about that night: not the few who threw the firebombs, but the crowd that applauded them. Neo-Nazi violence doesn't need many people. It only needs no one to stop it. Germany learned that the hardest way. From the year two thousand to two thousand seven, a small group calling itself the National Socialist Underground killed ten people: eight of Turkish origin, one Greek, and one German policewoman. For years the authorities looked for the culprits among the victims' own circle, the press talked about the "kebab murders," and the case looked like a mafia crime. The truth came out in twenty eleven, eleven years after the first killing.

Before we go on, one clarification is needed, because two different things are often confused here. By neo-Nazis we mean people who openly embrace the ideology of the Third Reich: racial hierarchy, antisemitism, the worship of violence. The major parties of today's European far right, by contrast, reject the label, and sometimes they show it. In twenty fifteen, Marine Le Pen expelled her own father, the party's founder, after he repeated that the gas chambers were a "detail" of history. In twenty twenty-four, when the lead candidate of Alternative for Germany said that not all SS men were criminals, Le Pen's party broke off the alliance, and the Germans were expelled from their shared group in the European Parliament. So the line exists. The question is how clear it is.

And these parties are rising. The Freedom Party of Austria was founded in nineteen fifty-six, and its first leader was a former minister of the Nazi regime in Austria and an SS officer. Today it rejects any neo-Nazi label, and in twenty twenty-four it came first in the national elections, with nearly three voters in ten. The same year, in France, Marine Le Pen's National Rally took more than thirty-one percent in the European elections. And in Germany, in twenty twenty-five, Alternative for Germany became the country's second-largest party, with one voter in five. Three countries, three different parties, and the same direction.

And just this month, Alternative for Germany won in two German states. On the sixth of September, in Saxony-Anhalt, it took almost forty-four percent, its best result in any state, and finished just three seats short of an outright majority. Two weeks later, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, it came first again, with more than thirty-eight percent. The other parties refuse to govern with it, the so-called "firewall." The intelligence services of Saxony-Anhalt have classified the party's local branch as a confirmed far-right extremist organization, which the party disputes. And its leadership claimed that the result shows voters have rejected the firewall.

What gives such parties this strength? Researchers offer many explanations: economic insecurity, distrust of those who govern, fear for identity and about immigration. None is enough on its own, and history never repeats itself exactly: twenty twenty-six is not nineteen thirty-two, there are constitutional courts, there is memory. But the pattern reminds us of something. A crisis that eats away at trust, a crowd looking for someone to blame, and all those standing outside the door, waiting to benefit. Among them, on the eastern border of the continent, stands a state.

Who benefits from a Europe that quarrels with itself? Moscow has two obstacles in its neighborhood: the European Union, which imposes sanctions when all its member states agree, and NATO. Many far-right parties have reasons of their own to dislike both. They believe in the nation-state, not in supranational institutions, and in Brussels they see an enemy. Nobody needs to give orders; the interests meet on their own. Depending on the party, they call for neutrality, for leaving NATO or its military command, for an end to sanctions. These are legitimate political positions. They coincide, however, with what Moscow would like.

And sometimes the interests meet on paper too. On the nineteenth of December, twenty sixteen, in Moscow, the Freedom Party of Austria signed a five-year cooperation agreement with United Russia, Putin's party of power. In twenty fourteen, France's National Front, as the National Rally was then called, borrowed about nine million euros from a Russian-owned bank; the loan was repaid early, in twenty twenty-three. And in twenty twenty-four, Czech authorities accused a pro-Russian news outlet based in Prague, Voice of Europe, of paying European politicians on Moscow's behalf. Those named, among them figures from Alternative for Germany, deny it. The party itself officially calls for an end to sanctions on Russia.

The political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov, who has studied these relationships, describes how their logic changed. At first, Moscow used the West's far right to legitimize its own actions. In twenty fourteen, when the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe refused to observe the referendum in Crimea, the "observers" who showed up were mostly representatives of European far-right parties and fringe organizations. Later, the support became a lever: a way to shake the liberal democratic consensus of the West from the inside. It isn't love of an ideology. It's geopolitics, which is why there are exceptions. Poland, while it was governed by the national-conservative Law and Justice party, was one of Ukraine's most anti-Russian allies, and Giorgia Meloni's party in Italy has backed NATO and Kyiv.

If the parties are the façade, Saint Petersburg is the basement. That is where the Russian Imperial Movement was founded, in two thousand two, with the aim of reviving the Russian empire. It has an armed wing and training camps, and since twenty fourteen it has sent volunteers to fight in eastern Ukraine. It also takes in foreigners. In the summer of twenty sixteen, two Swedish neo-Nazis spent eleven days at one of its camps and learned to handle weapons and explosives. A few months later, bombs went off in Gothenburg, at a refugee housing center and at a meeting place for left-wing groups. One person was seriously injured. In twenty seventeen, three men from the same circle were convicted. And in April of twenty twenty, the United States put the Movement on its list of terrorist organizations: for the first time, a white supremacist group had been added to such a list.

And it wasn't only a camp. The private army Wagner took its name, according to reports, from the alias of its military commander, Dmitry Utkin, an admirer of Nazi Germany; an alias that points to Hitler's favorite composer. Fighting in its ranks was Rusich, a group of neo-Nazis with a Slavic swastika on its emblem, founded in eastern Ukraine in twenty fourteen. And all of this in a war that Putin presented, on the twenty-fourth of February, twenty twenty-two, as the "demilitarization and denazification" of Ukraine.

That country had a Jewish president then, Volodymyr Zelensky. His grandfather fought in the Red Army against the Nazis, and three of the grandfather's brothers died because of the Nazi invasion. It is true, however, that Ukraine has far-right extremists, as almost everywhere in Europe, Russia included. The Azov battalion was born in twenty fourteen, and among its founders and first fighters were people with a neo-Nazi past, before it was folded into the National Guard. But in the twenty nineteen election, the country's strongest far-right party took about two percent and failed to clear the five percent threshold. For Moscow, then, Nazism seems to be a tool: an accusation when it points at an enemy, a tolerated partner when it points at the West.

However hard Moscow encourages these movements from the outside, it doesn't create Europe's far right; it finds it ready. The roots are always local, and what matters is not who waters them, but what a society does when they sprout. Greece lived through it in miniature, from the rise to the trial. In two thousand nine, a small far-right party with Nazi references took less than one percent in the elections. Two and a half years later, in the middle of the economic crisis, it took almost seven percent and eighteen seats. A fringe, in other words, had walked into parliament.

In September of twenty thirteen, Pavlos Fyssas, thirty-four years old, a rapper with anti-fascist lyrics, was watching football at a café in Keratsini, with his partner and a group of friends. A supporter of the party stabbed him in the street. Fyssas, still alive, pointed out his attacker to the police; he died a little later in the hospital. In less than two weeks, the party's leadership and several of its lawmakers were in custody. The trial began in twenty fifteen and lasted five and a half years. On the seventh of October, twenty twenty, the court ruled that this was not a party that had at some point gone astray. It was a criminal organization, with a hierarchy and a central command, that operated as a party, and had organized attacks on migrants, on trade unionists and on human rights defenders.

Outside the courthouse, about twenty thousand people were waiting. When the verdict was announced, they burst into applause, and Pavlos's mother, Magda Fyssa, was heard shouting to her dead son that he had done it. In March of twenty twenty-six, the appeals court upheld the convictions of forty-two defendants, among them all the members of the leadership. By then the party was already out of parliament: in twenty nineteen it had taken less than three percent and lost all eighteen of its seats. In twenty twenty-three, when the Supreme Court barred the new party of its former spokesman from the elections, he backed another one from prison, which took almost five percent and twelve seats.

And now the story returns. On the fifteenth of September, twenty twenty-six, the party's former spokesman walked out of prison, and his supporters were waiting outside. The law bars him from running for office until twenty thirty-three. But he declared that he is returning to politics and preparing a new party, and legal experts are already discussing how he might try to get around the obstacle: as an independent candidate, or alongside a party that appears to have no connection to him. The Supreme Court, when called to decide, will judge whether a party is truly independent or the same story under a different name. And the voters will have their say too.

So what does a democracy do when voters push such parties toward power? The Germans, weighed down by their history, chose isolation: you don't govern with them, whatever they win. In Greece, it was the courts. The Danes tried the opposite. When the Social Democrats adopted a tougher immigration policy, the anti-immigration Danish People's Party fell from twenty-one percent to about nine within four years. Critics say that is how its ideas won, even if the party lost. Supporters answer that it brought back to the center voters who would otherwise have been lost. Nobody knows for sure which road works. We only know which one has never worked: looking away, and waiting to see how far they will go.