Nancy A Matthews. Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. Editor: John Hartwell Moore, Volume 2, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008.
Neo-Nazism is a loosely organized movement operating mainly in Europe and the Americas that promotes white supremacy, particularly hatred of Jews, and hearkens back to the Nazi regime led by Adolf Hitler in Germany from the 1930s through 1945. Among the hundreds of racial hate groups in the United States, neo-Nazis are among the largest, along with the Ku Klux Klan. To understand neo-Nazis today it is helpful to review their foundations in German Nazi politics of the early twentieth century.
The term Nazi is an acronym of the National Socialist German Workers Party (National sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). The original Nazi Party in Germany arose after World War I. Under the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war in 1918, Germany was required to pay reparations to the countries it had invaded. This international condemnation imposed a heavy economic burden on the people and the state, which fostered deep resentment. During the 1920s the Nazi, with Hitler among its top leaders, tapped into this resentment and inspired many Germans with ideas about patriotism and German supremacy, despite the earlier defeat. Hitler advocated rejecting the Treaty of Versailles and returning to German expansionism. The worldwide economic collapse and high unemployment of the Great Depression starting in 1929 made the Nazi Party’s ideas attractive to more people, and they began to gain power both through elections and as a street strategy of recruiting veterans and the unemployed into paramilitary groups.
Hitler came to power through elections in 1932 that gave the Nazi Party a parliamentary majority. After he was appointed chancellor in 1933, he quickly moved to consolidate power. The Nazi regime, also known as the Third Reich, pursued a policy of invasion and expansion, beginning with annexing Poland in 1939. This was the precipitating event for the commencement of World War II. Hitler and the Nazis tapped the long-existing and underlying anti-Semitism of European societies to scapegoat Jews as a major cause of their economic and social instability.
Most infamously, the Nazis engineered genocide against the Jews, commonly called the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a carefully planned government program of extermination of Jews that lasted from 1941 through 1945. Long before the policy of organized mass murder was implemented, however, Jews were targeted by the Nazi regime with increasing harassment, violence, and restrictive laws. For example, after the coordinated attack on Jewish homes and businesses known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in 1939, Jews were required to pay fines for the damage caused, even though they were its victims. The Nazis revived the medieval policy of the ghetto, a term that refers to walled-off sections of towns in which Jews were segregated from the rest of the population, which facilitated rounding them up as the Nazi policies progressed toward genocide. Six million Jews from across Europe were killed. Initially, paramilitary groups committed mass murder in the towns where Jews lived. Later, men, women, and children were shipped by train to concentration camps, where some were forced to work under slave conditions until they died of disease or starvation, while those judged too weak to work were murdered en masse, eventually through a highly industrialized death machine. The so-called Final Solution was also applied to other social and racial groups the Nazis considered undesirable, including Roma (previously known as Gypsies), homosexuals, communists, and the disabled.
The foundation of Nazi ideology was belief in the racial superiority of the German or Aryan people. The crisis in German society provided a context for the development of an ideology of ethnic and racial superiority and a cultural movement that celebrated a romanticized image of the German Volk through the revival and creation of mythology, music, theology, and ritual. The Nazis drew on nineteenth-century theories of racial difference, superiority, and inferiority. Nazis viewed the German people as the “master race,” invoking theories that ancient peoples from the Indus region and Iran had migrated to settle modern-day Germany. Descendants of this “Aryan race” were seen as biologically and culturally superior, and thus deserving of all society’s goods. All other races, by definition in Nazi racial theories, were inferior and parasitic, which justified subjecting them to control and destruction.
Most analysts have characterized the Nazi state as fascist, meaning it was based on authoritarian principles with all power centralized in the state (although some scholars argue that the term fascism should be used more narrowly to apply to Benito Mussolini’s movement in Italy that developed at the same time). This extreme form of state power facilitated the imposition of Nazi ideology and political programs, including its official policies of racism.
After World War II: The Neo-Nazis
The term neo-Nazi refers to groups since World War II that seek to revive the ideology and political movement of Nazism. In the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century there has been a resurgence of neo-Nazi activity worldwide, but especially in Europe and North America. While neo-Nazis form a distinct subset of modern right-wing extremism, in their ideology and sometimes social groups they overlap with other groups, notably racist skinheads, white nationalist groups, Christian Identity (a white supremacist religious movement), and in the United States, the Ku Klux Klan. In their various guises, neo-Nazis espouse white supremacy, extreme nationalism, and an authoritarian fascist social structure. In the second half of the twentieth century, many European countries made Nazi political parties illegal. Nevertheless, groups that are not technically political parties continued to exist on a small scale. By the end of the twentieth century, such groups were growing. In some regions these movements developed close ties to extreme right-wing political parties that gained substantial representation in parliaments. Neo-Nazi groups also fomented street violence against targeted groups, especially immigrants.
Neo-Nazis in Europe. The neo-Nazi movement is found in every country in Europe. After World War II, Europe was divided between the West, allied with the United States, and the East, allied with the Soviet Union. Germany, the birthplace of the Nazi movement, was divided into West and East. The Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, outlawed Nazi political parties in its post-war constitution in 1949. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet and communist systems suppressed other forms of political organization, including nationalist and fascist movements. However, since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, a resurgence of neo-Nazi activity has appeared, especially in the countries of the former Eastern bloc, including the former East Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Western European countries have also seen an increase in extreme right-wing activity beginning in the 1980s.
The ideology of European neo-Nazis continues to echo the original Nazi ideas, centered on nationalism, authoritarianism, and white supremacy. But as European societies have become more multicultural, xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment have become prominent themes. While the Jews of early twentieth-century Europe had been present for hundreds of years when they were targeted by Hitler, today’s targets are more recent immigrants and refugees who, as part of globalization, have moved to Europe in search of economic opportunity or political asylum. Many of these immigrants are from African countries, the Middle East, and Turkey and are perceived by right-wing extremists as threatening the core of Western civilization. Right-wing movements have long been analyzed as a backlash by social groups who perceive that they are losing their place in society. The growth of Islam with immigration has led to cultural clashes that provide neo-Nazis and similarly minded activists with fodder for spreading hatred against anyone they decide is “other”—that is, non-European. Perceived competition for jobs also leads to anti-immigrant views, as in the United States. The creation of the European Union (EU) in 1992 added a layer of threat to traditional national identity in Europe. The EU human rights standards of tolerance for religious and cultural diversity create a context in which transnationalism is valued above nationalism. This sparks resentment against the state, the trans-national entity of the EU, and people who symbolize the profound shifts in society of recent decades
European neo-Nazi activity ranges from highly institutionalized organizations that fall short of being actual political parties to more fluid, grassroots entities that engage in terrorist violence, commonly against foreigners. Ami Pedahzur and Leonard Weinberg (2001) suggest that while neo-Nazi political parties are banned in some European countries, the neo-Nazi movement in other guises supports political parties of the extreme right wing, creating a threat to European democracy. The activities of these neo-Nazi organizations include operating think tanks to influence policy indirectly, sponsoring Holocaust denial events, operating publishing houses, and producing music that appeals to young extremists. The neo-Nazi Internet presence has grown dramatically, and like the Internet itself, is an international phenomenon.
Neo-Nazis in the United States. Unlike Europe, neo-Nazi groups in the United States have never been criminalized. American neo-Nazis are part of a wider extreme right-wing, white supremacist movement that also includes the Ku Klux Klan. While they have little overall influence on U.S. politics, they have had a serious impact locally, where they have engaged in intimidation and committed violence against particular groups and recruited disaffected youth into their organizations.
The Intelligence Project, begun by the civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center, has monitored hate groups in the United States since 1979 and provides a respected clearinghouse of information about neo-Nazis and related groups operating in the United States. Its 2006 Year in Hate report lists 844 active groups, of which 191 are neo-Nazi.
The National Alliance, the largest U.S. neo-Nazi organization, claims to represent a worldview based on beliefs about “nature” and the place of Aryan or white people within the “natural order.” Their ideology is framed in language that attempts to sound scientific. For example, the National Alliance Web site promotes their “law of inequality” as the idea that evolution produced superior white people in northern Europe, where the necessity of “surviving a winter required planning and self-discipline, advanced more rapidly in the development of the higher mental faculties—including the abilities to conceptualize, to solve problems, to plan for the future, and to postpone gratification.” On its Web site the National Alliance claims to believe that this natural superiority of white or Aryan people imposes a “hierarchy of responsibilities” on members of the race to be as strong as they can be, to be “collective agents of progress,” and to strive for higher levels of consciousness. Thus, much of their rhetoric sounds rather high-minded.
However, among the National Alliance’s social and political goals are establishing “white living space” and “Aryan society.” This means “rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values and customs everywhere,” which is elaborated to mean removing Jewish artists from museums, Jewish musicians from music, and any nonwhite face from films or other media. Ironically, the National Alliance has to defend its advocacy of a strong, centralized state, since there is a strong tradition on the U.S. right of complaining about the evils of “big government,” as the following quote from the Web site illustrates:
Many patriots look back fondly at the government as it was in its first phase, when it was less democratic and less intrusive in the lives of citizens. Perhaps the time will come when we can afford to have a minimal government once again, but that time lies in the remote future. The fact is that we need a strong, centralized government spanning several continents to coordinate many important tasks during the first few decades of a White world: the racial cleansing of the land, the rooting out of racially destructive institutions, and the reorganization of society on a new basis.
The discourse of the National Alliance uses language that appeals to pride, fear, and resentment. Its members invoke patriotism, which continues to be seen as a positive value in American culture, though it easily merges into nationalism, and from there to racism and xenophobia. For white Americans frustrated by their inability to get ahead, the National Alliance program offers explanations that sound reasonable (e.g., that multiculturalism contradicts nature) couched in pseudoscientific grounding (e.g., through evolution and natural selection). Some of its language resonates with New Age notions of pursuing “higher consciousness,” although this is achieved through racial purity rather than the universal tolerance usually associated with that spiritual tradition. Aside from the actual content of National Alliance beliefs and programs, the tone of its discourse is dangerous because it is so soothing and inspiring.
By contrast, the second largest U.S. neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Movement, adopts a more strident tone and directly invokes Nazism and Hitler. This group claims symbols of that era as its own: the swastika and the brown shirt uniform of the SA (Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers who operated in the 1930s in Germany to terrorize the population into submission to the Nazi program). The National Socialist Movement’s Twenty-five Point Program, posted on its Web site, contains a hodgepodge of mandates that range from banning non-white immigration and ejecting nonwhites from the United States to demands for a living wage and land reform that includes affordable housing. These demands illustrate the combination of traditionally “right” and “left” ideas found in National Socialism.
As a social movement, the neo-Nazi movement is not static but undergoes change constantly; groups split and merge, and new groups form out of other social contexts. This is true worldwide, as the movement responds to changing societies and draws on the legacies of racism everywhere.
The growth of the Internet has facilitated the growth of neo-Nazi movements in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The Internet has given neo-Nazi organizations, like other social movements, a low-cost way to reach sympathizers and recruit adherents. Cyberspace has enabled European neo-Nazi groups to escape state controls by having their Web sites hosted by groups in the United States. American neo-Nazi groups have links to European neo-Nazi groups on their Web sites and vice versa. This may be the precursor to the growth of a more coordinated international movement, which would be a threat to democracy and racial equality worldwide.