We've been living under Hitler's spell – time to wake up

Telegraph

8 hours ago

The age of Hitler was not the Thirties and Forties: it has been our own lifetimes. It began in the Forties, was in full swing by the Sixties and is only now, it seems, coming to an end.
In the post-war era, Adolf Hitler has been our most potent, unifying figure. He remains our touchstone and our backstop. In a world where we seem increasingly unable to agree on anything, we can still almost entirely agree on condemning him. Anyone who defends Hitler thereby reveals themselves to be a monster. Whenever we want to condemn someone, we almost instinctively compare them to him. His indisputable evil makes him a unique fixed reference-point in our moral landscape.
For example, as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, memes of Vladimir Putin as Hitler began to appear – even as Putin himself stridently (and absurdly) claimed that his war aim was to 'denazify' Ukraine. Hillary Clinton is one of many people to have called Donald Trump a new Hitler, and compared Trump's 2024 rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, to the notorious pro-Nazi rally that took place there in 1939. Boris Johnson compared the EU to Hitler; conversely, during the height of Brexit rancour, he himself was regularly depicted with a toothbrush moustache. Even now, it seems, we still define our values with reference to the Nazis. We cannot shake our fascination.
I first remember hearing Hitler's name in the late Seventies. I think I was about six years old. I asked my mother something like: who is the worst person ever? Well, who else could she possibly have chosen? Who else would you choose? My next flash of memory – though it might, in reality, have been months later – is of asking her: has anyone ever written a book about Hitler? I remember feeling at the time that my second question was slightly shameful. My instinct was that it was wrong to write a book about a bad man; it was probably wrong even to want to know more about him. But my mother surprised me by pointing to our bookshelves, and a fat hardback with that dreaded name on the spine in barefaced capitals: my father's copy of Alan Bullock's 1952 biography Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. 'Oh, yes,' she said, 'there are lots.'
There are indeed, and more every year: not just because Hitler was an enormously consequential figure, but because I'm not the only person to have found his evil fascinating. We cannot stop retelling and reinventing his story, and the endlessly rich story of the war against him. A lifetime later, the films, the books, the ever more tenuous documentaries keep coming; to judge by the schedule of the History Channel, and the lists of many publishers, the Second World War is almost the only event in human history. And historians are forced to share Hitler with storytellers and myth-makers – anyone who wants to stiffen whatever they're drinking with a shot of cheap moral spirits. Sauron, the Daleks, Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort: they're all, unmistakably and unashamedly, Nazi tribute acts.
The age of Hitler is the age in which the Western victors of the Second World War have set the terms of global conversation. Many of us have lived the majority of our lives in an era of broad and stable consensus about our most basic shared values. Human lives are fundamentally of equal worth; all human beings have fundamental and inalienable rights; our lives, bodies and consciences belong to us and to no-one else. These truths seem self-evident to the point of banality. Nonetheless, most people in most periods of human history have not believed any such things.
And consider what happens when anyone refuses to conform to those supposedly universal anti-Nazi values. For example, in Zimbabwe in the late Nineties, Chenjerai Hunzvi, a particularly brutal enforcer acting on behalf of Robert Mugabe, adopted and gloried in the nickname 'Hitler'. It signalled his ruthlessness to the regime's opponents, to terrify them and to defy any criticism they might level at him. On that level, it worked. For the rest of the world, though, it only cemented the view that Zimbabwe's rulers had become mere predators, and contributed to Mugabe's ostracism on the international stage.
Deliberately aligning yourself with Hitler is rare. More commonly, people or movements discredit themselves with unintended or ill-concealed echoes of Nazism. The most obvious examples of this are found in the persistent tendency of many anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist movements around the world to stray, or lapse, into open anti-Semitism. For most of my lifetime, people in Western societies who broke that taboo have automatically ostracised themselves. It's a mark of the end of the age of Hitler that that taboo is clearly decaying.
Belligerence, too, can activate our anti-Nazi antibodies. Vladimir Putin may have been surprised that his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 met with such a startlingly different Western response from the one received by his war in Chechnya, or his annexation of Crimea. But those earlier acts hadn't involved a full-scale, unconcealed armed invasion of a neighbouring sovereign state. When Putin tried such an act, it triggered Europe's collective memories of 1938-40.
I'm not the first person to notice that the modern world is preoccupied by Nazism, nor that the Nazis have an outsized role in our ethics. But the people who make this point often come from one end of the political spectrum. Take the French writer Renaud Camus, notorious as the originator of the far-Right conspiracy theory the 'Great Replacement': he has lamented what he calls 'the second career of Adolf Hitler', meaning the Führer's career as a moral symbol. Camus and other activists resent how the spectre of Nazism is invoked when they propose mass expulsion of immigrants, purges of the judiciary or restrictions on Muslims' religious freedoms. It's time, these people believe, that we stop being frightened of bogeymen with swastikas.
This is not my view. I don't want us to unlearn the lessons of Nazism, lessons that were learned at such a terrible cost. To recognise Hitler as representing a truly exceptional evil is the beginning of wisdom. But this recognition isn't enough. Simply knowing that Hitler was a monster is not an adequate guide to the world we live in. In Britain our instinct has long been to compare every crisis to the Second World War: we even, ludicrously, tried it with Covid-19. There are some evils which the age of Hitler has simply not prepared us to face, and some misleading lessons it has taught us. Shouting 'Nazi!' at each other is a hopeless way to deal with our economic, environmental and demographic crises. And a knee-jerk rejection of 'appeasement', on its own, is a poor guide to international relations in a nuclear age.
Our values are more fragile than we think. Our sense of what's right and wrong, our deep convictions about justice and human rights, feel like timeless, self-evident truths, and we can't help looking down on ancestors who didn't have the wit to see them. Nor can we help believing that, now we've grasped those truths, we'll never let go of them. Surely people will always believe in democracy and human rights; surely the arc of the moral universe does bend towards justice? But this is demonstrably, factually incorrect. Our values, my values, your values, are the outcome of a particular historical process, a process in which the Second World War was decisive.
And now those values are again on the move. On the Right, across Europe and beyond, the taboo against parties that have a whiff of fascism has virtually gone. Trump's acolytes play with 'Hitler salutes' and the like because they enjoy making their opponents splutter with outrage. Meanwhile, on the Left, the new identity politics of race and gender have challenged ideas that used to be truisms, such as simple egalitarianism, the aspiration to be colour-blind or the conviction that anti-Semitism is an exceptional evil to be avoided at all costs. Indeed both sides, to no-one's surprise, have started spitting venom about Jews again.
We can strive to keep the post-1945 consensus going, but the war is falling off the edge of living memory. Like it or not, the age of Hitler, the age when appalled fascination with the Nazis dominated our moral imagination, is coming to an end. The question is: what will come next?
The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It by Alec Ryrie (Reaktion, £15.95) will be published on July 1. Alec Ryrie will be speaking at Oxford Literary Festival, in partnership with The Telegraph, on July 30. Tickets: oxfordliteraryfestival.org