THE RISE OF NAZISM IN GERMANY

The Nazi regime of 1933 to 1945 brought horror into the world on a scale almost impossible to comprehend. After just six years in power it detonated the largest single military conflict in history that consumed some 55 million lives. 6 million Jews were coldly butchered in a deliberate campaign of extermination. By 1945, of 5 million Soviet POWs, only one million survived. At its point of origin the German population, with some 6.5m dead or wounded, faced a devastated country in which one fifth of its housing uninhabitable.

The deeds of Nazism were such that the commandant of Auschwitz concluded they were "so terrible that no one in the world will believe it to be possible..." Human history continues to witness terrible experiences of inhumanity. What made Nazism unique until that time was the scale and deliberate calculation involved. Target groups were selected for extermination - mental and physical "defectives", gays, Sinti and Roma ("Gypsies"), political opponents and of course, the Jews - old, young, women, men, most of whom could not possibly be a threat - all annihilated using "state of the art" capitalist methods. One of these was the concentration camp: "the modern facility for isolating and destroying the 'dispensable'."[Sofsky]

For many who witnessed the liberation of the camps in 1945, their awful lesson was so self-evident that simply recounting what had happened seemed sufficient to immunise future generations from a repetition. Thus the British editor of Hitler's book Mein Kampf wrote in 1969: "The plague has run its course. It is now for the scientists to isolate and examine the bacillus". Tragically this is not true. The brown plague has returned, and although fascism first came to power in Italy in 1922, Nazi Germany is the model that inspires the new followers. The danger is visible in the movement of Le Pen in France, Heider in Austria, Zhirinovsky in Russia, and fascists who were recently in the Italian government.