Echoes of Nuremberg: Learning from history to stop the new authoritarian surge

Key topicsRise of global far-right populism echoes 1930s fascist movementsVE Day reflections highlight democracy’s fragility and fading memoryMass rallies and propaganda fuel modern authoritarian threats.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Rosa Prince.Niklas Frank was a seven-year-old boy the last time he saw his father Hans. Today, he keeps a photograph of the man’s corpse shortly after his execution by hanging as a reminder of the 4 million people murdered under Frank’s Nazi command of Poland during World War II.Speaking on the 80th anniversary of the end of the conflict in Europe Thursday, Niklas said: “My father isn’t dead....German people are fed up with democracy, like in the end of the Weimer Republic, and they’re looking for a new Fuhrer, a new leader.”Both my grandfathers were in Germany on this day 80 years ago. John Prince was an English war reporter attached to General George S. Patton’s Third Army; three weeks earlier he had been at the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp. I have seen the photographs he took that day.My maternal grandfather, Harold Freeman, was a Jewish GI from Brooklyn who had fought through the Battle of the Bulge and was beginning to understand that had his family not emigrated from Poland a generation earlier, he would likely have ended up in Buchenwald or someplace like it.Both were writers, and reading their words this week, as I felt compelled to as VE Day approached, I was struck by how much they would have recognized today.Take this entry from John’s diary in July 1944: Watching captured Germans bury thousands of their comrades’ “headless torn limbless bodies, stinking fearfully,” he observed: “Nuremberg led to these rows of mounds of soil above mangled lifeless men.”Nuremberg, the German city chosen for the trials of Hans Frank and other captured Nazis precisely because a decade earlier it provided the setting for rallies that rang with the cheers of ordinary Germans-turned-Nazis whipped to a pitch of racist hatred by Adolf Hitler.Mass rallies are back in vogue in Germany — and further afield. At his 100-day campaign celebration in Michigan last week, Donald Trump spoke of missing the MAGA rallies and warned those seeking to curb his power grabs and assaults on the US Constitution: “Nothing will stop me.”In the UK, the populist Nigel Farage launched his Reform party’s local election campaign with what he billed as the “biggest rally in modern political history” in the city of Birmingham, where 90 years earlier the fascist Oswald Mosley addressed a rally attended by 10,000 people..Read more:.Germany’s election chaos: Voters on edge – Katja Hoyer.Spain’s far-right Vox party held a rally in Madrid against the socialist government this week, the latest in a series of such events, some of which have been attended by international fellow travelers including Marine Le Pen of France, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Portugal's Andre Ventura.Back in Germany, in February, an election rally by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) where leader Alice Weidel called for migrants to be thrown out was graced live by video link by Trump’s ally Elon Musk.Grandpa Harold would have had thoughts about Musk. Writing to my grandmother Bea in March 1945, he wondered why more of the ordinary Germans he saw hadn’t challenged Hitler’s rise to power. Ultimately, he blamed apathy — and that bothered him. “There are millions in the US who, though eligible to vote, never do so,” he wrote. “Then there are those whose thoughts are molded by the raucous press, radio `experts’ – and rabble rousers. Here is a vacuum democracy has left, a vacuum which might be filled by anti-democratic venom.” The power of propaganda is no less raucous today, led by Fox News and conspiracy-fueled podcasts where rabble rousers are given free rein.In Britain, VE Day was marked by street parties, bunting and waves from King Charles III from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. It all felt a bit hollow, when seven days earlier a plurality of those taking part in local elections voted for the anti-immigrant, nationalistic Reform. That morning, the arrests were announced in Oldham, in northern England, of nine men accused of holding a party in a pub to mark Hitler’s birthday, complete with a cake frosted with swastikas.Meanwhile, in Moscow, as Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski points out, Vladimir Putin made a mockery of the message of peace that VE Day ought to represent by ordering a fake ceasefire in Ukraine, presumably to avoid distractions from his grand celebrations as he hosted fellow leaders of varying degrees of autocracy, including China’s President Xi Jinping. Everywhere you look, populists and autocrats are on the rise. The far-right National Rally leads the polls in France; Hungary, Turkey and India continue their slide toward dictatorship; Romania seems on course to elect the hard-right leader George Simion, and Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding Milei has a well-developed personality cult.Atop it all in the White House sits a man so ignorant of history that his VE Day social media post featured the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, symbol of the war in the Pacific that continued to rage on May 8 and would do so for another three months. The erosion of democracy feels so pervasive yet so incremental, it’s hard to know how to respond. When Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the German state’s move to classify the AfD as a “right-wing extremist” group as “tyranny in disguise,” the Foreign Ministry clapped back: “We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”That’s exactly right. This is the last year veterans will be present at a major commemoration of VE Day. In the future, we can mark the day with bunting and Union Jack socks if we like, but it’s more important to recognize and challenge fascism wherever and whenever it rears its monstrous head.On VE Day, 1945, my grandfather Harold wrote home: “It was a beautiful day, a bright clear warm one.” It was a pretty nice day 80 years on as I stood outside St Paul’s Cathedral and marked the two minutes’ silence in memory of the fallen. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the storm clouds are gathering again..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Echoes of Nuremberg: Learning from history to stop the new authoritarian surge

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