The American Influence on German Neo-Nazism: An Entangled History of Hate, 1970s–1990s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes a transatlantic approach to the history of the Far Right by examining the American influence on German neo-Nazism from the 1970s through the 1990s. The main argument reveals a disturbing yet hitherto unacknowledged reality, which has implications for the way we understand the global Far Right today: the strengthening of Germany’s neo-Nazi movements would have been unthinkable without US involvement. In the decades after Hitler, when East and West Germans struggled to suppress Nazism, American neo-Nazis exploited the US right to free speech and the increasing ease of global communications to circumvent restrictive German censorship laws and ship propaganda across the Atlantic Ocean. In so doing, they contributed to the expansion of a worldwide network of Holocaust deniers and galvanized a new, younger generation of neo-Nazis on both sides of the Berlin Wall who turned their hatred not only against Jews but also against the immigrants and asylum seekers who arrived in the context of postwar mass migration to Europe. In exposing these transatlantic far-right entanglements, the article makes several interventions into the study of German history, Holocaust memory, and antisemitism. First, it speaks to recent historiographical approaches that aim to analyze the role of the long taboo concepts of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ in German efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past. Second, it reconsiders the triumphalist Cold War narrative of America’s influence on post-Hitler Germany; not only does it highlight the failure of US denazification efforts to eradicate the racist mentalities of the Third Reich, but it also reveals that American actors played a crucial role in re-Nazifying Germany. Finally, it encourages historians to examine the politics of racism, xenophobia, and Holocaust denial beyond nation-state borders as a means to better understand the resurgence of global far-right extremism today.