Fighting the Nazi Threat Today

What is fascism?

MUSSOLINI and his Fascist Party first came to power in Italy in 1922 (this is where the word fascist comes from), and immediately set about imprisoning, exiling and murdering their opponents. When Hitler and the Nazis took power in 1933 in Germany (the word Nazi comes from the name of his party, the National Socialist German Workers Party), one of the first things the Nazis did was to ban left wing parties and trade unions, and to round up socialists, Communists and other critics and put them in concentration camps.

Nazis and fascists are totally against democracy. They do not believe in elections or free speech or in allowing the existence of political parties or trade unions, but in establishing totalitarian states which take charge of all parts of people’s lives. They attempt to achieve power by violent and militaristic means, and do not tolerate opponents. They are ultra-nationalistic, and have very sexist ideas about women’s place in society.

Death camps

Nazis usually try to gain mass support through scapegoating of particular groups, often in a racist way. In Nazi Germany and the territories it conquered during the war, political opponents, gays, Gypsies and other ‘non-Aryans’ such as Poles and Russians all suffered, and many were murdered. The brunt of the Nazis’ hatred was reserved for the Jews, who were blamed for everything that went wrong--unemployment, losing the First World War (1914-1918) and the terrible economic conditions that Germany suffered in the 1920s and 1930s.

Six million Jews from all over Europe perished in the Holocaust at the hands of special murder squads and in death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and Treblinka, where they were gassed during the Second World War (1939-1945).

Modern Nazis

Modern Nazis have targeted ‘immigrants’ and refugees as the source of all problems in society--black and Asian people in Britain, Turkish people in Germany, and Arabs and black people in France for example. This is despite the fact that many of these people were born in these countries, or were invited there for economic reasons. This is the same way Hitler identified Jews as the cause of Germany’s problems in the 1930s. However, because the terrible history of the Holocaust is a block on their growth, parties like the Front National in France or the British National Party in Britain often deny that they are Nazis and claim they are nationalists or ordinary right wing parties. The Anti Nazi League believes it is important to identify these parties as Nazi parties.