Nazis are everywhere.

It’s 2017, and suddenly, once again, in Charlottesville, in Boston, all over the country, Nazis are everywhere. How did this happen?

It occurs to me that to the majority of people who are flirting with neo-Nazi identity, Nazis just aren’t real. A Nazi is a comic-book villain in a Quentin Tarantino movie. It’s the ultimate epithet for one who is disagreeable: the Soup Nazi, the Feminazi.

But Nazis were much more real when I was growing up in the 1960s. My childhood was saturated with Nazis. They were still being hunted and brought to trial. I encountered them continually on TV and in movies. I watched so much “Combat,” “Rat Patrol,” “Twelve O’clock High,” and “Hogan’s Heroes” on TV that I came to be better able to distinguish among Nazi uniforms than American ones.

Nazis were no joke, which is why “Hogan’s Heroes” caused such a stir when it went on the air in 1965, only 20 years after the last American POWs left actual German prison camps. Werner Klemperer had qualms about playing Colonel Klink, and it was hard to get actors to appear as guest stars on the show. It was a time when we all walked among people who had lost loved ones in the war, who had been injured fighting Nazis, who wore concentration camp tattoos.

And then there were all the books I’d read as a teenager — Exodus, Mila 18, Forged in Fury, Night — all of which made me feel burdened and exhausted by the knowledge of how I had been spared by historical and geographical chance.

But today, for many people, Nazi are abstract figures, and the words used to describe them have been anonymously woven into our language: the blitz, the stormtrooper, the brownshirt.

This was brought home to me the other day when I entered a big chain crafts store and saw the following sight:

If the horrors of World War II have become mere catchphrases to the likes of the marketing team at a major crafts chain, then perhaps it’s no wonder that a new generation of young Nazis bought up all the tiki torches at the Charlottesville Home Depot.

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Brian Hanson-Harding

Written by

Obsessed with doing things the hard way.

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