It is an awful sign of our awful times that as last night’s Panorama: Germany’s New Nazis (BBC1) unfolded, my main thought was this: is it more soul-shrivelling to hear about the resurgence of the far right in a country you hoped had been inoculated against it for all time by the horrors of the Holocaust, or to see white supremacy steadily gain pace across the globe? God help us, either way.

Panorama focused on an extremist cell called the Freital Group, from the town of Freital in Saxony, and its increasingly violent activities in the latter half of 2015, using the specific conditions in their corner of the world as the lens through which to view the wider malaise. Reunification in 1989 led to the end of most of the industry in the blue collar area. As Dirk, who has lived through the good times and the bad, says: “We work in order to meet bills and taxes. There is nothing left for feeding others.”

In 2015, the immigration crisis hit and Angela Merkel’s open-door policy meant that hundreds of refugees and economic migrants arrived in the town of 40,000 unwelcoming people. The Freital Group emerged during a welter of hostility. The town divided, and those who tried to help the newcomers became targets for vitriol and violence from their neighbours. “There was a fear of being overrun by a few thousand who would continue to live in their own way,” says Dirk. His friend later expands upon the point: unlike native Germans, he says, migrants would have “no respect for pretty blond women”. A pretty blond woman called Ines, meanwhile, was facing online death threats and had to send her Ghanian foster son away for his own safety.

The Freital Group decided to make their feelings known first by blowing up the car of a local politician known to be helping asylum seekers. Thanks to police failure, they were able to move on to more violent attacks in which it was only a matter of purest chance that no one was killed. When they were arrested they were at first only charged as ordinary criminals. It wasn’t until Germany’s federal prosecutor took over the case that the group was treated as a terrorist organisation. A minority of the townsfolk rejoiced. Dirk and his friends think the attackers are just bigmouthed boys who feel hard done by.

What do you do as this plays out across towns, countries and the world? Is a hardening of prejudice inevitable as nations are forced to play host and share resources that are – whether in fact or in perception – scarce? Do we come down hard on anyone who questions the wisdom of untrammelled immigration? Or is denouncing them instantly unfair? Panorama posed the questions. Let’s hope the answers come quickly.

In the meantime, we can all escape to Alaska (the programme, at least, if not the state itself). A new documentary series, Alaska: A Year in the Wild (Channel 5), opened at the beginning of the frozen north-west territory’s seven-month winter and didn’t set out to do anything more extraordinary or impossible than record life as it plays out on ice sheets and up mountains at temperatures that can freeze oceans all the way to the north pole.

Musk oxen, covered in ice, roam the tundra, seeking vegetation not yet frozen beneath the snow. Arctic foxes shed their brown coats, fluff up the new white and hope the scavenging is – in arctic terms – easy. Dippers dip in and out of rivers, shrugging off temperatures that would kill us, and bashing their fishy finds to death on nearby rocks – nature icy white in tooth and claw. Glaciers creak. Seven feet of snow falls and ice crystals fill t he air. Lynx – mean, moody and not quite magnificent, the least endearing of all cats – track snowshoe hares, but we have to keep faith that this kind of show at this kind of time (9pm) won’t show us a dead bunny – and so it happily proves. Dead moose are different, though, and we do see one of those, felled by its lack of fat reserves because it spent its youthful energy in the summer trying to grow up. Youth is indeed wasted on the young.

Overall, Alaska was a wonderful, solid hour of astonishing sights – a giant Christmas card with a savage indifference at its heart. It won’t be a bad place to head for, all things considered.