The appointment of Adolf Hitler in January 1933 as Chancellor of Germany was the outcome not of an election, but of a political conspiracy involving a small number of senior military and government officials, headed by General Paul von Hindenburg. Its horrific consequences were World War II, the Holocaust and the destruction of tens of millions of lives.

After the unimaginable barbarity and suffering – the extermination of 6 million Jews and others, the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union which claimed 27 million lives, the death of millions more in the war – people the world over demanded one thing above all: “Never Again!”

And yet, nearly 75 years after the fall of the Third Reich, the neo-Nazi right has become a major political force in Germany. In the summer of 2018, fascist mobs rampaged through the streets of Chemnitz, beating up foreigners and a Jewish restaurant owner. In January 2019, the far-right AfD, now the official opposition in the Bundestag, staged a walkout of the Bavarian parliament during a Holocaust remembrance ceremony. Fascism is once again a real and growing danger.

Why Are They Back? analyzes the interaction of high-level political conspirators, media propagandists and right-wing academics at Berlin’s Humboldt University in the present-day resurgence of Nazism and German militarism.