Continue Reading Below Advertisement

You remember them now, right? Maybe you were a fan. I wasn't, personally, but I do get how hearing those songs again might evoke memories of a simpler time. A time when every food product was EXTREME! and winning a war in the Middle East was a thing we were still capable of as a country. So before you get too ensconced in your nostalgia, I feel like I should tell you something: Ace of Base was probably a bunch of Nazis.

Actually, that they have ties to the neo-Nazi movement isn't in dispute, or at all a secret. A few years ago, Vice music editor Ben Shapiro wrote an article that revealed that Ace of Base founder Ulf Ekberg was once in a Nazi punk band called Commit Suiside. Here's a sample of the band's lyrics, as shared in his article:

Noisey.Vice.com

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Subtle!

Vice covers way more ground in their write-up about Ekberg's past, and I definitely encourage you to give it a read at some point. However, the piece ends with an interesting question: "Did Ekberg use Ace of Base's success as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and erase his neo-Nazi past?"

I think I can answer that. Ekberg did not use Ace of Base to hide his Nazi past. Quite the contrary. Ace of Base was a Nazi band, too.

For starters, let's talk about that name. It's weird, right? Vaguely militaristic. "Bass" is the word you'd expect to be there, seeing as how it's music-related and all. I think I can explain not only why they went with "base," but also why it sounds so warlike. The name is most likely a reference to the Keroman Submarine Base, a massive U-boat launching and docking facility constructed by the Nazis in the French town of Loriant. It's considered one of the most important and ambitious projects of the entire war for their side. In 1941, the missions that embarked from this facility alone were responsible for taking out more than 500 Allied ships. It was so well-constructed that the Allies built a new bomb specifically to take out this one facility. The bomb was called the "Tall Boy," and it failed miserably. The Allies finally crippled the base, but only by literally flattening the entire city around it and blocking U-boats from accessing the station. We never took it, though. The Germans, despite eventually being completely surrounded by Allied forces, managed to hold onto the bunker through the end of the war.