PART III

Legacy
The implications of the Nazi brand
7
HITLER OUR CONTEMPORARY
Brand heritage: the Reich as a power brand

The cult of Hitler today is framed by an understanding of the scale of the atrocity.
But for the genocide of the Jews, he might have evolved into a super-Napoleon,
the toast of cultists everywhere and nostalgia fetishists. Yet the iconography of the
concentration camps, the pathetic debris of personal items, shoes and spectacles, the
long silent lines of the doomed and the deceived queuing up for certain extinc-
tion – these are the interpretants. They trigger, in normal people, a visceral
response: the Holocaust, like the Western Front, has become part of the landscape
of modern memory. The imagery of both has acquired perpetual residence in the
imagination, a past that is forever present.
But the impact of Nazi propaganda did not remain completely buried in the
rubble of Berlin. They have bequeathed to us their image and their brand, the dull
footage edited out. And this is a triumph they would have valued. Burleigh dis-
cusses the sensationalism, the debased forms in which the media celebrate the Third
Reich: ‘the Nazis cynically manipulated posterity as they had manipulated their
contemporaries; by way of continuity, they are cynically manipulated in their turn
by a “Hitler industry” for which there seems to be an insatiable market’.1 And he
adds ‘a regime which had lived by image perished by it, in a final triumph of style
over substance, as the greatest stage villains of all departed what they called
the stage of history, leaving a lingering trail of evil beyond the curtains’. Today,
therefore, Nazi Germany is part of a popular cultural industry, one that has com-
municated insights about that regime in symbolic ways, from Darth Vader to Dr
No. But, while the representation of Nazism in science fiction sometimes gets
closer to the truths than more cerebral studies, it also de-historicises them, makes
them no longer real but part of a twilight fantasy world. These fictions are tenu-
ously based on something that once existed; the archaeologists of the SS, for
example, really did hunt down ancient relics for the enchantment of the Reich as
they do in Raiders of the Lost Ark.2
256 Legacy: the implications of the Nazi brand

Nazism’s function as a brand is one reason why it has an imagistic perpetuity

quite unlike any other regime that existed in history. Its branded quality does not
alone explain this but it is nevertheless part of the explanation. But to the brand
meanings understood by German contemporaries, the original targets, must be
added later ones, for the brand became a cipher for boundless evil and nihilistic
violence and egomania; a reminder of what we as human beings are capable of
doing, that Nazism is a territory of the human mind. Such imagistic perpetuity is
not fully explained by the historical significance of what the Nazis actually did and
their responsibility for the Second World War. Rather is it a tribute to the dex-
terity of their image creation and the coherence of their image structure. The
imagistic properties of the Nazi brand echoed in many unlikely places. Spotts, for
example, claims that Mick Jagger and David Bowie watched Triumph of the Will
together fifteen times and cites Bowie: ‘he (Hitler) made an entire country the
stage show – he was ahead of his time’.3 The pop industry mines the surfaces of
civilisations for outrageous imagery and finds refreshment in Nazi symbolism. Thus
in Lady Gaga’s ‘Alejandro’ (Steven Klein, 2009) de-individuated males pay homage
to a female dominatrix in an eroticised militarist balletic. Another pop connec-
tion – during the 1980s Andy Warhol commissioned Hitler’s court statuarist Arno
Breker to sculpt actor-model Jo d’Allesandro (Breker was at Hitler’s side in the
famous photo before the Eiffel Tower; Warhol died before this commission could
be executed).4
We have all lived through the Nazi era. Films and documentaries imaginatively
reconstruct this period as no other. There is a life, and also an afterlife, to the Nazi
brand; we retrieve their world not as it was but as they wanted it to be. Garth
Jowett argues that ‘since 1945 we have concentrated on the loss of the war by the
Nazis, ignoring their incredible propaganda victories in Germany and elsewhere’.5
Citing R.M. Waugh, he speaks of the ‘populist image of the well tailored Nazi
officer’, and ‘that the historical persistence of these images is testament to the
strength of Nazi propaganda’. The films are of course a way of talking about the
history of the Third Reich and often they attain a kind of metaphoric truth,
penetrating some core essence of the regime via their melodramatic excess. Night of
the Generals (Columbia Pictures 1967), for example, features a fanatical Nazi general
(Peter O’Toole) who ravages a large sector of urban Warsaw, and also murders
prostitutes as a private sideline: he is pursued by a ‘good’ officer-detective, played
by Omar Sharif. The irony, of course, is that he is targeted for these individual
murders and not the colossal war crimes; legalism and process continue to function
beneath a macro-structure of criminality.
The Nazi was a staple of the post-war Hollywood movie industry; he was a way
of affirming the meaning of being American and celebrating the American native
virtues of guts, courage and dynamism: by showing America’s antithesis, what it
was not, it helped to define what in fact America was. And the post-Second World
War US war movie is often another of the Hollywood genre studies about the
damaged American male and how extreme conditions allow him to self-repair and
attain validation even through death (Von Ryan’s Express for instance, Twentieth
 Hitler our contemporary 257

Century Fox 1965). And yet, in relation to the true horrors committed by Nazism,
the post-Second World War Hollywood film is curiously forgiving, not least in its
frequent distinction between the psychotic Nazi and the ordinary decent German
officer and soldier. A film such as Bridge at Remagen (United Artists 1969) is firmly
in this tradition. The German officers represent in the end those great qualities of
loyalty, duty and courage, it is simply that they have to perform them in the con-
text of a deranged regime which ultimately betrays them by its utter fanaticism.
There is also the distinction between the German army and the SS perpetuated in
Second World War and post-war movies, which project and sustain the myth that
the army itself was not implicated in the atrocities. In the Cold War era, Germany
was of course an important movie market, but beyond this there was a new
adversary: Germans were part of the Western alliance, and from the mid-1950s part
of NATO. Their past could not simply be written off as all evil and thus there
surfaces a dual structure in the later twentieth-century chronicling of the Nazi era.
In the new, Cold War, the truths of the old, hot war were conveniently forgotten.
It was not until the film Schindler’s List (Universal Pictures 1993) that moviegoers
were really exposed to the actual savagery of Nazism. The after-life of Nazi pro-
paganda has evolved as the direct personal memory of the regime has diminished.
In this afterlife, Nazi imagery does not remain in some kind of refrigerated state.
On the contrary, it is actively developed or applied thinly disguised to science-
fiction. It has thus become a representative symbol system for the reductivist drive
to hyper-chauvinism and abject homage to a supreme leader, the dulling of our
humanity by the surrender of its ownership to the diktat of meta-organisations.
And Hitler is a huge phenomenon. As an example of this, his rant (Bruno Ganz) to
the assembled generals in the film Downfall (Constantin Film 2004) has long been
one of the most popular of YouTube virals (to which banal English subtitles are
continuously added, turning Hitler into everything from a hyperventilating cor-
porate executive to a hysterical football club manager). Erik Rentschler quotes
from a modern novel about Hitler on television: ‘he’s always on, we couldn’t have
television without him’. He adds:

set designers for Batman Returns drew generously on the work of Albert Speer
and Arno Breker. George Lucas restaged the closing scene from Triumph of the
Will in the finale of Star Wars; a recent rock video by Michael Jackson likewise
unabashedly recycles Riefenstahl’s images of soldier males paying deference to
their master. American artists pilfer the Nazi legacy with relish. The beautiful
divers, dancers, and discus throwers of Olympia serve as prototypes for television
commercials, magazine ads, and photo spreads.6

Is Nazism, then, symbolic of certain things that are latent within human nature, not
about them, but us?:

indeed, the incessant recycling of Nazi sights and sounds surely represents a
crucial measure of today’s postmodernism. A direct line leads from the Nazis’
258 Legacy: the implications of the Nazi brand

vanguard deployment of pyrotechnic histrionics and audiovisual excesses to the

profuse present-day investment in constant simulations and hyperreal events.
In many respects, these images from the past are very close to us, closer than
we might imagine, closer than some people might like.7

Others speak of ‘the insidious posthumous infiltration of the Nazis into the modern
consciousness through the most modern medium available. It was doubly insidious
since most of the surviving footage was made at their behest, and not surprisingly
depicts them at what they regarded as their best.’8 For the Nazi ‘has long ceased to
be a real historical being. He now inhabits the daemonic twilight of the enter-
tainment world: the mass-produced collective subconscious within which the Zulu
warriors coexist with invaders from outer space and the Waffen SS.’9 Yet the
measure of their public impact may be gauged from a celebrity photo book, Piotr
Uklanski’s Nazis (1999), which features around 150 of the most famous actors of
the twentieth century – even unlikely ones such as Ronald Reagan and Errol
Flynn – playing German soldiers, officers or members of the SS.10 It is difficult in
fact to think of a famous actor who did not, at some point, play a German soldier,
such a staple of the entertainment industry have Nazis become. One of Nazi pro-
paganda’s biggest cultural legacies is in the realm of science fiction; it has had a
definitive impact on popular cultural products, everything from Captain America to
James Bond’s adversaries Goldfinger and Blofeld, and there is even a ‘Third Reich’
episode of Star Trek. This again raises the question of the relationship between
Nazis and modernism, how far they represented a reaction to aspects of the
modern condition and how far they anticipated some of the later developments.
This sci-fi aura arises from the conception of the Hitler state as a technopolis, a
world which worshipped technology and constricted the definition of what it is to
be human in homage to some sort of scientifically baptised prototype, pursuing the
technical edge in everything (e.g. television with its relaying of the 1936 Berlin
Olympics). In a sense the Nazi has ceased to be an actual or even a historical figure
and has entered the mythological realm, wherein science fiction is the legatee. He
is no longer really real.
Were even the Nazis in on the act, recognising, at a certain level, the sci-fi aura
of their regime? Early in the Second World War Marvel comics published an epi-
sode in which Superman demolished part of the German West Wall in occupied
France. But news of this found its way into the weekly newspaper of the SS.11 The
SS response refers to Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman:

an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in

New York, is the inventor of a colourful figure with an impressive appear-
ance, a powerful body, and a red swimsuit who enjoys the ability to fly
through ether. The inventive Israelite named this pleasant guy with an over-
developed body and an underdeveloped mind ‘Superman’. He advertised
widely Superman’s sense of justice, well-suited for imitation by the American
youth.
 Hitler our contemporary 259

Siegel wanted ‘to import the idea of manly virtue and spread them among young
Americans’ after seeing Germany and Italy’s revival:

we see Superman, lacking all strategic sense and tactical ability, storming the
West Wall in shorts. We see several German soldiers in a bunker, who in
order to receive the American guest have borrowed old uniforms from a
military museum … His true strength only shows itself in flight, however. He
leaps into the air to tear the propeller from a passing German airplane. As we
can see from the next frame, however, Superman has apparently made a mis-
take, since he seems to have encountered a Yid pilot. No German would say
what the pilot says: ‘Himmel! Vos is dat?’

The article claims of Superman ‘instead of using the chance to encourage really
useful virtues, he sows hate, suspicion, evil, laziness, and criminality in their young
hearts’. They conclude that this author ‘stinks’; from the SS then, the language of
the school playground.12
The broader popular culture is also replete with Nazi reference. Even before the
United States entered the war Charlie Chaplin was The Great Dictator (United
Artists October 1940), but since that time James Bond villains, Austin Powers’s
adversary Dr Evil (who does indeed have a German sidekick) and so forth seek
total dominion within some new global order: Hitler is the paradigm and the
ultimate science fiction villain. Even the Daleks of Doctor Who were surely Fascists
(‘annihilate, obliterate, exterminate!’), similarly with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s
child-persecuting Baron Bomburst, while Dr Strangelove’s arm could never forget
its previous allegiance no matter how hard he strove to control it. Hitler’s surro-
gates are recurrent in the mass media, all of them mere shadows of the mad lunatic
who tried to take over the world. And the indirect as distinct from the direct
references are even more visible. Wistrich has observed:

there is an enormous suggestive power inherent in Nazi mythology, a seduc-

tiveness in the emotions, images and fantasies which it released, that should
not be underestimated. The alacrity with which the mass entertainment
industry since the 1970s has marketed this aspect of Nazism in sumptuous
movie and TV treatments is a signal warning.

And moreover:

For it was already apparent 40 years after Hitler’s death that in the popular
culture of the West Nazism was often no more than a source of light-headed
amusement, of distraction, perverse fascination and even sadomasochistic por-
nography … It can be observed all around us in the way the Nazi insignia and
emblems, the signs and symbols of the Third Reich from swastikas to black
leather boots, have become part of pop iconography. Stormtroopers or SS
uniforms, Hitler T-shirts and the skinhead or neo-Nazi rock music glorifying
260 Legacy: the implications of the Nazi brand

violence still attract a part of the youth culture of both East and West … this
impact probably has as much to do with the power of kitsch, of images and of
modern myths as with the sadism and criminality of the Nazis which culmi-
nated in the mass murder of European Jewry. It is often difficult to avoid
contamination by this debased aesthetic, but the effort must be made to
deconstruct and neutralise its appeal.13

The Nazi of the post-war D-movie is alpha male and wielder of ultimate violence,
the preening possessor of a private seraglio, magnetically attractive to women
towards whom in fact he is indifferent, and latently violent. But it is the menacing
aspects of Nazism and the wish to affiliate with raw brute power which attracted
many of its recruits in the first place: the science fiction/neo-pornographic enter-
tainment industry does unwittingly surface and illuminate some basic truths. Hence
in one French poster an SS man, leather coat over his shoulders, cigarette in a
holder, is admired by seven pouting women in underwear;14 and in another a
monocle-wearing German officer, glove in hand, places his booted foot on a naked
woman.15 From rake to rape. But what does all this mean, this synthesis of Nazis
with pornography, this Nazi as ultimate male? Given of course the actual things the
SS did, such playful fantasies go beyond the worst possible taste, as they suggest
some of the emotions which originally precipitated and sustained Nazism. Films
such as Gestapo’s Last Orgy ‘are so preoccupied with immediate profit that they
have no comprehension of, or concern with, possible “costs” to culture, memory,
or for that matter, anything at all’.16
Interestingly, this tradition begins in the war itself with the RKO Radio Pictures
film Hitler’s Children (1943),17 where the poster features an SS man whipping a girl
against a backdrop of uniformed girls of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM). But it
is not enough to dismiss this as merely juvenile or sick: it testifies to the endurance
of the imagery carefully created by the Nazis themselves that has penetrated
the collective subconscious, a part of our culture in fact, a reservoir of expressive
material for any theatrical exposition that plays with the dark side of human nature.
Every one appeared to join in and in the 1970s it was the turn of the black com-
munity: a ‘blaxploitation’ film poster features a black SS man armed with Luger
and women in revealing costumes.18 Alongside the sexualised Nazi there is the
nihilism, Nazism as explosions. Hence posters for The Train (United Artists 1964)
feature Paul Scofield as a senior German officer standing haughtily against a blazing
incineration of trains and railway lines, German soldiers and fleeing people.19
Other publicity materials, for example, the film Hell in Normandy (1967) or Ach-
tung! The Desert Tigers (1976) or Tobruk (1967) similarly emphasise above all Nazism
as raging inferno, the symbol it has more than any other bequeathed to history.20
Many films are of course both – a pleasing amalgam of sex and violence so that all
human perversity is catered for. Images for The Night of the Fox (1990), for exam-
ple, partake of both traditions: a woman wrapped in fur coat (and naught else),
pistol firmly in the stockings of her exposed leg, poses smilingly against a
background of explosions.21
 Hitler our contemporary 261

There is a historic past but, with Hitler, a media present that is melodramatic but
even, on occasion, comedic (such as Look Who’s Back, a comedy about an inept
Hitler returning to Germany and struggling with modern technology and condi-
tions, 2015; and in Iron Sky, 2012, Nazis fled to the moon after 1945 where they
build a space fleet to re-conquer earth in 2018). Nor does mass media really scru-
tinise the propaganda world of the Reich, it merely hands down the propaganda-
conceived image. One rare exception is Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin
Tarantino), one of the very few films to have surfaced the role of propaganda in
the Nazi dystopia. A German sniper who killed two hundred and fifty of the
enemy is the star of a new propaganda film called A Nation’s Pride and the climax
(a fantasy of revenge where Jewish soldiers kill top Nazis including Hitler and
Goebbels) is structured round a cinema showing of this film before the Nazi elite.
The Third Reich lasted little more than twelve years, yet such has been the
protracted media afterlife that it feels like a century. Hitler remains perhaps
the only figure from history with whom all teenagers are intimately familiar, the
one image and only memory that adolescence has managed to retrieve from all of
the pasts of the human race. It is hardly surprising then that he resurrects as a force
in adolescent depravity, everything from the Columbine High School massacre to
the inspiration for Russian skinheads (the progeny of a people who lost vastly more
than twenty million of their kin in the Second World War). The shadow of Hitler
looms over the history syllabus of schools, not merely because of the significance of
what he did in the global order but more than that, because of the vividness of the
imagistic legacy: he is accessible to teach, to fire the minds of distracted youth.
Hitler has transcended Hitler. He has become a concept, a point of reference,
quite simply a structuring element in our global political and cultural conscious-
ness. He lives as never before since 1945, and as the direct memory of the Second
World War recedes the fascination with him has grown; why, for example, is
there so much less public interest in Josef Stalin, so fewer books published, even
though Stalin’s infamy is (arguably) as extreme? But what we mean by ‘Hitler’
today lies principally in the domain of imagery, and his immortality is an
achievement of his propaganda (typical Daily Mail headlines in any given week
over the past decade might be: ‘Hitler’s secret flying saucer: did the Führer plan
to attack London and New York in UFOs?’, 18 November 2010, or ‘The English
debutante who staged Nazi orgies as a gift of love to Hitler’, 11 October 2013, or
‘The smiling face of Evil: Adolf Hitler grins as he poses with children ….’, 31
March 2017).
There is an entire industry re-embodying the imagery of the Third Reich for a
large global consumer market and retailing it through the internet. The aesthetic
and symbol system have a power to insinuate into the regressive consciousness,
their existence a synonym for mechanical discipline and warrior fanaticism. This
afterlife, like the life, is deeply artefactual, and there is a stupendous trade in
memorabilia. Books, daggers, websites, watches, clocks, T-shirts, posters, CDs,
videos and iconography in all their various forms fester and propagate; and then
there are those posters. The Nazis are forbidden, and therefore they are exciting,
262 Legacy: the implications of the Nazi brand

and the vividness, the inspired lunacy of their imagery continues to scandalise, its
very insistence assuring replication through time and cyberspace.
One company (Your Third Reich HQ, PZG INC., Rapid City, South Dakota)
fondly retails memorabilia such as photo books (SS Division Horst Wessel, SS Hitler
Youth Division, Knights’ Cross Winners of the Waffen SS, Reichs Autobahn). Or there is
Mein Kampf; or a video of Goebbels’s Total War speech; or a map which shows the
huge tracts of ‘stolen’ German lands and the concentration of Germans in neigh-
bouring countries. A reprint of the 1937 Stanley McClatchie book Look to Germany,
The Heart of Europe is available, and a book on the Reich Chancellery, ‘the most
remarkable government structure ever built in Germany’. Then there are the busts
‘imported from Europe’, such as the Adolf Hitler, ‘a brilliantly lifelike sculpture and
made from genuine marble dust’; as well as the Barbie-type dolls. These include
Rommel, while the Himmler figure ‘includes: finest quality material and leather,
leather hobnailed riding boots, authentic uniform … cigar …’. Certainly the com-
mentary is partisan: ‘Himmler was a truly gifted organiser and put his talent to good
use for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Hitler chose Himmler’s elite SS to be the
instrument to transform Germany’s class conscious reactionary Wehrmacht into a
National Socialist People’s Army’, and we are told that Germany’s true form ‘was not
obtained until 1941 to 44’. Some idea of our world, indeed, as it might have looked
had Germany won the war.
Hitler also reigns in cyberspace. And the production of Nazi propaganda is a
contemporary process (kinesis), as well as a historic event (stasis). Parades, and spee-
ches, songs and assorted imagery self-perpetuate in a virtual Reich whose legatees
embellish its aesthetic for posterity. People actually ‘produce’ their very own Nazi
propaganda in their own homes, piecing together the original pictures and songs to
create a fresh synthetic of propaganda. For example, ‘I Had a Comrade’, the elegiac
soldiers’ lament popular in the Nazi period as a funeral march, occurs in many guises
on the internet alongside retrieved imagery of military comradeship and menace.
These are miniature Nazi epics, and they are followed with comments like ‘my
grandfather was in a panzer regiment’, and continuing on from this ‘so was mine’. So
Nazi propaganda has a past and a present; film propaganda now available for free
online includes Triumph of the Will, Hitler Youth Quex, SA Mann Brand and other
complete films. Then there are the computer games. Killzone 3, a game published by
Sony, commences with a Nuremberg-style rally where a fanatical dictator harangues
his imperial cohorts. And Facebook pages like ‘Prussia Reborn’, while explicitly
rejecting Nazi ideology, do heroise and sentimentalise the Wehrmacht via the heri-
tage of its propagandist imagery. Some such social media sites (e.g. ‘Very Wehr-
macht’, with its mysterious ‘Der Kommandant’), arose not to regurgitate Nazi beliefs
but to perpetuate an idea of the German Army of World War Two. They may be
evanescent and even organised by college and high school students or, as was the
case of ‘Tiger Commander’, are related to the playing of WW2-based computer
games. Other sites such as ‘This Was Germany’ nostalgically retail Nazi pictography,
or conscript neo-Fascist imagery in the service of illiberalism or indeed, as in the
example of ‘Trumpenreich’, a crudely racialist agenda.
 Hitler our contemporary 263

Notes
1 Burleigh, Third Reich.
2 Arnold, ‘Past’.
3 Spotts, Hitler and the Power.
4 Marco Bodenstein, ‘Andy Warhol, Arno Breker, Joe d’Allesandro’; Prometheus, Internet
Bulletin for Art, Politics and Science, No. 80 Autumn (2001).
5 Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion.
6 Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion.
7 Ibid.
8 Burleigh, Third Reich.
9 A.P. Foulkes, Literature and Propaganda, London: Methuen, 1985.
10 Pyotyr Uklanski, The Nazis, Zurich: Editions Patrick Frey, 1999.
11 ‘Jerry Siegel Attacks!’, Das Schwarze Korps, 25 April 1940, Calvin College German Pro-
paganda Archive.
12 Ibid.
13 Wistrich, Weekend.
14 SS Girls, dir. Jordan B. Mathews, 1976; Uklanski, Nazis.
15 ‘S.S.Camp 5. – Women’s Hell’, directed by Sergio Garrone; Uklanski 1999.
16 Graeme Krautheim, ‘Desecration Repackaged: Holocaust Exploitation and the Market-
ing of Novelty’ Cinephile 5 (2) Spring 2009.
17 Uklanski, Nazis.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.