What is there in Nazism for teenagers to like?

Although the recent teenage glorification of Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology at a school in Larnaca in Cyprus is nothing new among teenagers, or confined to Cyprus, the attraction of Nazi ideology to teenagers is puzzling. 

In 2005, when a 20-year-old Prince Harry was pictured in the Sun attending a fancy dress party in a khaki uniform with a swastika arm band he apologised to the Chief Rabbi in the UK for the offence caused to Holocaust survivors and admitted it was a huge mistake for which he was very sorry.

Leader of Reform UK Nigel Farage, who aspires to become British prime minister, wallowed in racism and Nazi glorification as a teenager. He has not apologised.

Apparently, he subjected fellow Jewish, black and Asian pupils at Dulwich College in South London to hurtful racist and antisemitic insults which they did not think were innocent teenage banter at all.

Far from it! A couple of former Jewish pupils at Dulwich College claimed he used to sing the well-known old song ‘bless them all bless them all’ as ‘gas them all gas them all’ in reference to the Nazi extermination of Jewish people in gas chambers and that Hitler was right to seek to exterminate the Jewish race.

No rational person would think that was innocent banter. Farage denies that specific allegation but there is evidence from a report written by a teacher that “his publicly professed racist and neo fascist views” made him ineligible to become a prefect.

The headmaster did not agree and made him a prefect anyway despite the objections of the teacher. As there is nothing in writing from the headmaster, his reasons are not known but it looks as though he didn’t take Farage’s extreme views against the ethnic origin of other pupils seriously.

Farage dismissed his teenage rants against black and Asian pupils and antisemitic tropes as teenage banter with no malice, but he has not particularised the banter he engaged in to enable people to evaluate its innocence.

What is interesting is that at the same time as Farage allegedly held neo-Nazi views he was also a fervent supporter of Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration stance. It looks as though he abandoned his antisemitism but retained his anti-immigrant sentiments that have now stood him in good stead politically.

Back in the 1960s, it was Indian and West Indian immigration that exercised politicians like Powell; in 2026 it is refugees arriving illegally in small boats that are the problem.  

If the stories about Farage’s racism and antisemitism at school are true, he was a nasty boy with bags of attitude which he re-focused as a grown up against immigrants and refugees.

Although originally of Huguenot refugee stock, Farage is an English nationalist and claims he has helped revive English nationalism into a respectable movement. It remains to be seen whether his nationalism is populism at the expense of other nationalities living in England or the acceptable face of patriotism borne of English history and culture that other nationalities can share.   

The attraction of Hitler and the Nazis to teenagers is difficult to fathom let alone interpret. Hitler is generally regarded as the personification of evil and is certainly not an attractive role model for teenagers to admire.

Unemployed and unemployable, he was a loser and a reject who shouted his way to power, murdered millions, destroyed Germany and committed suicide. So, what is there to like about him that attracts teenagers?

He was a byproduct the stupidest war in history – WWI – and the stupidest peace treaty in history. As the British economist and participant at the peace talks at Versailles 1919, John Maynard Keynes warned at the time, the terms of the peace treaty were impossible and likely to cause nationalist resentment in Germany and another war within 20 years – which is exactly what happened. Hitler was the inevitable consequence of a bad war and a bad peace and the tendency of people to scapegoat minorities.

It is not difficult to understand the attraction of Nazi ideology to Germans after the humiliation of World War I and the 1919 Versailles peace treaty, as Keynes warned.

Hitler told the Germans what they wanted to hear. It is called populism. He made the Germans feel good about themselves and it was done so well by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels it sent the whole German nation on a collective heroic high.

The swastika, the uniforms, the salute, the colours, the architecture, the parades all symbolised power in unity and symmetry – coupled with ideas about eugenics and delusions of master race status – made the Germans feel good as they did not know the tragic consequences that would follow. But the teenagers of today know only too well the consequences of Nazi ideology.

You would think that the crushing defeat of the Nazis and the Third Reich 1933-45 and the war crimes and crimes against humanity and the genocide the Nazis committed against the Jews of Europe would put teenagers off Nazi ideology.

The more charitable view is that some teenagers with a lot of attitude dabble in Nazi ideology for a while and get over it eventually. Teenagers are known to be contrarian and some have an attitude problem but they must know that glorifying Hitler is very offensive to people who fought the Nazis and died in their death camps and their surviving relatives.