Inside the terrifying rise of Germany’s Neo-Nazis who’ve ‘forgotten the past’

The man named Morten attempts to grab our photographer’s hand. “Delete, delete,” he says, pointing a leather-gloved figure at the screen. Express photographer Phil Harris raises his palms in bemusement, he’d joined the conversation late and wasn’t aware the man and his friends didn’t want to be filmed.

But Morten, one of thousands of neo-Nazi protesters who recently marched through the streets of Dresden, isn’t having any of it.

“Check the telephone,” he barks, walking around to look over Phil’s shoulder. “They’re not allowed to take any photos. Let me, let me check him.”

Satisfied that no video is being recorded, he stands to attention, eyeing Phil warily. He frequently interrupts to shout about how much time we have left. “Five minutes,” he orders. “Now two.”

The reason for Morten’s aggression is unclear, but we suspect it has something to do with the fact that, less than 24 hours earlier, we photographed him proudly waving a Norwegian flag at the Neo-Nazi march in Dresden.

He was one of many foreign fascists the German police said had traveled from abroad to attend a demonstration ‘commemorating’ the lives lost during the bombing of the East German city during the Second World War.

Organisers presented the event as a sober reflection on the brutal events of the conflict, lighting candles, wearing black and reading out names of lives lost.

But the truth was that it was a flimsy cover for more than 3,000 neo-Nazis to assemble to promote lies about some of the worst atrocities in modern history and spread their hateful ideology to anyone who’d listen.

Marching past thousands of riot police, they displayed banners that denied the Holocaust and accused the Allied Forces of committing “war crimes”.

These Neo-Nazis know it is illegal in Germany to display Swastikas or do Hitler salutes so they devised other ways to signal their allegiance to the Third Reich.

Most protesters ignored the authorities’ pre-event warning not to wear black and swaggered through the streets with balaclavas pulled up around their faces.

They shout “Heil” aggressively and belt out banned versions of the national anthem as a group, provocative displays that are offensive but unlikely to result in thousands of police officers plowing into the crowd with batons drawn.

During the event, we found it almost impossible to talk to the fascist demonstrators. Everything was choreographed by men with headsets and white armbands who were antagonistic towards journalists.

“Do not walk behind the demonstration. You cannot be confused with being part of it,” a man with a strawberry-blonde beard told us when asked whether anyone would speak.

Their orchestration of events felt more sinister when the true feelings of demonstrators, like Morten, who wouldn’t give a surname, were revealed.

We found the Scandinavian with cold blue eyes barking instructions at a group of five men, who were also at the Dresden event, out for a mid-morning walk around a town on the outskirts of Dresden the following day.

Although he is initially aggressive towards us, he still clearly enjoys the attention and takes the opportunity to launch into a vile anti-Semitic tirade against “f***ing Anglo American terrorists” once the camera is lowered and the voice recorder rolling.

It is a horrendous rant, probably illegal under German law, but one he feels empowered to spout from a square overlooked by a former Nazi euthanasia facility.

Despite being a Norwegian who claims to be against a “European monoculture”, Morten appears to have an obsession with Nazi Germany.

He is not the first person from Norway to develop an unhealthy infatuation with Hitler. During World War Two the country was ruled by local collaborator Vidkun Quisling, who courted the dictator as the conflict neared and was installed as leader when Germany invaded.

His betrayal is so infamous that, after the war, the term quisling became a synonym for “collaborator” or “traitor” in multiple languages.

Like Quisling, Morten is only too keen to lecture the young German men by his side about the ways they have been wronged since the Second World War.

“Germany isn’t a real country. [It] never had a peace agreement with the f***ing Allies,” he shouts, spittle flicking from his lips. “We are still occupied by the Anglo-Americans who do exactly what they want.”

It’s hard to tell to what extent those around Morten agree with his wild conspiracy theories.

When asked if this concept about post-war Germany is widespread, the other men shake their heads. But the fact that they follow Morten’s orders about who can speak and for how long is an indication that his posturing has some influence on them.

It would be wrong to think that after the fall of the Nazis in 1945, their supporters just disappeared. Especially in the former East Germany in the years since the war, there have always been extremists with terrifying views.

What’s changed is that we are now living in an era when people like Morten can access young, undeveloped minds in unprecedented ways. Social media has given fascists a way of delivering their message unfiltered to an audience on a scale beyond their wildest dreams.

Hours later in the same square where we found Morten and his posse, the Jacob family, seemingly ordinary Germans, expressed their own concerns at the way technology enabled hateful concepts to flourish.

“I think it is a problem of education, in my opinion,” says Hendrik Jacob, an engineer from Dresden. “We have two sons, 18 and 12, and we have the impression that at school the discussion about the time under fascism is too small.

“At their age social media is a strong influence and there is a lot of false information and fake news on there.”

They found it disturbing that proud neo-Nazis would gather in Dresden to promote their hate but felt the political landscape had tilted to empower such gatherings like never before.

In the recent German elections, the two most popular parties were the centrist Christian Democratic Union and the hardline Alternative fur Deutschland [AfD].

The latter has factions the government considers extremist and a regional leader who can legally be described as a ‘fascist.’

“Angela Merkel’s government was too left-wing,” says Hendrik. “So they lost a lot of . As the economy gets worse or people feel that it is [it pushes people further away].”

Empowered by the groundswell of public support, the AfD has also been doing the unthinkable: suggesting Germany needs to reappraise how it views the Nazi-era.

“Frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that,” the hard-right party’s most famous supporter told a pre-election rally repeating a common argument used by the AfD. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their parents, their great-grandparents.”

Yet if we don’t remember history, how can we avoid going wrong again?

Given its candidate for Chancellor, Alice Weidel’s grandfather, was a Nazi judge and her deputy, Beatrix Von Storch’s, was Hitler’s finance minister this repositioning is something of a strategic necessity in a country still grappling with the heinous atrocities of the Holocaust.

But when we met Von Storch campaigning in East Berlin we found she was willing to go even further, suggesting the comparisons opponents drew between her party and the Nazis enabled extremists, like those who marched through Dresden, to gain traction.

“We should not be talking about the Third Reich and water down all the damage done,” she told us. “The average young person might think Hitler was not all bad if [people such as the AfD are] like them. So we should not do that.

“If people start to understand Nazi means you think there are only two genders, that you’re against mass illegal migration and you’re not in favour of an ever closer the that’s absolute rubbish and it’s dangerous.”

It is a matter of fierce debate in Germany regarding who might be opening the door for neo-Nazis to prosper, but it is pretty undeniable that the shifting of the political spectrum has helped. According to Dr. Heiko Giebler, a senior political scientist at Freie Universität Berlin, time is an undisputed factor in Germany’s current trend.

“Germany is a late bloomer [in having an emerging Far Right] these kinds of parties already had like double-digit numbers in other countries, but were at like 2% or 3% in Germany,” he explains. “One of the explanations that is put forward is that the longer the atrocities that

Germany committed in World War Two are away from us and the fewer people [there are who] can still talk about what what has happened in Germany, the more it is forgotten.”

Standing with his face lit by the flames of the Dresden memorial candles is the terrifying result of that lost history.

Dressed in an all-black ‘traditional’ outfit that wouldn’t look out of place in a 1933 rally, Luis Wagner puffs his chest and marches around the fascist demonstrator’s meeting point. He shouts “Heil” with guttural pride before belting out an illegal version of the German national anthem at a volume that can be heard ten yards away.

Wagner claims to be a “proud Nazi”, even though he is too young to have had any conversations with the relatives who lived through that era.

After launching into a hateful speech about Winston Churchill and the “war crimes of Dresden”, Wagner then claimed to be part of a “growing” wave of youngsters across Germany who were becoming fascists.

“[The stigma to call yourself a Nazi] is really changing because of people like me that are standing here and saying openly what I think. I am that’s a signal for other young Germans to do the same,” he tells me.

“Most people who have my views don’t agree with their parents. They are mostly left-wing whereas young people are getting more and more right-wing.”

This is Germany’s worst nightmare: a young neo-Nazi, disconnected from the horrors of the past and with an enthusiasm to recruit more people into his hateful ideology.

How it deals with people like this will define the country’s future.