The Beast Reawakens: The Chilling Story of the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement
Martin A. Lee
Routledge
1997
560 pages
There are a number of books published between approximately 1990 and 2010 that attempt to survey the post-war radical racist scene in various geographic contexts. Perhaps the best recent book that attempts such a history is Leonard Zeskind’s 2008 survey Blood and Politics, which looks at the political efforts of American white supremacists during the second half of the 20th century. Martin A Lee, a co-founder of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, produced his own contribution to that subject, a lengthy work of investigative journalism on the global far-right scene of the post-WWII period, ranging from a post-Third Reich German Nazi underground to the contemporary American anti-semitic “second revolution” fantasizing militia movement.
Lee’s book is probably the only text about the racist far-right, that I know of, that follows the threads of that scene all the way back to the Third Reich. He describes the post-war influence of Nazi Party members who were close to Hitler including Otto Skorzeny, an SS Colonel who was in the Furher’s bodyguard regiment who, up to the time of his death, was involved in numerous racist organizations. The narrative of Lee’s history comes almost full circle when he notes that Oklahoma City bomber and American right-wing fanatic Timothy McVeigh had a contact in the German ultra-right wing scene in a section that sounds almost like conspiracy theory if only because this contact is not mentioned in other sources about the bomber.
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