Rock Nazis

Long before Mel Brooks pranced about as a storm trooper singing, “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / come and join the Nazi party,” and stuck ice skates on a pirouetting Hitler, Donald Duck slaved away in a Nazi factory, shouting “Heil Hitler!” The 1943 Disney sketch, “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” is a surreal anti-Nazi propaganda film lampooning the Third Reich and the master race—a sashaying Nazi band sings, “Ja, we is the super men / Super-duper super men,” while Donald Duck has the great honor to work “forty-eight-hour days” for the führer. The satire of the eight-minute short is obvious from the opening shot of ridiculously exaggerated goose steps, but since then, Nazi cosplay in the entertainment industry has been considerably less clear in its allegiances.

John Lennon, for example, had the interesting habit of goose-stepping across stages, holding a comb across his lips like a Hitler moustache, and performing the Nazi salute in front of crowds. His ex-wife Cynthia once said that “John was absolutely fascinated by Adolf Hitler.” What are we to make of this behavior? Does it reveal Lennon’s latent antisemitism and nostalgia for the Third Reich, or was it just, as the journalist Ivor Davis suggested, “his off-kilter way of relieving the crazy pressure”? That’s the question at the heart of British musician and author Daniel Rachel’s excellent new book, This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich, a meticulous work that explores the surprising and disturbingly common use of Nazi imagery in modern music—and not for the purpose of parody. Rachel carefully documents dozens of bands and musicians who sang about Nazis and the Holocaust, collected Nazi memorabilia, or wore Nazi clothing, most with unironic enthusiasm.

Many people are familiar with the antisemitism of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, who recently dressed up in an SS costume for a concert in Berlin, but Rachel goes deep, showing how long-standing and widespread the phenomenon is. In a careful courtroom style that grows more damning with each example, Rachel delivers the goods on the bad behavior of dozens of rock stars and bands. John Lennon insisted on adding Hitler to the crowd of celebrities on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the cover artist Peter Blake confirmed his presence: “Yes, he is on there . . . you just can’t see him.” Brian Jones, an original member of the Rolling Stones, dressed up in full SS drag for a German magazine, the Stones frontman Mick Jagger posed for Leni Riefenstahl, and Keith Richards once attended a wedding “attired in Nazi uniform.”

David Bowie “visited Hitler’s wartime bunker where he saluted with a stiffened right arm,” and Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, apparently “harboured a peculiar fascination with Nazism.” He simply couldn’t resist the urge of getting “dressed as Adolf Hitler” and driving through a Jewish neighborhood in London, “waving a swastika.” Not to be outdone, Sid Vicious, the bonkers bassist for the punk band the Sex Pistols, “strolled through the Jewish quarter of Paris exposing a swastika T-shirt worn beneath a hardened leather jacket. Sneering and gesticulating, he flashed a flick knife at scandalised onlookers.”

Musicians across genres—the bluesy Eric Clapton, Heavy Metal’s Lemmy from Motörhead, pop stars Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga, and more—collected or wore Nazi clothes. In one representative and unconvincing defense, Ginger Baker, drummer of Cream, said in an interview, “I’ve got an SS officer’s cap. I think it’s a good thing to wear these things. It makes a few people remember there was a war—it’s not a thing to forget or let happen again.”

Rachel also explores troubling lyrics, perhaps most infamously the song “Belsen Was a Gas” by the Sex Pistols and the swastika-wearing Sid Vicious. The 1977 song presented “a chilling, unapologetic and simultaneously ironically humorous portrayal of life in a concentration camp—an act that remains truly shocking.” The irony may be lost on some of us. The shouted lyrics go: “Belsen was a gas I heard the other day / In the open graves where the Jews all lay / Life is fun and I wish you were here / They wrote on postcards to those held dear.” Their contemporary Siouxsie Sioux sang about “too many Jews” but later clarified with aggravating absurdity that she only meant “too many fat businessmen.”

With impressive patience, Rachel parses the bad faith defenses of musicians who “casually exploit Third Reich tropes, as if they were mere theatrical props.” Troublingly, he writes, “The swastika and, more broadly, Nazi insignia was increasingly becoming a musician’s mark of rebellion detached from its origin.” In partial explanation, Rachel points to the general lack of historical education among rockers. At first, I grew frustrated with his habit of reiterating the most basic of points about Nazi evil—the racialist antisemitism of the Nazis, concentration camps, the Holocaust by Bullets, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—until I remembered that the book is filled with examples of people who seemed not only oblivious or indifferent but often genuinely ignorant to the horrors of the Third Reich. (Members of the Blue Öyster Cult, the first band to use a heavy metal umlaut, were allegedly shocked when their SS-inspired art inspired someone to perform a Sieg Heil in front of them.)

I suppose Rachel’s instinct is a fair one, although lack of education doesn’t properly explain the “oops, I did a Nazi salute again” phenomenon—so what does?

Cool is the currency of rock, and as the genre grew out of the bowl cuts and crisp suits of the early Beatles and Yardbirds, artists looked for more radical and antisocial ways to act cool. Disaffected glares, wild hair, burnt cigarettes, and high cheekbones were a must, but in the seventies and eighties, some British and American musicians started finding inspiration elsewhere. Rachel writes that “in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were easy targets for mockery, yet they also evoked a sense of wonder and reverence.” By the seventies, wonder and reverence were on the rise. David Bowie gushed to a journalist that “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God!” It was a common refrain, and “Nazi chic” became something of a cultural trend in the decades after the Holocaust. Rachel notes that “many artists have engaged with the legacy of Nazism by wearing uniforms, imitating the grandiosity of Third Reich rallies” and that “it was often the allure of shiny buttons and polished medals that captivated musicians.” Ace Frehley, who was one of the two non-Jewish members of KISS, admitted that “Yeah, [the Nazis] did have the coolest clothes.” In punk, it wasn’t the clothes; it was the swastika, which was deliberately used to shock and appall people—part of punk’s language of cool.

Many critics have noticed the similarity between rock concerts and fascist rallies—early on, Elvis Presley’s concerts were compared to the “uninhibited party rallies the Nazis used to hold for Hitler.” David Bowie, Queen, and Pink Floyd later all deliberately staged concerts to evoke the kind of fascist delirium of the Nuremburg rallies.

Rachel is reluctant to accuse most rockers of outright antisemitism, even when he is skeptical of claims like Ginger Baker’s that all the cosplay is really about raising awareness. Certainly some of them were very dumb, but then again so are many antisemites and Nazis. As Rachel dryly notes about the punk band the Exploited, “If swastikas, racist rhetoric and brawling with Asians . . . was meant as an anti-fascist statement, it was largely lost on their expanding far-right fan base.” Still, he’s eager to absolve when he can, writing of the Beatles that “any suggestion of anti-Semitism in the Beatles was quashed . . . when the Beatles performed at London’s Pigalle Club to a predominantly Jewish audience.” I’m personally unsure how this absolved Lennon of singing, “Baby you’re a rich fag Jew”—apparently in reference to Beatles manager Brian Epstein—when recording the song “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.”

Trying to figure out why bands can’t quit the Third Reich, Rachel turns to Susan Sontag’s argument that “the SS was designed as an elite military community that would be not only supremely violent but also supremely beautiful.” When musicians wear storm trooper outfits, swastikas, and Nazi crosses and stand “in front of a Third Reich flag draped in full Nazi regalia,” they aren’t being subversive, transgressive, or groundbreaking. They’re being played for fools, willfully submitting to a deliberate element of Nazi propaganda.

In his conclusion, Rachel writes that “in my effort to avoid casting myself as the Simon Wiesenthal of rock ’n’ roll, I have tried to strike a delicate balance between explanation and not attributing blame.” It’s true that, in isolation, each story comes with its own specific explanation—Lennon was letting off steam, Sid Vicious was blindly seeking out the most offensive thing he could do, David Bowie got swept up in drugs and the naturally fascist trappings of stadium rock—but none of the individual notes explains the antisemitic chord.

Maybe some of the answer lies in rock’s desire to flip the bird at power, and Jews have always been prominent in entertainment—the “fat businessmen” and “fag Jews” allegedly running the world of popular music as well as other worlds. Rachel notes two organizations of musicians from the seventies that were organized to fight discrimination: the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and Rock Against Racism. Rachel notes that “despite the swastika representing ‘a war against European Jewry,’ Rock Against Racism identified neo-Nazi activity not by rising anti-Semitism, but by its discrimination against Black people.” The ANL, meanwhile, was explicitly anti-Zionist. This only really makes sense if Jews were not seen as victims or as a minority in need of defense.

In 1965, the folkie Chad Mitchell Trio had a minor hit with their satirical “I Was Not a Nazi Polka.” Featuring a young John Denver, it ridiculed former Nazis pretending they had never even heard of Hitler. Unlike performers such as Michael Jackson—who drew on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will for a music video, sang “Jew me, sue me,” and claimed he was merely highlighting social and political problems—the trio, like Mel Brooks, invoked Nazis to criticize Nazis, not to be cool.

Perhaps the strangest case in Rachel’s book is Rock around the Bunker, the 1975 passion project of French musician Serge Gainsbourg. Born in 1928, he and his family survived the war in hiding—once he spent a night alone in a forest, clutching an axe to defend himself against the Gestapo Jew hunters. By the time he put the album out, Gainsbourg had been the leading man of French pop music for almost twenty years, but it was poorly received.

The boppy, upbeat album, Rachel writes, “depicts [Hitler] locked in his bunker, Allied bombs dropping overhead, surrounded by gay SS officers and Eva Braun listening to American music, much to his annoyance.” The first song on the album, “Nazi Rock,” opens with Nazis preparing for the Night of Long Knives like they’re going out to
 the club:

Put on your black stockings, guys
 Adjust your garters well
 Your suspenders and your corsets
 Come on, it’s going to get wild
 We’re going to dance.

Backup singers trill “Nazi rock! Nazi, Nazi rock!” in an uncomfortably catchy tune. According to Rachel, Gainsbourg said, “I wanted to exorcise this period that I lived in when I was a kid, where I was marked with a yellow star.” Needless to say, he didn’t find Nazi fashion cool and transgressive. In another track of the album, “Yellow Star,” he “imagined the star as a symbol of status, like earning a sheriff’s badge or a marshal’s insignia.” That was the same year that David Bowie praised Adolf Hitler as a rock star while swanning around, drug addled, as the “Thin White Duke.”

Just a few months ago, America’s favorite fascist, Nick Fuentes, said:

Why is Hitler cool? I’ll tell you why very simply. Because what Hitler represents is if white people didn’t give a fuck. That’s what it represents. When you see Hitler, when you see the edits, when you see the vision, and what is the vision? The vision is grand architecture, beautiful fashion, an unstoppable military. You see white people without limits, without restraint. You see white people without the self-imposed guilt, the shame.

Last year, Ye (a.k.a. Kanye West) released a song called “Heil Hitler”; Fuentes and a group of his loser fascist friends were later recorded singing it at a club (Ye, following in the noble tradition of previous pop stars, has recently tried to apologize).

Rock ’n’ Roll’s engagement with Nazism has remained astonishingly consistent across decades and genres. Did I mention the popularity of SS swastika hats with K-pop bands? What is going on?

Daniel Rachel writes that “there was no attempt to compile a list of artists to denounce” in his book. He’s not trying to cancel anyone or play gotcha, but ultimately he can’t quite explain the phenomeon—why are these artists so drawn to Nazis, rather than, say, the Ku Klux Klan, if they aren’t antisemitic? Whatever their various motives, what we need is not so much an explanation as to put Hitler back on ice.