By Alan Jacobs
Thursday, August 27, 2026
Long, long ago, in an America far, far away, I got my
first job: working in a bookstore in a new shopping mall. Mainly we had
shelves, miles and miles of shelves, along the walls and across the aisles, but
we also had a couple of rotating racks, and one of those was devoted to a
series of books: Ballantine’s Illustrated History of the Violent Century.
What a title for a series.
Almost all of the books we had were about World War II,
and I often grabbed one off the rack and took it to the stockroom to look
through while eating lunch, which I typically picked up from a then-new and
then-small chain of restaurants called Chick-fil-a. (I wonder whatever happened
to that little enterprise? I liked it, anyway.) Over the years—I worked
my way through college at that bookstore—I probably read every book on that
rack, but the one I kept coming back to was a little item called Nazi Regalia. Jack Pia took the fascinating
photographs that fill the book’s pages, but its introduction was written by one
Alan Wykes—“Author, journalist, raconteur and professional clubman,” according
to his obituary—who says:
So far as the gorgeousness of
their raiment was concerned the Italians always had the edge on the other Axis
powers. It was positively Ruritanian. The Germans settled for the practical and
sombre rather than the gorgeous. But no one could equal them in the width of
the psychologically influential net they spread over civil, political, military
and para-military branches of the organization. The Nazi Party was everywhere
evident; and its protocol was distinguished by its insignia – witness the
infinite variety shown here. You will find medals for varying degrees of valour
and achievement, medallions to commemorate occasions such as games and rallies,
weapons with subtle distinctions implied by the decoration of haft or blade,
gorgets, tabs and lanyards to declare rank or regimental fervour. Everyone in
any kind of official position, civil or military, was instantly recognizable
through the descriptive language of regalia.
“Infinite variety” is scarcely an exaggeration. Medals in
great profusion, several kinds of daggers with several kinds of scabbards,
metal identification discs, pistols with carved wooden handles, caps and hats
and helmets, gold-embossed book covers, clothing for every possible situation,
flags, banners, elaborate gates and fencing, and, on everything of course,
swastikas, swastikas, and more swastikas.
I thought about Nazi Regalia—indeed, fairly
swooned, in a Proustian fashion—when I heard Nick Fuentes
say about the Nazis: “It’s just cool—the uniforms, the parades, it’s cool.
As a guy, you look at World War II, and it’s fascinating, and it’s interesting,
and it’s compelling, and it’s cool.” Well, here’s the thing, Nick: It was supposed
to be cool. That was the whole point. You know those companies that think they
can get away with a lousy product if their branding is on point? That was Nazi
Germany.
Think of all the movies you’ve seen with Nazi officials
in their sleek knee-high boots and riding breeches—no, wait, go to this page and
watch the clip from Fritz Lang’s Hangman Also Die (1943) in which the
German emigré actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, playing the real-life monster
Reinhard
Heydrich, makes the most gloriously Nazi-campy entrance ever. He’s even got
a riding crop, which he waves about sensually, to accompany the breeches and
boots. But about those boots … as James Holland has pointed out in a recent
episode of the king of World War II podcasts, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, they may look
cool, but they’re not very practical—especially when you consider that the
period from 1939 to 1945 featured some of the coldest, wettest winters that
anyone then alive could remember. Get boots like that wet a few times and they
stiffen, after which they start to peel and rot.
Hey Nick: Maybe you should develop some sales resistance?
You’ve bought a clunker.
Nazism was almost from the beginning an aesthetic
phenomenon —see Leni Riefensthal’s famous documentary Triumph of the Will
(1935)—because the aesthetics were intrinsic to the propaganda, and propaganda
was the Nazis’ chief weapon. Everyone in the Nazi hierarchy, even Adolf Hitler
in his more sober moments, understood that Germany simply did not have the
resources to win a long war—this is one of the most dominant themes of We
Have Ways—and therefore had to overwhelm its enemies. This is what
Blitzkrieg was all about, and what the propaganda is all about; this is why
(hello, Graham Platner) you wear items featuring a Totenkopf:
to induce people to surrender immediately. You do this even at the risk of
having your soldiers wonder whether they’re the baddies, because you either win
quickly or you lose.
Spoiler alert: The Nazis didn’t win quickly.
Also, the moral of this story: Make sure you know the
morals of a story, and not just its aesthetics.
So then I wonder: Is interest in the Second World War
today largely an aesthetic matter, not just for Nick Fuentes, but for most
people, especially younger generations? Are they far enough away from it all
that the only real question is whether something looks cool or not?
One intriguing point: If you look at the #ww2 tag on TikTok
you see, sure, people explaining the whole war in 90 seconds, but also a lot
of colorized video with that muted artificial-antique grain, which makes images
of actual warfare look like exercises in retro kitsch. But it’s also the case
that the average age of listeners to (and watchers of: it’s also on YouTube) We
Have Ways of Making You Talk is 37—and nobody is going there for the pretty
pictures.
This YouTube video by Fin Harrington on the Gen Z interest
in the Second World War—with a quarter of a million views and nearly 8000
comments—argues that the appeal is not primarily aesthetic, but rather … well,
moral. These young people haven’t inherited the Good
War story; their education has mostly taught them to think that all wars
(and almost all nations, certainly including our own) are shameful. According
to Harrington, what seems to fascinate them most is the fact that millions of
young men, from all the nations involved, thought the matters at stake in the
war were so vital that they were worth fighting for, dying for, and yes,
killing for. The young people surveyed in the study Harington draws on are so interested in World War
II that nearly a third of them worry that they could become obsessed.
There’s one problem, though: The study that Harrington
cites to support his claim that “Gen Z is Becoming Brutally Obsessed with WW2”
is based on a survey of German young people only. And in Germany—where
reminders of the war are inscribed on the very stones of the cities, where
schoolchildren take field trips to the sites of concentration camps, and where
one political party, Alternative Für Deutschland, is maintaining what one
commentator calls a “strategic ambiguity” toward the country’s Nazi past—a
purely aesthetic interest in the war is harder to sustain, and people whose
grandparents fought for Germany and perhaps were even enthusiastic Nazis
certainly have a greater incentive to imagine what their participation in such
a culture would have been.
The German educational system treats Vergangenheitsbewältigung—“coming to terms with the
past”—as a moral obligation. And the American educational system does also, as
long as the past that we must come to terms with is our history of slavery and
racism. World War II? Not so much. In this regard a 2025 YouGov survey—conducted on the 80th anniversary
of the end of the war and involving people Great Britain, France, Germany,
Italy, Spain, and the USA—is both interesting and frustrating. From it we
learn, unsurprisingly, that people from Spain (which never entered the war) and
Italy (which got out early) feel that they know less about the war than people
from the other nations. Nevertheless, when asked “How important, if at all, do
you think it is for schools to teach about World War 2 and the events leading
up to it?” and “How relevant, if at all, do you think the events of World War 2
and the years leading up to it are to the world today?” the Spaniards and
Italians are just as insistent about the war’s significance as the people of
the other countries.
For those who think this war was the most significant
event of the past few hundred years—I am among them—this is encouraging. But
while we get a sense from this survey of how much people care about the
war, we can’t discover how much they know. Among the American
respondents, 59 percent say that they know “a great deal” or “a fair amount”
about the war—which puts them ahead of Italians and Spaniards, and behind the
other three nations—but self-reporting in such matters isn’t worth much. How would
these people do on the exam I imagined in my
first essay in this series? There’s no way to know. Similarly, that YouGov
study surveyed adults only, and doesn’t break down its results by age. What
would such a survey look like if it started with teenagers and broke down its
results by age cohort?
This much is clear: In the absence of real, substantive
knowledge of the war—its causes, its prosecution, its consequences—an aesthetic
response is the only readily available one. But what starts as an aesthetic
response need not end as one. When Piers Morgan pointed out
to Nick Fuentes that there are people still living who were imprisoned in the
camps built by those “cool” Nazis, Fuentes simply replied, “I don’t care”—but
it’s possible to care. Early on I may have been fascinated by Nazi Regalia,
but my interests grew and deepened. The success among some relatively young
people of shows like We Have Ways of Making You Talk suggests that many
even now are willing to go deeper when they’re given the chance. And in this
matter as in others we’re able to teach our children well. I believe it matters
very much whether or not we do so.
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