On 24th November an international nazi conference took place in Sweden. Only one of the participants – Holocaust denier Lady Michèle Renouf – (above, centre) was English, but the speeches were all given in or translated into English, and the event’s title was in English: “European Unity – A Future to Fight For”. It seems that the organisers were aiming at an English-speaking online audience outside the conference hall, though videos have not yet been streamed and the conference has been given no publicity among English-speaking nazis.
Most of the speakers came from the Nordic Resistance Movement, which is seen as one of the most pro-Putin components of the European nazi scene. The NRM’s Finnish branch was banned in 2019, and in June this year the NRM and several of its leaders were listed by the US State Department as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists”.
Fredrik Vejdeland, (below, left) the 46-year-old NRM leader and a keynote speaker at the conference, was one of the three individuals singled out by the State Department and labelled as terrorists. US organisations and citizens are prohibited from having any transactions with the NRM as an entity, or with Vejdeland as an individual. The designation also singled out two other leading figures. Pär Öberg, (below, middle) a 53-year-old veteran of the Swedish far right who is seen as one of the NRM’s few intellectuals and was once an elected councillor for the Sweden Democrats, having been active in a range of more or less openly nazi movements since the 1990s. And Robert Eklund, 50, (below, right) who is the NRM’s Swedish coordinator.
Vejdeland took over as NRM leader earlier this year from Simon Lindberg, whose nine years as leader had seen the movement fragment after failed attempts to stand in elections.
Within Europe’s nazi spectrum, the NRM is one of the most violent and one of the most pro-Russian groups. It developed out of the most ideologically extreme and thuggish sections of the Swedish skinhead movement in the late 1990s. At just the time when Combat 18 in the UK was falling apart, similarly terroristic nazis in Sweden formed the Swedish Resistance Movement. Their leaders included convicted bank robbers and murderers.
SRM’s founders had earlier called themselves Vitt Ariskt Motstand (White Aryan Resistance), and like Combat 18 they were inspired by American models including the armed robbers and assassins in The Order, its spiritual leaders William Pierce of National Alliance and Robert Butler of Aryan Nations, the Texan terrorist Louis Beam who developed a strategy of violent “leaderless resistance”, and Tom Metzger, who tried to organise violent nazi skinheads into “White Aryan Resistance”, whose name the Swedes adopted for their new group before it became SRM.
In 2014 the Swedish Resistance Movement split over whether European nazis should take the anti-Russian side in Ukraine. Several leading activists from Sweden, Italy and other countries took up arms in support of Ukrainian nazi units such as Pravi Sektor. One of these armed extremists, Francesco Fontana, (above) was a veteran of the Italian fascist movement Casa Pound. Fontana and other pro-Ukrainian paramilitaries went on to build links with British nazis including the magazine Heritage & Destiny.
But back in Sweden, the SRM (which was soon to grow into the NRM in alliance with allied gangs in Norway, Finland and Denmark), disowned the Ukrainian cause.
Ever since then, their rivals on the European nazi scene have denounced the NRM as a front for Russian intelligence.
The NRM has for years had financial and political ties to Russia, including to another group previously designated by the US State Department as terrorist, the Russian Imperial Movement.
Later this month, a Russian war criminal Yan Petrovsky (below, left), arrested while living in the home of an NRM activist, is due to stand trial in Finland, charged with “violating the laws of war and committing acts of cruelty against both injured and deceased enemy combatants”. These offences relate to fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014. Both in 2014 and after Russia’s invasion in 2022, Petrovsky and former paratrooper Aleksandr Milchakov (below, right) led a far-right Russian unit called Rusich and were notorious for acts of torture and other war crimes.
Due to the fact that other European nazis, both in 2014 and since 2022, fought on the opposite side to Petrovsky’s Rusich, the situation has brought tensions between rival factions to boiling point. Adding to the confusion, one of NRM’s original founders Klas Lund, a convicted bank robber, and Haakon Forwald, the former leader of NRM’s Norwegian branch, now run a rival and even more violent organisation called Nordic Strength, after accusing their ex-comrades in NRM of selling out. As our readers will remember from the Combat 18 days, both factions include prominent Satanists.
All this makes the conference slogan “European Unity – A Future to Fight For” even more ironic and ambiguous. Searchlight expects there will be more fighting than unity!
But we found the conference guest list more than usually interesting. The NRM participants were unsurprising, including the sanctioned terrorist Vejdeland and Andreas Johansson who runs the NRM’s podcast Nordic Frontier. Johansson was a guest speaker at the Patriotic Alternative conference in Lancashire in 2022, and has previously interviewed both PA leader Mark Collett and Michèle Renouf.
Though first known to Searchlight readers as a David Irving groupie, Renouf’s pro-Russian stance goes back long before her involvement in Holocaust denial and other far right activism. Her first husband Daniel Ivan-Zadeh was from a Russian émigré family, and sometimes used the title Count Griaznoff. As Countess Griaznoff, the future Lady Renouf was involved in many Russian charity events in London, and was a frequent guest at the Russian Embassy.
During her later divorce from her second husband, New Zealand merchant banker Sir Francis Renouf, she was revealed to have had an affair with the Bulgarian fencing champion George Ganchev, who later became a party leader and presidential candidate in his native country. Ganchev (who died in 2019) was eventually exposed as having spent twenty years throughout the 1970s and 1980s as an informant for the Bulgarian State Security service.
With this background, Renouf’s involvement with the pro-Moscow NRM comes as no surprise.
But Searchlight was surprised to see two other speakers joining Renouf and her NRM comrades.
Isabel Peralta, the 22-year-old Hitler worshipper from Madrid, was joined by at least one fellow member of Devenir Europeo, an offshoot of one Europe’s most elite nazi organisations, the now defunct CEDADE. And Peralta’s friends from Dritte Weg (Third Way), one of the most militant and ideologically purist German neo-nazi groups, sent a delegation headed by their leader Matthias Fischer.
What’s strange about this is that Peralta and Dritte Weg are usually thought to be on the anti-Putin wing of European Nazism. What is going on? Behind the façade of “European Unity”, is there some sort of realignment under way? Or did some of the speakers have a hidden agenda unknown to their “comrades”?
Although seen as consistently pro-Ukraine since 2022, there was a time when Dritte Weg sent delegates to the same Russian Imperial Movement conferences as the NRM. During her time studying and working with Dritte Weg in Germany (a sojourn that ended in her expulsion from the country), both Peralta and members of this party attended events at Renouf’s German home, once the home of convicted nazi terrorist leader Manfred Roeder.
Another thing that all three (Renouf, Peralta and Fischer from Dritte Weg) have in common is an association (past or present) with Heritage & Destiny, whose contributors have struggled to bridge the Moscow-Kyiv divide. One of the many mysteries of the Swedish conference is that so far H&D has not published a single word about it, even though the event was held in English and several contributors were in various ways linked to the magazine and its editors.
In the magazine’s most recent issue, Peralta wrote one of a series of articles on (coincidentally or not) the theme of European Unity. Also featured on the same theme were Gabriele Adinolfi (fresh from a conference of anti-Putin fascists in Lviv) and H&D’s assistant editor Peter Rushton. Both Adinolfi and Rushton (who has been one of Peralta’s most frequent collaborators for the past two years) are virulently anti-Putin. Adinolfi was part of the Italian fascist faction that fled into exile after the bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980. While his ex-comrade Roberto Fiore travels Europe and the Middle East pushing the pro-Moscow line, Adinolfi is on the opposite side.
With the war in Ukraine escalating, is it a coincidence that Peralta and her anti-Russian friends turned up at a conference run by pro-Russian propagandists? Who is spying on whom? And who will be stabbed in the back first?
The situation really calls for the pen of Searchlight’s old friend Stieg Larsson, a dedicated anti-fascist who expertly dissected Swedish nazi networks that extended from pre-war years right up to the violent gangs that eventually created the SRM and NRM. Last month was the 20th anniversary of Stieg’s death. In his memory we shall continue his fight against the Nordic Resistance Movement and their fellow terrorists.