A flurry of activity in UKIP-world following the ‘appointment’ of eleven new members to the party’s National Executive Committee has raised some intriguing questions which may enliven the first meeting of the new NEC at London’s Union Jack Club this weekend.
Only a few days ago no fewer than seven of the new batch of eleven NEC members were also appointed as directors of UKIP Ltd, and their appointments duly notified to Companies House.
One, predicably enough, is Richard Inman, Tommy Robinson’s right-hand man and organiser, whose elevation reinforces the new close relationship between UKIP and the Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’) tribe of racists. Another is Stan Robinson (no relation) one half of the racist Voice of Wales online blog and a man who prides himself in his trade union-busting activities of many years ago. We’ll see how that goes down on the new ‘Voice of the white working class’ UKIP. He too is close to Yaxley-Lennon.
But most interesting of the lot is the appointment of the ‘batshit preacher’, the ‘reverend’ Calvin Robinson (no relation to either) UKIP’s lead spokesman on everything. And it’s interesting because it records his usual country of residence as England, when in fact he departed these shores three months ago to take up a full-time role as priest ministering to a parish in West Michigan.
Now, it is an offence to provide false information in company filings such as these, so we can only assume that this was an entirely honest mistake by UKIP’s Chairman (and convicted criminal) Ben Walker, who must have completely forgotten that Robinson is now based permanently on the other side of the Atlantic. We emphasise this to discourage people from contacting Companies House to point out what is plainly an unintended and thoroughly innocent error.
But mystery surrounds the fate of some of the newbie NEC members whose appointments were announced at the end of October. For instance, there is Joseph Smith, whose presence still does not grace the NEC page on the UKIP website, and Paul Grindley, who made a brief appearance but then vanished just a month later. And there is the even stranger case of Greg Hornchurch, not amongst those whose appointments were publicly announced but who has now popped up on the NEC page as if by magic.
And we have to mention the case of young Roger Quilliam. One of the first things he did upon his election was scuttle about on the internet closing previous social media accounts. We can’t imagine why, though from a Google search page (below) you may get a brief taste of the sorts of thing he was posting before he was elevated to the upper ranks of UKIP.
If we have one piece of advice for the new NEC members, it is this: at your first meeting, in London this Saturday, do ask Mr Walker about the mysterious trust through which he exercises total control over UKIP Ltd and hence over the party itself. It’s a very curious arrangement, though one for which we are sure he has a perfectly innocent explanation.
Saturday’s gathering, NEC members are being told, is a big secret, and they must not reveal to anyone that it is being held from 12 noon, in the Private Function Room at the Union Jack Club, Sandell St, London SE1 8UJ Tel: 020 7902 6000. Now, we understand that the Union Jack Club has a policy against hosting political meeetings, so it would be most unfortunate if people were to call them up and let them know what is planned by a group that is now in bed with ‘Tommy Robinson’.
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.
Isabel Peralta, at last year’s Heritage & Destiny conference in England, with close collaborator Peter Rushton.
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.
Dr Kat Williams and Dr Siobhan Hyland examine the ascendance of the German far right party in recent elections
Voters in the eastern German states of Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg went to the polls throughout September to cast their ballots in state elections, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) finishing first in Thuringia, and a close second in Saxony and Brandenburg.
Trouncing the Christian Democrats (CDU) who have led the Thuringian state parliament since reunification in 1990, AfD won 32.8% of the vote. Its victory in Thuringia is significant, not only because this is the first time since the Second World War that a far-right party has finished first in a state election, but also because AfD is designated as a right-wing extremist group by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and is monitored by German intelligence services.
Furthermore, this year Thuringia’s controversial AfD leader Björn Höcke was convicted of using Nazi slogans at a political rally.
While Höcke has hailed the AfD’s success in Thuringia as a “historic victory”, it may prove extremely difficult for AfD to form a coalition government because none of the other parties are willing to work with it, including the newcomer Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). The BSW appears to resonate with voters in the eastern German states because of its criticism of the federal German government and continued military support for Ukraine.
Coming third in all three state elections, the BSW will be a key potential coalition partner for the other parties, despite its pro-Kremlin stance. Germany’s electoral system of proportional representation means AfD will not be able to govern without the support of other parties. Attempts to form coalitions by the other parties without the AfD have, unsurprisingly, been decried by its deputy AfD leader Alice Weidel as “undemocratic”.
Led by Jörg Urban, AfD came a close second behind the CDU in Saxony with 30.6% of the vote. In practical terms, the CDU will take 41 of the 120 parliamentary seats in Saxony, and AfD 40.
AfD also came second in the Brandenburg election on 22 September behind the incumbent Social Democrats (SPD) who have led the state parliament since 1990, securing 29.2% of the vote to the SPD’s 30.9%. Former dentist Hans‑Christoph Berndt, AfD lead candidate in the Brandenburg elections has, like his counterpart in Thuringia, been labelled a right-wing extremist by the domestic intelligence services.
The run-up to the elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg were dominated by public outrage over immigration following stabbings in the city of Solingen in North Rhine‑Westphalia. The suspect, a Syrian man who came to Germany as an asylum-seeker, is purported to have links to the Islamic State terrorist group. The stabbings took place during a festival of diversity to commemorate the city’s 650th anniversary, with three people killed and eight injured.
Crackdown
Following accusations from AfD and its prominent members such as Höcke – that the ruling coalition of the SPD, Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens have ignored the alleged threat posed by asylum-seekers – Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD vowed to crack down on “illegal” migration. Against this backdrop of enduring political partisanship, the German federal elections are due to take place in September 2025.
According to the DW news channel, since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, reports of anti-Semitic violence have increased in Germany, with graffiti painted on Jewish homes, arson attacks and assaults. The Central Welfare Board of Jews in Germany has set up a hotline providing advice on how to deal with anti-Semitic incidents.
Deportation
Martin Sellner, a leader in the Austrian Identitarian Movement, was deported to Germany from Switzerland in October, defying a ban imposed on him earlier in the year. He was also banned from entering Germany this year, a ruling that was later rescinded as unlawful.
He is a proponent of “remigration”, the expulsion from Austria of anyone without Austrian nationality who is considered “long-term unemployed” or living in a “parallel society”. He was previously under investigation for links to Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who in 2019 massacred 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, although the investigation was dropped in 2021.
Photos: AfD party leader in the state of Thuringia Bjorn Höcke (left), recently convicted of using Nazi slogans at a rally, led the party to first place, while Hans-Christoph Berndt (centre) and Jörg Urban (right), led the party into second place in the states of Brandenburg and Saxony respectively
This article first appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Searchlight
Martin Smith reflects on how one song and two singers came to represent opposition and resistance to Hitler in the Second World War
One of the most beautiful and certainly most popular songs of the Second World War was Lili Marlene.
A poem written in 1915, it was first recorded by German singer Lale Andersen in 1939 and was titled Das Mädchen unter der Laterne (The Girl under the Lantern). Another hugely popular version was recorded by Marlene Dietrich, a German exile living in the USA.
The German forces’ radio station, Soldatensender Belgrad (Soldiers’ Radio Belgrade) popularised Andersen’s version of the song and played it on rotation. Its powerful transmitter meant that both Nazi and Allied frontline soldiers in the Mediterranean, Europe and the East listened.
The record became a huge hit among both German and Allied soldiers.
Yet the Nazis, and in particular its propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, detested the song. They believed that its pessimistic and defeatist lyrics were bad for the morale of German troops.
Goebbels also had a visceral hatred of Andersen.
Goebbels snubbed
Andersen was not involved in any anti‑Nazi resistance movement, but she rejected the state’s anti-Semitism. Her support for the Jews of Germany was known by the Nazi authorities – they had intercepted her “friendly” correspondence with German Jewish refugees living in Switzerland.
Recently translated Nazi documents of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto record that Andersen was invited to perform a concert for the Nazi ghetto guards. Andersen refused the invite.
This snub was too much for Goebbels, he had Andersen arrested in 1942 and charged with “undermining the troops’ morale”.
The singer’s popularity probably saved her from being sent to a prison camp, but she was barred from performing.
Over the following year, German soldiers made demands on their leaders to see Andersen perform and in particular hear the song Lili Marlene.
As the situation in the Eastern Front deteriorated and the German army suffered a series of military defeats, Goebbels was forced to rescind the ban. He allowed Andersen to perform again in late 1943, but on one condition – that she did not sing that song.
At her first concert after the ban was lifted the audience stamped their feet and demanded she sang Lili Marlene. When the audience realised that she was not going to sing it, they sang it themselves.
The Nazis officially banned the song in 1944.
Hypnotic version
Across the Atlantic, a German in exile, singer Marlene Dietrich, was also singing her version of the song.
Unlike Andersen, Dietrich publicly opposed the Nazis. She cut her teeth in the left cabaret scene in Weimar Germany and became a major film star in Germany during the 1920s.
Spencer Tracy (as Chief Trial Judge Dan Haywood) and Marlene Dietrich (as the widow of a Nazi general, who gives witness) in the fictionalised account of one of the trials of nazi generals, the film ‘Judgment at Nuremberg‘
In 1930 she moved to Hollywood, USA, and became a huge box office star making a series of major films including The Devil is a Woman, Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus.
Steven Bach’s excellent biography, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend argued that she held left/liberal political convictions. He revealed that she and film-maker Billy Wilder helped Jews and dissidents escape from Germany. In 1937, her entire salary for Knight Without Armor ($450,000) was used to help Jewish refugees.
In 1939, she became a US citizen and renounced her German citizenship. When the USA entered the war in 1941, Dietrich became one of the first Hollywood stars to help sell war bonds.
She sang for Allied troops across Europe. When US troops entered Germany, she performed for them on the front line. The song the troops always wanted to hear was her hypnotic version of Lili Marlene.
In 1944, the Morale Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) initiated the Musak project – musical propaganda broadcasts designed to demoralise Nazi soldiers. Dietrich recorded Lili Marlene for the project, it was hugely popular.
Dietrich would remain a major star for decades after the war. In 1961, she appeared in Stanley Kramer’s film Judgment at Nuremberg, a powerful portrayal of the post-war Nazi trials.
In it, Lili Marlene makes a memorable appearance sung by a choir and hummed by Dietrich as she walks along the street with Spencer Tracy discussing the poignancy and beauty of the German lyrics and her hatred of Hitler.
Goebbels was right to fear the power of Lili Marlene, it continued to haunt the Nazis long after the regime was reduced to ashes.
Underneath the lantern, By the barrack gate Darling I remember The way you used to wait T’was there that you whispered tenderly, That you loved me, You’d always be, My Lili of the Lamplight, My own Lili Marlene
Top Photo: During Marlene Dietrich’s visits to Europe to sing before Allied troops in the Second World War Lili Marlene was always top of the request list
This article first appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Searchlight
Searchlight has been reporting for several months on the increasing radicalisation of right-wing parties. Not just the obviously racist and neo-nazi right, but the constellation of parties and groups that are just outside the Conservative Party (and sometimes overlap with the Tory right).
The clearest example of this came a fortnight ago when David Kurten (above, left), leader of the Heritage Party (which broke away from UKIP in 2020) publicly aligned himself with nazis mourning the death of Ursula Haverbeck, (above, right) one of the world’s most notorious Holocaust deniers.
Kurten wrote (wrongly) that Haverbeck had “died in prison in Germany under anti-free-speech laws for ‘Holocaust denial’.”
Note the scare quotes around ‘Holocaust denial’, implying that Kurten doesn’t believe that such a concept exists, just as he didn’t believe that the pandemic existed. He went on to call Haverbeck’s case “a grave injustice”.
Kurten clearly cares nothing for either political truth or historical truth. His first and most basic error is that Haverbeck died not in prison but in her own bed at home in Vlotho, Germany. She left prison four years ago after serving a two-year sentence.
It’s true that Haverbeck has repeatedly been in court and given further prison sentences, but none of these had been enforced. And the reason she has been in court so many times is that she set out deliberately to break German law.
This was a tactic promoted by Haverbeck’s fellow nazis Ernst Zündel and Horst Mahler. They believed that by defying the law and getting sent to prison, they would stimulate the growth of a larger and more militant neo-nazi and Holocaust denial movement.
That’s why Horst Mahler, for example, responded to his prison sentence by writing an even more extreme antisemitic hate manifesto and having it smuggled out of his jail cell, then after his release skipping bail and fleeing to Hungary, knowing this would result in further prosecutions.
None of this amounts to “injustice”, let alone “grave injustice”. As with any other law in any democratic country, one can agree or disagree with whether particular acts should be criminalised. But once a law is on the statute book, there is nothing unfair about the criminal justice system setting out to punish someone who deliberately and repeatedly breaks the law.
Until the late 1960s it would have been perfectly legal for someone like David Kurten – whose father was Jamaican – to be abused in the street, or at school, or in his workplace, or denied employment or refused service in a bar or restaurant, solely because of his race. As with any other law, those against inciting racial hatred or discriminating on grounds of race were debated in Parliament, and some people opposed them on free speech grounds. But no-one could in 2024 set out to break those laws by abusing Kurten repeatedly and grossly, then claim “injustice” if they were prosecuted.
Before setting out to defend Haverbeck, Kurten should have informed himself about just who she was.
Ursula Haverbeck was a lifelong, dedicated nazi. Her political activity was at first linked to her partner and eventual husband Werner Haverbeck, who served to the rank of Untersturmführer in Hitler’s SA and SS.
Werner Haverbeck joined what became the Hitler Youth in 1923, ten years before Hitler came to power, and first attempted to become a full member of the Nazi Party in 1926 even before he was old enough to be eligible. He joined the SA (the notorious stormtrooper section of the party) in 1928, and the SS in 1936.
At various times Haverbeck served on the personal staff of Hitler’s deputy führer Rudolf Hess, and in academic and propaganda branches of the Nazi Party.
Because Kurten is an idiot as well as being a far-right extremist, he accompanied his social media posts with a photo of a modern nazi in fancy dress (Cecily Amanda Forrell) under the mistaken impression that this was a photo of the young Haverbeck.
But then accuracy has never been Kurten’s forte. He repeatedly spread disinformation and conspiracy theories during the pandemic, and under his leadership Heritage has become the most obsessively anti-vax of Britain’s far right parties.
Had he bothered to do any research before looking for another online “free speech” bandwagon, Kurten would have discovered that the Holocaust denial scene is packed with both neo-nazis and those who (like Haverbeck) are the original article.
Ernst Zündel, one of the world’s most prolific publishers of Holocaust denial literature, was already an active follower of the Canadian nazi Adrien Arcand, long before taking up fake history. Arcand proudly called himself the “Canadian Führer”.
David Irving, the best-known British holocaust denier, was a young supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley in the late 1950s and actively promoted racist causes as a student, before beginning a lifetime of acting as a nazi apologist with close connections to both Third Reich veterans and violent British extremists.
Anthony Hancock, the Brighton printer who produced Holocaust denial material for clients worldwide, was a second generation racist and fascist, as well as a criminal forger and fraudster. Another active Holocaust denier in Britain was Richard Edmonds, who spent almost fifty years as a leading official of nazi parties: first the NF, then the BNP, then the NF again.
Germar Rudolf, now 60, who is probably the most active Holocaust denier on today’s scene, was a student activist in several far-right groups before beginning his “research” into the Auschwitz gas chambers.
Manfred Roeder, one of the earliest German Holocaust deniers, was also leader of a nazi terrorist gang, convicted for his role in a group that firebombed asylum seekers’ homes, leading to two murders.
Pedro Varela, Spain’s most active Holocaust denier, has served several prison sentences and was also President of the most notorious Spanish nazi group CEDADE. He worked closely with one of the pioneers of Holocaust denial, the fugitive Belgian nazi Léon Degrelle who was a Standartenführer in the SS and a personal favourite of Adolf Hitler.
When David Kurten stands up for the “freedom” of Holocaust deniers he is standing up for some of the most active hatemongers in the world. Holocaust denial is a key part of neo-nazism and antisemitism. If Kurten doesn’t realise that, he is too stupid to be leading a political party. If he does realise it and doesn’t care, then he is a disgrace to British politics and should be treated as a dangerous extremist.
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