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“I do believe you can join the service with tattoos,” he says. “I’m sure you can join with a swastika. There’s a big gang problem in the armed forces right now: if you went to a recruitment station with a swastika I don’t think they would stop you, it would be noted in your record.”

Hitler was pure evil, of that there is little doubt, but such an evaluation should be the start of a commentary and attempted understanding of his character, not simply a start and end point in itself. If he is dismissed as such, we are removing the need to chart back through history. We are bypassing the necessity to analyse and see why he came to embody such evil; why his anger was so entrenched by Versailles; why his views and propaganda were so successful; and how he came to be in a position to express European anti-Semitism so violently. In short, if we dehumanise, we are removing the burden to understand and comprehend, and in doing so, amplifying the possibility of it happening again.

Carter F. Smith is a former military investigator who worked with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command from 2004 to 2006, when he helped to root out gang violence in troops. “When you need more soldiers, you lower the standards, whether you say so or not,” he says. “The increase in gangs and extremists is an indicator of this.” Military investigators may be concerned about white supremacists, he says. “But they have a war to fight, and they don’t have incentive to slow down.”

Andrew Wheatley

Against all intuitive reasoning the white supremacist movement in the United States thinks the election of Barack Obama is the best thing to happen to them for decades.