“We Have Conquered Germany but Not Their Ideas”: Tracking Fascist Afterlives from World War to Cold War

On May 8, 1945, President Truman announced that Nazi Germany had surrendered. Across the country, crowds spilled into the streets to mark what Truman framed as “a solemn but a glorious hour.” Tickertape rained down from windows overhead. Strangers embraced one another in the crush of boisterous crowds. While these iconic scenes capture the national mood, they do not tell the full story of the U.S. response to V-E Day. This paper explores how antifascist and fascist networks in the United States responded to Allied victory and U.S.-led denazification efforts in Germany against the backdrop of the global geopolitical sea change underway between 1945-1949. On one hand, antifascist activists questioned whether fascism had really been defeated, whether it could ever be defeated in the West, and whether the United States would learn anything from fascism’s reign and apparent ruin. Asked to comment on Nazi defeat, for instance, the Black Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois replied: “We have conquered Germany but not their ideas.” On the other hand, and to a remarkable degree, the U.S. fascist, pro-Nazi, and other far right figures in my research tended to agree, allayed in this time of crisis by faith that the collapse of the Third Reich did not sound the death knell for their local-global movement as a whole. Focusing on three sites, New York, Atlanta, and the U.S. occupation zone in Germany, and the networks that connected them, I trouble the idea of 1945 as a ‘break,’ while also grappling with what does change about the global far right after World War II. I ground this analysis in a second organizing message held in common between far left and right: that the postwar Black freedom struggle would become the primary organizing site and battleground for the emerging postwar local-global far right.