Rachel grew up in Birmingham in the 1980s and, like many children of his generation, fell in love with the Sex Pistols<\/a>. \u201cI would happily sing along to Belsen Was a Gas,\u201d he says, citing the punk pioneers\u2019 most gratuitously tasteless song. \u201cI saw images of Sid Vicious with a swastika armband and thought it was funny. At the same time, raised in a Jewish house, I began to understand what the Holocaust was, and to see images of mass burial sites at Belsen while singing Belsen Was a Gas triggered an emotion that was difficult to unravel. It has stayed with me ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols in a swastika T-shirt, with his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, 1978.<\/p>\n CAMERA PRESS<\/p>\n It is remarkable just how many rock and pop stars have toyed with Nazism. Sometimes it has been calculated to offend \u2014 as when Keith Moon of the Who and Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band dressed up as Nazis and paraded through the Jewish north London neighbourhood of Golders Green in 1970 before being chased by a woman from a kosher bakery. Sometimes it has been a sign of mental disintegration, such as the rapper Kanye West selling swastika T-shirts on his website. In all cases it has not aged well.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to be the Simon Wiesenthal of rock\u2019n\u2019roll,\u201d Rachel says, referring to the Austrian Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter. \u201cBut it\u2019s happening in plain sight and being digested by, in some cases, millions of people. Having laid all this out in the book, I\u2019m asking, why is this still going on?\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Caitlin Moran: Selling Nazi T-shirts at the Super Bowl? Even for Kanye, it\u2019s a new low<\/a><\/p>\n There are some surprising people among the roll call. John Lennon had a collection of Nazi memorabilia, and among his ink drawings was a self-portrait with a Nazi salute and the words \u201cHeil John\u201d. He kept both private. \u201cWe only know about them because they were sold after [his first wife] Cynthia Lennon\u2019s death<\/a>,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cLennon\u2019s experience reflects that of many people who were born into the war. British men before them had to kill Germans, and then the Beatles were playing in front of German audiences. On his first trip to the US John was deeply shocked to see a swastika on an elevator wall \u2014 so I don\u2019t want to kick on John Lennon but [Lennon\u2019s interest in Nazism] was a starting gun in rock\u2019n\u2019roll history.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2023 Rachel visited concentration camps in Poland, where he found SS membership cards and swastika armbands in antiques shops. \u201cI found myself almost wanting to buy them, to hold these relics associated with mass murder, so I do understand [the fascination],\u201d he says. \u201cBut Keith Moon parading around Golders Green in an SS uniform only 20 years after the Holocaust? That can\u2019t be right.\u201d<\/p>\n Does he think it was stupidity or provocation? \u201cBoth, and they are the substance of rock\u2019n\u2019roll. I was in a band for most of my younger years and not thinking about what you\u2019re doing is a mainstay of band life. But that\u2019s why the infrastructure around it has to take responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Ignorance can also play a part. Holocaust history was not compulsory in British schools until 1991, while in the US it is compulsory in only 27 states to this day. \u201c[The Holocaust] was an orchestrated genocide,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cThat understanding wasn\u2019t necessarily present in the history of rock\u2019n\u2019roll but it should be now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 How Myra Hess defied the Nazi bombs to bring music to wartime London<\/a><\/p>\n How about Bowie, who certainly wasn\u2019t ignorant of war history? \u201cYou\u2019re dealing with someone who planned to write a musical about Goebbels, and that can\u2019t all be excused away by cocaine use,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cBowie, Mick Jagger and Bryan Ferry have talked about the impact of Leni Riefenstahl\u2019s film of the Nuremberg Rallies<\/a>, and when you watch Triumph of the Will it\u2019s easy to see a parallel with Hitler doing a Sieg Heil before thousands of people and a rock star on the lip of a stadium stage, controlling an audience. But in rock\u2019n\u2019roll there has been an attempt to divorce the spectacle [of Nazism] from the reality, which was an attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. These musicians are divorcing theatre from mass murder.\u201d<\/p>\n What about musicians who claim they are keeping alive the memory of Nazi atrocities so that they don\u2019t happen again \u2014 as the 1970s art rock shockers Throbbing Gristle did when they used imagery of Nazi death camps? \u201cI\u2019m hugely sceptical of people who say they dress up in a Nazi uniform so people don\u2019t forget,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cThe scariest thing about Throbbing Gristle is that when you go down the staircase of Rough Trade on Denmark Street [a shop in central London], you\u2019re confronted by a Throbbing Gristle poster of the gas chamber at Auschwitz and the words, \u2018Music from the Death Camp\u2019. What am I meant to think of that?\u201d<\/p>\n Eric Clapton in 1976, the year his Birmingham Odeon concert kickstarted the Rock Against Racism movement<\/p>\n ARMANDO GALLO\/GETTRY IMAGES<\/p>\n As Rachel points out, a poster showing people being lynched or raped would be unthinkable in a record shop. \u201cWe treat racism and misogyny seriously in rock\u2019n\u2019roll now,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has become accountable, which is why Mick Jagger no longer includes Brown Sugar<\/a> in Rolling Stones sets. So why is Nazism exempt?\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, one of the most famous examples of racism in rock inspired an entire movement. \u201cDo we have any foreigners in the audience tonight?\u201d Eric Clapton asked at an August 1976 concert at the Birmingham Odeon, not far from where Enoch Powell had made his \u201cRivers of Blood\u201d speech<\/a> in 1968. \u201cStop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out,\u201d he continued. A left-wing activist called Red Saunders wrote to NME in protest, and Rock Against Racism was born.<\/p>\n One of the strangest episodes is punk rock. The Sex Pistols\u2019 manager, Malcolm McLaren, who was brought up in a Jewish community in Stoke Newington, gave the band swastika armbands to wear. Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees, influenced by The Night Porter, an erotic 1974 film about a sadomasochistic relationship between Dirk Bogarde\u2019s former concentration camp officer and Charlotte Rampling\u2019s former inmate, wore a swastika armband at early concerts. The original version of the Banshees song Love in a Void featured the line: \u201cToo many Jews for my liking.\u201d Why?<\/p>\n Bowie starred as an aristocratic Prussian officer in the 1978 film Just a Gigolo<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n \u201cWhere were the people, from then until now, posing that question?\u201d Rachel asks. \u201cIn the early Nineties Malcolm McLaren trotted out some vacuous excuses about shock value. But the counter to McLaren was the Clash\u2019s manager, Bernie Rhodes, who had Holocaust survivors in his family and refused to indulge in it.\u201d<\/p>\n In a 1977 interview in Sounds magazine with the Jewish writer Vivien Goldman the Banshees dismissed the accusation that Love in a Void was antisemitic, claiming the offending line referred to \u201ctoo many businessmen\u201d. \u201cBut what is that saying?\u201d Rachel asks. \u201cNone of it makes sense, to be honest.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Revealed: David Bowie\u2019s secret list of his favourite songs<\/a><\/p>\n While writing the book, Rachel approached musicians who had used Nazi imagery. \u201cThere was a perhaps understandable silence from those with compromised pasts,\u201d he says of the response. \u201cSo it became more important to examine justifications from the time.\u201d These ranged from annoying an older generation (\u201cIt was an anti-mum-and-dads thing\u201d said Siouxsie Sioux) and extreme dysfunction (Bowie\u2019s drug use) to protestations of ignorance. \u201cNever did any of us consider a certain Mr Hitler,\u201d claimed Peter Hook of New Order (a band named after the name Hitler gave to his vision of an Aryan Europe), previously of Joy Division (named after the name given to Nazi brothels).<\/p>\n Not everyone, however, simply took Nazi imagery and ran with it. \u201cSerge Gainsbourg made a whole album called Rock Around the Bunker<\/a>,\u201d says Rachel, citing the great French songwriter\u2019s 1975 record about Hitler\u2019s final moments, which he wrote as an attempt to \u201cexorcise the period I lived in when I was a kid, when I was marked with a yellow star\u201d. \u201cThe proud tradition of rock\u2019n\u2019roll is of standing up to injustice,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cPaul Weller did it with elegance and beauty on Ghosts of Dachau, as did Leonard Cohen on Dance Me to the End of Love.\u201d<\/p>\n I wonder how Rachel\u2019s relationship with Bowie, the Sex Pistols and countless others has been tainted by his research. \u201cIt was a really hard book to write for that reason,\u201d he says. \u201cI love many of these artists\u2019 music and I don\u2019t want to be denigrating people who have meant so much to me. But the book asks: how much longer can we separate the art from the ideas? I\u2019m not saying we stamp on our record collections but that we need to move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n Kanye West has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust and self-identified as a Nazi<\/p>\n GEORGE PIMENTEL\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n Sometimes we seem to be moving backwards. In 2023 Chaeyoung of the Korean girl group Twice posted a picture of herself wearing a T-shirt showing Sid Vicious and a swastika. In the tightly controlled world of K-pop, which comes from a country that was under Japanese colonial rule until the end of the Second World War, did nobody think this was a bad idea? Kanye West, once a hugely innovative figure, has in recent years praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust and self-identified as a Nazi. Even taking into account his poor mental health, supporting West looks like collusion \u2014 yet a million people bought his last album. Rock\u2019n\u2019roll has always given its heroes the right to behave outside societal norms but there has to be some kind of accountability.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last song I heard by Kanye West has the chorus \u2018Heil Hitler,\u2019\u201d Rachel says. \u201cWho were the engineers, who was the manager, who is buying it? We can\u2019t just single out the artist.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately flirtation with Nazi imagery cannot be divorced from the realities of Nazi ideology and what it led to. \u201cI can see parallels with the rise of the Nazi party in the early Thirties and what has been happening in America under Donald Trump \u2014 a belief that democracy isn\u2019t working,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cThe next step is to find scapegoats, so the stronger the defensive wall within rock\u2019n\u2019roll, the better.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s hope rock\u2019n\u2019roll, which after all built itself on the power of rebellion and the ability to speak truth to power, steps up to the challenge. <\/p>\n \u2018Rock stars are fascists\u2019: David Bowie and the dark side of the Thin White Duke, by Daniel Rachel<\/p>\n In 1969 David Bowie made a prophecy. \u201cThis country is crying out for a leader,\u201d he told Music Now! magazine. \u201cGod knows what it is looking for, but if it\u2019s not careful it\u2019s going to end up with a Hitler.\u201d Over the next few years he released a series of songs exploring the ideas of fascism: The Supermen from the album The Man Who Sold the World (1970); the call to \u201cmake way for the homo superior\u201d in the lyrics to Oh! You Pretty Things (1971); and \u201cHimmler\u2019s sacred realm of dream reality\u201d in Quicksand (1971). <\/p>\n This paved the way for Bowie\u2019s Thin White Duke \u2014 emaciated, cocaine-fuelled and infatuated with the Third Reich. For his Diamond Dogs tour in 1974, Bowie gave the set designer Mark Ravitz a three-word brief, \u201cPower, Nuremburg and Metropolis\u201d, adding: \u201cI want tanks, turbines, smokestacks, fluorescent lightning, alleyways, cages, watchtowers, girders, beams, Albert Speer.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cEverybody was convincing me that I was a messiah, especially on that first American tour [in 1972],\u201d Bowie told Rolling Stone magazine three years later. \u201cI got hopelessly lost in the fantasy. I could have been Hitler in England. Wouldn\u2019t have been hard. Concerts alone got so enormously frightening that even the papers were saying, \u2018This ain\u2019t rock music, this is bloody Hitler! Something must be done!\u2019 And they were right. It was awesome. Actually, I wonder,\u201d Bowie added, \u201cI think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I\u2019d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 David Bowie unseen: inside his archive of 90,000 personal treasures<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cRock stars are fascists,\u201d Bowie told Playboy magazine in 1976. \u201cAdolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It\u2019s astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God!\u201d<\/p>\n On May 2, 1976, returning to England for the first time in two years, Bowie arrived at Victoria station in London and greeted a horde of fans in an open-top Mercedes-600. Standing in the back, with slicked back hair and a black shirt, Bowie waved to a jubilant crowd. The media pounced. The Daily Mail reported that Bowie had saluted the crowd. The NME ran an image of Bowie with an extended right arm and the unforgiving headline, \u201cHeil and Farewell\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThat photograph caused an awful lot of trouble,\u201d says the man who took it, Chalkie Davies. \u201cThe whole thing lasted about 30 seconds. I managed to grab two frames, but, sadly, when I saw the negatives, I realised my image was a little blurry and Bowie\u2019s hand had been reduced to a mere sliver. The NME needed the picture first thing Monday morning but after I\u2019d sent it, the retouchers drew a hand onto his arm. When the image appeared in that week\u2019s edition, he appeared to have raised his hand in salute.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy image was blurry and the retouchers drew a hand onto his arm,\u201d says the photographer Chalkie Davies. The NME published it with the headline \u201cHeil and Farewell\u201d, though Bowie always insisted he had only waved<\/p>\n CHALKIE DAVIES\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n A 17-year-old Gary Numan \u2014 himself on the cusp of stardom, and stylistically indebted to his idol \u2014 was in the crowd and adamant that Bowie had innocently gestured. \u201cIf a photographer takes a whole motor-driven film of someone doing a wave you will get a Nazi salute at the end. I\u2019d be amazed if he did a Nazi salute. I didn\u2019t see anyone walking around saying, \u2018What a wanker, he did a Nazi salute.\u2019 People just thought he was waving, and I\u2019m sure he was.\u201d<\/p>\n In Britain to perform a sold-out six-night residency in Wembley, Bowie told the Daily Express, \u201cI\u2019m astounded anyone could believe it. I have to keep reading it to believe it myself. I don\u2019t stand up in cars waving to people because I think I\u2019m Hitler. I stand up in cars waving to fans \u2026 It upsets me. Strong I may be. Arrogant I may be. Sinister I\u2019m not. What I am doing is theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 The musicians who embraced Nazism, from the Sex Pistols to Kanye West<\/a><\/p>\n But 12 months later, the London Evening News reported that Bowie had reiterated his idea that Britain was \u201cready for a new Hitler\u201d. The Musicians\u2019 Union (MU) had, by then, called for Bowie\u2019s expulsion. \u201cThis branch deplores the publicity recently given to the activities and Nazi style gimmickry of a certain artiste and his idea that this country needs a right-wing dictatorship,\u201d blasted the composer Cornelius Cardew, a branch executive member of the MU. A vote resulted in a 12\u201312 tie. Cardew made a second speech, arguing that \u201cwhen a musician declares that he is \u2018very interested in fascism\u2019 and that \u2018Britain could benefit from a fascist leader\u2019 he or she is influencing public opinion through the massive audiences of young people that such pop stars have access to\u201d. The motion passed: 15 to 2.<\/p>\n To curb a backlash, Bowie attempted to set the record straight. \u201cWhat I said was Britain was ready for another Hitler, which is quite a different thing to saying it needs another Hitler.\u201d Claiming his politics were closer to communism, Bowie told the music newspaper Record Mirror: \u201cI\u2019m half-Jewish.\u201d Not exactly: it turned out that his older half-brother, Terry Burns, was the child of a relationship between his mother and the son of a Jewish furrier, Jack Rosenberg.<\/p>\n \u2022 On the trail of David Bowie \u2014 and his favourite haunts<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Sid](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/b9fa5c02-06f8-4726-9634-f271e7bb6f4b.jpg\")
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