Like Nigel Farage, as a teenager I was obsessed with Hitler and the second world war. Unlike Nigel Farage, this fascination didn’t extend to singing “gas ’em all” and Nazi marching songs, racially abusing classmates, saying “Hitler was right”.
Earlier this week, The Spectator published a bizarre apologia for this behaviour that derided the steady drip of accusations from pupils and teachers at Dulwich College as a politically motivated “smear”. Writer Nigel Jones claimed Farage’s antics were typical of English private schools of the time, where pupils shared an “obsessive fascination with the war” and with Nazis.
During the 1990s, at my English state boys’ school, our obsession with Hitler had a different tone. He was the ultimate bogeyman, the frothing embodiment of evil. We didn’t wonder whether he was right, but instead fantasised about killing him. I’d imagine flying an Avro Lancaster to drop a bomb on the Führerbunker, blowing him to smithereens, or shooting him with a sniper rifle like the protagonist in Geoffrey Household’s adventure novel Rogue Male. Hitler would have died with a pleasing “Achtung! Aieeeeee!” – the traditional final words of fascists in war comics.
If we weren’t concocting ways to dispose of the Nazi leader, we’d mock him with emasculation in renditions of the wartime song Hitler Has Only Got One Ball. If anyone goose-stepped, it was with their finger under the nose for a moustache, John Cleese-style.
This isn’t to say that there weren’t problematic incidents. We had a Jewish teacher who conducted a profoundly moving assembly that imagined our town under fascism, people disappearing in the night. A friend recently recalled how some pupils (not the war nerds) would mutter about gas chambers in front of him. Of course, teenage boys will often be drawn to this sort of edgelord behaviour, and our culture remains fascinated with the Nazi war machine and iconography – it’s notable that at Dorset’s Tank Museum, it is the brutish German Tiger that draws the biggest crowds.
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Part of my motivation for writing Men at War, my book about masculinity and sexuality during the second world war and its cultural legacy since, was to explore the appeal to teenage boys of these war machines and the violence they wrought. There is a sliding scale between morbid curiosity and far-right fanaticism, but the accusations levelled at Farage are so numerous and consistent they seem to suggest his political nastiness ran deep.
It’s striking that it seems to have extended into his late teens, when most of us had left war obsession behind in favour of music, trying to get served in pubs and pathetic dreams about sex. Besides, by then, my consumption of military history books, and especially the powerful TV series The World at War, had made abundantly clear that there was nothing to admire about Hitler, that the war was unrelentingly grim.
The controversy around Farage echoes that of a man I wrote about in Men at War. Micky Burn was an entitled, privately educated teenager who was given a signed copy of Mein Kampf by Hitler himself, and attended the 1935 Nuremberg rally. For a while he was duped by Nazi ideology, an error he wrote about frankly, and with brave honesty, in his memoir Turned Towards the Sun. Counselled by wiser heads, he eventually realised “what Hitler’s Germany was offering men as soul-saving was shit”, and ended up fighting Nazism in a British commando unit. I can’t shake the suspicion that this is a lesson that the teenage Farage never quite learned.
Luke Turner is the author of Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering, 1939-1945
Photograph Richard McDowell/Alamy