Liking the cut of Rommel’s uniform doesn’t make you a Nazi

‘Oh Daddy, please can I have that Nazi eagle badge.

‘Oh Daddy, please can I have that Nazi eagle badge. Oh please, oh please.’

We’re standing in the gift shop of the Baugnez ’44 memorial museum outside Malmedy, Belgium — me, Grandpa (aka my dad) and Girl — and we’re peering longingly into the original second world war memorabilia display case like Tiny Tims at Christmas. There are so many things we’d like if only we had the money: original GI helmets (€400 for a good one, with decent leather strap), packets of vintage Camels, tins of delousing powder, camouflage sticks, Wehrmacht pay books and, yes, Nazi eagle badges of all shapes and sizes. Inevitably, it’s the German stuff we covet most.

But you’re not really supposed to admit that sort of thing in print, are you? When in 2007 Bryan Ferry confessed to a German newspaper an admiration for the aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl’s films, Albert Speer’s buildings and the iconography of Nazi rallies he was forced by Jewish pressure groups to make a grovelling public apology. When James Brown, editor of GQ, included Field Marshal Rommel on a list of the 200 most stylish men of the 20th century, he was sacked.

Apparently the truth is no defence because Ferry and Brown were right: Nazi Germany really did have better-looking kit and more compelling iconography than its rivals. If we seek to censor this truth we’re not so much honouring the memory of the six million who perished in the death camps as increasing the likelihood that such a crime against humanity will happen again.

After all, let’s not forget that just 11 years before the outbreak of the second world war, the Nazis were garnering only 2.8 per cent of the German vote.