A Nazi By Any Other Name / Literature

• In Animal Farm, Mr Frederick of Pinchfield Farm is Nazi Germany in the analogy. Frederick is known to torture his animals, uses anti-Animalist propaganda to keep them in line, and after making a deal with Napoleon which he immediately cheats him in, he attempts to seize Animal Farm in the Battle of the Windmill.
• In Animorphs one of the protagonists compares Crayak to a Nazi, given his genocidal plans to wipe out every species but the Howlers. The Ellimist agrees that term is probably accurate "in a moral sense."
• In the world of Selenoth (The Arts of Dark and Light), Savondir is a totalitarian monarchy with expansionism, Darwinism and eugenics, Fantastic Racism, purges, a powerful corps of mages who function as a State Sec, and a cowed local church that shills for its totalitarian government.
• The Malwa in the Belisarius Series were there to restore the purity of the human race. Except they were remarkably incompetent about it.
• The primary villains of Carson of Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs are the militaristic, dictatorial "Zani Party", complete with an incompetent ally from a nearby city named Muso.
• Caliphate is an interesting example of two opposing parties featuring a few subtle Nazi aspects:
  • The Imperial States of America is an anti-Islamic fascist empire that initially rounded up Muslims in internment camps just before deciding to nuke most Islamic countries in the world and annexing most of the American continent in which the narration uses terms like Anschluss. Much like the Third Reich, its ruled by an President that functions like a Fuhrer due to having repealed the constitution, civil rights and freedom of expression among other things.
  • The titular Caliphate doesn't seem like this trope at first, having more in common with the Taliban combined with the historical Ottoman Empire. However, Muslims are considered superior to everyone else as all second-class citizens, especially Christians, are referred to as the slur Nazrani (Nazarene). Its also a totalitarian state characterized by trusting in the authoritative power of one book, being queasy about sexual deviance, contemptuous of women, hostile to modernity, nostalgic for past glories, obsessed with old grievances and addicted to revenge. It's possibly no coincidence that their mutaween religious police functions like the Gestapo and most of what we see takes place in Germany. Then its revealed they plan to use a biological weapon to exterminate non-Muslims all around the world.
  • One has to wonder where the Jewish people would fit into this scenario. Well, a throwaway comment by a character makes an disturbing implication about how Israel solved the Palestinian problem once and for all.
  Caruthers: "...they learned the lessons Himmler and Eichmann sought to teach [them], as well".
• The Bernice Summerfield novel Down by Lawrence Miles features a member of the Stella Stora Sigma Schutz-Staffel SturmSoldaten (the SSSSSS), "the most ineffective Nazi group since the Outer Hebridean National Party", who is a collection of Nazi stereotypes masquerading as a character (intentionally; his Character Arc is that he realises this). The less ludicrous Fifth Axis appeared later in the same series (now continued as novels and audio plays published by Big Finish). In a case of it all coming full circle, it turned out that the Fifth Axis worked for the Daleks.
• Brother In The Land examines the aftermath of a global nuclear war. Among many other horrors, an elite of survivors shoot hoarders; execute the sick, and, on penalty of starvation, enforce agricultural toil.
• German children's book Der überaus starke Willibald. Said Willibald is a mouse who takes over the colony of mice living in the house when things look bad. Then he ostracizes an albino mouse and everyone who opposes his reign. His allies are the fat Hermann-mouse and the smart Josef-mouse who likes to spew slogans like "Flink wie Fledermäuse, hart wie Tirolerbrot, zäh wie Schweineschwarte" (agile like bats, hard as Tyrolean bread, tough as pork rinds - a variation of the Hitler Youth slogan "agile like sighthounds, hard as Krupp steel, tough as leather").
  • Justified as the book is pretty obviously meant to educate German children about the Third Reich.
• Discworld has several Nazi-like groups:
  • Wolfgang von Uberwald's werewolf "movement" in The Fifth Elephant deserves mention here. Wolf wears a black uniform with a nickel crest of a wolf's head and lightning bolts, uses phrases like "Joy through Strength" and his mother calls dwarfs "subhuman" (Ironically, because they use a different set of idioms than humans do, a dwarf might take that as a compliment).^note According to a 1943 OSS profile, "Wulf" was Adolf Hitler's favorite nickname for himself. "Adolf" comes from "Noble Wolf" in Old High German.
  • The vampires in Carpe Jugulum are also organized racists ("The trolls are stupid, the dwarfs are devious, the pixies are evil and the gnomes stick in your teeth"), but less military about it.
  • The Dogs' Guild in Men at Arms. Their entry in GURPS Discworld notes that if Big Fido had been human "the Discworld might have been in serious trouble, possibly involving jackboots", and certainly the image of an insane poodle insisting "the proper shape for a dog was a lot bigger" calls to mind a short, dark-haired man going on about Nordic perfection. According to The Discworld Companion, his speeches even included the phrase "the Master race" ... only this was humanity, which caninekind was going to overthrow.
  • While ideology is lacking, the past Ankh-Morpork shown in Night Watch is a fascist police state along similar lines as that in V for Vendetta. Notably, the Secret Police are called the Cable Street Particulars, which besides being a Shout-Out to the heroic Baker Street Irregulars references the "Battle of Cable Street" between Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts and anti-fascist Londoners. Their leader, Captain Swing, fits the "non-Aryan/perverse Nazi" role, being odd and sickly looking (think Goebbels) yet obsessed with a Eugenic kind of phrenology. (Although phrenology was popular with the sillier sort of criminologists back when Hitler was still painting postcards in Vienna, so it may not be an intended Nazi reference.)
• S. M. Stirling has stated that his goal in creating The Draka was to imagine a Nazi-like country that actually knew what it was doing. The Draka are like the Nazis but Darker and Edgier. In fact, the first novel of the Draka tetralogy is set in the opening hours of a war between the Draka and Nazi Germany, which eventually leads to the fall of Europe.
• In The Dreamside Road, The Liberty Corps has shades of this. They have yet to commit any large-scale atrocities, in-story, but many of their agents have no qualms about killing civilians as they pursue the Aesir and its crew.
• Frank Herbert has stated that he based House Harkonnen from the Dune novels on the Nazis. It's a little bit subtle, though, because they show very few of the Religion of Evil tendencies of the Nazis, and more of the intrigue, personality conflicts, and decadence.
  • On the other hand the good guys worshiped a messianic warlord, held traditional civilization in contempt, were arrogant about their physical prowess, had an arcane occultist religion which included the use of narcotics, and launched a holy war for the liberation of their race. There's a bit of Black-and-Gray Morality going on, which is probably deliberate.
• The Hittites in The Egyptian are treated as Nazi-expies. Which is not really fair. The whole book can be interpreted as an allegory of WWII, but especially the people's reactions to it. The factions aren't supposed to be expies. At most, they are references to World War II.
• The Eschaton Series: In Iron Sunrise, there's a supposed "master race" called the ReMastered. Charles Stross has said in his blog that his original working title for the book was Space Nazis Must Die!
• The human-supremacist groups that crop up in the Garrett, P.I. novels after the Cantard War's end have this flavor. Ironically, they're referred to in-Verse as "human rights" groups, with the implication that only humans should have legal rights in Karenta.
• The Human Crew in Gone is a group dedicated to murdering all the kids with superpowers, who they call a variety of racial slurs including "freaks", "moofs", "mutant freaks", and "chuds" and don't consider to be human, and putting "normals" in control.
• The Pure Ones in Guardians of Ga'Hoole are owls who believe that Tyto alba — barn owls — are superior to any other species of owl.
• The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale is a theocratic, hyper-misogynistic version (even more so than the actual Nazis) of this trope, but it still counts: they are white supremacists that ship off non-whites of both genders to the Colonies (which are basically death camps) and regard African-Americans as "Children of Ham", a narrative used historically in real life to explain black skin and justify slavery. Its also implied they have quietly exterminated Jews by pretending to send them to Israel, only to drop them off in the middle of the ocean. The tv show downplays the racism aspect by allowing non-whites to live in their territory, employing them as part of the army and the Handmaid program and encouraging their birth-rates. Of course this also means enslaving non-white women and turning them into Breeding Slaves, so it isn't much better.
• In what is probably the most well-known example, the Death Eaters from Harry Potter believe in the superiority of pure blood, and will kill anyone they feel is inferior to them. Their leader, Voldemort, hates anyone not of pure wizard blood, yet he himself is not pure blood; Adolf Hitler viewed "Aryans," commonly portrayed as blonds with blue eyes as the master race, yet he himself was brown haired. J. K. Rowling acknowledged the Death Eaters are supposed to represent the Nazis, though the American-produced film adaptation of Goblet of Fire played with the parallel a bit by having the Death Eaters don costumes resembling black Klansmen's robes.
  • And that's not even getting into the seventh book, for most of which the Power Trio are on the run in one of the most blatant parallels of Nazi-occupied Europe ever seen outside of the Dystopia genre. The Ministry of Magic has become so corrupted from the inside by Les Collaborateurs, that they essentially pass the Nuremberg Laws against Muggle-born wizards, and under the guidance of Umbridge are shown creating pamphlets touting purity of blood whose content and saccharine covers call to mind the publications of Julius Streicher. In those pamphlets, the Ministry openly bans Muggle-borns (wizards born to a non-magical parent) from going to Hogwarts, makes it a crime *not* to report on them, and explicitly describes their plan to send them to camps. The various Death Eater minions inside the Ministry are dressed in khaki clothes, with red, white, and black armbands bearing the Dark Mark. The sign of the Deathly Hallows has a history very similar to that of the swastika, as well - originally an innocent symbol, then used by wizard-supremacist Grindelwald, etched on walls by stupid pricks to get attention...
  • Naturally, Grindelwald was defeated in 1945, of all years, and holed up in a prison called Nurmengard (which sounds like Nuremberg, and has the very "Arbeit macht frei"-like slogan, "For the Greater Good", carved over the gate). Fans have used this to speculate on whether Grindelwald actually had something to do with the rise of the Nazis themselves. Also, a lunatic, old loner as the last inmate of an incredibly well-guarded prison? That sounds like Rudolf Hess.
    • Regardless, the possibility of a task force of wizards and muggles contributing to the Allied victory over the Nazis is invoked in-universe.
  • The Polish translation of Deathly Hallows explicitly called the Snatchers (those who hunted Muggleborns and La Résistance for profit) szmalcownicy. Real Life szmalcownicy sold hiding Jews to the Nazis during the War.
    • Said Snatchers can also be compared to the Einsatzgruppen that hunted Jews, inter alia, in occupied Europe.
  • Another very obvious nod by Rowling to the Nazi association with Voldemort and Death Eaters comes from a book Hermione reads about Voldemort and the Dark Arts called The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. This is a nod to journalist William Shirer's seminal history of Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
  • Umbridge hides it a bit better than the Death Eaters in her first appearance, but she's honestly no better than them. By the final book, she drops the mask and starts holding a Kangaroo Court to persecute Muggleborn Wizards.
• The Garth Nix short story "Hope Chest" features a villain called the Leader who terrifies populations into submission and brings everyone who hears his voice under his thrall.
• In the Hostile Takeover (Swann) series, the planet of Waldgrave, where the Dacham brothers grew up, is a planet inhabited by blond blue-eyed people, ruled by an openly fascist government, and devoted to ethnic purity.
• In It Can't Happen Here, the Windrip regime is led by a charismatic dictator and characterized by racism, jingoism, vicious suppression of dissent, concentration camps, and foolish wars of conquest. To boot, the Corpo Youth is reminiscent of the Hitler Youth. Especially jarring is the fact that the novel was published in 1935, shortly after the Nazis came into power. Sinclair Lewis' satire proved prescient about the horrors of Nazism, but was unappreciated in its own time for a plot that contemporary critics found improbable, which is to say, they didn't think It Can't Happen Here could happen there.
• In Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster, Sir Roderick Spode is leader of the Black Shorts, obviously based on Oswald Moseley's Black Shirts. His followers shout 'Heil Spode!' In the TV series, the Black Shorts use the 'flash in the pan' symbol associated with the Black Shirts, and instead of craniometrics or eugenics, they practice a bizarre pseudoscience based on measuring knees.
• In The Migax Cycle, much of Migaxian rhetoric is reminiscent of the Nazis, especially their emphasis on ridding Migax of squells. This is magnified once skeefers are herded into ghettos and are forced to register with the government.
• In Moses, Man of the Mountain the ancient Egyptians are portrayed this way: the nationalist rhetoric of the Pharaoh's speeches, the militaristic foreign policy, the vaguely German-sounding titles, and the all-seeing secret police evoke images of a certain world power of the time.
• In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party INGSOC is very Nazi-like. It kills and/or kidnaps any dissidents, tirelessly releases propaganda, is discriminant towards the populace and is constantly at war. O'Brien even notes in his Grand Inquisitor Scene that the Nazis and the Stalinists came closest to what the Party is trying to achieve. It may verge into Commie Nazis, as they're also based on Stalinists (who Orwell hated) and then-current Soviet repression (the point being all totalitarianism has some similarities), with a supposedly socialist ideology (however, O'Brien privately admits that their real goal is simply power).
• T. H. White's The Once and Future King has a Hitler analogue in the person of Mordred, who leads the Nazi-like Thrashers. Mordred pushes ideas of racial supremacy and anti-semitic ideas. An ant colony, which Merlyn takes King Arthur to visit into using magic, stands in more for fascism generally. The ant society's suppression of individuality is a strong allegory for the totalitarian state. In the postlude The Book of Merlyn, White, through his Author Avatar of Merlyn, stands up in favor of anarchy and against what he calls the collectivist philosophies of fascism, communism and capitalism.
• In Parable of the Talents, the Christian America sect is exactly like the Nazis. They have a Glorious Leader, Jarrett, who persecutes all non-Christians and others who he sees a scapegoats. They place all people they see as "heathens" into concentration camps where they are forced to do hard labor, be converted to Christianity, and raped and beaten. They also often will take the children of the so-called "heathens" in order to raise them as Christians.
• The Swedish children's book series Peter No-Tail (or Pelle No-Tail) has a Fantastic Racism example in Måns, who bullies the title character for having no tail and for being a housecat. He frequently tries to rally the other cats against Pelle by singling him out as supposedly priveleged. The books themselves were first written in the 1930s by Gösta Knutsson, who was appalled by the acceptance of Nazism by many Swedes at the time.
• The Plot Against America: Subverted. While it seems for much of the book that Lindbergh is a Nazi, a member of the protagonist's family who worked in the Lindbergh administration claims that Lindbergh was forced to govern by the Nazis, who had kidnapped his son (who is thought to have been killed). Note however this is never proved. In any case, while antisemitic policies are begun by Lindbergh, they're much milder than what the Nazis did, which indicates the theory may be correct.
• Record of Lodoss War: The Crown of the Covenant: Diaz, the new king of Flaim, evokes pretty standard fascist rhetoric when he takes the throne: he calls back to the imperial ambitions of the founder of Flaim and argues that the long peace and the eponymous magical crowns that enforce it have been stifling them from achieving their manifest destiny to rule Lodoss.
• Redwall Ungatt Trunn's Blue Hordes. They insist that they're "The Chosen Ones" and that every creature that isn't one of them is a member of "the lower orders". Also, the land of Riftgard can only be ruled by a member of the family of "Pure Ferrets", who all speak with ridiculous faux-German Funetik Aksents.
• The character of BOSS agent Liutnant Verkramp, in Tom Sharpe's novels of apartheid South Africa, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. Verkramp, the sworn defender of apartheid and the white Boer race, enlists a German psychiatrist and possible Nazi refugee, Doktor von Blimenstein, in making precise scientific measurements of black Africans so that he can assess how tainted the Piemburg Police Force is by black blood. Incidentally, sharpe is playing this as satire and very black comedy.
• Church of the God Awaiting of Safehold mixes this with Religion of Evil. They have a leader who's getting more and more insane as the war goes on (Clyntahn), his Minister of Propaganda a la Church (Rayno) the "enemy" who "must be eradicated" (Charisians and Reformists), feared organisation that supervises said eradication and searches for heresy (Inquisition) and concentration camps which are referred to as such. Lampshaded in Midst Toil And Tribulation, where Merlin compares them to Nazis in the narrative.
• In Frederik Pohl's Search the Sky, the Biological Faction of the Jones conformity cult (No, not that Jones cult; this was written in The '50s) was convinced that everyone who did not fit the draconian Jones phenotype was Always Chaotic Evil. Since they took over the colony world Jones long before the story takes place, we know very little about the Cultural Faction, save that they were probably the lesser of two evils once the Joneses had won.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, this trope is Played With. The book actually features a group of people called Dawnists (named for the Dawn Empire, which they want to bring back) who are analogues to Neo-Nazis, their monstrous idol being Dayless the Conqueror himself. The main difference between these guys and real life Neo-Nazis is that there's actually no evidence of racism in either the Dawnists, Dayless, or Dayless's policies. The desire to Take Over the World and give a Historical Hero Upgrade to a despot and war criminal they're all too young to have actually experienced firsthand are still there, though.
• Sherman Alexie's short story "The Sin Eaters" provides an inversion of this trope: Rounding up minorities in concentration camps? Check. But why? To get bone marrow from them to fight a plague and, rather than wiping them out, forcibly breeding them. The woman the narrator is forced to mate with points out that he's just twelve. And That's Terrible.
• Space Academy: The Notha are a race of fascists and an authoritarian totalitarian military dictatorship. They don’t consider other species sentient but talking animals. The Community races hold them in contempt in return with Vance struggling to treat them with the respect he doesn’t get from them.
• The Army of Excellence in Swan Song, who want to destroy everyone who developed disfiguring keloids after nuclear war destroyed America. There's a lot of talk about 'genetic purity', and the leader even wears some vintage SS uniforms.
• That Hideous Strength: The National Institute of Coordinated Experiments definitely qualifies, with Lord Feverstone talking about "liquidation of the backwards races" being part of their overall plans, taking control of the newspapers, and having a rather reich-ish and brutal institutional police. Their head director, Horace Jewels, is good at giving speeches, but rather incompetent overall—sound familiar?. They even have some literally diabolical Mad Science going on, giving them the rare feat of having shades of Stupid Jetpack Hitler and Ghostapo at the same time!
• Harry Turtledove:
  • The Freedom Party from the Timeline-191 series are the Alternate Universe CSA-version of the Nazis, with Jake Featherston standing in for Hitler, and mass murder of blacks replacing the Holocaust.
  • Inverted in the novel length version of In the Presence of Mine Enemies, where the "Nazi" leaders are Gorbachev and Yeltsin in brown shirts.
  • In The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, there are backstory allusions to a "Leader" of the "Allemans", who set off the Second Sorcerous War.
• The Bane from The Underland Chronicles - scarily good orator, possibly insane, wreaks Holocaust-esque genocide on a group of innocent mice ("nibblers"). He tells them that he is only "relocating" them yet again; however, this is discovered to be false when he traps them under a volcano and gasses them to death.
• Warrior Cats. Tigerstar was originally from ThunderClan, but came to power in ShadowClan during their darkest hour; Hitler was from Austria, but came to power in Germany during a low point in its history. Tigerstar merged RiverClan into ShadowClan to form TigerClan; Hitler merged Austria and Sudetenland into Germany to form Greater Germany. Like all good dictators, Tigerstar had his own secret police, consisting of Brokenstar's rogues and Darkstripe. He started imprisoning and mistreating halfClan cats, clearly planning to eventually kill them, because he claimed that they couldn't be trusted, and blamed them all that had ever gone wrong. And finally, up until she realised how evil he was, Sasha was the Eva Braun to Tigerstar's Hitler.
• Watership Down's Efrafa warren has aspects of Nazism, Stalinism, and ancient Sparta. It's not really a straight-up allegory, since the Efrafrans aren't shown to be racist and their leader, General Woundwort, actually is the badass he likes to be seen as, but it is nonetheless a police state obsessed with security, fear of the outside, and physical perfection.
• The TV movie and the book The Wave (1981) is about a teacher who starts a youth movement at a high school that is suspiciously close to Nazism, in order to teach a lesson about how easy it is to get caught up in such a situation. It is based on a true story.
• In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, the False Dragon Mazrim Taim uses rank names that the Nazi used. This is more of a Kick the Dog moment to show that Taim is evil and cannot be trusted, rather than trying to portray Taim as Hitler. He also refers to himself as the "M'Hael", or "Leader", and General Bashere is uncertain he's the real Taim because he's shaved his mustache, which may be a subtle Lampshade Hanging.
• And there is Dr. Bob Mengele ("no relation") in Wild Cards.
• In The Wandering, the assembly of worshippers that Neshi witnesses on the world he winds up on worships a god that demands racial purity at all costs. Judging from the fact that one of their victims was a Jew, it seems to suggest that the last world Neshi ended up on was Earth.
• Age of Fire: The Wyrmmaster (the villain of the first book) and his followers are very strong parallels to the Nazis — they view humans as the Master Race, and ascribe to a paranoid delusion that the other hominid races (the elves, dwarves, and blighters) are all part of some grand conspiracy to keep humanity divided and weak. To this end, the Wyrmmaster starts capturing and breeding dragons as Slave Mooks so that his forces can wipe all the other races out.
• The villains of Redwall installment Triss are the royal family of Pure Ferrets, who are pure white and deem themselves the only ones worthy to rule Riftgard while enslaving other species, and shpeak mitt shtronk German accents.
• The Archduchy of Crius in Lucifer's Star is a Downplayed Trope example of this as they're meant to have some fascist elements in order to make them Obviously Evil to the rest of the galaxy but they're actually more akin to World War I Germans and a Feudal Future group. Nevertheless, characters in-universe make comparisons due to their unchecked militarism and lust for conquest.
• Twilight of the Red Tsar: Stalin. Oh boy, Stalin. How could someone arguably up there with Hitler get any worse? Another holocaust, using nuclear and biological weapons (on fellow communists), and purging almost anyone who could have fixed his mess.
• Young Jedi Knights had a non-Empire example with the Diversity Alliance, an terrorist organization of aliens that sought to Kill All Humans. Albeit they have sympathetic backstory due to enduring mistreatment under the Empire's speciesist policies and their leader being Oola's half sister and a former slave herself, they still plotted to commit galaxy-wide genocide using chemical weapons no less. The official illustrations go the extra mile by featuring Nazi-like imagery with their charismatic leader giving a speech with the red and black flags of their group in the background.
• In the humorous fantasy novel Tres enanos y pico, by spanish writer Ángel Sanchidrián, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed elves are incredibly racist against the "inferior" races, such as humans or goblins, but they especially hate dwarves, whose very existence oppresses them ... somehow. They plan a genocide against the "inferior" races, and it is explained that in the past they created a very powerful weapon in order to corrupt and demoralize the dwarves. That weapon was beer ... It didn't work.

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