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A Nazi By Any Other Name / Live-Action TV

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Examples of A Nazi by Any Other Name in live-action television.

  • Alien Nation: Although they don't wear Nazi-style paramilitary uniforms, Purist rhetoric is very reminiscent of Nazism. They express fear of being outbred by the Newcomers (given their far shorter reproductive cycle), start with "only" demanding they be kept separate from humans and denied all civil rights (as the Nuremberg laws had done to Jews, although it invoked Jim Crow legislation as well, which inspired them) before soon graduating into attempting genocide by creating a bioweapon. In one episode when George goes to a Purist group's headquarters, they have flags hanging in a very similar manner to the Nazis'.
  • The Scourge from Angel episode "Hero" are demons whose ideas about racial purity drive them to destroy all creatures that are part demon and part human, a description that fits two of the show's heroes at that point, Angel and Doyle. The Scourge wear well-fitted grey uniforms of a cut fashionable in 1940's Europe, and drive trucks and motorcycles from the same era. Ironically it had already been established in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that pure-blood demons were actually giant monster creatures, so the Scourge would have been half-breed demons themselves.
    • It has been debated among the fandom and some have speculate that the Scourge understand "pure demons" not as the Eldritch Abomination in what the Mayor turn or as Ilyria was but as simply non-vampires, non-humans and non-halfdemon half human hybrid. Possibly not every demon is aware of the existence of the "pure demons".
  • Babylon 5:
    • The Night Watch have a number of Nazi/Brownshirt parallels (notably pro-Earth jingoism and anti-alien xenophobia), with Zack Allan as an example of a sympathetic character who gets swept up in it. He turns against Night Watch when the chips are down. Lampshaded in one episode when a shopkeeper asks members of the Nightwatch if they were "late for their Bund meeting", invoking the Nazi collaborationist German/American Bund.
    • William Edgars states that, thanks to the anti-telepath virus he developed, "The telepath problem... will finally be over". The pause suggests that he realizes what he sounds like... but he doesn't back away from his plan.
    • Similar to the Magneto example, some in the targeted minority aren't that different. The Psi-Cop uniforms have definite Nazi connotations. The fact that telepaths all wear gloves only adds to the look.
  • Battlestar Galactica (1978) has the Eastern Alliance on planet Terra (surprisingly, an aversion to the Planet Terra trope in that it's not Earth), which serves as a fusion of sorts between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The uniforms appear to include elements of both, as well as their attitude towards others. They view the Western Coalition (the democratic bloc) as inferiors and are perfectly willing to make peace with them and then attack. (Does This Remind You of Anything?) When launching their nukes, the Commandant even tells his subordinates to only put the most "critical and loyal" citizens into bomb shelters, citing the projected casualties from the Western Coalition's nuclear retaliation as "acceptable".
  • Averted in Blake's 7 despite Terry Nation's fondness for this trope (he created the Daleks after all). The sterile and shoddy appearance of the No Budget sets, lackluster functionaries, brainwashing of dissidents, and ubiquitous camera surveillance draw more from the socialist dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four than Those Wacky Nazis.
  • The Boys (2019): Stormfront's more Fantastic Racism comes from her view of Supes and creating more of them with Compound V (she's also a regular racist toward Black and East Asian people). Of course, she turns out to be an actual Nazi from Hitler's time, made ageless in appearance thanks to early experiments by the Nazi scientist who invented Compound V (and then defected to the United States when she saw which way the wind was blowing).
  • The season 2 villain of Chuck, Fulcrum, uses a symbol◊ that greatly resembles the Iron Eagle used by the Nazis. It also uses the Nazi colors of red, white, and black. However, the show offers no insight into Fulcrum's motivations except for a desire to preserve America's "rightful place" in the world.
  • Continuum: The terrorists from the future constantly refer to the main character, a cop from that same future, as a fascist. It initially appears to be an example of Commonly Misused Words, as "fascist" is overused quite often in real life, but as the show wears on and we see more flashbacks to that future, it becomes clear that she really is a fascist. She was a decorated officer in a corporate police state that would make Big Brother proud, and she initially has no problems with the modern world stomping on freedoms and increasing security as a result of her fight with the terrorists, although she amends her views as she spends more time in the past.
  • Doctor Who:
  • Dragnet: The 1967 episode "The Big Explosion" features a Neo-Nazi named Donald Chapman who tries to blow up a racially integrated school.
  • Farscape:
  • The Wesenrein in Grimm, a centuries-old group of extremist Wesen that oppose "race-mixing" (a Wesen marrying a Wesen from another bloodline) and befriending Grimms (traditional enemies of the Wesen in general). Even their flags look disturbingly similar to the Third Reich's flag.
  • Heroes:
    • When Hiro travels to the future aftermath of the destruction of New York City, the future depicts Nathan Petrelli (actually Sylar, who had killed Nathan far earlier) as president, as well as a hunting down of evolved humans in a very similar manner to Nazi Germany. Mohinder even mentions sarcastically leading evolved humans into gas chambers when expressing disgust towards "Nathan's" request to test a serum that would kill evolved humans.
    • Nathan is responsible for starting a similar initiative in Volume 4, where Evolved Humans are rounded up into camps to either suppress their powers or be experimented on... leading to the question, how much of what happened in the Bad Future from Volume 1 was actually Nathan's doing before Sylar stole his identity?
    • Volume 5 reveals this had also briefly happened once before in secret during the 60's. Ironically, most of the former inmates went onto found The Company, who did pretty much the very same thing.
  • Highway to Heaven: Jonathan and Mark are sent to a Midwestern small town, where a Jewish man named Everett Solomon (a Nazi war camp survivor, whose parents were killed) is set to speak ... and the organizer of a Neo Nazi-type organization is planning to assassinate him as they make their own hate-mongering speeches. The episode's main driver — racism, as many of Michael Landon's scripts did so eloquently — set up the episode's Aesop: During a planning meeting in the Neo-Nazi group's basement, the leader's son accidentally triggers a machine gun, mortally wounding the leader and two others. The Jewish man (whose son was killed by the goons) has a heart attack and needs a transplant ... and only the Nazi leader's blood type is available. Jonathan visits with the Neo-Nazi leader's wife, urging her to consent to the operation (as her husband's hateful "heart" is not the same as the biological functions of a heart, and that Solomom is a good person), which she does. After Solomom learns that he had received his sworn enemy's heart, he wants to die ... but has a renewed purpose after having a dream where his beloved son and his parents urge him to tell their story to counteract the Nazi group (before it has a chance to re-form).
  • Inazuman: The Despar Army believe in the superiority of neo-humans and seek to totally exterminate humanity and mutants. The similarity is punctuated by how the Neo-Humans incorporate a lot of thinly-veiled Nazi imagery and their leader Geisel having the title of Führer, alongside being shown burning books.
  • Kamen Rider: Shocker are an underground terrorist organization which seeks to convert selected humans into transhuman monsters called "kaijin", then take over the world and subjugate the rest of humankind. In a double subversion, they originally were Nazis who sought to create a literal Master Race, but expanded to the point of recruiting people non-Nazi believers who instead took interest in the other aspects of Shocker's ideology.
    • Kamen Rider Outsiders: Zein is a tyrannical AI that seeks to extinguish malice from humans and concluded that the extinction of humanity is the necessary step to establish new world order. Originally introduced as a Benevolent A.I., but at the end of the first season, Zein is outed as the true Big Bad of the spinoff, with its goal taken to a darker context to the point it plans to turn a certain video game that kills people in real time as its own personal Auschwitz by creating a cannon fodder of unsuspecting players to be sacrificed against the villains, tricking mankind into speeding up their own self-destruction.
  • In Lexx, the Divine Order are a fascist empire who often wear leather, greet each other with salutes, and repurpose the flesh of executed prisoners. One scene in the pilot movie even has a group of Hitler Youth-esque brainwashed kids who subsequently get eaten by giant worms.
  • In the Monty Python's Flying Circus short "Mr. Hilter and the North Minehead Bi-election", Hitler flees to England and tries to become the mayor of North Minehead by disguising himself as "Mr. Hilter". He is joined by Ron Vibbentrop and Heinrick Bimmler.
    Man on the street: I don't think I like the sound of these "boncentration bamps".
  • The Orville: The Regorians in "All the World is a Birthday Cake" are an advanced society who dress like fascists and seclude a section of their population to concentration camps. Being a sci-fi series, the spin is that their target group is based on astrology, with all people who are born under a bad sign from their own history (Gilia, which collapsed into a black hole millennia ago) considered subhuman. By the same token, children born to Giliacs under a different sign are considered normal citizens.
  • Pennyworth has the Raven Society, a fascist organization which seeks to overthrow the British government and purge the country of all "undesirables".
  • In Robin of Sherwood, the Sons of Fenris are a (relatively) subtle Middle Ages example. They greet Gulnar by shouting "Hail Gulnar" and punching the air, they use a sun cross as their symbol (which is not necessarily Nazi in nature, but is a banned Nazi emblem in Germany when used in an overt right-wing political context), and Adolf Hitler had a personal near-totemic fascination with wolves.
  • Sliders:
    • The Kromaggs are changed to this after the show was moved to Sci Fi Channel. They start wearing Nazi-like uniforms, having breeding programs, and claiming to be the master race. They also perform cruel experiments on humans in order to further their scientific knowledge.
    • There's one episode in which the sliders visit an alternate U.S. that is turning into a Nazi-like state under a rising demagogue, Gov. Schick (presumably an allusion to Schicklgruber, the surname of Hitler's father). The episode suggests that in this alternate reality there was no Third Reich or Holocaust, making the U.S. unprepared for that type of occurrence in their own country.
  • The Space: Above and Beyond episode "Eyes" tries to paint Nicholas Chaput, one of two candidates for UN Secretary-General, as this. The emblem of his political party is four "E"s placed in a vaguely swastika-like arrangement, he is described as "far-right", and his thwarted assassin asks West "what if someone had got to Hitler before he rose to power?" Ends up being a bit of Bait-and-Switch Tyrant — Chaput tells West that his political rival's corporation may have instigated war with the Chiggs.
  • Stargate SG-1 gives us the Eurondans, who are a white supremacist nation locked in a bunker with most of the planet occupied by their enemies (called "Breeders", because they had children without regard for race) who they try to kill with poison gas. They also put on the Reich. There's a moment when Adar, the leader, expresses that he does not wish for Teal'c to return to his world. Initially it seems that he is uncomfortable because Teal'c is Jaffa, but it's soon made apparent that the reason he states Teal'c is "not like us" is because he is black.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek: The Original Series:
      • Colonel Green, the World War III leader recreated in the episode "The Savage Curtain" as a symbol of evil, was portrayed this way in the Expanded Universe novel Star Trek: Federation, where he's the leader of the "Optimum Movement", and his symbols include geometric shapes (interlocked triangles, rather than the swastika) and black eagles. This portrayal was continued in the Star Trek: Enterprise episodes dealing with Terra Prime, with the hate-group's admiration of Green reflecting the neo-Nazi attitude to Hitler. (The Terra Prime arc was partly written by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, who also wrote Federation.) A loud thudding sound accompanied Federation making its villain, Adrik Thorsen (presumably intended to be a German name, but it ended up more Scandinavian...still Middle-to-Upper Europe, though), be blonde and blue-eyed.
      • The episode "Patterns of Force" avoids this by not having an alien culture coincidentally resembling Nazi Germany, but an alien culture who are consciously imitating Nazi Germany under the influence of a misguided human infiltrator who thought that he could culturally uplift them by replicating the, he thought, admirable social cohesion of Nazi Germany without the whole "racist, ableist and homophobic genocide" bit. Unfortunately, his second-in-command sympathizes with Nazi racial ideals and quickly disposes of him before introducing the Nazi racial ideology and appointing himself as a Hitler-like dictator. Not unnaturally, this led to the episode being banned in Germany for almost thirty years.
      • The whole concept of genetic augmentation is presented to reflect this trope. In the first Eugenics Wars, a bunch of superpowered dictators (i.e., a Master Race) conquered the Earth until they were deposed. Afterward came the Augments, who fancied themselves a master race.
      • "The Conscience of the King" gives us Kodos the Executioner, who culled people based on his eugenics theories, and has lived under an assumed name to escape punishment for his crimes decades later. The comparisons to the Nazis (especially in the 1960s, when knowledge of the many fugitives living underground became prominent after the capture of Adolf Eichmann) are probably intended.
    • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Cardassians are a clear analogue to a Fascist dictatorship, but as a whole, they're a mix of most of the major Fascist powers. Their actions during the Occupation of Bajor, however, have clear and distinct parallels to the Nazi regime — right down to the forced-labor camps and their treatment of prisoners. This is alluded to throughout the first season and then put clearly on display in its second-to-last episode, "Duet", which deals with the labor camp Gallitep and Kira's reaction to one of its supposed former officers — the parallels to Auschwitz are undeniable. The parallel is never more clear than during this chilling monologue showing the Cardassian attitude toward Bajorans:
      Darhe'el (actually Marritza): Oh, no, no, Major, you can't dismiss me that easily. I did what had to be done. My men understood that, and that's why they loved me. I would order them to go out and kill Bajoran scum, and they'd do it! They'd murder them! They'd come back covered in blood, but they felt clean! Now why did they feel that way, Major? Because they were clean!
    • Star Trek: Voyager:
      • The episode "Nothing Human" has the Doctor consulting a holographic recreation of the Cardassian Dr. Crell Moset, before being informed by a Bajoran crewmember that Moset was a war criminal who conducted "experiments" on Bajoran force-labor camp workers, not unlike those done on concentration camp prisoners during WWII.
      • The two-parter "The Killing Game" features the Hirogen taking over Voyager and forcing the crew to participate in a World War II recreation on the holodeck, with the Hirogen roleplaying as the Nazis. The Alpha Hirogen is dismissive of the Nazis' claims of superiority, warning an upstart SS officer hologram never to underestimate his "prey", but his Beta actually adopts the ideology for real after listening to a speech given by the same SS officer, seeing many similarities between his own Hunter-Warrior culture and Nazi Social Darwinist ideals.
      • "Counterpoint" shows an authoritarian nazi-like Devore Imperium bent on eliminating every single telepath species, even children, which forces the Voyager to secretly smug refugees. The Devore military not only uses black uniforms and Nazi-like symbology, the alien commander is Affably Evil and enjoys Tchaikovsky.
    • A significant portion of Star Trek: Discovery's first season revolves around the Terran Empire of the Mirror Universe, the Federation's Evil Counterpart. The Terrans are fascist, rabidly xenophobic human supremacists with spiffy uniforms, a very Hitleresque salute, and a Cult of Personality centered on their supreme leader, the Emperor. Anything nonhuman is mercilessly hunted down and either enslaved, killed or eaten.
    • Star Trek: Picard: In an alternate timeline, Earth government is a fascist xenophobic dictatorship named the Confederation that has ravaged the Ferengi, Cardassians, Romulans, Klingon, Borg, etc.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959) used this a few times with various different groups and planets, sometimes Nazis, sometimes communists.
    • The best example is "He's Alive", which has Dennis Hopper as a Neo-Nazi figure who's advised by Hitler (He's alive meaning As Long as There Is Evil; Hitler lives on intolerance).
    • In "Eye of the Beholder", the Leader is based on Adolf Hitler. In his speech, he continually stresses the importance of ensuring "glorious conformity" and abiding by a single norm. He says that all that is different must be cut out like a cancerous filth as differences weaken the state.
    • In "The Obsolete Man", the State is based on various totalitarian regimes. In his opening narration, Rod Serling says that "it has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time." The Chancellor himself says that the State had predecessors who had the right idea such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin but they did not go far enough in eliminating the undesirables such as the elderly, the sick, the maimed and the deformed.
  • The Visitors of V (1983) and its 2009 remake are thinly veiled Nazi stand-ins, complete with extermination camps (meat-processing plants) and an almost-swastika logo (the show was even originally conceived as a straight adaptation of the above mentioned It Can't Happen Here before being changed to be more clearly sci-fi). In the original miniseries, a Jewish Holocaust survivor acknowledges the parallels.
  • Walker, Texas Ranger: Season 6's "The Soul of Winter" has Walker dealing with a neo-Nazi group known as the Sons of the Reich. Its leader, Stan Gorman, used to be stationed at Ford Hood with the pastor of a church the former was terrorizing, and tried to kill his son, but ended up killing the wrong kid.

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