Neo-Nazi Music Shows Return To Europe

Two major neo-Nazi music concerts will be held in France and Italy over the coming weeks, in what extremism experts are warning will be significant networking and fundraising events for the European extreme-right.

The French concert, Call of Terror, is scheduled to be held in an unannounced location in the southeastern Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region on February the 24th, while an Italian gig called Hot Shower will be held somewhere in northern Italy three weeks later. The events mark the return of the concerts, billed by their organisers as festivals and both established fixtures on Europe’s underground extreme-right music scene, for the first time since they were interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

READ: Coronavirus shut down Europe’s neo-Nazi music festival scene

The gigs will feature some of the biggest names in the explicitly neo-Nazi musical genre known as “National-Socialist black metal,” or NSBM. The genre’s racist ideology is made clear on a poster for Hot Shower circulated on social media, which features a cartoon rat - Splinter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - wearing a Jewish Star of David, along with a hooded Klansman.

“Please stop comparing [Jews] to vermin - it's insulting to the vermin,” read one comment beneath the poster on the gig’s Facebook page.

Thorsten Hindrichs, a musicologist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz who specialises in far-right music subcultures, told VICE News that the concerts are two of the major events in Europe’s neo-Nazi musical underground. 

“Both festivals are of enormous importance for the international NSBM-scene, because they have already established a certain tradition, and because the line-ups usually feature ‘high-calibre’ Nazi bands,” he said. 

Headlining Call of Terror, which is being held for the fifth time, is veteran Polish band Graveland, described by Hindrichs as “one of the stars of the international NSBM-scene.” 

Formed in Wrocław in 1991, the group has had albums banned in Germany, and appears on an Anti-Defamation League list of “hate music” bands. The group’s founder, who uses the stage name “Rob Darken,” told an interviewer in 2006 that most people would describe his politics as “extreme right-wing National Socialist convictions.”

Other acts on the Call of Terror lineup include Italian band SPQR - a phrase referring to the Roman Republic - which has been promoting its appearance at the festival with its latest music video, which features footage of Ukrainian soldiers in combat and is dedicated to far-right Ukrainian fighting units including Azov Brigade, Right Sector and the Russian Volunteer Corps. Also on the bill was Polish NSBM band Kataxu, which, like SPQR, was “very well-known within the scene,” Hindrichs said. 

France was known for having one of the strongest and best-networked NSBM scenes in Europe, alongside strongholds further east like Poland, Ukraine and Russia, he added. 

READ: Black metal festival in Ukraine is the neo-Nazi networking event of the year

The Hot Shower event in northern Italy, being held for the ninth time since the inaugural concert in 2012, will be headlined by Vothana, a US-Vietnamese NSBM-band that Hindrichs said rarely performed live. The lineup also includes Brazilian band Walsung, whose catalogue includes the Nazi-glorifying track “When Totenkopf Rises (Der Stürmer)”, and the French NSBM band Seigneur Voland, which has a song titled “Quand les Svastikas étoilaient le Ciel” (“When Swastikas Light Up the Sky”).

Alexander Ritzmann, senior adviser at the Counter Extremism Project, said that events like the concerts acted as “central networking hubs” for transnational extreme right-wing movements. 

“They have a social function - [to] ‘make fascism fun’ - and they are used to make money for the movement through ticket sales, merchandise and catering,” he told VICE News. 

Key figures in the right-wing extremist underground would typically meet up around the event and discuss areas of collaboration, including potentially violent actions. Ritzmann said there was no “clear distinction between the extreme right-wing music scene, and violent right-wing extremism.”

“They all meet at those events, where spreading hate propaganda against minorities is at the centre of the action,” he said.

These music events serve as a key revenue stream for the traditional neo-Nazi underground scene, with much of the money raised put back into far-right activity. These activities include financing the publication of political material, organising events, covering legal fees for extremists who fall foul of the law.

“A lot of cash is changing hands at these events,” said Ritzmann.

READ: Neo-Nazi music festivals are funding violent extremism in Europe

Hindrichs said that he believed the previous editions of the concerts had drawn a few hundred attendees each, all of whom would have been hardcore adherents of the extremist NSBM scene. “You don't end up at a festival like this by accident,” he said. “Anyone who goes there … is already ‘on board’.”

Organisers for Hot Shower responded to a VICE News request for comment in an apparently facetious manner, seemingly using a common white supremacist code referencing Adolf Hitler’s initials (“A” being the first letter of the alphabet, “H” being the eighth) in response to a question about the expected attendance at the event. “For the last edition we just sold 188 tickets, it will be a good thing to have the same number again,” read the response. A poster for the festival says the capacity is limited to 300 people.

The organisers also brushed aside a question about the hateful ideology behind the event, responding that they were “really surprised that VICE is so happy to write about a few people in a little gig.”

Organisers for Call of Terror did not respond to a VICE News request for comment.