Valérie Dubslaff is an Associate Professor at the Department of German Studies and Applied foreign Languages at the Rennes 2 University (France) and a junior member of the Academic Institute of France (Institut universitaire de France, IUF). Her research focuses on women’s and gender history and the history of the far right in Germany and Europe. She is currently working on the social, political, and gender-based reconfigurations of the German and European far right in the post-war period (1940-1950).
- “Deutschland ist auch Frauensache”, NPD-Frauen im Kampf für Volk und Familie, 1964-2020, Berlin, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022
- with Fanny Bugnon, Camille Cleret, Tauana Gomes Silva and Solenn Mabo (eds.), Femmes contre le changement. Conservatisme, réaction et extrémisme en Europe XVIIIe-XXIe, Rennes, PUR, 2024
- with Agathe Bernier-Monod, Etienne Dubslaff, Elisa Goudin-Steinmann (eds.), L’Allemagne et au-delà. Questionner les dynamiques nationales et transnationales, Stuttgart, Steiner Verlag, 2024
National Socialist Continuities in Western Europe: (Re-)activation of Transnational Networks in the Post-War Period (1950s)
The presentation aims to deal with the activation of old and new Nazi networks in Western Europe in the post-war period. The “new” international, which was launched at the beginning of the 1950s, was partly based on political connections that had already existed in a modified form in the interwar period, were further developed in German-dominated Europe during the Second World War in the context of Nazi collaboration, and were now, after the collapse of the “Third Reich”, reactivated in the form of post-Nazi networks. The aim was to prevent a European integration of a “liberal” nature (Plan Schuman, 1950; founding of the ECSC, 1952...) and to design and implement an alternative European project with a nationalist orientation.
The period under consideration is limited to the 1950s, with a particular focus on the years 1950-1953, when the “nationalist synergy” reached its preliminary peak. Against the backdrop of the European nationalist conferences in Rome (1950), Malmö (1951) and Zurich (1951), which were each used as collaboration platforms to found competing collection movements such as the Mouvement Social Européen (European Social Movement, MSB) or the Nouvel Ordre Européen (New European Order, NOE), the presentation uses the approach of network and entanglement history to shed light on the past and contemporary relationships of the main protagonists and their European infrastructure: What was the “community of conviction” of the actors based on? How are the biographies of Karl-Heinz Priester (Germany), Maurice Bardèche (France), Per Engdahl (Sweden) and Oswald Mosley (Great Britain) connected? Were their contacts based on a shared collaborationist past? On shared experiences or ideological convictions? Why did the NOE split from the MSE under the leadership of the Swiss Amaudruz, the Frenchman Binet and the German Rössler? And how do the respective structures (Deutsche soziale Bewegung, Parti populaire suisse, Nysvenska Rorelsen, Sozialistische Reichspartei...) and organs (“Courrier du Continent”, “Défense de l'Occident”, “Prométhée”, “L'Europe réelle”...) behind them relate to each other? What ideological differences or overlaps do they display? What concepts of Europe do they create?
The relationship between Karl-Heinz Priester and Maurice Bardèche will be examined as an example of the transnational infrastructure. Both actors can be seen as the Franco-German driving force behind the European collection efforts and have much in common both in biographical and intellectual terms. The focus here is on their personal, media, intellectual and ideological connections, as well as their contacts with Arab states, especially the Arab League and the Egyptian Nasser regime, which was an active supporter of European neo-Nazism.