Pop Music, the Swastika & the Third Reich

By Daniel Rachel

Published in hardback (£25), eBook and audio, 6^th November 2025

A shocking and absorbing account of pop music’s complicated history with fascism and the imagery surrounding it from award-winning author Daniel Rachel. Introduction by Billy Bragg.

In this meticulously researched and sensitively told history, with an Introduction by Billy Bragg, Daniel Rachel examines pop music’s enduring and problematic fascination with the swastika – and Nazism itself.

Over the last seven decades, some of rock ’n’ roll’s most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theatre of the Third Reich. From Keith Moon and Vivian Stanshall kitting themselves out in Nazi uniforms and terrorising Jewish neighbourhoods to Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious brandishing swastikas in the pomp of punk, generations of performers have associated themselves in troubling ways with the aesthetics, mass hysteria and even ideology of Nazism. Whether shock factor, stupidity, or crass attempt at subversion, rock ‘n’ roll has indulged these associations – whimsically, carelessly, occasionally malevolently – in a way not accepted by any other artform. But how accountable should fans, the media, and the music industry be for what has often seemed a sleazy fascination with the eroticised perversions of a fascist regime?

In This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll, award-winning music historian Daniel Rachel navigates these turbulent waters with extraordinary delicacy and care, asking us to look anew at the artists that have defined us, inspired us and given us joy – and consider why so many have been drawn to the imagery of a movement responsible for the twentieth century’s worst atrocities. Alongside a sensitive history of the Holocaust and an examination of the place it holds in our cultural consciousness, Rachel asks essential questions of actions often overlooked or underplayed, whilst neither casting sweeping judgement nor offering easy answers. In doing so, he asks us to reassess the history of rock ’n’ roll and sheds new light on the grim echoes of the Third Reich in popular culture and the legacy of twentieth (and twenty-first)-century history as it defines us today.

Daniel Rachel said: ‘This has been a tremendously difficult book to write. But I believe necessary. As a teenage music fan, I struggled to reconcile rock ’n’ roll’s rebellious attitude with my understanding of the horrors committed by the Third Reich. The swastika links both as an emblem of Nazi oppression but also a leitmotif for rock ’n’ roll defiance. Today, the global rise of fascism challenges the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers in the Second World War. If rock ’n’ roll is to remain at the vanguard of the revolutionary spirit it needs to confront its shortcomings, stand against persecution, and address its historical failings.’