Thomas Weber, professor of history at Aberdeen University, is recognised as one of the world’s leading authorities on Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He’s also excellent company. 

I’ve spent time talking to him about the many similarities between the 1920s and 1930s and today. 

Weber is originally from Germany. He studied at Oxford and taught at Harvard. He was founding director of Aberdeen University’s Centre for Global Security and Governance. His books - including Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi - are internationally renowned.

We’ve chatted at length about his role as historical consultant on the German film Goebbels and The Führer. The movie is a warning about how easy it is for ordinary people to be seduced by extremism. Indeed, the film was initially called Führer and Seducer.

If you want to understand the extremist mind, and how Europe slipped into horror a century ago, there’s no better authority in Scotland than Weber.

It’s a distinctly troubling sign of the times, therefore, that Weber has stepped forward to comment not on Germany’s past but on the state of Scotland today and the extremism festering in our country like poison in a suppurating wound.

This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

Weber spoke out following what has been described as ‘fascist-style demonstrations’ by far-right extremists in Glasgow and Edinburgh. 

The first event occurred on June 18. Around 60 men clad head-to-foot in black paraded in columns outside Glasgow Cathedral.

If the homage to Mussolini’s fascist blackshirts wasn’t clear enough, the........

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