When she was an 11-year-old schoolgirl, the writer Gitta Sereny passed through Nuremburg while a Nazi rally was in full swing. She recalled being awed by ‘the joyful faces all around, the rhythm of the sounds, the solemnity of the silences, the colours of the flags, the magic of the lights’. She understood nothing of the political message. Nor, of course, could she have known where it would all lead. It was pure showbusiness.

Reading her words in Daniel Rachel’s survey of certain musicians’ thorny fascination with the iconography of the Third Reich, two thoughts occur. One: it is no wonder that as early as the 1950s, rock’n’roll shows reminded some observers of Nuremburg. Two: most of the artists who toyed with iron crosses and swastikas, or lifted images from Triumph of the Will, thought no more deeply about it than that 11-year-old. Can they be so easily excused?

The author of three excellent oral histories, Rachel has produced not so much a narrative as a charge sheet. Having combed the music press archives for evidence of Nazi chic, he presents his findings with prosecutorial rigour, starkly juxtaposing them with capsule accounts of what the Nazis actually did. Damningly, the only people who agreed to be interviewed were those, like the journalist Vivien Goldman........

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