Eleven years ago, I walked into the home of a man I regarded as one of the faces of Europe’s radical right. I was making a documentary tracing the footsteps of members of my family who had been murdered in Auschwitz. As part of it, I interviewed Constant Kusters, leader of the Dutch far-right Nederlandse Volks-Unie.

Inside his home was a mannequin dressed in a black uniform bearing the familiar SS insignia. Before we started the interview, I said: “I want you to know that I am Jewish.” “No problem,” he replied, a little too quickly, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

“From the far right, I have never heard that we have a problem with the Jews. We have Moroccans, Kurdish people, people from Africa. That’s the new problem for the far right person in Europe,” he said.

The documentary went to air on 20 May 2015.

In the same film, I interviewed Rainer Höss, grandson of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. He had publicly confronted his family’s history. I asked him what he thought about the rise of antisemitism and the revival of neo-Nazism in Europe. “I think it’s bigger than ever,” he told me. He spoke about right-wing parties and movements gaining power across Europe. I asked him whether he thought a Holocaust could happen again. “Of course,” he replied.

I’ve been thinking about those conversations since Sunday’s election in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The Alternative for Germany, the AfD, won 43.8% of the vote. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU took just 17.2%. The AfD won 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats, three short of a majority. It was the best result the party has ever achieved in a German state election and put it close to something Germany has not seen since the Second World War: a far-right party governing one of its states.

In 2017, I was in Germany when the AfD made its breakthrough into the Bundestag, Germany’s........

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