The death of the Austrian far-right politician Jörg Haider has again focused world attention on his country's ambivalent attitude to its Nazi past. The son of an SS officer, Haider won notoriety by praising Hitler's welfare policies and describing concentration camps as work camps. None of this seemed to bother Austrian voters, who gave him and his fellow-travellers a third of the vote in the last elections.

In Italy, too, right-wing politicians have recently showed signs of a positive attitude to the fascist regime run by Mussolini from 1922 to 1945. The election of Gianni Alemanno as Mayor of Rome was greeted by supporters shouting “Duce! Duce!” - the name taken by Mussolini and Hitler, while the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has declared that his movement is “the new Falange”, in a reference to the Spanish fascists of Franco's day.

What drives the radical politicians of the new Right is, in the first place, hostility to immigrants, a feeling that is likely to get worse as the European economy slides into recession. Added to this are fears of the collapse of law and order. The rhetoric of fascism provides a handy symbol for the far Right's determination to deal firmly with immigrants and criminals. It contrasts with the complacency of conventional politicians in Italy and Austria who for decades after the Second World War cosily arranged everything for their own benefit in coalition governments built on political compromise.

This collapsed in Italy a few years ago, and seems to be collapsing in Austria today. In both countries, support for the far Right offers voters the most obvious means of giving voice to their protest and disillusion.

Such rhetoric arouses little public hostility because Austrians and Italians have never felt guilty about their fascist past, as the Germans have. In Germany today you will see former concentration camps turned into sombre monuments to the murderous cruelty of Nazism; small brass plates in the pavement outside houses and shops whose Jewish owners were driven out in the 1930s, with the names of those owners inscribed on them; a monument to Jewish victims of Nazism installed at the centre of the capital city, Berlin. The Nazi past is everywhere, and people's rejection of it is universal and comprehensive.

True, in parts of the former East Germany, the far Right has made some headway, building on popular resentment, especially among the young and unemployed, of the economic shock therapy administered after its absorption into the West in 1990. But it has always remained on the fringes of politics, completely ostracised by the mainstream.

Not so in Italy and Austria, where the far Right is an acceptable coalition partner for leading parties, and few seem troubled by its positive references to the national past.

Both countries see themselves as victims of Nazism. Austria was occupied by Germany in 1938, and although most Austrians welcomed incorporation into the Third Reich, they grasped the opportunity of presenting their country as a victim of Nazi oppression in 1943, when Hitler was clearly losing the war. As someone said, the great achievement of the Austrians after the war was to persuade the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler German.

Austrian involvement in the crimes of Nazism was seriously underplayed. Austrians were overrepresented in the higher ranks of the regime, particularly the SS, and where Austrians ran the Nazi occupation of other countries, as in the Netherlands or Serbia, they drove on the persecution of the Jews with particular thoroughness and venom.

The Austrian Government has done a lot since the late 1990s to encourage a more critical attitude to the country's Nazi past, but while this has led to some excellent academic work and significant moves towards compensating the victims of Nazi oppression in Austria, it does not seem to have percolated far into the mind of the Austrian public.

In Italy, the German invasion that followed Mussolini's overthrow in 1943 sparked a resistance movement, but the fact that it was led by Communists has led some far-right politicians to declare a preference for the SS men who tried brutally to repress it. Anti-Semitism was weak in Italy, many Italians tried to rescue Jews from the Germans, and even the far Right has gone out of its way to reassure Italy's Jewish community of its friendly intentions. Italians do not feel guilty about the Holocaust. Mussolini's regime appears to many simply a normal part of history.

Does any of this represent the resurgence of fascism in the troubled Europe of the 21st century? History never repeats itself, and there are effective restrictions on the kind of fascism that flourished in the 1930s. We are unlikely to see blackshirts marching through Turin or Vienna shouting for the death of the Jews or the launching of a war of conquest in the Mediterranean or Eastern Europe. What we should worry about is not a re-emergence of old-style fascism but the abuse of its memory to encourage hatred and violence towards vulnerable minorities.

Richard J. Evans is Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. His book The Third Reich at War 1939-1945 is published by Allen Lane

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