JUST two generations ago, Hitler was marching Jews, gypsies, communists, and those with learning difficulties into the notorious concentration camps with their stench of death.

It is a little over 77 years since the start of the Second World War.

There’s still a somewhat romantic vision of the Allied troops who fought and died on the battlefields of Europe in the name of freedom. Our veterans are lauded, rightly, but rather ironically, by far right groups who hold them up as the paradigm of Britishness.

Blind patriotism has no place in modern Europe and the US, in the era of globalisation. It wasn’t good for Germany in the 1930s and 40s and it certainly isn’t good now.

We’ve been through a long, global downturn, and people are rightly looking for someone to blame, and to turn against the establishment. We’d enjoyed a long period of relative prosperity, peace and nations across Europe setting aside their grievances to work together in unity, until the 2007 economic crisis.

Pre-Hitler, Germany had embraced liberalism. But the Nazis fed on the disillusioned middle classes, the struggling working classes, the ideology of the richer classes.

The slow, drip, drip of atrocities against the Jews grew from a tiny few incidents to a gradual crescendo, until they were marched into shower blocks and gassed in huge numbers.

History is supposed to act as a warning bell for the future. But the Brexit vote, based heavily on an anti-immigration agenda, and the recent US election, have sparked a kind of global madness.

While people are looking for those responsible, they turn their faces to the right for help.

Like Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler was seen as a bit of a joke candidate, a rank outsider, with his extreme views on the supremacy of the German nation.

It’s reported that he had a campaign slogan to make Germany great again. The Jews, Communists and socialists, were all blamed for the nation’s ills.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Across the west, the right is feeding, vulture-like, on anti-Muslim sentiment.

Marine Le Pen is gaining ground in France, while an anti-EU moment led to a referendum win in Italy, ousting the centre-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

Hungary, Germany.

The Netherlands, Slovakia, Poland, all are seeing a rise in support for anti-Islam, anti-immigrant parties.

Austria’s neo-Nazi party, thankfully lost out to a centre-left government last week, but the fear is that is the exception that proves the rule.

The disillusioned, the “just-about-managing”, as Theresa May calls them, are rightly angry.

A “lost decade” economically, as Bank of England governor Mark Carney described it, has led to a financial situation in which more than 40 per cent of working families have accessed a food bank in the UK.

It’s far too easy to blame others for society’s ills, the benefit claimants, the immigrants, but to do so, to look to the far right for answers, is only to repeat a course of history which we hoped never to see again.