Catherine Hokin, author of The Girl Who Told the Truth, reflects on the rise and fall of Oswald Mosley’s fascist movement in England, how fascism continued after the end of the Second World War, and the lessons history can teach us.
“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
That quote from the writer George Santayana – or some version of it – feels like it’s been the backdrop to my life, and I suspect I’m not alone in that. It was a lesson I was encouraged to learn before I think I’d learned any actual history. And like every other cliché we parrot, it has a grain – or perhaps, at the moment, a truckload – of truth in it.
Whether we’re looking for lessons or reassurance or hope, history is where we turn to make sense of the modern world, which is perhaps one of the reasons historical fiction remains popular for both writers and readers. Readers often approach historical novels wondering how they would deal with challenges such as war and loss. And as writers we are frequently all too aware of the parallels between then and now.
While I was writing The Lost Mother, which is partly set in the Texan detention camp where German Americans were imprisoned, the news was full of frightened refugee children on the Mexican border. While I was describing the Berlin Wall falling in The Secretary, Donald Trump was busy building another one. But I’ve never written anything where the present felt so close to the past as it does in my latest novel, The Girl Who Told the Truth.
The Girl Who Told the Truth is set in London and Berlin between 1934 and 1948, against a backdrop of the rise and fall of the fascist movement in England (led by Oswald Mosley) and the last days of the Third Reich. I’d always associated Mosley primarily with the period before WWII, including the Battle of Cable Street.
But one of the strands which came out of the research, and then became very important to the novel, was how much support he and his fascist movement continued to gather after 1945, and how overtly they continued to support the ideals central to the Nazi regime. As described in Daniel Sonabend’s excellent We Fought Fascists, the thousand-plus guests who attended Mosley’s 1945 Christmas party were served drinks by girls dressed in Bund Deutscher Mädel uniforms and Mosley entered to shouts of Heil and Nazi salutes.
It is a mistake to think that the end of the Third Reich meant the end of fascism, but that was a commonly held mistake – or perhaps misguided hope – in 1945.
Fortunately, the economic and social conditions in the UK weren’t unstable enough to allow for a fascist uprising and Mosley and his movement eventually declined in popularity.
He left Britain for Ireland in 1951, returned briefly in the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill Race Riots to stand for parliament on an anti-immigration platform, moved permanently to France shortly after that failed, and died there in 1980. His brand of politics, however, survived, resurfacing most notably with Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, with the National Front, and now with the Reform Party.
As one of my characters says in 1946 in The Girl Who Told the Truth: “That’s the thing nobody wants to admit. That Germany was beaten, but fascism? Oh no. That’s as alive as you and me. It’s simply gone to ground.” Unfortunately, nobody is listening to her, which is intended as a reflection of the times.
As far as the Allies were concerned, the threat to democracy now came from the rise of communism and the end of one war gave birth to a new cold one where the danger came from Russia and reds under the bed.
Once the Nuremberg Trials were concluded, the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis were pushed to one side until Adolf Eichmann’s capture forced them back to the surface in the early 1960s.
“It can’t happen here,” is a common response to the rise of fascism. It’s a common response from the characters in my book, closely followed by, “it couldn’t happen again.” Except it can. My antagonist, Margarete, was partly inspired by the story of Else Krüger, a very private woman in later life who had once been Martin Bormann’s secretary and who escaped from Hitler’s bunker with – allegedly – a bag of diamonds, a copy of Hitler’s last testament and, possibly, a personal message from him.
The conspirators I surround her with in London were all known to British Intelligence. They maintained a network dedicated to keeping the Reich’s flame alive, and they continued to support Mosley’s European ambitions. And all those I included went on to have very prosperous, unrepentant and politically active lives in South America, Italy and Germany.
As I said at the start of this article, the past felt horribly close to the present while I was writing this novel. How could it not when the headlines we read everyday are filled with leaders chasing absolute power, the dismantling of democratic institutions and the scapegoating of perceived outsiders? When the American president has been granted broad immunity from prosecution if he breaks the law, a move which could allow a power-grab by Trump which could be similar to those instigated by Hitler and Mussolini.
When we see increasing support for Reform in the UK, Vox in Spain (once also the home of a fascist dictator), the AFD in Germany, the Fratelli d’Italia and on and on along a deeply depressing list. And when the right to protest in the UK is seriously under threat and the rhetoric on immigration, from both Reform and the Labour Government, becomes tougher every day.
As my characters have to painfully learn, fascism can very definitely happen here, or anywhere. When I described what my protagonist Annie most fears in 1946 – that the real danger is the UK ignoring the warning signs and sleepwalking into the collapse of democracy – I had the voices of 31 Nobel Laureates in my head. Eighty years after I put those words into her mouth, I really hope we’re all listening.
The Girl Who Told The Truth by Catherine Hokin is published on 13 January, 2026.
Read more about this book.
Catherine writes historical fiction set primarily in Berlin, covering the period from the 1930s up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and dealing with the long shadows left by war. Her books have been translated into a number of languages including French, Italian and, most recently, German.
You may also be interested in some of Catherine’s other features:
The ‘hidden’ Nazis of Argentina
The Berlin blockade, 1948–9: the first Cold War stand-off
German reunification: still dividing opinion 30 years on
More related Historia content:
Living in the minds of monsters by Douglas Jackson
Some reasons why history gets lost by VB Grey
The Spanish Civil War: a war against children by Maggie Brookes
Family memories of Italy in World War Two by Cristina Loggia
Mussolini meets the World’s Fair by Anika Scott
Images:
- Shadwell: detail, Cable Street mural, slightly cropped: Jim Osley for Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Oswald Mosley and Benito Mussolini in 1936: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Cable St mural: author’s photograph
- View from above of the judges’ bench at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, between 18 October, 1945, and 1 October, 1946: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park (public domain)
- English fascists at a rally in Trafalgar Square, January 1938: Wikimedia (public domain)
