"He's not just German, he's East German! He's a Commu-Nazi!"
— The Nostalgia Chick, reviewing Cool Runnings
A mix of Communism and Fascism is frequently used as "the government we don't like" in fiction. The trope is in action when the heroes enter a Communist country and find that it's Putting on the Reich - or when soldiers in a Fascist army call people Tovarisch. Modern examples of this trope may be explicitly referred to as Nazbols or National Bolsheviks.
This trope is common and popular in the United States. Nazis became Acceptable Targets during WWII, Communists shortly after it, and both are foreigners from far-off places with "strange un-American" philosophies. Since both Nazis and Communists are villains by default, why not have characters who are both at once to be double evil? But this was never much more than a Comic Book trope, and is a Dead Horse Trope at best at this point; Nazi and Communist ideologies are more likely to be portrayed in fiction as polar opposites with their only real similarity being their hatred towards the United States.
Over in Europe, this trope is unknown, and somewhere between eye-rolling and fisticuff-inducing. Germans are still ashamed of what they got up to in the war years, and not really in the mood for joshing about it just yet. Russians are rightly proud of their massive effort in the war ("WWII was won with British intelligence, American steel, and Russian blood", as the saying goes) — and are nostalgic for the Soviet Union itself (and especially for Stalin), and for the high relative prosperity and world-historic significance that they had under the USSR. The countries caught between two fires in the war, however, suffered at the hands of both sides — to this day, some of these countries have banned both communist and Nazi ideologies, as well as their symbolism in some cases.
There is, however, a certain degree of truth to this trope. Hitler himself was keen on recruiting former Communists in the Nazi party, saying You can always make a National Socialist out of a Communist, but from a Social Democrat - never. Likewise, many former Nazi officials were quietly recruited in the Communist party in the East Germany. Many officials in the countries caught between Hitler and Stalin managed to work for both sides (burning documents, scapegoating Jews, and giving just enough aid to La Résistance that you can claim you weren't a collaborator can work wonders). East Germany was Nazi-ruled until it was Communist-ruled, and their internal security forces, which had No Budget early on, used WWII surplus uniforms for much longer than you'd expect. (This made East Germans popular antagonists in US Spy Fiction.) And finally, the SA, Ku Klux Klan and Communist street fighters came from similar Lower-Class Lout backgrounds.
Part of the problem can be traced to the Nazis themselves, or rather their official name, the National Socialist German Workers Party. This has lead certain political figures to denounce anything that they feel smacks of socialism as just another step on the road to swastikas and dodgy mustaches, with plenty of references to totalitarian Communism (especially Stalin) for good measure. Of course, there are three main problems with this belief: First, that Socialism and Communism aren't the same thingnote ; second, just because the Nazi party used the word "Socialist" in its name doesn't mean it actually had Socialist (or Communist) objectivesnote , just like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is none of those things and the Holy Roman Empire wasn't any of those things; third, that Hitler really, really, really didn't like Bolshevism, blaming the Jews for it, comparing it to a disease, and also kinda fought a war over that issue.
See this trope's analysis page for further discussion — and for some both historical and relatively recent (2000s) movements which are unpleasantly close to being Defictionalizations of this trope. See also Nazi Nobleman, for a different conflation of two groups that historically didn't always get on. Compare The Horseshoe Effect.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Mobile Suit Gundam: While aspects of Zeon are clearly lifted from the Nazis, including much of their symbolism, other parts of the Zeon ideology bear similarity to Communist beliefs about class struggles, particularly their rhetoric about colonists (lower classes of Earth forced into space to live in colonies) being oppressed by a wealthy Earth elite. Further redoubling this, Zeon Zum Deikun is usually depicted as looking quite a bit like Karl Marx.
- Sgt. Frog: When briefly commanding the Keroro Platoon, Tamama indulges in a bit of Putting on the Reich and titles himself "Comrade Führer" in the Funimation dub. A clear warning that he's gotten drunk on power.
- SPY×FAMILY takes place in a Fantasy Conflict Counterpart for Cold War Germany, including an Ostanian Secret Police equivalent to The Stasi (a communist government's organization). Though its name, "the State Security Service", is the Stasi's unabridged name in English, it's usually shortened to "the SSS", a rather blatant reference to the Schutzstaffel (SS). Their uniforms are also halfway between Nazi and Stasi (which were very similar in real life, and the latter were sometimes made from the former). Ostania itself came out of a large scale war sometime in the recent past, with revanchism still being a strong political force similar to the Weimar Republic, but without the Jazz and the ideological militias clashing in the streets. In short, Ostania's government overall doesn't bear much resemblance to communism or Nazism, instead being a general mix-and-match of Germany throughout most of the 20th century.
- "Ghost Manufacturing Machine", a story in the Astro Boy manga, featured a dictator named Statler, a name mashup of Stalin and Hitler. Although generically evil, he didn't seem to have any political agenda outside becoming immortal and taking over the world, though.
Comic Books
- Captain America: The Red Skull started out as a Nazi villain, but in the 1950s suddenly became a communist. This was later retconned so that the "Communist Skull" turned out to be an imposter who wasn't so much a communist as simply being anti-American, with the original Red Skull returning to his fascist roots.
- Played with again in the Winter Soldier and Death of Captain America story arcs, whose main villains are the Red Skull and the former Soviet general Alexander Lukin. The original Evil Plan is Lukin's, who tries to kill the Skull in order to obtain a supernatural artifact he needs to complete it. However, due to the artifact's Applied Phlebotinum, he ends up with the Skull's consciousness inside his head along with his own. Cue an uneasy collaboration, in which Lukin's original anti-capitalist plot is altered more and more to fit the Skull's homicidal, Take Over the World goals.
- The Hammer Empire in Danger Girl spoof this trope, taking the most outrageous aspects of both (although mostly Nazism).
- One Hellboy story has Neo-Nazis involved in a project called "Red November". This is justified since the Nazis did use the color red in much of their regalia (as they were trying to win over ex-Communists).
- Used in several stories in 2000 AD
- The Volgans from Savage/Invasion! and ABC Warriors are a fascist government, but they use a lot of Soviet/Communist imagery and their soldiers have uniforms and weapons similar to the Red Army. Justified Trope, as in-universe they consist of Russians who took over the Soviet Union and out of universe, they were supposed to be Soviets but changed due to not wanting to antagonise the Soviet Embassy in London.
- The Norts in Rogue Trooper appear to be based upon both Nazis and Soviets.
- Tintin: The country of Borduria, introduced in King Ottokar's Sceptre, was depicted first as a fascist country. After 1945, it is modeled on the Eastern Bloc with some Nazi-style uniforms, as seen in The Calculus Affair, complete with its own Secret Police (ZEP) led by Colonel Sponsz, and a dictator called Kûrvi-Tasch who promotes a Taschist ideology. A statue of Kûrvi-Tasch in uniform appears in front of a government building, in which he wears a moustache similar to Joseph Stalin's and gives a Nazi-like salute.
- The fifth Lethal Legion, in West Coast Avengers, was made of resurrected historical villains who receive superpowers and appearance of supervillains. The group included Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Stalin. But initially, they did not care a dent about the Avengers: when they recognized each other, both of them tried to kill each other.
- Lubania of DC Comics series World's Finest Comics numbers 192 and 193 is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture Ruritania version of this trope. It is a Central European dictatorship, Superman and Batman are taken to a concentration camp, Colonel Koslov wears a Nazi-inspired uniform, yet every member of the Lubanian army refers to each other as "comrade".note
Film — Live Action
- Bridge of Spies gives this feel to the East Germans. While obviously Communist, the East German NVA uniforms resemble Wehrmacht ones and The Stasi wouldn't look too out of place as Gestapo agents in the Third Reich.note Not to mention the East Germans are fanatical with border control in Berlin. Finally, a gang of trouble-making boys Donovan runs into feel eerily similar to modern Neo-Nazi skinhead groups.note
- In Captain America: The Winter Soldier HYDRA has not only infiltrated the Soviet and Nazi governments but the American government and SHIELD as well.
- This blog post
notes that the film version of The Hunger Games has the Capitol built in a style using Stalinist Soviet and Nazi Fascist architecture.
- The Christian dystopia movie If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, predicts the persecution of Christians in an America that has been taken over by Commie Nazis.
- The B-Movie Laser Mission, starring a pre-Crow Brandon Lee, can be summed up as "Cuban Secret Nazi Communists in Africa plan to start World War III by using a diamond laser to create a nuclear weapon and only Bruce Lee's son can stop them."
- The secret police in The Lives of Others are clearly East German communists, but a prologue scene makes it clear that the Stasi uses Gestapo methods and there is a clear continuity from Nazi Germany to the DDR.
- Penthathlon is a largely forgotten 90's action movie starring Dolph Lundgren as an East German Olympian who defects to the United States. The villain is a Stasi agent who later goes on to join a Neo-Nazi group after the fall of Communism.
- The East Germans in Top Secret! were all supposed to be communist, but wore Nazi uniforms. Since this is a parody film of Cold War / WW2 spy films this particular caricature was deliberate.
- The CROC society in Z claims in their rhetoric that they want to combine nationalism and royalism with a worker's state and are "neither left nor right". They're quickly shown to be a far-right reactionary organization, as shown very quickly when one of its members is told that the "worker's state" sounds a lot like Communist rhetoric and also by the fact that said member assassinated a centre-left politician on behalf of the right-wing government.
Literature
- The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four intentionally combined aspects of Communism and fascism, as well as their symbolism. This was because, being a democratic socialist, Orwell thought that Stalinism and Nazism were effectively identical in their effect on the population and true motivation of elite power for its own sake, no matter what the difference in their purported ideology. O'Brien actually mentions in the book that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used basically the same tactics as the Party, with the only exception being the Inner Party does not tell itself that its motivations are good. Furthermore, Oceania itself combines some of the worst aspects of the American and British Empires Orwell loathed, having experience with the latter, while the state of Eastasia and its ideology of Obliteration of the Self combines Chinese authoritarianism and elements of Imperial Japan at its worst.
- In The '80s pulp series Doomsday Warrior set in a post-nuclear future dominated by the victorious Soviet Union, fascism has risen again in Nazi Germany. For some reason instead of nuking the country out of existence, the Soviet Premier uses them as a mercenary force to send after The Ultimate American. Needless to say, logic is not a strong point in this series and it's just an excuse to have our hero fight Nazis when he's not battling Dirty Communists or Nuclear Mutants.
- In the dystopic thriller Caliphate, Russia is mentioned to have become a Socialist-Tsarist regime whose ruler Vladimir the Fifth controls Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Though never seen in action, it's rather odd that they would combine these two mutually exclusive government systems that have been literally at war with each other.
- In Gary Paulsen's Harris and Me, mention is made of the 'Commie Japs', presumably North Koreans, by a veteran of the Korean War.
- In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell describes the efforts of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia to discredit the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification:
The P.O.U.M. was declared to be a disguised Fascist organization, and a cartoon representing the P.O.U.M. as a figure slipping off a mask marked with the hammer and sickle and revealing a hideous, maniacal face marked with the swastika, was being circulated all over the town by P.S.U.C. agents. Evidently the official version of the Barcelona fighting was already fixed upon: it was to be represented as a ‘fifth column’ Fascist rising engineered solely by the P.O.U.M.
- Moonraker by Ian Fleming has the Soviet Union lending a nuclear warhead to a group of Nazi rocket scientists planning to blow up London, which is unlikely, to say the least. What's to stop them firing it eastward instead? Even the characters in the book lampshade it and it's almost like Bond and M are wondering why Fleming is making them play out this absurd idea.
- In Christopher Anvil's Pandoras Planet, the plot thickens when Communist-settled planets and Fascist-settled planets resort to an alliance to dispose of the Classic American-settled planet. However, they don't REALLY trust each other and are prepared to stab each other in the back as soon as those pesky Columbians are eliminated — a fact the Centran supreme commander is gleefully ready to take advantage of.
- East German agent Mundt in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was a former Nazi who joined the Communists out of expediency. The character is amoral, rather than ideologically Nazi or Communist, although he is an anti-Semite. The Batman Gambit by British Intelligence plays on the natural antagonism between Mundt and Feilder, the latter a Jew and dedicated communist.
- In the Len Deighton novel SS-GB, Nazi Germany conquers England. By November 1941, with England under their thumb, the Nazis are still "good friends" with the USSR (In Real Life, Germany invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941). One character states that "Nazi bastards and Communist bastards are all alike".
- In the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh, protagonist Guy Crouchback is eager to enlist for service in WWII when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invade Poland and divide it between them, hoping he'll get a chance to fight against both of the world's worst ideologies-"The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms". Instead, Britain allies itself with Stalin's USSR, and most of the novel is about Guy's growing disillusionment with an increasingly ignoble cause.
Live-Action Television
- Played straight in Airwolf episode "Fallen Angel," in which Archangel is captured by Karl Kruger, an ex-Nazi war criminal now working for the East Germans. Previously averted in "Fight Like A Dove," which also featured an ex-Nazi named Kruger, but this one working for Archangel.
- Although the Daleks of Doctor Who are blatant Nazis by another name, their first story uses them to reflect Cold War fears of nuclear warfare. "Power of the Daleks" shows them posing as workers (specifically, miners, whose left-wing union activities were hugely significant in 1960s-70s Britain), and "Day of the Daleks" shows them running Stalinist gulags and state factories.
- The Peacekeepers in Farscape: they're totalitarian, but their official ideology is rarely discussed (they're officially anti-species-mixing, but at least one and quite possibly two half-human hybrids have reached high positions), and their design aesthetic is an equal mix of Nazism and the Soviet Union in its short-lived early Modernist phase.
- Get Smart:
- The evil organization Kaos, as "generic bad guys" were clearly a mixture both communists and Nazis, with everyone having either a German accent or a Russian accent. This was always done with a wink and a nod since Get Smart was a parody of spy shows and movies.
- In The Most Dangerous Game "homage" episode, "Island of the Damned", the villain is alleged to have successively belonged to the Nazis, the Communists, the Mafia, and KAOS, at which Smart exclaims, "If there's anything I hate, it's a joiner!"
- An episode of Highlander features a Russian politician who is ostensibly a Communist and wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. However, his rhetoric is noticeably fascist, up to an including claiming that a secret cabal of wealthy Jews controls the West. The Soviet Union was pretty antisemitic but they never went that far.
- Played straight in MacGyver (1985); the episode "The Enemy Within" began with Mac on a mission behind the Iron Curtain narrowly escaping from East German troops dressed in World War Two era Wehrmacht uniforms.
- Amusingly averted in the M*A*S*H episode, "A Smattering of Intelligence," in which Hawkeye and Trapper fool one secret agent into thinking Burns is a communist and convince the other that he's a fascist. They compare notes and realize that someone must be lying, as it's impossible to be both.
- On My Name Is Earl, John the Artist berates his estranged parents for (allegedly) not giving him enough love during his childhood, and calls them commie Nazis. His father replies that he's a terrible son who knows nothing about history, while his mother bursts into tears.
- The Cardassians in Star Trek, their internal policies are definitely Communist, complete with Kangaroo Courts, Nineteen Eighty-Four-style government surveillance and a rogue KGB-esque intelligence service, but their foreign policy is disturbingly Nazi, right down to the concentration camps and rampant Cultural Posturing. Although the Nazis also had Kangaroo Courts, secret police, government surveillance, etc.
- In Star Trek: The Original Series, the Klingons were introduced as this before they were retconned as a species of Proud Warrior Race Guys.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Obsolete Man" what little we learn of the State's ideology apparently takes inspiration from both Communist and Nazi philosophy. They ban books and religion, eliminate anyone who's deemed "obsolete" (either formerly having been things like librarians, or simply unable to work), and when denounced by Wordsworth, the Chancellor freely admits that Stalin and Hitler were both precursors for them, but they have gone even further. Their militant state atheism echoes that of Communist states, including forbidding ownership of the Bible on pain of death (along with other sacred scriptures, one presumes) and exterminating weak, old, or sickly people who can't provide useful work to them, echoing Nazi practices (though in neither case exactly).
Stand-Up Comedy
- In George Carlin's routine "Beard", he discusses how, at the time, people with thick, bushy beards were sometimes considered "Commie Nazi Fag Junkies". He then goes on to note on how many levels that doesn't work.
- Joked with in a David Cross routine mocking Tea Party hatred for then-president Barack Obama.
"He's a Nazi! He's a Muslim! He's a Communist, Socialist, Black, Muslim Nazi! That's the worst kind of Nazi there is! He's a zombie too, I think!"
Tabletop Games
- In the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of Ravenloft, the domain of Falkovnia is often summed up, somewhat derisively, as "a Medieval-flavored combination of Nazi Germany and the USSR being run by Vlad the Impaler". The domain features a combination of Fascist-like military dictatorship, crushing oppression for the vast population of serf-like non-soldiers, and a paranoid, ever-watching government that treats its populace like cattle — to the point where children who survive birth are branded on the forehead. Its Darklord and military despot, Vlad Drakov, essentially combines Hitler's manic charisma & rages with Stalin's brutal paranoia and coats it all with Vlad the Impaler's sadism, complete with demanding nightly impalements as "dinner theater".
- Subverted in the Freedom City setting for Mutants & Masterminds. Communist terrorist group Overthrow is an apparent subsidiary of SHADOW, the huge Nazi terror group and HYDRA knockoff that is responsible for most terrorism in the setting. Overthrow's leader, Dominic Ashe, is, however, fully aware that his goals and those of the SHADOW leadership are incompatible, and is planning to depose them one day, while SHADOW's leaders in turn see Overthrow as little more than pawns.
- In Paranoia, Alpha Complex is at war with the Commies (among many others); one module portrays the Commie-run Alpha State, who's at war with the NazCIA.
- The Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40,000 is neither Fascist nor Communist, but has distinct elements of both— including "Commissars" named for the Soviet ideological officers and dressed like Nazi agents. The Death Korps of Krieg in particular are the most straight examples, being patterned after WWI-era German trench infantry (with French greatcoats and Russian gas masks) while being lead by Commissars patterned after WWII-era Soviet political officers. This makes them "Catholic Space Commie-Nazis". The Watsonian reason for this is probably a case of Future Imperfect, while the Doylist reason is GW giving a reference point for those players more familiar with historical wargames.
Video Games
- Call of Duty: Black Ops features the Ascension group, Nazi scientists working on the Soviet space program in an early level, and later we're introduced to Dr. Friedrich Steiner, a scientist employed by the Waffen-SS during the war to produce the 'Nova 6' toxin gas who later defects to join the USSR. This is Truth in Television insofar as many Nazi scientists did end up defecting to one of the victorious sides after World War II in order to avoid prosecution.
- Zig-Zagged with the Ultranationalist movement in Modern Warfare. They do fly around the Hammer and Sickle as their logo and claim to want to return Russia to its former-Soviet glory. Their invasion of several European countries in the third game also makes a lot more sense if one assumes there to be many pro-Socialist or pro-Soviet factions within them. However, they never seem to officially espouse any Marxist social or economic theory and their hatred for the west is rooted in patriotic jingoism rather than in Communist ideals (Hell, their being super nationalistic is in their name). The Modern Warfare series might be an unintentional exploration of the real ideology that is active in Russia known as National Bolshevism, which admires the Soviet era and its industrial and military policies—not because its adherents see it as a bastion for international worker freedom, but because it represented Russia at the peak of its power.
- Chivalry: Medieval Warfare has the Mason Order, who combine the populist rhetoric and goals of communists with Nazi-esque social Darwinism. Basically, they're this trope in a medieval setting.
- The Coalition of Ordered Governments, or COG, from Gears of War is a rare example of protagonist faction with an ideology that blends between Communism (greater good above individuals, equality between citizens, and Octus Canon's mandate on simple life) and Fascism (nationalism, jingoism, and demands of unquestionable loyalty to the state). Unlike Nazism or Fascist ideology in both real life and fictions, COG ignores distinctions between different skin colors or religions of its citizens. The only distinction they care about is whether your nation is part of the COG or not, and if not, they probably won't treat you very well even if you're on the same side. Hoffman calls out the logic of the COG treating their conquered nations better than their willing allies.
- Disco Elysium:
- It's possible for your player character to be both a Fascist and a Communist at the same time (or, if you like, a Fascist/Communist/liberal centrist/free-marketeer, as the game tracks all of your ideologies on their own). If you finish the game with equal points in both Fascism and Communism, Kim will remark on how you want both a worker-led utopia and an immigrant-banishing absolute monarchy, and he has no idea how you manage to reconcile these two views. This is, of course, done to emphasise how ideologically shallow your character is.
You: I don't like women, I just like their rights.
- While the game overall treats Fascism and Communism as two completely separate ideologies, the game also sets up a parallel between René, an elderly war hero who protected the King in the revolutionary war, and Dros, a Communard who deserted the revolutionary army and survives as a bitter old hermit. Both are miserable old bastards who loathe the modern world and have spent their entire lives repressing everything fun, true and good out of their ideological dedication; even Dros realizes this, fantasizing about murdering René but experiencing devastating grief when he actually does die. The player can even point out that much of Dros' rhetoric about "disco whores" and the like sounds much more fascist than communist; Dros, who nominally loathes fascists, is not happy to have this pointed out.
- It's possible for your player character to be both a Fascist and a Communist at the same time (or, if you like, a Fascist/Communist/liberal centrist/free-marketeer, as the game tracks all of your ideologies on their own). If you finish the game with equal points in both Fascism and Communism, Kim will remark on how you want both a worker-led utopia and an immigrant-banishing absolute monarchy, and he has no idea how you manage to reconcile these two views. This is, of course, done to emphasise how ideologically shallow your character is.
- Hearts of Iron IV:
- In vanilla HOI4, as the German Reich, the player has the option (assuming they've chosen the appropriate focuses) of leaving the standard Axis and upgrading the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact into the much tighter Berlin-Moscow Axis faction (faction members can't declare war on each other). This, appropriately enough, scares the living shit out of literally every other nation that isn't allied with the German Reich, considering that invading the U.S.S.R is what caused Germany's downfall more than anything else IOTL. The effects of forming the Berlin-Moscow Axis are so bad that a fascist/communist America can return to democracy immediately, while Britain rallies every democratic nation on Earth to form the Grand Alliance faction as protection from the new Axis.
- In Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg, a Game Mod for Hearts of Iron II, Darkest Hour, and IV, a faction of European socialist leaders have adopted the ideology of Totalism (short for Totalitarian Socialism), which merges elements of both the radical left and the radical right. Though gameplay-wise, Totalism also contains traditional authoritarian socialist leaders that don't have the right-wing elements, the three "real Totalist" leaders — Oswald Mosley, Georges Valois, and Benito Mussolini, the original three who signed the Totalist Charter — all express the blend of radical right-wing and radical left-wing ideology should they come to power. Just to drive the point in further, all three figures were known to have flirted with both socialism and ultranationalism in real life.
- In Red Flood, a spin-off of Kaiserreich, there are actually several examples. Joseph Goebbels is kind of this as he is a revolutionary republican who harkens back to the nationalist ideals of 1848, Ernst Graf zu Reventlow turns Germany into a National Bolshevik dictatorship with pagan elements if he comes to power, Karl Radek is a Leninist who works with nationalists to further his own goals, Dmitry Mirsky in the Kavkaz Society (Georgia) is referred to as a National Bolshevik and actually coined the term in real life, Okawa Shumei, the leader of the Japanese Revolution, is both a socialist and an imperialist who wants to create a pan-Asian federation, and Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the Volkstaat if America Collapses is inspired by Goebbels and has elements of American patriotism, relating his ideology to the Founding Fathers.
- In The New Order Last Days Of Europe, one of the possible Russian unifiers is Ivan Serov, a member of the right-wing Passionariyy Organization in the Komi Republic. Serov's ideology is "Ordosocialism", a fusion of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy with Russian chauvinism. His actual regime combines the Nazis' racism, militarism, and fanatical belief in the leader with actual socialist policies— albeit ones restricted to Russians. In-game, his ideology is a subideology of National Socialism, and a closer look at his faction pie shows that the Ordosotsialisty party has both National Socialist and Communist wings. Through decisions and national focuses, the player can strengthen either wing, resulting in either a really racist version of Marxism-Leninism (if the Left Ordosocialists win) or Russian Strasserism (if the Right Ordosocialists win).
- Commie Nazis have entire ideology category in Red World (set in a world where the USSR won the Cold War) in the form of National Bolshevism. Some examples of countries classified as National Bolshevik include Libya under Muammar Gaddafi and the splinter state Union of Lincoln under Richard Spencer.
- The Helghast of the Killzone series are mostly your typical Nazis By Any Other Name, but some of their iconography and ideals show a lot of Stalinist influence. Heck, even one of their commanders physically looks like Stalin.
- The Helghast leader, Scolar Visari, is pretty much Space Hitler. "Visari" also sounds like part of "Vissarionovich", part of Stalin's given name.
- One of the main Helghast antagonists of the series, Jorhan Stahl, has a name in which the first two letters of his first and last name are the same as Stalin's. Stahl, like Stalin, also means steel.
- By the time Shadowfall kicks in, the Helghast are stand-ins for Communist East Germany, but still retain their third reich belief in racial purity.
- It's also fair to compare the Helghast to the Arab Nationalist movement which itself is accused of invoking "Commu-Nazi" methodologies. The death of Scolar Visari in the second game and subsequent insurgency mirror the death of Saddam Hussein and its aftermath, and the Helghast remnant in Shadowfall also draw from Palestinian Nationalists in their conflict with Israel alongside North Korea's conflict with the South.
- In Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall, as the Soviet empire enters terminal decline, the nations of the Eastern Bloc begin experimenting with new ideologies. Some of these mix socialist economics with anti-Soviet nationalist politics, a combination referred to as "left nationalism," which is a form of Authoritarianism in game:
- The German Democratic Republic can invite a known Nazi to be part of your cabinet as interior minister, and adopt Strasserism as the ideology of the Socialist Unity Party.
- In Poland, if you keep the Party's old guard, you can adopt an independent, nationalistic socialism based on an alliance between the Party, the Church, and optionally the right-wing state syndicalists.
- Romania's National Communism is pretty much this, combining unreformed socialist economics with an aggressive nationalist platform, and a little of North Korea's Juche for flavor.
- Solakov is a potential Bulgarian leader, supporting aggressive Left Nationalism and separation from Soviet interests in favor of expanding Bulgaria's geopolitical power.
- North Korea is already effectively an absolute communist monarchy, and their Juche is the model of left-nationalism that Romania and other National Communists strive to emulate.
- In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Human Hive faction headed by Chairman Yang is built on a devilish blend of Western authoritarianism, Legalism, and Communism, with contributing ideas from Nietzsche, Chairman Mao, and the Chinese classical philosophies, all taken to it's most brutal. Unsurprisingly, Yang's Human Hive is a very, very dark shade of grey, in fact it would be outright black if not for some Villain Has a Point moments. The Usurpers are still pretty inarguably the most evil faction, though.
- Sniper Elite V2, as wells as its predecessor Sniper Elite, has a group of Nazi German officers and scientists willing to defect to the Soviet Union in exchange for their research on the V2 rocket. Due to the nature of their work, Fairburne is tasked with taking them out, while protecting those willing to defect to the USA. The original game even has Karl in Wehrmacht disguise taking out Red Army soldiers in Berlin.
- Stellaris:
- Defied by the Shared Burdens civic introduced in the Megacorp expansion. It turns your star nation into Commie Land, but the civic requires the empire have the Fanatic Egalitarian ethic and not have the Xenophobe ethic. The Nazi stand-in civic, Fanatic Purifiers, can only be picked by Fanatic Xenophobes with either the Militarist ethos or Spiritualist ethos, which are totally incompatible ethics. You cannot even be an Authoritarian regime with Shared Burdens, as Fanatic Egalitarian forces you to have a democratic government type.
- In earlier editions of the game, this trope was played relatively straight in comparison, in which the game had Collectivist/Individualist rather than Authoritarian/Egalitarian, where Collectivism played this trope relatively straight with capacity of having political commissars and a literal "Ministry of Benevolence", further enforcing a sense of general totalitarianism. The lack of restrictions on other ethics requirements to prevent you from choosing Xenophobe in addition to Collectivist made it easy to achieve this before they changed the axis to Authoritarian/Egalitarian.
- The East Europan Imperial Alliance of Valkyria Chronicles play the aesthetics of this trope to the hilt, merging the roles of every eastern and central European power bloc that faced off with the west, whether they be the Central Powers, Axis, or the Warsaw Pact. They mix Soviet-inspired tanks with German-inspired elements such as the suspensions; their troops are armed with German-inspired small arms and uniforms; and they refer to the Empire as both the Fatherland and the Motherland. Despite this, their actual government is an autocratic absolute monarchy, effectively making them Commie Nazi Bismarckean Habsburg Tsarists. It is perhaps best emphasized by the name of the Imperial capital - Schwarzgrad, which combines 'Schwarz', German for 'black', with 'Grad', a short Russian form of 'Gorod' often used at the end of names, meaning 'city'. They're also explicitly stated to have conservative social norms in the in-game lore and are frequently bigoted towards the setting's Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Jews. The fourth game explicitly refers to them as "fascists", however, and in a rare conversation with enemy soldiers, its men have reactionary views on women— an odd thing to have given that the Soviet Army in the second World War made more frequent use of female troops than any other.
Webcomics
- One Scandinavia and the World comic has Europe and Australia congratulate USA (Obama-version) on taking his first steps toward universal healthcare. USA cries that he doesn't want to be freedom-hating communist hippie-nazis like them, three ideologies that most certainly doesn't fit together.
Web Original
- An alliance between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia was narrowly averted according to Cracked's "5 Insane 'What If' Scenarios That Almost Changed Everything".
- The Rather Good Flash video Fear the Kitties could be considered an example of this. The song is in German and mocks Germany's fascist tendencies. The kitties, however, are wearing Russian uniforms.
- This image originated from Something Awful. Once there was a "make German translations of image macros" thread and the second picture in the thread was a translation of that picture. A wonderful example of the generalized form of Poe's Law.
- In the alternate history story Twilight Of The Red Tsar, Josef Stalin survives the stroke that kills him IOTL and emerges from his sickbed as an even more cruel and paranoid ruler, engaging in massive purges and persecutions of ethnic minorities that culminate in a concerted effort to wipe out Soviet Jews— an act called "the Second Holocaust". His reign of terror later inspires the Neo-Communist movement in America, who turn to the anti-Semitic and totalitarian aspects of the Soviet ideology in order to justify their violence and hatred rather than espousing actual Communist ideals.
- In The Death of Russia, the National Salvation Front, an actual far-left/far-right coalition that was a real force in immediate post-Soviet Russia, takes power in the election that follows Boris Yeltsin's death in the 1993 coup. They rule for roughly a year, take minor amounts of territory from former SSRs, and get their asses kicked in Chechnya before turning on one another and burning Russia to the ground through a civil war.
Web Video
- Jreg:
- His videos on political ideologies (in particular the Centricide series) depict National Bolshevism as this, personified as the character Nazbol.
- Anarcho-Fascist, aka Anfash, is a more subtle and unconventional example of this. While his far-right ideas about culture would be right at home among fascists, he also holds very left-libertarian economic views, and his ideal society would be made up of ethnically homogenous communes.
- This YouTube Poop has Dennis Prager teaching students how to be "CommuNazis".
Western Animation
- Rocky and Bullwinkle: Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale have pseudo-Russian names and accents. Their boss, known only as Fearless Leader, closely resembles Otto Skorzeny.
- From The Simpsons episode "King of the Hill", the Trope Namer:
"McBain to base! Under attack by Commie-Nazis!"
"They won't stop me from delivering these UNICEF pennies!"
"Go pennies! Help the puny children who need you!"
