BEN CHACKO: Your work defending Deborah Lipstadt from a lawsuit by David Irving after he sued her for accusing him of Holocaust denial show that you have always taken the importance of the historical record seriously. A number of recent developments suggest the history of the second world war is being falsified by nationalist and far-right groups in a variety of countries. 

In Poland, we saw a row go international over a proposed law that would have made it an offence to accuse Poland of complicity in the Holocaust; in Latvia, we have the regular march of Waffen SS veterans who are paid pensions for their wartime activity by the government; in Ukraine in 2016 we saw a national holiday created in honour of Symon Petliura, whose anti-Bolshevik separatist government oversaw pogroms that killed tens of thousands of Jews, and now one honouring Stepan Bandera, whose Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in active collaboration with the nazis. Why do you think it is becoming fashionable to claim these people as heroes?

RICHARD EVANS: Eastern European countries have a disturbing tendency to regard the Soviet Union as a worse and more brutal historical regime than Nazi Germany. This has led them to glorify anyone who resisted the Soviet domination of their countries or opposed the Soviet Union in any way, especially if they claimed to be acting in the national interest. This is a disturbing trend. 

They should remember that while occupation by the Red Army and 40 years of domination by the Soviet Union were oppressive and in many cases murderous, especially in the Stalin years, the nazis’ General Plan for the East, official German government policy from 1942 onwards, intended the removal of 45 million people from central and eastern Europe to Siberia, or in other words their effective extermination, since they were to be left without food or medicine. 

This included 100 per cent of Jews, Poles (85 per cent), Lithuanians (85 per cent) Belorussians (75 per cent) and Ukrainians (65 per cent). Around 14 million were to remain, but were to be treated as slaves and also deprived of the basic necessities of life. 

BC: One source of far-right “justification” rests on anti-communism and anti-Russianism, though the modern Russian government is not communist. It seems odd to have young Poles or Ukrainians waving swastikas around when millions of people from their countries perished under nazi occupation. We also saw a row when Ukraine's parliamentary speaker Andriy Parubiy, who founded the neonazi Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine, was applauded in the Scottish parliament as a guest last year. Is ignorance about the second world war and particularly the nature of the war on the eastern front contributing to a blasé attitude to anti-semites and neonazis?

RE: Yes, we need to redouble our efforts to educate people on the history of the second world war. My own book The Third Reich at War has been translated into Polish, Romanian and Russian, and I hope that more translations will follow. 

BC: You've said elsewhere that the way Donald Trump seems to relish tearing up international agreements, like the Paris accord or the cold war-era arms limitation treaties, reminds you of Hitler and his attitude to the League of Nations. In Europe, we have figures like Matteo Salvini in Italy persecuting people for trying to help refugees and being rather unsubtle about his admiration for Mussolini. Is fascism making a comeback? If so, why do you think that is?

RE: The place of Italian fascism in Italian memory has always been more ambiguous than the place of nazism in German memory. Silvio Berlusconi for example identified in part with Mussolini and made a number of positive remarks about him. Again, there is a job of historical education to do here, though Italian historians have not been doing it very well. 

But fascism is not really making a comeback. At its core was the ruthless, mass use of physical violence against its opponents, and we haven't seen that resurface in the 21st century: neither Trump nor Orban nor any other real or would-be strongmen of the present day has sent hundreds of thousands of armed and uniformed stormtroopers on to the streets. 

Nor have present-day strongmen replaced, or sought to replace, democratic institutions with openly undemocratic, one-party rule. 

Rather, they have undermined them from within, often with mass public support, and hollowed them out. This is a very disturbing trend and so far we have not managed to think of effective ways of countering it. 

BC: A lot of evidence suggests anti-semitic attacks are on the rise. Horrific attacks like that in Pittsburgh last autumn come as statistics indicate a rise in anti-semitic incidents in the US, Britain and France. Some, especially on the right, attribute a rise in anti-semitism to issues such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to the anti-semitic ideologies of extremist Islamist organisations such as al-Qaida and Isis. Yet we are also seeing a rise in Islamophobic hate crimes in Western countries. How do you see the relationship between Islamophobia and anti-semitism, and is the fact that both seem to be on the rise linked?

RE: Islamist extremists certainly propagate anti-semitism, and there is a certain amount of it on the left, among a minority of supporters of the Palestinians who fail to draw a clear boundary between criticism of Israel and generalise hostility towards “the Jews.” Islamophobia however is now becoming more widespread and more significant, as an aspect of cultural nationalism and hostility towards immigrants (though of course many Muslim families have been citizens of Britain, France and other countries for years). 

Racial prejudice, fuelled by nationalist opposition to globalisation, is on the rise, along with xenophobia and religious hatred. This too is a disturbing phenomenon. Ultimately it is the economic crash of 2008 that did most to fuel the rise of racism, of which both anti-semitism and Islamophobia are aspects.

BC: Another issue touched on by the whole David Irving case is fake news. Lots of people decry it, from Donald Trump who accuses the mainstream media of it to the mainstream media who accuse many minority opinion outlets of promoting it. Do you believe a collapse in trust in the traditional media through issues like phone hacking and the promotion of lies to lead us into war in Iraq has encouraged the growth of “fake news,” or was much media “fake news” already? And how do you suggest those of us who care about the truth counter the spread of fake news?

RE: “Fake news” is the product above all of the rise of social media and the internet, which bypass and disempower the traditional gatekeepers of opinion such as newspaper and magazine editors and radio and television journalists. We need to continue to build websites that convey factually accurate stories, and subject unsupported opinion and prejudice to rigorous fact-checking.

Sir Richard Evans is the author of 18 books, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy, and was president of Cambridge's Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017.