“One day we shall come back. Until then, à bientôt.” Those ominous words—à bientôt, “bye for now”—were spoken by an anonymous German military spokesman on Nazi radio on Sept. 1, 1944. By that time, defeat was knocking on Hitler’s door. But that didn’t deter one of his cocksure officers from going on radio to forecast the future resurrection of the Nazi death machine.

This man was not alone in his sinister prophecy. At the end of World War II,thousands of Germans believed and hoped Nazism would one day return. The majority in the West, however, underestimated Nazism’s resilience.

Herbert W. Armstrong was among the select few who escaped this deception. As early as spring 1945, he began warning that although Nazism had been disfigured and dismembered, its heart was still beating—slowly, quietly, undetected—in dark crevices across the planet.

“Hitler has lost. This round of war, in Europe, is over,” he told listeners of his World Tomorrow radio program on May 9, 1945. “And the Nazis have now gone UNDERGROUND. … They plan to COME BACK and to win on the third try” (emphasis mine throughout).

It was a bold forecast—one that time is proving to be alarmingly accurate!

Nazism Survives

When World War II ended, the British Ministry of Economic Warfare estimated that the Nazis looted nearly $27 billion from the nations they had conquered. Michael Sayers and Albert E. Khan followed the dollars in their 1945 book The Plot Against the Peace: “Since 1943, Nazi money, jewels and other valuables have been streaming across the Reich frontiers and finding their way by clandestine channels into Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and North and South America. … With these vast hidden sums at their disposal, the Nazis have already reconstituted and reorganized their wartime international fifth columns and set up new propaganda agencies and terrorist leagues for the postwar period.”

Edwin Hartrich confirmed this years later in his book The Fourth and Richest Reich. He noted that when Allied forces moved into Germany at the end of the war, they found plenty of Nazi soldiers and sympathizers, but little evidence of Nazi leaders and organizations. “It was soon obvious that many high-ranking Nazis, especially members of Himmler’s dreaded Gestapo, the SS, and S-D organizations, had disappeared; they were hiding behind false identification papers until such time as they could escape to South America or some other receptive asylum for ex-Nazis,” he wrote.

The Nazi brain trust slipped out of Germany before the war ended. Then, loaded with billions in cash and the belongings of millions of incinerated Jews, they began planning World War III!

But the war ended over 60 years ago. Is there evidence of Nazism’s existence or reemergence today?

A Nazi Renaissance

Conditions are ripe for the emergence of Nazism in Germany and across Europe. Commenting on the global financial crisis in October last year, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble drew some eerie parallels between it and the economic woes that preceded World War II. “We learned from the worldwide economic crisis of the 1920s (1930s) that an economic crisis can result in an incredible threat for all of society. The consequences of that depression was Adolf Hitler and, indirectly, World War II and Auschwitz.”

Just a little over a month later, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück issued a similar warning, saying, “Germany’s … rescue package for its financial sector could be used to stir up feelings of social injustice that would benefit far-right parties ….”

These mainstream German politicians are looking at the nation’s social climate, seeing that it’s alarmingly similar to that of the 1930s, and suggesting that history could repeat itself.

If we look closely, we see that it already is.

In July this year, the German weekly Der Spiegel ran a cover story suggesting that the Treaty of Versailles is why the “Second World War had to follow the First.” Imposed on Germany in June 1919, the post-World War I treaty was “humiliating,” “harsh” and too demanding of the debilitated German state, lamented Spiegel—thus it was a justifiable pretext for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler’s propaganda machine preached the same message about Versailles during the late 1920s and the ’30s to foment hatred and instill a desire for retribution among Germans.

This banter about Allied guilt for causing World War II is not occurring in whispers among Nazi sympathizers in log cabins in the backwoods of Germany. This was a cover story in a popular weekly newsmagazine which, like Newsweek or Time in the United States, shapes national conversation in Germany. And as translators at German-Foreign-Policy.com observed, the German daily Die Welt “takes a similar position” to Spiegel on this issue, as does the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the most popular newspaper in southern Germany.

Like all peace treaties, the Treaty of Versailles had its imperfections. But it was no harsher than previous peace accords imposed by Germany on France and Russia—and, after all, Germany had caused a conflict that ultimately snuffed out 10 million people. The Treaty of Versailles was not the true cause of the Second World War. World War II occurred because the minds of Adolf Hitler, his henchmen and millions of Germans were taken captive by the war-inducing spirit of Nazism!

Now that spirit of Nazism is being resurrected.

“A specter is haunting Europe,” the Times wrote last year. “It wears jackboots, a swastika and a delicate tear-stained expression of angst-ridden introspection. And it’s called the Touchy-Feely Nazi. It can be found in your local multiplex in a quartet of high-profile movies … that take a fresh … new look at the Second World War almost exclusively and often sympathetically from the Nazi point of view” (Dec. 22, 2008).

The history of Nazism is being rewritten. “What these films share is a common revisionist tone,” the Times continued. “‘Look,’ these movies seem to say, ‘being a Nazi wasn’t that easy, and furthermore not everybody caught the bug.’”

This is dangerous fiction. “There is a tendency, perhaps derived from the sources that filmmakers use for these films, to show everyone as being very rational and reasonable,” said Richard Evans, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge University and the author of a definitive Third Reich historical series. “Whereas only Hitler and just a few people around him—the top-level Nazis—are seen as absolute raving maniacs. And the fact is that Nazi ideology did go fairly wide and deep.”

Those who fail to understand Nazi history will not recognize when that history is being repeated.

The Holy Roman Empire

Both history and prophecy prove that Nazism was not a historical anomaly. As Sayers and Khan observed, “[A]lmost all the peculiar features of Hitler’s regime, its unbridled aggressiveness, its inordinate brutality, its homicidal racial chauvinism, have been characteristic of past political manifestations of the Pan-German secret ruling combine of Junkerism, Prussian militarism and economic feudalism.”

World War II was a short and vicious eruption of what historians admit is a long-held German goal for continental subjugation—and world dominance. Mr. Armstrong understood this reality, which is why he warned—as early as 1945—that Nazism did not die, but went underground.

Mr. Armstrong used another term to describe Germany’s longstanding quest for global domination: the Holy Roman Empire!

The Holy Roman Empire is a political, religious and military conglomerate that has risen and fallen from power in Europe over the past 1,500 years. As is explained in our free booklet Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, this deadly empire began in A.D. 554, when the Roman Emperor Justinian recognized the supremacy of the pope and forged an alliance between Rome and the Vatican.

There have been five resurrections of this empire in Europe since Justinian’s Imperial Restoration. In each case—be it Charlemagne’s vicious empire in the 8th century, Otto the Great’s German empire of the 10th century, Napoleon’s in the early 19th, or Hitler’s in the mid-20th—the Vatican was the primary influence over the empire. That’s why it’s called the “Holy” Roman Empire, though the use of the term “holy” is one of history’s cruelest misnomers.

The spirit of Nazism is the same spirit as that of the Holy Roman Empire!

Bible prophecy reveals there will be seven total resurrections of the Holy Roman Empire. History shows that six of those resurrections have occurred. Current events show that right now, in Germany and the Vatican, and in Europe, the final resurrection—fueled by the reviving spirit of Nazism—is raising its terrifying head.

You must know where this trend will end. To find out, request your free copy of Who and What Is the Prophetic Beast?