Because war hawks always fight the last war. That last one ended with stories of mass cremation: Bodies burned from their own fat (in times of diesel shortage), human soap works and nazi tattoo art that was turned into skin lampshades.

We were fed a steady diet of Nazi alarmism in the sixties and seventies. Note that none of those stories could be proven. But there were comics, outraged pocket-books that could be read on the train, the occasional documentary of a perfectly healthy human saying something. At most, there was a photo of a queer-looking lampshade. The soap stories were never proven. Those piles of starved bodies in the photos were after a typhus outbreak and economic sanctions. Yes, people died.

There should never have been the division of society and mass formation that turned on its own.

However, it's the narrative that is handed down over generations. It becomes like the fairytales of cannibalism and child kidnapping. Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and granny's tales of woe.

So it's an easy narrative that rolls off the tongue. Cremation, secret deaths, war atrocities that cannot be confirmed.