Although President Trump, among others, has tried to draw a sharp line between the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who descended upon Charlottesville and the presumably “very fine people” who were “also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee,” the line between fascism and worship of the Confederacy is not so clear. In fact, it never has been.
The Nazi order praised the Old South, seeing in Dixie a society that exalted white leadership and kept African Americans on the lowest rungs of the social order. Recognizing this, civil rights activists have worked for over 80 years to expose those links and to show how the veneration of the Old South can provide a nurturing climate for hateful, fascist ideologies. Revealing the deep connections between Nazi and Confederate beliefs became essential to proving that Southern racial practices were, in fact, clearly antithetical to American values like democracy and equality.
Nazis themselves saw a clear line from their own beliefs to those of the antebellum South.
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/166762
