May 23, 2017, marked the 156th day of the trial of Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi party that had, just five years earlier, made history when it entered the Hellenic Parliament for the first time. Even before its political successes, the party had shocked much of Greek society by terrorizing refugees and migrants and carrying out wanton violence against political opponents, most often leftists. Entering parliament with 7 percent of the vote had not tampered the neo-Nazi party''s tendency toward bloodshed. Threats compounded. The pogroms continued. Murders followed, brutal knifings in which victims were left to bleed out in the streets. Now, sixty-nine Golden Dawn members were on trial. After a Golden Dawn supporter stabbed and killed the Greek anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in September 2013, the state accused the defendants of operating a criminal organization.

That day, United Kingdom-based filmmaker Konstantinos Georgousis, who had followed Golden Dawn members for his documentary The Cleaners, arrived at Korydallos Prison near the capital, where the trial was taking place. Georgousis took the stand and spoke about what he had seen while documenting the party''s campaigning some five years earlier. During the lead-up to the parliamentary elections in May 2012, Georgousis had tailed party candidate Alekos Plomaritis as he campaigned in Athens. Golden Dawn surged in those elections and a subsequent vote later in the year. When the young documentary filmmaker took the stand, none of the defendants were present, an absence that would come to define much of the five-year trial. Plomaritis made several horrifying statements to Georgousis throughout the filming. At one point during the filming, Georgousis followed Plomaritis and others as they harassed non-Greek vendors in an open-air market. "Get out of here," he barked.

"You''re not Greek." Addressing the camera, Plomaritis said of migrants: "These parasites drink our water, eat our food, and breathe our Greek air. And they kill us." He continued, "We are ready to open the ovens. We would turn them into soap, but we may get a rash. So, we''ll only use it to wash cars and pavements." Of the statements that most haunted Georgousis, he later told the courtroom, was a threat that proved with time to be true: "The knives will come out after the elections." Golden Dawn had already accumulated a terrifying track record of violence, which included highly organized pogroms carried out by well-trained attackers reminiscent of Nazi Germany''s assault squads, but there was no doubt that the bloodshed reached a crescendo after the party entered the parliament.

And while it was true that Golden Dawn had never had a monopoly on far-right violence or anti-migrant pogroms in Greece, there was no denying the party''s concerted effort to till the soil for militant racists and neo-fascists who sought to "cleanse" Greece of groups whom Golden Dawn had always identified as enemies: refugees, migrants, minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, leftists, anarchists, and anti-fascists of all stripes. Although Golden Dawn is an outlier in many respects, the neo-Nazi organization''s catastrophic rise in Greece marked a worrisome development on a global scale. Throughout the party''s existence, Golden Dawn imported white nationalist texts from abroad and often modeled its strategic operations off neo-Nazi groups outside of Greece. The success Golden Dawn enjoyed in a pair of 2012 legislative elections in Greece, however, changed everything. Around Europe, far-right groups had been growing for decades, but they eschewed the sort of unabashed Nazism that Golden Dawn celebrated. Landing in the Greek parliament while also commanding a terrifying presence in the streets represented something entirely new, and neo-Nazis and white nationalists the globe over took notice. The Greek party offered a blueprint for others that hoped to straddle parliamentary politics and street- level violence. *** Throughout much of the time while I was writing and reporting this book, Golden Dawn''s trial was ongoing--and it groaned along at a funeral pace.

There were thousands of documents to trudge through, and a series of strikes by public sector workers and lawyers didn''t help speed up the process. With proceedings repeatedly delayed, a verdict seemed distant, and clarity about the exact extent of the party''s role in the wave of destruction and bloodshed that had gripped Greece for so long remained unclear. And the violence, though occasionally decreasing, had never been eradicated. Between 2012 and 2018, the Athens-based Racist Violence Recording Network documented 988 incidents of bigoted violence, more than half of them targeting refugees and migrants.