I stepped into the night air and felt the past seize me by the throat. Hard, sudden, merciless. Glen Huntly Road, in Melbourne, hummed like any other Sunday.

But inside my mind, the image of the Jerusalem courtroom of 1961 was still thundering, as Adolf Eichmann sat there in his neat suit, with the mild manners of a bank teller who has never lost a minute’s sleep.

His voice was quiet, almost apologetic, the sort that offers you a seat on the tram while planning your annihilation.

I had just watched The Eichmann Trial at the Jewish International Film Festival. For two hours, I sat as history peeled back its skin, revealing the machinery of evil in its purest, most bureaucratic form. Behind that glass booth sat the man who once decided who would live and who would turn to ash.

He adjusted his headphones, straightened his papers, spoke in the rhythm of a bookkeeper and described the destruction of the Jewish people as if reciting a shipping schedule.

“When neo-Nazis file paperwork, they’re already halfway inside the house.

He did not snarl or erupt. He did not spit hate in wild tirades. He was polite. Measured. Almost forgettable.

Yet, this was the architect of the ‘Final Solution’, who once declared, with the serene glee of a man recalling a perfect holiday, “I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.”

“Extraordinary satisfaction.” That sentence is a blade that has never left my flesh. It twists every time I hear a young Australian voice repeat the same ideology in a new accent.

I stood on the footpath and understood the booth Eichman was in was no museum piece. It was a warning flare. And it is aimed directly at us.

Because the poison Eichmann consumed is breathing again on Australian soil, the glass box has now been opened.

Across Australia, the neo-Nazi NSN (National Socialist Network) is trying to drag this country into the same sewer of hatred that once drowned a continent.

Its members are Hitler worshippers, the contemporary heirs of the SS guards who pushed mothers clutching their children into the gas chambers, who watched smoke rise from crematoria and called it success.

And they want political power. Not metaphorically. Literally.

The NSN has spent years training, recruiting, hijacking rallies and terrorising communities.

This is what they believe: “We want to deport all Third World immigrants and Jews as well, regardless of how they feel about that,” said Jack Eltis, NSW leader of the NSN, in his PowerPoint slides.

And now they are trying to register as a political party under a name ripped from the bones of our own racist past: White Australia.

When neo-Nazis file paperwork, they’re already halfway inside the house.

We were warned this was coming.

This month, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess, the man we pay to keep us safe while we sleep and who chooses his words with surgical precision, has looked the country in the eye and said that neo-Nazi networks like the NSN pose “the single greatest threat to Australia’s liberal democracy”.

We know exactly where this road ends. We have watched the credits roll in blood again and again and again.

In Christchurch, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian the NSN once tried to recruit, walked into two mosques and murdered 51 worshippers.

In Charleston, Dylann Roof executed nine African/American parishioners in a church.

In Pittsburgh, Robert Bowers slaughtered 11 Jews in the Tree of Life Synagogue.

In Norway, Anders Breivik murdered 77 people, hunting down children and teenagers at a summer camp.

Different accents, different continents. Same delusion. Same fever. Same fantasy of a race war. Same ideology, burning like acid in the veins. Same lie, poured into lonely ears: you are the last pure thing left and only murder will save the white race.

Every white-supremacist lone-wolf shooter began the same way: a man in a room, nodding along to someone else’s hate or scrolling alone through digital venom until he convinced himself he had been chosen to strike the first blow.

The road from a whisper on an encrypted app to a headline of blood is shorter than any of us wants to admit.

Only days ago, the Australian Federal Police arrested two men for threatening federal MPs. Joel Davis, a leading member of the NSN, was charged after urging his followers to “rhetorically rape” MP Allegra. Another man, Stefanos Eracleous, was charged with defacing an Indigenous flag inside Senator Lidia Thorpe’s electoral office.

For Holocaust survivors, watching Hitler’s disciples march in Australian streets is shattering beyond words. If the children of Auschwitz survivors must watch this horror show, then we have already lost something sacred.

The NSN is not slowing down. In August, they infiltrated the anti-migrant marches that rolled through our cities, slid their slogans into open microphones, draped their venom in borrowed patriotism. Thomas Sewell climbed the steps of Victoria’s Parliament house, planted himself behind a podium draped in our flag, and delivered the keynote speech at the city’s March for Australia rally. All this while ordinary Australians clapped, looked away or told themselves it was just words.

Three weeks ago, 60 members of the NSN unfurled “Abolish the Jewish Lobby” outside NSW Parliament. They disrupted an Indigenous ceremony on Anzac Day. They marched through Adelaide shouting, “Australia for the white man”. They’ve built a network of camps to draw disaffected teenagers into their ranks.

Leader of the NSN, Thomas Sewell, faces more than 20 charges for the violent attack at Camp Sovereignty in Melbourne. Prosecutors say Sewell screamed, “Let’s get them” and 30 men charged like hounds released from hell, pinning bodies, smashing ribs, breaking a woman’s nose, splitting another’s scalp open and hurling missiles. Sewell himself punched and kicked in a frenzy until even his own followers dragged him away.

In October, a magistrate looked straight at Sewell, who had marched his black-clad paramilitary column through the heart of Ballarat, boots hammering the ground, mouths roaring “Australia for the white man” and “No more Chinamen” and found him not guilty of acting in an offensive manner.

And now, they are exploiting Australia’s party registration rules with a clinical focus that would make Eichmann grin. In their latest communiqué, the NSN announced that they have already crossed the 1,500 signatures needed to register their federal party, “White Australia”.

And the most chilling part? The Australian Electoral Commission has admitted it is powerless to stop them, no matter how openly racist and how violent they are. And there is a deeper terror. The membership lists are confidential. Sealed tighter than a coffin lid.

No employer will ever know. No neighbour. No journalist. No light will ever fall on the names of those who put the gun to the temple of everything we swore to defend.

A private army swelling in the dark.

And somewhere down that road, if we keep blinking, keep shrugging, we may see a neo-Nazi rise in the House of Representatives or Senate, smoothing his tie, clearing his throat and promoting Hitler’s ideology to the country.

Not from some gutter, not from a prison cell, but from the green leather of Parliament itself, under the same flag the diggers died for.

That is not a nightmare. That is the next station on the line we are already boarding.

And at some point, PM Albanese and every premier must face a brutal truth: we have built laws strong enough to register a party, but not strong enough to prevent a party that dreams of a Fourth Reich.

The NSN is a contagion. A black sun rising. A reviled ghost clawing its way out of the grave, seeking living hosts.

Some evils are not to be tolerated, discussed, accommodated or reasoned with. They are to be driven out, as the ancient world cast out plagues, as fire purges rot from the timber, as lightning splits the tree to save the forest.

A society that cannot reject the worshippers of annihilation has forgotten the meaning of its own heartbeat.

A nation that allows the agents of racial purity to recruit in daylight has already forgotten the smell of burning synagogues and the sound of trains that never stopped.

Our elected representatives must ban them, not as a gesture, but as a commandment. Ban them because there are children alive today who will one day ask what we allowed, what we excused, what we ignored and there must be an answer that does not taste like shame.

The gates must be shut before the wolves walk through wearing human faces. We are at that point. The line is here. It glows red.

And when I think of Gideon Hausner, the Israeli Attorney-General who stood in the Jerusalem courtroom as the prosecutor of Eichmann, speaking for a people obliterated, I hear again the blast in his voice: “I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers.”

Those words are not just echoes from our past. They are a live detonation under our feet. And the shrapnel is screaming one command: Speak now, or choke on the silence forever.