Professor Norman Cohn - Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1559275/Professor-Norman-Cohn.html

Having witnessed at first hand the apocalyptic atrocities of war, Cohn
wondered whether the fanatical ideas of the Nazis and Communists were
exclusively a 20th-century phenomenon or whether they had more ancient
roots. Both tyrannies contained the myth of a final titanic struggle
against a demonised enemy - the Jews in the case of Hitler's Germany,
the bourgeoisie in that of Stalin's Soviet Union.
Although working as a linguist when he returned to academic life after
the Second World War, Cohn - with no training as an historian but
never hidebound - embarked on a quest for the historical origins of
these ideas which took him back to the Middle Ages.
---SPSmith