“Zoomer Historian” Unmasked: We name the Hitler apologist with a huge online following

HOPE not hate can reveal the identity of the “Zoomer Historian”, the extremist behind one of the largest Hitler apologist channels on YouTube, as the former gaming YouTuber Sam Wilkes from Guernsey. Wilkes is also a key online propagandist for the fascist Homeland Party.

Since March 2023, a popular YouTube channel titled “Zoomer Historian” has produced a regular stream of videos defending the legacy of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. 

Portraying the Third Reich as a victim of Allied warmongering, the man behind the anonymous account is among the most high-profile promoters of WWII revisionism on the platform, with an enormous 171,000 subscribers. Popular titles include “World War 2 Was Not Worth Fighting”, “How Winston Churchill Started WW2” and “Hitler’s Peace Offers 1933-1940”.

When not defending Hitler on YouTube, the “Zoomer Historian” frequently promotes the Homeland Party, a splinter group of the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative, to his 57,000 followers on X/Twitter. 

He also uses the platform to relentlessly advance his racist worldview, pushing the “white genocide” conspiracy theory — the notion that white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by immigrants — and campaigning for the “total remigration” of non-white people from the UK, a supposedly non-violent form of ethnic cleansing.

HOPE not hate can reveal that the activist behind the pseudonym is Sam Wilkes from Guernsey. Despite his preoccupation with the “demographic replacement” of “native” Brits, Wilkes has spent years living in Eastern Europe, including Romania and Latvia, and has two children with his Latvian fiancée. 

Wilkes launched his YouTube following in 2016 under the name SamGSY, gaining tens of thousands of followers for his FIFA and football-related videos, before renaming it “Zoomer Historian” in 2023 and pumping out WWII revisionism to the same audience. 

This February, Wilkes suffered what he described as a “gigantic financial hit” when his Patreon account was banned, but he continues to monetise his content on other platforms. 

While Wilkes claims his YouTube content is “non-political”, comments on the messaging app Telegram suggest an extreme agenda. For example, during a conversation about Hitler in the chat group of Tommy Robinson, he wrote that Robinson would: 

“never admit to the final red pill, the anti-hitler propaganda is too embedded in our society.. for now”.

7 September 2022

He has also quoted Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, and shared a video of John Tyndall, the former leader of the National Front and British National Party. 

The content of Wilkes’s videos is unsurprising given that he has cited David Irving, the disgraced historian and Holocaust denier, as his main influence, describing him as a “hero” and his books as “masterpieces”. Irving Books has even offered Wilkes a discount to share with his followers, and was described by Wilkes as one of his “two favourite publishers”, alongside the white nationalist Antelope Hill. 

The Homeland Party

While still fringe, the Homeland Party has grown exponentially in recent months, thanks in part to Wilkes and other fascist social media influencers. Wilkes and other figures associated with the party are engaged in a long-term effort to desensitize their followers to the notion of mass deportations, hoping to normalise and ultimately realise the removal of non-whites from the country.

Homeland activists try to mask their extremism when interacting with the public at the local level, hoping to win over ordinary Brits, gain council seats and build towards national power. One wonders what the party’s target demographic would make of Wilkes’s views on Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill.  

For more information on the Homeland Party, read our report: The Fascist Fringe: Patriotic Alternative and its Splinter Groups