Current Events > Does anyone know German history post WW2? How did the nazis stop being nazis?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Thinking about this in relation to propaganda and populism? How did nazi German and the people who were propagandas into following it de-radicalised in the aftermath? Ask because curious how the current state of populism round the world will stop? Was it just an organic thing or did they put in measures to reduce it?

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Tag

There might be a YouTube video on this.

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Google De-Nazification.

My parents live a couple years in West Germany in the 70s. My dad was in the army and stationed there.

They say they met actual ex nazis they think. Basically nazis just kinda either changed their ways or stopped expressing their views once it was no longer sanctioned by the government and lived out the rest of their lives quietly.

Zikten posted...

My parents live a couple years in West Germany in the 70s. My dad was in the army and stationed there.

They say they met actual ex nazis they think. Basically nazis just kinda either changed their ways or stopped expressing their views once it was no longer sanctioned by the government and lived out the rest of their lives quietly.

so your parents friends they still believed in the ideology? Just hid it?

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considering nazis were hunted down and most of them went into hiding or were tried for their crimes and killed

I'd say they chilled the fuck out once it wasn't socially acceptable there anymore, kind of like how the US is, with moving away from discrimination and slavery, or we were at least until trump

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Akagami_Shanks posted...

considering nazis were hunted down and most of them went into hiding or were tried for their crimes and killed

I'd say they chilled the fuck out once it wasn't socially acceptable there anymore, kind of like how the US is, with moving away from discrimination and slavery, or we were at least until trum

Im not just about about official nazis In power but those who agreed with their ideology / promoted it.

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A lot of the dyed in the wool Nazis fled the country.

My parents met some when they were invited to a party in the early 1970s. My father ended up talking to a guy who was very keen on the space drive. My father, god bless his cotton socks believed them to be talking about going to other planets.
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Crepes posted...

so your parents friends they still believed in the ideology? Just hid it?

Well I dont think they were friends. These were older people. One of them was their landlord I think. Just people that lived in area that my parents encountered. My parents were in their 20s at the time. The landlord for example was like 80 or something. But yea, people just stopped talking about it but I think many of them probably still believed in nazi stuff. They just lost the power to do anything about it

Well it starts with losing the most murderous war fought in history and your side losing all governing autonomy through force of arms.

They still have a lot of room to run in that regard before anyone can come down on them as harshly as we did the Nazis

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I remember reading something years ago about anti-Semitic slurs being used at demonstrations during the Berlin blockade and wasnt able to find a source. I did find this article which is quite interesting but only tangentially related.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/germany-nazism-medieval-anti-semitism-plain-sight-180975780/
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Akagami_Shanks posted...

considering nazis were hunted down and most of them went into hiding or were tried for their crimes and killed

West Germany didn't bother hunting down Nazis until in the 80s when they were pressured into doing something about it by Israel and the United States. Many of the Nazi trials in West Germany only resulted in minor sentences from 5-10 years due to the fact that the people trying the Nazis were Nazis themselves.

Trelve posted...

West Germany didn't bother hunting down Nazis until in the 80s when they were pressured into doing something about it by Israel and the United States. Many of the Nazi trials in West Germany only resulted in minor sentences from 5-10 years due to the fact that the people trying the Nazis were Nazis themselves.

This is a good point - there were even laws passed that set a statue of limitations for being charged with Nazi actions, overall a lot of trying to close the door so as not to stir up old bones

They fled all over the world , mainly Argentina

As for in Germany, the economy fixed it.

The Nazis only took off because post war Germany was shit. Hitler and WW2 gave everyone work and a purpose.

As much as people hate to admit it, having a job and stuff to do is what curbs the most extremism

You can see the rise of racism, extremism, loss of masculinity in areas with high unemployment

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UnfairRepresent posted...

The Nazis only took off because post war Germany was shit. Hitler and WW2 gave everyone work and a purpose.

Despite communist uprisings, the Allied occupation of the Ruhr and Rheinland, hyperinflation, and the first few painful years of the Weimar economy when Germany actually made genuine attempts to pay reparations, the most popular party in Germany from 1920 to 1929 remained the centre-left SPD. Meanwhile, the Nazis' share of the vote in federal elections had been in decline since 1924 and sank to a feeble 2.6% in May 1928.

So either it wasn't just the length of the lines for soup kitchens that brought the Nazis to power, or the Weimar economy wasn't actually in such terrible shape for most of its life. (The Republic's rebound from the recession of winter 1926-27 saw a twelve-month growth rate higher than any achieved during the Third Reich.)

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And UR was not seen in this topic again.

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Crepes posted...

And UR was not seen in this topic again.

He's right enough that economic crises are a witches' cauldron for political extremism, but I think it's too deterministic to heap all the blame for the rise of the Nazis on purely economic factors. Germany was hardly the only country that suffered from high unemployment and poverty between 1929-32 -- it was a global depression, after all -- but it wasn't the first time that Germany had been down that rocky road after WW1, and not every country that suffered during the depression caved in to left- or right-wing dictatorship.

So there must have been something else, something in Germany's political culture and history, to explain why after 1929 the Nazis suddenly went from being a fringe party about to disappear down the drain, to being a significant force. Versailles isn't a good enough explanation, because during the German referendum of 1929 -- held to decide whether Germany should formally renounce the Treaty and refuse to stop paying reparations (which Germany stopped paying in 1932 anyway) -- fewer than 15% of German voters even bothered to turn out for it.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U5w7tjrqDlo

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CrimsonRage posted...

iirc there was a massive de-programming campaign done by the allies to de-nazify the germans

The Allies' denazification programme was a colossal exercise in bureaucratic red tape more than anything else. Ordinary Germans learned to make jokes about the lengthy questionnaires (131 questions over six pages) they were required to fill in, detailing their activities before and during the war, because they realised it was practically impossible for under-resourced, harassed Allied officials to check the veracity of what had been written on 13 million forms.

I'd guess that many Germans found the most compelling argument against Nazism was the disastrous consequences for their ruined, divided, occupied country of having followed it.

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We killed their leaders and the rest went into hiding.

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Firewerx posted...

I'd guess that many Germans found the most compelling argument against Nazism was the disastrous consequences for their ruined, divided, occupied country of having followed it.

Largely this. Why would anyone but the most strident ideological believers in Nazism continue to espouse that system in the aftermath of a losing war it directly caused? The appeal of Nazism at its heights for the average German was that it didn't disrupt your life and the country appeared to be getting better by some metrics, none of which was true by 1945. Germany was soundly defeated, worse than it ever had been in WWI, and their leader killed himself like a coward after seeing the depths of his failures.

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CW_McGraw posted...

Germany was soundly defeated, worse than it ever had been in WWI, and their leader killed himself like a coward after seeing the depths of his failures.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if the July 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler had been successful. Would the western Allies have stood united -- or might separate peace deals have been negotiated, deals that ended up sparing Germany from western occupation?

And if Germany manages to survive the war without the punishing devastation that rubbed Germans' noses hard in the harsh lessons of total defeat... Does the aftermath leave behind smouldering embers of Nazi ideology that could burst into flame again a few years later, with Hitler revered as a martyr by more and more Germans who insist that Nazism "never really failed"?

I guess what I'm saying is that maybe we should be thankful the 1944 plot failed.

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It took a long time. A lot of the general German population still believed that the Nazis weren't that bad. A lot of bureaucrats from the Nazi party got to keep their jobs. Hans Globe, who helped write the Nuremberg race laws, made it into a top position in the chancellery. The Wehrmacht was generally believed to be a "clean and honorable" army instead of an instrument of genocide; some generals who had ordered crimes against humanity got off scott free, and the myth wasn't properly dispelled before the 1990s.

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Firewerx posted...

Makes you wonder what would have happened if the July 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler had been successful. Would the western Allies have stood united -- or might separate peace deals have been negotiated, deals that ended up sparing Germany from western occupation?

The 1944 plotters were still strong nationalists and wanted a Great Germany, with at least the 1914 borders plus Austria. The Allies would never have accepted those demands, and were gunning for an unconditional surrender of Germany, which the entire Wehrmacht opposed.

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ZeldaMutant posted...

The 1944 plotters were still strong nationalists and wanted a Great Germany, with at least the 1914 borders plus Austria. The Allies would never have accepted those demands, and were gunning for an unconditional surrender of Germany, which the entire Wehrmacht opposed.

Yeah that's why I didn't really like the movie Valkyrie.

Acting like they were heroic humanitarians and great people by virtue of the fact they wanted power and to kill Hitler.

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Allied occupation, the Nuremberg trials, and Hitler shooting himself

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sondast posted...

We killed their leaders and the rest went into hiding.

wow u must be rly old

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I would imagine that without social media/digital mediums to communicate, effectively having the nazi ideology banned made it much harder for them to "stay alive".

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I had a teacher who was a few years too young to be in the HJ, he always said that growing up in the piece of shit Germany had become made hating Nazis easy before he even fully understood the full extent of their evil ideology.

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It's my understanding de-Nazification was more thorough in the East(the East German government, being composed of socialists who had been persecuted since the Nazis came to power, were that much more invested in rooting out former Nazis), whereas the West was somewhat more lenient(though that isn't meant to imply that they didn't care or try).
As far as a societal thing, my understanding is that it took a generation or two for a plurality of Germans to really confront the fact that WW2 Germany was exceptionally, capital E EVIL. There are, of course, still Germans(and likely always will be) who rationalize what happened, and there are probably even Holocaust deniers and/or people who think it was a pity they never turned Moscow into an artificial lake.
Still, it must be said the Germans are handling things pretty well, particularly compared to other nations with dark pasts.

lolreddit link but r/askhistorian is actually pretty good.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b6w6ym/nazism_in_postwar_germany/ejouod0?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

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ElatedVenusaur posted...

Still, it must be said the Germans are handling things pretty well, particularly compared to other nations with dark pasts.

That's quite true. But I believe it's only because Germany's total defeat represented perhaps the most catastrophic failure of any leader or ideology in the 20th century.

I think it's significant that when the Ottoman Empire laid down its arms in 1918 and Constantinople was placed under military occupation by the British, for several months afterward Turkish newspapers and parliamentarians openly acknowledged the enormity of what had happened to the Armenians, condemned the genocide, and demanded full investigations and swift trials. But when Turkish nationalist resistance hardened and the nationalists eventually won the ensuing war, the wind blew from a very different direction -- and the new Republic built a wall of silence and denial around the Armenian genocide that has stood to this very day. It's often the losers, not the winners, who learn the real lessons; and the nationalists could rightly claim to have won.

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they were still nazis mentally. my dad met an old nazi decades ago and the guy was still extremely racist

I guess they made it illegal to espouse nazi ideology and educated the newer generations

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Firewerx posted...

That's quite true. But I believe it's only because Germany's total defeat represented perhaps the most catastrophic failure of any leader or ideology in the 20th century.

I think it's significant that when the Ottoman Empire laid down its arms in 1918 and Constantinople was placed under military occupation by the British, for several months afterward Turkish newspapers and parliamentarians openly acknowledged the enormity of what had happened to the Armenians, condemned the genocide, and demanded full investigations and swift trials. But when Turkish nationalist resistance hardened and the nationalists eventually won the ensuing war, the wind blew from a very different direction -- and the new Republic built a wall of silence and denial around the Armenian genocide that has stood to this very day. It's often the losers, not the winners, who learn the real lessons; and the nationalists could rightly claim to have won.

yes. The Armenian genocide is something that should still shame the world today but far too people arent aware of it.

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The rest of the world skull fucked the Nazi right out of em

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ThyCorndog posted...

they were still nazis mentally. my dad met an old nazi decades ago and the guy was still extremely racist

I guess they made it illegal to espouse nazi ideology and educated the newer generations

I know that Germany takes some knocks for refusing to accept that there's such a thing as an absolute right to freedom of speech, but I believe that on balance they've taken the correct approach and it's largely paid off. Thanks to the twists and turns of their history, Germans are perhaps more acutely aware than many other peoples of the risks of too little free speech and of too much free speech.

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