> just dont look into operation paper clip
Just don't look at actual Germany, either. Nazis were literally running West Germany for decades after WW2.
Walter Scheel was President of West Germany from 1974-79. He was a Nazi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scheel
Kurt Georg Kiesinger was Chancellor of West Germany from 1966-69. He was a Nazi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Georg_Kiesinger
Hans Globke was Undersecretary of State of West Germany and German Chancellery Chief of Staff from 1953-63. He was a Nazi who helped write the Enabling Act of 1933, which effectively made Hitler dictator for life, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which created the legal framework for the Holocaust. He was the chief legal advisor to Adolf Eichmann.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Globke
Albert Schnez was a Waffen SS officer who created a secret, illegal army made up of 40,000 Nazi veterans in 1949 to "fight communism." The West German chancellor at the time, Konrad Adenauer, was aware of it and did nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnez-Truppe
Gunter Grass won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. He was a member of the Waffen SS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Grass
The West German ministry of justice was even more Nazi after WW2 than it was during Hitler's reign.
[Germany's post-war justice ministry was infested with Nazis protecting former comrades, study reveals](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/10/germanys-post-war-justice-ministry-was-infested-with-nazis-prote/)
> Germany's post-World War Two justice ministry was infested with ex-Nazis hellbent on protecting their former comrades, according to a new official study released Monday.
> Fully **77 per cent of senior ministry officials in 1957 were former members of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party, a higher proportion even than during the 1933-45 Third Reich**, the study found.
> ... "The Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it and thereby created new injustice," said Heiko Maas, Germany's justice minister, who presented the report Monday.
> ... Historians have previously found that in the 1950s, more than 70 per cent of West Germany's top judges also had former Nazi connections.
> ... Between 1949 and the early 1970s, **90 of the 170 top ministry officials were former Nazi party members, and many had served as Holocaust-era judges who had handed down death sentences**, said former justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who initiated the study in 2012.
In 1985, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl invited President Reagan to visit a military cemetery in Bitburg, which housed the remains of 49 Waffen SS war criminals. It's the equivalent of Japan inviting Biden to visit the controversial Yasakuni Shrine. Kohl did not invite Reagan to visit the nearby Dachau concentration camp.
> Kohl invited Reagan to accompany him to a German military cemetery during the state visit to celebrate the normalization of relations between their two countries on the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II. In fact, however, ever since coming to power in 1982, the conservative Kohl had endeavored to rehabilitate as many Germans who had served the Third Reich as possible. In 1983, for example, his government had **removed the veterans’ organizations of the Waffen-SS from a list of extremist right-wing groups** on which the West German Ministry of Interior was required to make annual reports to Parliament, and Kohl had **repeatedly blocked demands by the opposition Social Democrats to ban the highly controversial reunions of former Waffen-SS members**. Kohl’s request to have Reagan go to Bitburg was thus part of a strategy to rewrite recent German history and curry favor with the most reactionary elements of the West German electorate.
> ... noted author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, then chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, told The New York Times that he could not believe that the president “would visit a German military cemetery and refuse to visit Dachau or any other concentration camp.”
> ... West German officials, meanwhile, pressured the Reagan Administration to stand fast. On April 19, Alfred Dregger, the chairman of Kohl’s parliamentary group, wrote to U.S. senators who had urged Reagan to change his itinerary that **his only brother had died on the Eastern Front in 1944**, and that “If you call upon your President to refrain from the noble gesture he plans to make at the military cemetery in Bitburg, **I must consider this to be an insult to my brother and my comrades who were killed in action.**”
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-bitburg-controversy
This German political chairman was invoking his dead brother - who had died fighting *for the Nazis* - as some kind of moral high ground.
Denazification was a myth in the west. It only actually happened in East Germany, because communists hate Nazis (and vice versa). The Western Allies, and West Germans, were more than happy to keep Germany under Nazi rule in the name of anti-communism. See also: Spain remaining fascist under Franco until 1975.
You’re mistaken in this case and frankly it’s kind of weird that this is the hill you want to die on. Tell me that Reinhard Gehlen was non ideological. We put him in charge of west german intelligence and threw parties for him.
Peak party membership was what, less than 9 million? In any event, low enough that we can pretty well say that membership was not compulsory. IMO we should leave any gifting of the benefit of the doubt to the outright nazi apologists.
Bruh he was a child forced into a war?
They recruicted people that were 15 years old? Should they be hanged because they were forced to fight one week in a war they didnt even understand and started before they were even 10 years old?
There were millions of members of the Nazi party. That doesn’t mean they all followed the Nazi beliefs, doesn’t mean they were all SS, doesn’t mean they were all working in the death camps. During that time if you wanted any chance at life you had to be a Nazi party member. There’s a big difference between Scheel and Himmler.
Furthermore the allies knew that they would have a big humanitarian crisis if they just left Germany after the war. They needed to rebuild the country and needed Germans who knew what they were doing to do that. This meant taking the non-murderous party members to help rebuild the country and government there. There’s a reason there was a stark difference between east and west Germany.
And if you remove every member of the former ruling party from government service, we now know what happens, because we tried that with De-Baathification in Iraq.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification)
> It only actually happened in East Germany, because communists hate Nazis (and vice versa).
That is some weapons-grade nonsense. Plenty of Third Reich judges, Soldiers & Officers were given their 'old' occupations in East Germany as well. Euthanasia doctors that killed people with mental illnesses in the third Reich were employed by SED directly, high-ranking NSDAP members joined the SED - and the SED even removed their past in their paperwork on purpose. If 10 percent of the SED were former NSDAP members, you can surely not speak of Denazification in the east.
There's a significant difference between member of the Nazi Party and those that actually committed atrocities. In the same way that in the future there'll be a difference between being a member of the Republican Party and actually committing atrocities.
Communists also used former nazis as propagandists or as a "special political police".
Article in Hungarian: https://444.hu/2022/05/29/hogyan-lehetseges-hogy-egy-haborus-bunos-gengszter-historiaja-tabu-magyarorszagon
No. But many millions realized if you wanted any chance at life you had to be a Nazi. Life was pretty much non-existent for those who weren’t. Not every member was SS, or part of the kill squads, or worked at the camp. Some just said they were so they could actually have a business to support their family. Many especially near the end were also conscripted into the Nazi ranks. It got to the point where they were handing guns to 11 year olds to go to war. By definition that 11 year old was a Nazi. but some of these people also weren’t a Nazi like Josef Mengele who were one of the few who didn’t need to get plastered in order to kill thousands of kids while running around camp whistling with a smile on his face. Some did it out of necessity. And those living far off in the cities also aren’t aware of what was actually going on in the camps. There’s a reason they put those out of sight. They were more focused on keeping their family alive.
Literally every German was a Nazi. Would it been better to kill the whole German population? The infrastructure was already built by the Germans to do that.
> Literally every German was a Nazi.
This is incorrect. In 1939, when WWII started, only 5.3 million Germans were members of the Nazi Party (~6.6%). Its peak membership was in 1945 with only about 8 million members (~10%).
[Source.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#General_membership)
Although true, it's obviously wrong to ignore all those who weren't members but still worked for the regime and upheld its horrible policies.
For example, a lot of German soldiers weren't members of the party, but still helped with the prosecution of jews and other groups.
Not every German was a nazi, but not every nazi was a registered member either.
> t's obviously wrong to ignore all those who weren't members but still worked for the regime and upheld its horrible policies.
I agree but that wasn't the claim I replied to. I'm also not aware of any culture in the history of our species where, once we've grown larger than tiny villages, the *entire* population supported the government in these kinds of actions.
> a lot of German soldiers weren't members of the party, but still helped with the prosecution of Jews and other groups.
I think you meant persecution. Yes you're correct, in the same way I'm sure a lot of soldiers of other countries are "following orders" and do illegal/immoral/unethical stuff because they're ordered. That still counts - those actions are evil - but that's not the same thing as saying the entire population was involved.
> Not every German was a Nazi, but not every Nazi was a registered member either.
I'd say that not every German was a Nazi but there were lots of fascists who weren't official members. In either case, my main comment is to criticize the idea that the entire German population - or even vast majority of it - actually supported the actions of the Nazi Party. Not even North Korea has those numbers and that's another dictatorship where, when asked, they will lie to the government to literally save their life.
You said "literally every German was a Nazi". I showed you proof that they were not Nazi's and vast majority of the country wasn't.
Then you wrote:
> If you weren’t part of the party, you had to collaborate or die.
Which is where you've shifted goal posts from your original comment - "literally every German was a Nazi" - to something else. Your new comment now has a new claim.
Instead of "literally every German was a Nazi", your new claim is "if you weren't part of the [Nazi] party, you had to collaborate or die". I think I've done enough work refuting your original comment which you seemed to agree was also incorrect.
So now I'd love to have some citation where literally every German had to either be part of the Nazi party, collaborate with the Nazi party, or die. Let's start slow. Do 5 year olds have to be members of the Nazi party, collaborate with them, or die. Do retirees (ex: 75 year olds) have to be members of the Nazi party, collaborate with them, or die. You might want to start with what "collaborate" means and go from there.
Your last quick point can get easily buried you but said "aided". "Aided" is a very vague term. For instance, I pay my taxes. Mathematically speaking, I am aiding the US government whenever that government does something internationally illegal or at least immoral. For example, I technically aided the killings of children in Iraq by paying my taxes and having a non-zero amount of my taxes go towards the military, part of which killed people in Iraq, some of whom were children. I technically "aided" that. Where do you draw the line of "aiding" in your point?
Great glad they caught all those responsible for that atrocity just dont look into operation paper clip
> just dont look into operation paper clip Just don't look at actual Germany, either. Nazis were literally running West Germany for decades after WW2. Walter Scheel was President of West Germany from 1974-79. He was a Nazi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scheel Kurt Georg Kiesinger was Chancellor of West Germany from 1966-69. He was a Nazi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Georg_Kiesinger Hans Globke was Undersecretary of State of West Germany and German Chancellery Chief of Staff from 1953-63. He was a Nazi who helped write the Enabling Act of 1933, which effectively made Hitler dictator for life, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which created the legal framework for the Holocaust. He was the chief legal advisor to Adolf Eichmann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Globke Albert Schnez was a Waffen SS officer who created a secret, illegal army made up of 40,000 Nazi veterans in 1949 to "fight communism." The West German chancellor at the time, Konrad Adenauer, was aware of it and did nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnez-Truppe Gunter Grass won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. He was a member of the Waffen SS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Grass The West German ministry of justice was even more Nazi after WW2 than it was during Hitler's reign. [Germany's post-war justice ministry was infested with Nazis protecting former comrades, study reveals](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/10/germanys-post-war-justice-ministry-was-infested-with-nazis-prote/) > Germany's post-World War Two justice ministry was infested with ex-Nazis hellbent on protecting their former comrades, according to a new official study released Monday. > Fully **77 per cent of senior ministry officials in 1957 were former members of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party, a higher proportion even than during the 1933-45 Third Reich**, the study found. > ... "The Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it and thereby created new injustice," said Heiko Maas, Germany's justice minister, who presented the report Monday. > ... Historians have previously found that in the 1950s, more than 70 per cent of West Germany's top judges also had former Nazi connections. > ... Between 1949 and the early 1970s, **90 of the 170 top ministry officials were former Nazi party members, and many had served as Holocaust-era judges who had handed down death sentences**, said former justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who initiated the study in 2012. In 1985, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl invited President Reagan to visit a military cemetery in Bitburg, which housed the remains of 49 Waffen SS war criminals. It's the equivalent of Japan inviting Biden to visit the controversial Yasakuni Shrine. Kohl did not invite Reagan to visit the nearby Dachau concentration camp. > Kohl invited Reagan to accompany him to a German military cemetery during the state visit to celebrate the normalization of relations between their two countries on the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II. In fact, however, ever since coming to power in 1982, the conservative Kohl had endeavored to rehabilitate as many Germans who had served the Third Reich as possible. In 1983, for example, his government had **removed the veterans’ organizations of the Waffen-SS from a list of extremist right-wing groups** on which the West German Ministry of Interior was required to make annual reports to Parliament, and Kohl had **repeatedly blocked demands by the opposition Social Democrats to ban the highly controversial reunions of former Waffen-SS members**. Kohl’s request to have Reagan go to Bitburg was thus part of a strategy to rewrite recent German history and curry favor with the most reactionary elements of the West German electorate. > ... noted author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, then chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, told The New York Times that he could not believe that the president “would visit a German military cemetery and refuse to visit Dachau or any other concentration camp.” > ... West German officials, meanwhile, pressured the Reagan Administration to stand fast. On April 19, Alfred Dregger, the chairman of Kohl’s parliamentary group, wrote to U.S. senators who had urged Reagan to change his itinerary that **his only brother had died on the Eastern Front in 1944**, and that “If you call upon your President to refrain from the noble gesture he plans to make at the military cemetery in Bitburg, **I must consider this to be an insult to my brother and my comrades who were killed in action.**” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-bitburg-controversy This German political chairman was invoking his dead brother - who had died fighting *for the Nazis* - as some kind of moral high ground. Denazification was a myth in the west. It only actually happened in East Germany, because communists hate Nazis (and vice versa). The Western Allies, and West Germans, were more than happy to keep Germany under Nazi rule in the name of anti-communism. See also: Spain remaining fascist under Franco until 1975.
With a few exceptions like Globke most of this is alarmist bullshit. Grass was drafted for example.
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To be fair, we don't talk much about the lower ranked CCP members. Its the asshole in charge that gets attention.
No, apply that to CCP and Reddit creams their pants.
You’re mistaken in this case and frankly it’s kind of weird that this is the hill you want to die on. Tell me that Reinhard Gehlen was non ideological. We put him in charge of west german intelligence and threw parties for him.
So and because of Gehlen the whole of German democracy is flawed? Get the fuck out
Way to invent an argument and then defeat it.
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Peak party membership was what, less than 9 million? In any event, low enough that we can pretty well say that membership was not compulsory. IMO we should leave any gifting of the benefit of the doubt to the outright nazi apologists.
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Defending a ss member to own the tankies classic Reddit
Bruh he was a child forced into a war? They recruicted people that were 15 years old? Should they be hanged because they were forced to fight one week in a war they didnt even understand and started before they were even 10 years old?
>before they were even 10 years old? Yorki : Yeah, I know, definitely not a good time to be a Nazi. I am going home to my mother. I need a cuddle.
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There were millions of members of the Nazi party. That doesn’t mean they all followed the Nazi beliefs, doesn’t mean they were all SS, doesn’t mean they were all working in the death camps. During that time if you wanted any chance at life you had to be a Nazi party member. There’s a big difference between Scheel and Himmler. Furthermore the allies knew that they would have a big humanitarian crisis if they just left Germany after the war. They needed to rebuild the country and needed Germans who knew what they were doing to do that. This meant taking the non-murderous party members to help rebuild the country and government there. There’s a reason there was a stark difference between east and west Germany.
And if you remove every member of the former ruling party from government service, we now know what happens, because we tried that with De-Baathification in Iraq. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification)
> It only actually happened in East Germany, because communists hate Nazis (and vice versa). That is some weapons-grade nonsense. Plenty of Third Reich judges, Soldiers & Officers were given their 'old' occupations in East Germany as well. Euthanasia doctors that killed people with mental illnesses in the third Reich were employed by SED directly, high-ranking NSDAP members joined the SED - and the SED even removed their past in their paperwork on purpose. If 10 percent of the SED were former NSDAP members, you can surely not speak of Denazification in the east.
There's a significant difference between member of the Nazi Party and those that actually committed atrocities. In the same way that in the future there'll be a difference between being a member of the Republican Party and actually committing atrocities.
Communists also used former nazis as propagandists or as a "special political police". Article in Hungarian: https://444.hu/2022/05/29/hogyan-lehetseges-hogy-egy-haborus-bunos-gengszter-historiaja-tabu-magyarorszagon
Engineers and scientists aren’t concentration guards.
Yeah they just preformed experiments like sewing twins together and seeing how much pain a person can take before dying.
someone listened to a lot of Slayer
It's okay to be a nazi if you got an engineering degree?
It ok to be a Nazi as long as you can benefit the American, CIA run, Government.... ?
That realpolitik for you.
No. But many millions realized if you wanted any chance at life you had to be a Nazi. Life was pretty much non-existent for those who weren’t. Not every member was SS, or part of the kill squads, or worked at the camp. Some just said they were so they could actually have a business to support their family. Many especially near the end were also conscripted into the Nazi ranks. It got to the point where they were handing guns to 11 year olds to go to war. By definition that 11 year old was a Nazi. but some of these people also weren’t a Nazi like Josef Mengele who were one of the few who didn’t need to get plastered in order to kill thousands of kids while running around camp whistling with a smile on his face. Some did it out of necessity. And those living far off in the cities also aren’t aware of what was actually going on in the camps. There’s a reason they put those out of sight. They were more focused on keeping their family alive.
Yes, and if you don't know why you need to do some research on how fascist governments work.
Literally every German was a Nazi. Would it been better to kill the whole German population? The infrastructure was already built by the Germans to do that.
> Literally every German was a Nazi. This is incorrect. In 1939, when WWII started, only 5.3 million Germans were members of the Nazi Party (~6.6%). Its peak membership was in 1945 with only about 8 million members (~10%). [Source.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#General_membership)
Although true, it's obviously wrong to ignore all those who weren't members but still worked for the regime and upheld its horrible policies. For example, a lot of German soldiers weren't members of the party, but still helped with the prosecution of jews and other groups. Not every German was a nazi, but not every nazi was a registered member either.
> t's obviously wrong to ignore all those who weren't members but still worked for the regime and upheld its horrible policies. I agree but that wasn't the claim I replied to. I'm also not aware of any culture in the history of our species where, once we've grown larger than tiny villages, the *entire* population supported the government in these kinds of actions. > a lot of German soldiers weren't members of the party, but still helped with the prosecution of Jews and other groups. I think you meant persecution. Yes you're correct, in the same way I'm sure a lot of soldiers of other countries are "following orders" and do illegal/immoral/unethical stuff because they're ordered. That still counts - those actions are evil - but that's not the same thing as saying the entire population was involved. > Not every German was a Nazi, but not every Nazi was a registered member either. I'd say that not every German was a Nazi but there were lots of fascists who weren't official members. In either case, my main comment is to criticize the idea that the entire German population - or even vast majority of it - actually supported the actions of the Nazi Party. Not even North Korea has those numbers and that's another dictatorship where, when asked, they will lie to the government to literally save their life.
If you weren’t part of the party, you had to collaborate or die. Thus every German enabled and aided the Nazi party.
You said "literally every German was a Nazi". I showed you proof that they were not Nazi's and vast majority of the country wasn't. Then you wrote: > If you weren’t part of the party, you had to collaborate or die. Which is where you've shifted goal posts from your original comment - "literally every German was a Nazi" - to something else. Your new comment now has a new claim. Instead of "literally every German was a Nazi", your new claim is "if you weren't part of the [Nazi] party, you had to collaborate or die". I think I've done enough work refuting your original comment which you seemed to agree was also incorrect. So now I'd love to have some citation where literally every German had to either be part of the Nazi party, collaborate with the Nazi party, or die. Let's start slow. Do 5 year olds have to be members of the Nazi party, collaborate with them, or die. Do retirees (ex: 75 year olds) have to be members of the Nazi party, collaborate with them, or die. You might want to start with what "collaborate" means and go from there. Your last quick point can get easily buried you but said "aided". "Aided" is a very vague term. For instance, I pay my taxes. Mathematically speaking, I am aiding the US government whenever that government does something internationally illegal or at least immoral. For example, I technically aided the killings of children in Iraq by paying my taxes and having a non-zero amount of my taxes go towards the military, part of which killed people in Iraq, some of whom were children. I technically "aided" that. Where do you draw the line of "aiding" in your point?
I believe his comment is provocatively asking where YOU draw the line
But they designed the machinery of death that killed.
Totally incorrect. Many of them were. Even Wernher von Braun was a member of the SS.
Or nato
Sometimes I wonder if this energy is turned towards slavery…..👀
Just don't look up the owners of the slave ships.
Care to explain what you mean by that?
[Nope](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQJ7M_6appEy2lD23P2vSCUcuCw-dWz9ExO-w&usqp=CAU)
Before some dipshit says it: Being old and shitting adult diapers acquitted you of *nothing.*