this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 49 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Spoiler...
They probably were.

But to be fair, Germans took a lesson from history, at least in the west, in the east however, they covered it up. And so AfD grew from the east with the help of Putin and Trump.

[–] PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not sure that's accurate. I mean, Heusinger, who was a high-ranking member of the Wehrmacht, was later a West German general, and a Chairman at NATO. Definitely striking, but not the only similar example. Denazification was woefully incomplete.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Just being part of the Wehrmacht doesn't automatically make you guilty.
You also can't put everybody in prison for being a member of the Nazi party.
To exaggerate it a bit, it sounds like you think genocide against Germany was the only moral response, but that is of course not at all moral, and would make the allied forces worse than the Nazis.

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Genocide? It feels like you're making a few leaps of logic there.

Either way, if they were a high ranking military commander in nazi Germany, they likely didn't get there by being nice and virtuous. To place them in another centre of power seems a little odd, at the very least.

[–] NeilNuggetstrong@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Shows just how important it is to learn from your country's history

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Other countries too.

[–] Tolc@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Germans took a lesson from history

Not really

And DDR prosecuted and ran intensive denazification programmes

I knew Dance Dance Revolution was good for something!

[–] forkDestroyer@infosec.pub 1 points 1 day ago

Wouldn't this be an example of them taking a lesson from their history?

I just stayed in the east for a few days. Nazis are openly wearing their identifiers there. Saw a couple and instantly knew they were Nazis: Both in the same Lo-NS-dale jackets, boots, the guy with the classic short hair trim plus to make it obvious for even the dumbest person he had a belt striped horizontically in black white red.

[–] ohulancutash@feddit.uk 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It was heavily covered up in W Germany too.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Bullshit, after the war it was revealed to the Germans in Western Germany how bad it was.

[–] ohulancutash@feddit.uk 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Post-war, the orthodoxy in German historiography was that Nazism was a crime committed by a small criminal group, that the German people were the victims of this crime, and that there was nothing specifically German about Nazism.

While functionalism emerged in left-wing historical thought in the 60s, whereby the wider population were held not merely victims but enthusiastic participants in Nazism, the orthodoxy sought to rehabilitate the Third Reich.

This culminated in the Bitburg incident in the mid-80s where Reagan and Kohl participated in a public ceremony to honour all the war dead including the SS buried there. Reagan’s justification was that the SS were just as much victims of the Nazi criminality as the European Jews, and that Germany must shed its war guilt.

So no bullshit at all.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

~~You are distorting something that has an element of truth so much that you are losing contact with reality. Neither Reagan or Kohl ever claimed the SS were as much victims as the Jews were. You are guilty of creating fake history, and that is actually a crime in EU!!!!~~

Sorry looked it up, he did say something pretty close to that. And I agree that is insane IMO.
But still a bad argument, first because it was 35 years after the fact, and West Germany did a lot to clean up their act for decades before that. Second because Reagan was an American, and does not reflect on what Germans did internally.

[–] varnia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 days ago

Yeah, found both my grandparents who said they didn't know anything and were afraid to act back then.

[–] yesman@lemmy.world 32 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Something like this may be handy when MAGA's start taking off their hats and peeling off the bumper-stickers.

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 day ago

They really aren’t hard to identify. Perhaps they can be a little hard to distinguish from nonvoters in some cases. But otherwise they reek of ignorance, arrogance, and confident incompetence.

[–] ranslite@pie.dasneuland.de 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)
[–] porter70000@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago
[–] lauha@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If nationality == german:
return true

[–] ranslite@pie.dasneuland.de 3 points 1 day ago

sad Sophie Scholl noises

[–] statelesz@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 day ago

It just defaults to "Yes".

[–] benjirenji@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 day ago

Found some where last name and city name matched, but asked my mom to narrow down the search.

[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

My German ancestry predates the Nazis, but I probably have relatives who were.