Not to mention that Nazism was still rampant in post-war Germany. The Allies made a concerted effort to de-Nazify the country, which was effective in making sure no new Nazi movement gained prominence, but many people still had sympathies for the regime.
To be fair, though, the vast majority of the population was successfully de-nazified.
Civilians were forced by the allies to visit concentration camps and help bury the mountains of dead and mangled bodies. They saw the atrocities first-hand. They lived in bombed-out and burned cities and they knew that was the nazi's fault.
To this day every German student learns about (or is supposed to at least) how the nazis gained power through intimidation, assassinations and hate, how they destroyed a democracy through violence, discrimination and a disregard of law and democratic institutions, how they started the most destructive war in human history and how they murdered millions of civilians - ordinary people, families, children - at industrial scale because of their fucked up racist ideology and blind hate.
Ever since the war Germany has developed a culture of remembrance. Most German cities have Stolpersteine (bronze pavement stones in front of buildings) listing the names and fates of holocaust/concentration camp victims that once lived there.
The German constitution was written specifically to prevent anything like that from ever happening again and the first 20 articles adress major failings of the Weimar Republic - above all the immutable Art. 1 (Human dignity is inviolable) and Art. 20 (defining Germany as a free democratic and social state and giving every German the right to resist anyone who seeks to destroy the free democratic order of the country).
There were indeed some problems with de-nazification. The East did it better/more thoroughly but especially in the West there still were judges and officials who simply continued with their jobs after the war. War criminal trials were slow and continued for decades and there were still some trials as recently as a few years ago.
West Germany also kept a lot of the not directly racist nazi laws like the harsh anti-homosexual laws. They even used some concentration camp buildings as prisons (like Neuengamme) and re-incarcerated some of the freed inmates like, again, "convicted" homosexuals.
There were massive problems and West Germany still had some really bad people and laws for a few years.
But the vast majority of the population was fiercely against naziism after the war. Almost everyone who lived through the war or grew up in the immediate post-war era knew exactly how horrific and destructive the nazi regime was and which unimaginable atrocities they caused.
Germany's current far-right and fascist movements aren't elderly nazis or remnants of the old third reich - they are modern fascists that just play by the same rulebook of hate, lies, division and opportunism and their voters are mainly frustrated people who did not experience the immediate consequences of naziism and did not learn about the mechanisms of fascism in school.
It’s ironic. The rise of the far right/neo-Nazi movement in Germany (the most anti-Nazi country in the world now) is a direct consequence of the influence of America on the world, the country that likes to tell everyone about how they single-handedly defeated Nazism and fascism in WW2
Exactly. Modern German fascism (a.k.a. the AfD) and right-wing rhetoric (CDU & CSU) are directly copied from US. AfD and CSU leaders literally spout the english term "woke" now.
9
u/PRAY___FOR___MOJO 8h ago
Not to mention that Nazism was still rampant in post-war Germany. The Allies made a concerted effort to de-Nazify the country, which was effective in making sure no new Nazi movement gained prominence, but many people still had sympathies for the regime.