Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/06/why-obsessed-nazis-third-reich

by diodorus • 11 years ago

55 76 11 years ago

tokenadult• 11 years ago

The three-book series on the Third Reich by historian Richard Evans[1] (the author of the essay kindly submitted here) was recommended to Hacker News readers in a comment in August 2014. I am glad I saw that recommendation. Three volumes of thoroughly footnoted history covering a lifetime (Bismarck's era to the end of World War II) in a large country was a lot of reading, but I'm glad I plunged in. The Allied war effort against the Nazi regime was a big part of the young experience of several of my uncles, and undoubtedly shaped the childhoods of both of my parents. And of course the result of World War II redrew the map of Europe. I think it's useful to be aware of the facts (and Evans's book series digs deeply into the facts) and not just the legends about the Nazis.

Anyway, the Nazis still have followers today. I have been doing research on a younger generation (that is, people with birth years like my parents, in the 1930s) of neo-Nazis[2] in the postwar era, and there are even people younger than that (birth years in the 1980s and 1990s) who haven't learned enough about Nazi history to know that the Nazis are no example worth following for anyone. We must never forget.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/01...

http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-Evans/dp/014...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Reich-at-War/dp/0143116711

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Connection-Eugenics-American-Soci...

http://www.amazon.com/Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe-Pi...

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Racism-Science-Interaction-Societ...

rdtsc2• 11 years ago

It was the latest party in Western world that launched a World War & proceeded to coldly, methodically and institutionally to exterminate groups of people based on their race, skin color, belief.

Now the reason I mentioned the War is because the War they started was lost by them. Had they won, who knows what the history would have been like.

It is also worth mentioning that US population has not necessarily been that terribly outraged by what Germany was doing. There were German communities that celebrated the fall of Paris at their Octoberfest festivals. Also Eugenics was going in full swing in US has well. Sterilizations of "inferior" people was praised as the new way forward.

US businesses have not exactly come clean in their dealings with the Nazi germany. Especially, IBM and its Hollerith tabulating machines. Those have alledgely been using in concentration camps. And those were not just buy and forget type deals. They had to have IBM technicians go visit the sites to fix and maintain them. For all I know, IBM hasn't opened their archives yet to be scrutinized for their connection with the Nazi Germany.

VLM• 11 years ago

"For all I know, IBM hasn't opened their archives yet to be scrutinized"

In a post photocopier era, if you downsize a quarter of a million citizens (probably more) over several decades and nothing surfaces, that proves nothing exists. Maybe everything was shredded in a big cover up in a pre-photocopier era. Maybe, perhaps most likely, nothing ever existed.

pyre2• 11 years ago

If said information did exist, how many people within IBM would actually have access to it? How would IBM top-brass not see this documentation as a potential liability when the Germans became the enemy or at least when the Germans lost the war?

I think that it's highly unlikely that such documentation was allowed to exist if it ever did exist in the first place. If it was allowed to exist past the 1940s, it was probably placed under lock-and-key. I doubt many of the rank-and-file IBMers would have access to it.

philwelch7• 11 years ago

Sweden had an active eugenics program until 1975 and practiced compulsory sterilization until 2012. Eugenics was extremely fashionable across the Western world and only ended because of its association with the suddenly-unfashionable Nazis.

The U.S. had groups like the German-American Bund because the U.S. was and is a diverse country with freedom of speech. Other Allied countries had similar groups, such as the British Union of Fascists. Actual support for Hitler was a small, fringe minority.

On the other side of the scale, individual Americans had been traveling overseas to fight against the Axis powers for years, dating back to the Spanish Civil War when the 2,800 American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought to defend the Spanish Republic. Also, the US supplied the Allies with $50 billion worth of food and supplies (over $650 billion in today's dollars), contributed militarily to the war, and spent another $17 billion ($160 billion in today's dollars) on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe afterwards. So, maybe let's take a look at everything in context and consider that, yes, individual people in a free country will sometimes support the wrong foreign leaders but "the US population" was not behind Hitler and repeatedly reelected governments that went above and beyond to contribute the nation's wealth and manpower to Hitler's defeat.

fennecfoxen• 11 years ago

Sweden had an active eugenics program until 1975 and practiced compulsory sterilization until 2012.

The state of North Carolina's program lasted until 1977. http://www.journalnow.com/specialreports/againsttheirwill/

rhino3692• 11 years ago

The US population wasn't totally anti-Hitler at first, mostly because Hitler didn't go full evil until pretty far into the War.

The early parts of fascism looked good. Germany was growing economically when the US was shrinking in the Great Depression.

The early mistreatment of minorities was swept under the rug. Remember, in 1935 the United States could probably be described as a lite-apartheid state. Jim Crowe wasn't all that different than Nuremburg laws.

The deathcamps came only after the war started. And it is pretty clear nobody believed the actual horrors going on in them.

It's easy to say that the world kept their eyes shut, but even Jews on train cars to Auschwitz didn't know they were going to an extermination camp.

But Germany was a first world, educated, fairly liberal country. If the holocaust could happen there, it could happen anywhere on earth.

geographomics• 11 years ago

Also the UK still invokes compulsory sterilisation, there was a case this past week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31128969

DanBC2• 11 years ago

It was the latest party in Western world that launched a World War & proceeded to coldly, methodically and institutionally to exterminate groups of people based on their race, skin color, belief.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Genocide

sukilot• 11 years ago

We have terrible genocides, but each has been relatively narrow in scope and easy for Americans to ignore. WWII consume the doing powers of the earth. Yugoslavia was in Europe, but not the wealthy part.

rdtsc2• 11 years ago

Didn't launch a World War and the number of victims wasn't comparable even.

There is also something to be said about it being institutionalized and methodical. You know, tabulated, planned, as opposed to crazies going around raping and killing.

All genocides are terrible, I am just explaining why perhaps that one particular is so prominent.

drumdance• 11 years ago

I think it's also because Germany was brought back into the democratic fold (or at least half of it was), and Nuremberg enabled lots of access to documentation almost immediately after the fact.

Statin's crimes weren't fully revealed until two generations later, and Mao is still mostly unknowable.

tomphoolery• 11 years ago

Also Eugenics was going in full swing in US has well.

For anyone who's interested in this part of the Nazi story, of which I am personally fascinated with, I urge you to check out Homo Sapiens 1900[1], a documentary about the Eugenics movement directly prior to World War II. Among other things, it basically chronicles the ideology and people who influenced Hitler, then goes on to show how these people's beliefs were embedded into the doctrine of Nazi Germany. What it does not focus on is the actual Holocaust, this movie is just talking about the philosophies that led to those atrocities. It's somewhat disturbing, but also enlightening, to see how some slightly hate-filled ideologies and pseudo-scientific beliefs can be combined with military might to form an almost unstoppable menace.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0176825/

Htsthbjig2• 11 years ago

"It is also worth mentioning that US population has not necessarily been that terribly outraged by what Germany was doing."

You can see film archives today and see people like Henry Ford and American Bankers as the main supporters of Hitler at the time.

Ford alone gave Nazis millions of dollars. He believed that "something has to be done with the jews".

blfr2• 11 years ago

The ideology that underpinned Stalin’s policies of mass extermination died in 1989 with the fall of communism, but the racism that drove Hitler’s lives on in myriad forms that continue to trouble the world today.

The opposite is true. While countries like North Korea and Cuba continue to experience the joys of communism in all its range (from genocidal to merely impoverishing), the west is so obsessed with not being racist that we will let heinous crimes slide, or even actively cover them up, like in the Rotherham sex abuse scandal.

I do wonder why communism gets a pass. Is it because they won and had half a century more for propaganda? Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning?

darkmighty• 11 years ago

I think if those countries people started widespread revolt against the regime the willingness of the west to intervene might change, but as-is a) You can't tell people their way of government is "wrong", on the principle that if capitalism was a minority you wouldn't want to be suppressed either; b) Most countries don't care and would find it hard to come up with support for an invasion from population/congress/etc c) They're just two nations, not a growing part of the globe as in cold war. As far as starvation goes, I don't think either of those two have refused external food aid. As crazy as Kim Jong-un is he doesn't want his population to starve.

blfr2• 11 years ago

I didn't mean to imply that anyone should intervene in DPRK, or Cuba, or anywhere else. Just that communism did not disappear in '89 and that our social norms around those ideologies are weirdly incongruent.

pidg• 11 years ago

Arguably, the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter, while the USSR, North Korea et al have created a highly bastardised version of communism.

pyre2• 11 years ago

I think that it's arguable that the Khmer Rouge carried out the closest attempt at pure Communism, but it's not like that turned out all that well.

That said, plenty of people associated things like the Stazi/KGB with Communism. I haven't actually read Marx's manifesto, but I highly doubt that his "worker's paradise" involved disappearing masses of people and a "report your neighbour, Comrade" mentality[1].

[1] Though I do know that he thought that there would be a progression like "Democracy => Socialism => Communism" and that each transition would involve bloody revolution.

mcantelon4• 11 years ago

the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter

Is there fascist literature detailing mass extermination? It seems they went beyond the letter.

And when speaking of communism, don't forget China which is also strongly authoritarian. If every implementation of Communism ends in tyranny then perhaps the ideology isn't compatible with reality.

philwelch7• 11 years ago

Revolutionary leftism is immensely fashionable today, and anticommunism is treated as a joke while antifascism is treated like a sacred duty. People like Oliver Stone are taken seriously when they publicly support communist dictators like Castro (who is such a great leader, he has to try to keep people from leaving his country, and whenever they send their national baseball or soccer team to the U.S. for a tournament some of the players defect). A film director who publicly supported Pinochet would be blacklisted forever, but we consider it a travesty that, for a few years in the 50's, Hollywood blacklisted people for supporting Stalin.

freshhawk3• 11 years ago

Isn't it a reasonable difference that a director who publicly support Pinochet would be "blacklisted" in that people would shun him and it would be unpopular to work with him? There would not be a show trial and an official state sponsored blacklist for him or her to go on, it wouldn't be systematic and rife with corruption.

That has, in my mind, been the main reason it was considered a "travesty".

vacri2• 11 years ago

North Korea is not communist, it's a dictatorship.

mcantelon4• 11 years ago

Communist countries inevitably end up in tyranny because expecting a ruling caste (party members) not to abuse that power is naive.

auganov• 11 years ago

I think it's just that there were more communist countries in the last century. It's easier to dissociate communism from Stalin than Nazism (and Fascism) from Hitler. Also it's harder to link communism with genocide on an ideological level.

notahacker• 11 years ago

Both Naziism and Stalinism died long ago, but only one of those ideologies died with Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps. And only one of them emerged from a developed democracy.

CmonDev3• 11 years ago

"...Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps..."

Are you from some parallel universe, where allies and not USSR had won the war and liberated people?

icebraining3• 11 years ago

Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning?

That can't be it, because fascism and nazism both involve massive central planning and State intervention. For example, the plan for the NSDAP[1] included such points as "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government", "Big industrial companies should share their profits with the workers", "We also want a law to take over land if the country needs it, without the government having to pay for it; to abolish ground rent; and to prohibit land speculation", "The State must protect health standards by making a law for compulsory gymnastics and sports", etc.

Likewise, if you read Mussolini's and Franco's speeches and writings, they're both very critical of capitalism and markets in general (which were often connoted with the Jewish people) and defended the creation of State-run or at least State-sanctioned monopolist corporations to take control of certain sectors of the economy.

[1] http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSDAP_25_points_manifesto

CmonDev3• 11 years ago

"...merely impoverishing..." - that's because of the sanctions not ideology or dictatorship.

mattmaroon• 11 years ago

I used to wonder why people hated on Nickelback so much. I mean yeah, they suck. But there are lots of bands that are worse. Go to your local metal bar and you'll find two of them tonight. Or listen to the full albums of most one hit wonders.

And there are bands that are more successful than Nickelback too. They're not even on Wikipedia's list of the best selling music acts, though they're not too far off. They've never won a single Grammy.

But it's virtually impossible to find a band that is both. If you multiply suckiness by popularity, you get a number in Nickelback's case that's astronomical. And I think that's what makes them so fascinating to people. It's not that they suck, and it's not that they're so successful. It's that they suck AND they're successful.

The Nazis are similar in that they were quite evil and quite "successful" (for a very evil definition of the word success, at least). They were really the Nickelback of genocide.

dylandempsey• 11 years ago

Ha. For me it's because Nickelback was so overplayed in Canada, so if you didn't like them anymore you couldn't get away from them. Canada has regulations that radio etc has to play a certain amount of Canadian content so they were heavily used to fill that quota.

philwelch7• 11 years ago

Ah yes, the same infamous Can-con regulations that foisted Celine Dion on an unwilling world.

MCRed• 11 years ago

Part of the obsession with the Nazis is because so many people don't understand what they were about and why. For instance, this article implies that they were just racists. Racism is a consequence of their ideology, not the reason for it.

Worse, we even have used them to short circuit discussion and close off self criticism with the "Godwins Law" trope. (godwin never said that those who use nazis as an example are wrong, he merely said eventually they would come up.)

We've (the USA) become a nation of holocaust denying racists because we believe that only germans (genetically) can be fascist and thus what happened in germany could never happen here, and anyone who brings up parallels automatically loses the argument.

Just because some people do so poorly, does not mean there are not parallels. Many of the propaganda pieces you see against muslims in the USA are similar to the ones against the jews in Nazi germany. The ideology of "you tell people they are being attacked and then you get your war" rings true here as it did in Nazi Germany. Even the precursors to the rise of fascism in german have existed here and had some similar consequences - high monetary inflation, economic problems with a lack of jobs, a lack of self esteem combined with a "we're the best country' form of nationalism. etc.

The nazis were never really properly studied in my schooling and my understanding is that history teaching has gotten only more superficial since.

A lot of understanding of what's happening in the USA and the world at large came out of an initial early interest in german history (because I lived there) and the consequent study of economics (Ludwig von Mises, a jew, prominent among them, who was scoffed at when he told other jews that they would have to leave austria because the nazis were going to invade.)

Anyway, the superficial understanding of the nazis and nazi era germany expressed in this very article is why we need to actually study the subject, obsessed or not.

closetnerd• 11 years ago

This is exactly it. It's as if Hitler was uniquely vile. There is no other person's name so well known, while the person himself so unknown. I think historians are scared that if he was better known, that he might have sympathizers. But this is ridiculous. Even in the biblical narrative, Lucifer was once God's favorite. Yet that doesn't take anything away from him being the Devil.

It's important to know about the atrocities committed. But even more so to understand that he was not the only, and furthermore will not be the only. There are people like him hellbent on similar outcomes. We can't avoid repeating history if we examine them at the superficial level, rather than on an abstract, psychological, human level.

baddox• 11 years ago

Racism is a consequence of their ideology, not the reason for it.

Can you explain that? It seems unlikely to me, given that racism is extremely widespread and is presumably just a consequence of the tribalist origins of human civilization. I suspect that specific parts of their formal ideology were chosen to explain or justify their much more deep-seated racism.

stannol2• 11 years ago

I'm German but spend a lot of time in the US. I don't mind Nazi/WW2 jokes (even though I've heard all of them a hundred times), I don't mind that as soon as I mention that I'm from Germany someone will eventually bring up the Nazis/WW2 in conversation, I don't even mind that (very few) people think I'm a Nazi. What gets me every time though is how many people think that it could have happened only in Germany because the US is somehow different (as you said "genetically"). It's really unsettling.

Tycho2• 11 years ago

'That it could have happened only in Germany' is an open question IMO. Or at least, if it isn't, then it's not obvious why (bearing in mind most people are not historians).

CmonDev3• 11 years ago

Just start asking them whether any of their ancestors owned slaves. Also why do they let people without insurance and money simply die helpless.

peterashford2• 11 years ago

I believe the Milgram experiment conclusively proved that a significant number of people can be coerced into doing the unthinkable when an authority figure tells them to. And this effect is universal.

weeksie• 11 years ago

The article delved into the forces and influence at work, mentioning Bismarck's genocide, Ataturk's national identity, as well as the Reich being a solid part of the colonial era (if the English can run India, why can't Germany march over Eastern Europe?)

high monetary inflation, economic problems with a lack of jobs, a lack of self esteem combined with a "we're the best country' form of nationalism. etc.

I agree with some of your critiques of the US (mostly the propaganda stuff), however you're reaching pretty hard on these comparisons. Lack of national self esteem? Laughable if you're comparing it to post WWI Germany. Inflation? That's outright wrong, inflation has been flat ever since the financial crisis. And jobs are back.

disputin• 11 years ago

I was thinking this comment sounds a bit alarmist and paranoid, and Alex Jones came to mind. Lo and behold, you mentioned von Mises. Racism and fascism are not equivalent to the holocaust. Even apartheid era South Africa was not equivalent to the holocaust. There are many degrees of shit between happy and holocaust.

mc322• 11 years ago

It's obviously untrue that only Germans could have been fascists as we had Italian and Japanese fascists, among many others, and, moreover the did execute their fascist beliefs to the extent they could resulting in some horrible things.

Htsthbjig2• 11 years ago

Because they lost, and it is free to criticize them. Also there were survivors.

Stalin killed millions of their own people too and how many films you see about it? Few films about China revolution too. It was not politically correct.

Part of my family comes from a communist country. If the party came to acknowledge that you stored pictures or any other document or proof of "past errors" you will have lots of problems, so most people destroyed them. Delation was normal even between family members.

When you kill them all, there is very few people that could write the History. Most of what we know of the native Americans genocide comes from the very few Americans that opposed that. But most Americans were certainly ok with killing the people there if they and their families could profit from it.

larrys• 11 years ago

"Stalin killed millions of their own people too and how many films you see about it? Few films about China revolution too. It was not politically correct."

To oversimplify things a bit a large reason for the obsessions has to be the availability of a large trove of images (movies, pictures) describing the event.

In a somewhat similar way people are obsessed with the Kennedy Assassination (and Kennedy and "The Kennedys" for that matter) no doubt driven in part by a large amount of images of a youthful Kennedy as well as obviously the zapruder film. Plus much of that unrolled on TV (the funeral I remember sitting in front of a TV watching as a youngster).

byoogle• 11 years ago

[Slightly OT] Amazon just put out a pilot of The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history about the Axis powers having won WWII based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSGFRY8 (watch! since popularity and feedback determine which shows get picked up and I’m hoping this one does).

freshhawk3• 11 years ago

For those who read the book, one of the changes might be very disappointing. They really seem to be taking out the best theme of the book, I would say the entire point of the book in favour of an alternate history that lets them have a resistance movement that gets to chant "USA USA USA".

This Atlantic article explains it better than I: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/man...

gnarbarian• 11 years ago

Another fascinating thing about them was their technology. Their subs, guns (stg44 first assault rifle) rockets (v2 first effective rocket) and airplanes (me262 first jet airplane) were considered decades ahead of allied technology.

We invested in the bomb and the computer instead. Without vonn braun we never would have gotten to the moon.

LyndsySimon• 11 years ago

The Nazis invested in the bomb too, through alternate means.

mc322• 11 years ago

Another issue is the USSR were our 'allies' so we could not immediately condemn them and as you imply they were part of the victorious party so they could make their own history, so to speak and ignore their gulags and the starvation of millions of Ukrainians.

another thing I think is important is the immediacy. Germans directly controlled our fate --if they won, we'd have been their subjugate, PRC, USSR, while enemies, were not the 'death of civilization' kind of threat, so who cared what murderous and genocidal things they did to themselves. Another thing is someone to have it a cause to propagate the story of the events. Those victims didn't have as great an agent to carry their story of genocide and suffering.

philwelch7• 11 years ago

The Nazis are the only real villains left. People will laugh at you and probably call you a McCarthyist or Nazi if you are anticommunist.

ghobs91• 11 years ago

Islamic terrorists?

mcantelon4• 11 years ago

It's much safer to pontificate on the evils of the past than challenge present evil, especially given the sponsors of Islamism, such as Saudi Arabia, are very wealthy and influential.

There is also the association, in the West, of Muslim terrorists with immigration (as Islamist terror attacks in the West have largely been committed by immigrants). Many in the media sympathize with the ideal of open borders and focusing on Islamism is seen as potentially undermining this idea.

scythe• 11 years ago

Because "if it could happen in Germany, it could happen here".

22:35 <&scythe> Do you understand why the Americans all had a problem with democracy?

22:35 <&scythe> And the Australians and Canadians were on board?

22:36 <&KinGAleX> Because you're mostly Germans?

A belief in American idealism -- up to about 1933 or so -- was that democracy was naturally, thermodynamically, the end-game stable state of human civilization. Sure, other democracies had failed in the past, but there was always an excuse. It was easy to believe until 1930 that the replacement of a democratic system with a despot could never happen in a modern democracy. After all, Italy had always been poor, and France had become a stable republic post-1871. Weimar Germany, at the time, was the world's second-largest economy, and had a largely fair and free electoral system.

Imagine tomorrow that Japan, modern Japan, becomes a Nazi-like dictatorship, and you start to see some of what the appearance of the Nazis in Germany looked like to Americans in the 1930s. We're obsessed with the Nazis because Naziism is an idea we can be afraid of; we don't have to worry about Americans trying to form a caliphate or having a Marxist revolution. We're totally unafraid of, say, Japanese-style imperialism, because Americans could never adopt a early-20th-century Japan-like imperial culture, obviously.

guard-of-terra• 11 years ago

Same thing happens in Russia. People in power, who were brought under Soviet regime, now soft-suppress research and education about Soviet wrongdoings. Honestly can't wait for them to retire / die out.

jqm• 11 years ago

"We" aren't.

peterashford2• 11 years ago

Because the people who have the biggest reach in telling stories about history (Hollywood) are American and the Nazis made an impact of the US via their impact on the Jewish people. If the US or US citizens has suffered the Rape of Nanking I imagine that we'd have more films about evil Japanese or films about Stalin or Pol Pot if your population of film makers were related to people who suffered under those despots.

It may be somewhat myopic, but it's understandable. At worst, it ignores other people's pain and elevates one people's suffering as the only suffering. But it is still understandable (if lazy).

Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?

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