
Why are we obsessed with the Nazis? - diodorus
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/06/why-obsessed-nazis-third-reich
======
Htsthbjig
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.

~~~
byoogle
[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](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).

~~~
freshhawk
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...](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/man-
in-the-high-castle-when-a-nazi-ruled-world-isnt-so-dystopian/384708/)

~~~
detaro
Thanks for the info+link, I'm going to stay away then. I agree, this is so
important in the book.

------
MCRed
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.

~~~
stannol
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.

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

~~~
throwaway344
You can blame the American healthcare system, but the idea that people don't
get immediate life-saving treatment is simply not true.

They will get the immediate treatment that they need. It might be more
complicated, expensive, and painful than if it was dealt with earlier, but it
will still happen.

Look at the EMTALA. The wiki page is pretty good.

------
rdtsc
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.

~~~
philwelch
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.

~~~
rhino369
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.

~~~
DanBC
> And it is pretty clear nobody believed the actual horrors going on in them.

I've read conflicting things.

[http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=3946...](http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394663#17)

> As for the implementation of the "Final Solution" and the murder of other
> undesirable elements, the situation was different. The Nazis attempted to
> keep the murders a secret and, therefore, took precautionary measures to
> ensure that they would not be publicized. Their efforts, however, were only
> partially successful. Thus, for example, public protests by various
> clergymen led to the halt of their euthanasia program in August of 1941.
> These protests were obviously the result of the fact that many persons were
> aware that the Nazis were killing the mentally ill in special institutions.

> As far as the Jews were concerned, it was common knowledge in Germany that
> they had disappeared after having been sent to the East. It was not exactly
> clear to large segments of the German population what had happened to them.
> On the other hand, there were thousands upon thousands of Germans who
> participated in and/or witnessed the implementation of the "Final Solution"
> either as members of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, death camp or concentration
> camp guards, police in occupied Europe, or with the Wehrmacht.

[http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard)

> The mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler's
> Holocaust, according to a new research study. They knew concentration camps
> were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-
> defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being
> killed out of hand.

> They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of
> every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read
> about them. They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to
> them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of
> officially-inspired German media articles and posters according to the
> study, which is due to be published simultaneously in Britain and the US
> early next month and which was described as ground-breaking by Oxford
> University Press yesterday and already hailed by other historians.

~~~
rhino369
IMO that is a lot of should have known, and maybe that is true.

But there is a reason the Jews didn't really fight back. They had no idea at
the scale of death going on. They figured they were really being resettled in
the east.

The reports of extermination camps were considered just rumor or propaganda.

~~~
philwelch
Some Jews did really fight back, because they did know what was going on:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising)

------
blfr
_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?

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

~~~
pyre
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.

------
tokenadult
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/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-
Evans/dp/0143034693)

[http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-
Evans/dp/014...](http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-
Evans/dp/0143037900)

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Reich-at-
War/dp/0143116711](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/Nazi-Connection-Eugenics-American-
Socialism/dp/0195149785)

[http://www.amazon.com/Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe-
Pi...](http://www.amazon.com/Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe-
Pioneer/dp/0252074637)

[http://www.amazon.com/Race-Racism-Science-Interaction-
Societ...](http://www.amazon.com/Race-Racism-Science-Interaction-
Society/dp/0813537363)

------
scythe
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_.

------
peterashford
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).

------
mattmaroon
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
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.

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

------
guard-of-terra
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.

------
philwelch
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
Islamic terrorists?

~~~
mcantelon
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.

------
jqm
"We" aren't.

