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> I don't see much of a difference to post WW2-Germany when all Germans suddenly discovered that they had been anti-fascist all the time. As a 'West German' I
by lispm 11y ago
> I don't see much of a difference to post WW2-Germany when all Germans suddenly discovered that they had been anti-fascist all the time.
As a 'West German' I can assure you that this was not the case. Germans after WWII were fascist like before. Many even openly did admit it ('es war nicht alles schlecht unter Hitler', 'die Juden waren schuld', 'der Russe hätte uns sonst überfallen', 'die Wehrmacht hat tapfer gekämpft', ...). What they told is that they did not know about some of the crimes or that they did not participate, but generally there were very few claiming to have been anti-fascists or even 'active' anti-fascists (sabotaging the war, etc.). Most told you: 'ich habe nur meine Pflicht getan', or similar. Surely there were anti-fascists, but even those often served in the army and many died somewhere in Russia, because they fought for their country (that was what they told) or did not have an alternative. The few (surviving) people who could claim to have been active anti-fascists were met with a lot of hatred by those generations after the war, see for example Willi Brandt ('Vaterlandsverräter').
It took decades to get rid of the 'fascist' thinking. Mostly when those generations died away. Remember the controversy around the 'Wehrmacht' and the 'Kriegsverbrechen'? Decades after the war that was a hot topic.
- jlg23 11y ago> As a 'West German' I can assure you that this was not the case. Germans after WWII were fascist like before. That is what I was trying to say; I'm sorry if I did not manage to express that properly by crossing the line to cynicism. I wholeheartedly agree with your summary of post-WW2 Germany - parts of my family later claimed they never liked Hitler but that they had been fighting in WW2 for Kaiser Wilhelm! A good watch for people interested in post-WW2 Germany's way of coping with recent history is "We Cellar Children"[1] (boy hides communist during WW2 in basement, then his fascist father just after WW2 and then he is finally arrested later on for painting a swastika on a wall after a journalist asked him to do so for a report...) I don't agree with your implication that "fascist thinking" is a thing of the past in Germany - but that's yet another topic. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054479/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054479/
- lispm 11y ago> I don't agree with your implication that "fascist thinking" is a thing of the past in Germany 'fascist thinking' in general will never be a thing of the past. Not in Germany and not in many other countries. But the level of fascist thinking is relatively low in Germany - compared to the decades before or even to some of the neighbor countries (hungary, poland, ...).