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I feel like we strongly underestimate as a culture just how effectively Nazism was neutered in Germany.
And Germany specifically, I will add. Fascism in Italy and Japan was nowhere nearly as effectively wiped out.
And Germany specifically, I will add. Fascism in Italy and Japan was nowhere nearly as effectively wiped out.
There are, of course, still fascists in Germany (AfD being the most prominent example). And that is worrying.
But if you compare Germany to basically *every one of its neighbors*, the fascists have a lot less cultural power.
But if you compare Germany to basically *every one of its neighbors*, the fascists have a lot less cultural power.
In Poland, right wing authoritarians *are* the government. In Austria, the ruling party was founded by fascists (though, oddly, anti-Nazi fascists) and the Freedom Party (founded by actual Nazis) won 16% of the last election. The largest party in Switzerland is openly far right.
In France, the government is at perpetual risk of falling into the hands of xenophobic fascists every time there's an election (Le Pen and Macron are neck and neck for the upcoming presidential election). In the Netherlands, the far right PVV is the second largest party.
In Belgium, the situation is pretty much the same as in the Netherlands. And in Denmark, the far right Danish People's Party was part of the ruling coalition as recently as 2019 (though thankfully they lost a lot of seats that year).
In Germany, by contrast, the AfD, has never been a part of the federal government or ruling coalition and while it's growth is concerning, it has consistently been denied any legitimacy by the larger parties.
It also, due to German laws implemented after WW2, is forbidden from advocating a lot of explicitly fascistic stuff or using Nazi symbolism. This isn't as important as keeping them from holding power in the first place but I do think it is noteworthy.
On a related note, I think everyone on the left who likes to wave the flag about how West Germany got off too easy and the Soviets crushed the Nazis better should be aware that AfD's geographical base of support is... East Germany.
But in any case, how did German fascism get neutered?
It's a complex question that honestly should be the subject of a longer study, but what I know about German politics and history leads me to the following conclusions:
It's a complex question that honestly should be the subject of a longer study, but what I know about German politics and history leads me to the following conclusions:
1) They lost World War II and they lost it *really* badly. It's amazing to consider now that the country is the economic heart of Europe, but Germany was utterly ruined in 1945. Barely a major city was left standing. It was at the utter mercy of the Allies, both West and East.
2) The Allies prosecuted the hell out of Nazi war criminals, at least at first. While an unfortunately large number of people did slip through the cracks, it's worth remembering the scale of the Nuremberg trials were still basically unprecedented.
Top level and mid level criminals alike were brought before military tribunals and sentenced to imprisonment or death. The entire world saw Germany punished for crimes against humanity and remembered. And Germany remembered too.
3) Relatedly, the Allies shoved the horrors of the Holocaust in the faces of the German people. There was a significant sense of "you did this and even if you didn't you let it happen" across the whole country. Collective guilt was strongly established.
4) The Allies also implemented a strong program of Denazification. This was eventually abandoned but was official policy from 1946 to 1951, not an insubstantial amount of time.
During this time *anyone* who'd ever been a member of the Nazi Party or the SS was denied work for the government and in many cases were imprisoned. An estimated 400,000 people were placed in internment camps as part of this policy.
It basically established (along with the Nuremberg Trials and the Allies giving forced tours of the concentration camps) that no, you couldn't just say "I was a member of the Party but I didn't do anything." Again, collective guilt.
5) The new German Constitution (called the Basic Law) was written with the explicit intent of preventing someone like Hitler from ever taking power again.
It declared, among other things, that the purpose of the state is to protect "inviolable human rights." In fact, the clauses upholding human rights are *special* because they *cannot be amended* unlike every other part of the Basic Law.
Later German laws established similar provisions and the government actually has an entire bureau dedicated to monitoring groups which are considered to threaten the democratic values of the Basic Law (though to avoid abuses they can't arrest anyone, only monitor and report).
6) Now comes the controversial bit.
After all this was done, the Western Allies *forgave* Germany.
After all this was done, the Western Allies *forgave* Germany.
The original reconstruction plan for Germany was to quite literally reduce it to subsistence agriculture. The Allies drew up a plan after WW2 to forcibly deindustrialize the entire country, so that it could never regain the capacity to wage war.
It was pointed out this would probably result in most of the German population starving to death because there just wasn't enough arable land to support the existing population. An estimated 25 million Germans would have died.
The Allies ended up changing their minds, probably both because that sounded unnecessarily ghoulish *and* because increasing tensions with the Soviets meant they had a practical reason to want an industrialized West Germany.
Cold War tensions definitely played a part here since one of the first conflicts to emerge between the Soviet Union and what became NATO was the question of whether to reunify Germany, with NATO deciding a unified Germany would probably fall under Soviet control.
So the British, French, and Americans deliberately decided to go about encouraging the formation of a Western-allied government based in Bonn, which led to the creation of the Basic Law and the gradual relaxation of Denazification as well as the Marshall Plan.
The Marshall Plan, more than anything else, probably got the West German government (and more importantly, the West German people) firmly on the side of NATO. In contrast to the "let them starve" approach, it directed $12 billion to *rebuilding* Europe... including Germany.
The UK, US, and France went from terrorizers, occupiers, and executioners to deliverers. And the deal only got better once the West German government came into being, implemented the Basic Law, and held open elections.
So to bring this extremely long-winded thread to a close... I think we beat fascism in Germany because we were willing to dig it out, stem and root. And I believe we were able to make that victory semi-permanent by helping Germany to turn a new leaf afterwards.
I don't think giving Germany a free pass would have worked. In Japan we implemented the same reconstruction programs (more or less) but didn't go to anywhere near the same lengths to hold the country responsible. And the far right is strong in Japan today.
The same is true in Italy, which got off even easier than Japan. And France, which, for all the celebration of the French Resistance was, in fact, very compliant and even participatory in Nazi crimes for a majority of WW2.
But I also don't think a purely punitive approach works either. The hottest bed of far right politics in Germany is, as I said, East Germany, where the Soviets never really stopped treating Germans as the enemy.
And in Russia itself, I feel turning our back on them after the end of the Cold War is to a large degree part of how Russia fell back into authoritarianism within a decade and is as virulently anti-Western as the USSR ever was.
Lastly, I think the checks and balances the German government implanted after WW2 (under pressure from the Allies of course) are incredibly important. It's not enough to know something is wrong or to punish the wicked. You have to set up systems to catch them in advance.
Anyhow overly long rant over.
