How does Germany view D-Day in modern times?

[EinsteinsHund]

@ElvisL1ves

This seems like a good summary of how German views on the war and Nazism have evolved over the decades.

It does seem odd that the Nazis have come to be seen as an alien conquering force imposed on a freedom-loving people, rather than as an indigenous popular movement driven by real people in real conditions. It’s not easy to accept that ordinary people can be so susceptible to going along with hatred, as long as they think they’re benefiting from it, and that Germans of the 1930’s were not fundamentally different from people anywhere else. It can happen anywhere and at any time, and it often has.

I once wrote a long post that tackled that very subject in a similar thread, I have to see if I can find it again…

Ah, here it is:

@EinsteinsHund

That is a ridiculously simplistic statement about a very complex, decades-lasting and still lingering subject. You could write multi-volumed books about it (and I’m sure someone has). Hint: it didn’t went like this: the REAL bad guys got judged at Nuremberg (heck, a slimy clever handsome scum like Albert Speer got away with 20 years), the lower ranks got swiftly denazificated, everybody knelt down and swore “I’ll be a good boy by now and an upright commie-hater” and everything was wine and roses. Except for those many nazi war criminals who escaped, many via the rat lines with aid by catholic cleric and US intelligence, there remained millions of bureaucrats, officials, clerks, policemen, judges etc etc. who had been good functioning and loyal executives during the nazi era who just couldn’t get rid of without a break down of civil order. Those, well, were “denazificated”, but many stuck to their former convictions and their influence remained, most atrociously in the field of justice: the early Federal Republic of Germany was very reluctant to judge nazi criminals because of that influence, and the ball only really got rolling by the braveness of one prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, with the Auschwitz trials in 1963. The outcome of these trials were IMHO not ideal, to say the least, and the following history of the prosecution of nazi criminals by German justice was often embarrassing, up to today.

There’s, for instance, the famous case of chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s important secretary Hans Globke. When Adenauer (who himself had been a staunch anti-nazi, his personal reputation is undoubted in that regard) was confronted with Globke’s nazi past, he famously quipped:

@Konrad Adenauer

Man schüttet kein schmutziges Wasser weg, solange man kein sauberes hat.

One does not throw out dirty water so long as one does not have any clean water.

And this exactly was the common attitude in the early years of the federal republic. This radically changed with the student revolt in the mid-sixties, when the new generation dared to ask their parents and grandparents the uncomfortable, nagging question “What did YOU do between 1933 and 1945?”. In a longer process, the view on those shameful years changed in the following years also in the mainstream, and from about 1970 on a real confrontation with our own past could happen on every social level, and the Warschauer Kniefallbecame possible (and Willy Brandt got much flak from the right for his gesture). Of course, a fringe of that student revolt turned terrorists, the RAF, which bit us in the ass during most of the seventies, and was a cruel joke of history: the opposition against historical crimes of contempt for mankind turned into an outbreak of inhuman crimes, but it shows how our nazi past haunted us still.

I’ll cut it now, though I could go on and show how this is an important subject till today, but I hope you get my gist so far. And we haven’t even handled the denazification process and handling of old nazi cadres in East Germany yet…

tl;dr;: “denazification” is a complex subject.