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mursilissilisrum t1_ivexqld wrote

Reply to comment by anon83479953 in They fled persecution in Nazi Germany. Then the British put them behind barbed wire by lanzkron

> I think most of them were just poor kids who had been conscripted; the actual Nazi ideologues were held in much more secure prisons.

Actual nazi idealogues were rare. Those atrocities were committed by Germans for the sake of Germany. Regular Germans were pretty happy with the nazis until they ran out of countries to rob and the people they'd tried to enslave started to come after them for revenge.

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LinkesAuge t1_ivf28i6 wrote

Let's also not pretend that the racism of Nazis would have been a problem in most cases in the US of the 40's. (not to mention that Nazi Germany was "inspired" by the US in regards to certain things...)

The same is true for Germans/Germany. While the NSDAP certainly fueled it but core elements of that ideology were common enough within the population, the NSDAP (and Hitler) simply managed to focus all the bad stuff.

The Nazis are sometimes made into these super villains and people are quick to say "x wasn't REALLY a Nazi" but the reality of the time was that it really didn't need much to be in line with Nazi ideology and that didn't require for you to constantly think about industrial scale genocide which is really the thing that sets apart the Nazis/NSDAP from the other reactionary/right wing groups of its time (and even that might have been down to a lack of ability/opportunity and especially scale, not like you can't find at least somewhat similar examples in the time period).

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redcrowknifeworks t1_ivfv1i0 wrote

yeah, its basically nazi propaganda that all the bad things were like, somehow happening nation-wide with disturbingly low civilian resistance while also being entirely unsupported by the nation.

The civilians might have been shocked by how brutal the reality of the camps were but im never gonna believe the narrative that somehow a small group was able to hoodwink the entire nation of germany into accidentally carrying out a genocide.

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