I appreciate the effort here, and this is history I am very aware of to be clear; maybe my phrasing was wrong: The Nazis, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers' Party, deliberatly apropreated the asthetic and rehtoric of a working-class movement, even adopting the word Socialist into their party name, to capture working-class support in their rise to power. What I'm unsure of is if this was understood at the time, by the party leadership, to have a dual character: garnering working-class support while also tarnishing or muddying socialism as an idea through its association with their party and activity.

Holding a parade with the army of the Bolsheviks, having so theorly attacked them over the years, is a strange thing to do. It would be interesting to read if German papers wrote about this parade and how it was framed. The point I'm trying to articulate here is, clearly, throughout history post WW2, historians and economists alike have attempted to conflate socialism and nazism as twin ideologies in practice, and I wonder if this was something the Nazis understood during their time in power and actively attempted to foment through things like this parade. How many people of the time believed this pact represented a kind of commonality or shared ideal, and how much of that is strictly ahistorical interpretation?

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 5 points 4 weeks ago

I feel like the Nazis probably understood this a little bit at the time, because the "holodomor was a genocide" narrative was popularized by Goebbels as a way of justifying the Nazis and OUN-B, etc. doing real genocide.

When I was poking around about the subject, one theory I saw was that the Nazis wanted to allay fears from the German people about war with the Soviet Union by making the relationship look much better than it was. I think between that and saving face over ceding the territory, it overall makes sense.