The journalist that slapped one of these nazis in power in 1968 has my respect
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
274 points (99.6% liked)
You Should Know
45013 readers
473 users here now
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Rule 11- Posts must actually be true: Disiniformation, trolling, and being misleading will not be tolerated. Repeated or egregious attempts will earn you a ban. This also applies to filing reports: If you continually file false reports YOU WILL BE BANNED! We can see who reports what, and shenanigans will not be tolerated. We are not here to ban people who said something you don't like.
If you file a report, include what specific rule is being violated and how.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You probably mean Beate Klarsfeld. The Nazi she slapped was then-chancellor of West Germany Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Her work also helped bring several high-ranking Nazis and war criminals to justice, Klaus Barbie being one of the more well-known ones.
Shit like this is why I shake my heads at dumbasses going "Just you wait ICE agents! Things didn't work out too well for all the former Nazi's who tried to say they were 'just following orders'!"
Yes things actually did turn out just fine for the overwhelming majority of Nazi's. Only like a couple dozen faced any sort of consequences. The rest quietly returned to their lives as machinists, butchers, office workers, farmers, etc.
This was a huge societal topic in the 70s as the after-war generation were becoming adults, and many realizing that their own father had been a nazi
Honestly; I’m curious how does one de-program another person. How do you denazification, defascism etc.
When I look at the world right now, it feels as if these things never left. Nazis stayed Nazis, fascism stayed with fascistic people.
All the while capitalism uses it to gain more money and wealth while looking at the world and not giving a care.
It's probably a similar kind of approach as would be taken for cult deprogramming - fundamentally, a form of therapy, to deconstruct the harmful beliefs and brainwashing of the ideology from first principles.
Unfortunately to your second point, I don't think that's the best approach either. Check out the first 6-12 months of the Iraqi government rebuild during the Iraq war. The Americans basically fired 20,000 Iraqi officials and military members who then had nothing to lose anymore. They then immediately started an insurgency.
Also after these fascist take overs, it's not as easy as simply saying "you're a Nazi, therefore you go to jail" because if you didn't swear fealty to the new government (i.e. if you were Democrat you would now have to call yourself Republican) you could be summarily executed on the spot (check out the video of Sadam's take over).
So you could resign. But then you get called a coward by armchair generals for not trying to stay in the system and slow it down as much as possible.
So you stay in and keep your head down, and may try to slow the processes down enough to hopefully save some innocents without getting pulled out back and shot. But then you're called a Nazi collaborator. Idk, I would probably just as well resign, but that could put a target on your back, too, because you're basically outing yourself as hostile.
Personally, i think how we handled it after WW2 wasn't perfect, but should be the goal. There's always clean up that can happen even years afterwards. But if you go purging an entire country's worth of government officials, you have to replace those you purged with equally qualified people. And you often find that those who are eager to step in, are often just eager to enact revenge, or in some cases, even worse than their predecessors because they are just opportunists who now have the good graces of the new regime who just wanted a quick transition to a friendly government.
Pure copium, sorry. The US invasion of Iraq should never be used as a template for anything. The US itself is a fascist nation and has been since it's inception.
"I'm fighting the system from the inside" is 100% pure cope, too. There was plenty of german resistance to the Nazi regime from outside the system.
“I’m fighting the system from the inside” is 100% pure cope, too.
Eh, 100% pure cope is a bit hyperbolic.
There are at least tens of thousands of accounts of Jews who lived, in part, because of the intercession of people who existed within the Nazi infrastructure. We just don't most of the names because people couldn't actually use their names when operating within resistance networks, but there are some famous accounts, like Schindler and The Pianist.
It is not always possible for people to work outside of a fascist system, and to pretend that it is is absurdly idealistic.
Eh, 100% pure cope is a bit hyperbolic.
Yeah, you're right, I've amended my original comment.
Oscar Shindler: pure cope.
To be clear, I'm not saying that it never happens, I'm saying that for most people who feel that they can do more good fighting the system from inside, that's pure cope. The story of Oskar Schindler is interesting because it is exceptional. The other commenter is right that my original claim was hyperbolic, so I've edited it.
I never said Iraq should be the template, I implicitly said Post-WW2 recovery should be. I was referring to Iraq as an example of what not to do, because it was specifically called out for a purge of Nazi officials at every level, which is exactly what happened in Iraq.
As for German resistance, yes of course there were forces outside of government, and they used insiders for information. To believe anything otherwise is just being willfully ignorant, and a waste of time.
Not very civilized, but highly effective.
How do you make a good Nazi? They have a saying about that.
The French executed a lot of them, like 10,000 to 15,000.
Shutting their brains off entirely seems effective.
you can't unless the other person wants to. they need to realise their mistakes and be willing to never commit them again and attempt to amend them if possible.
a lot of people taken in by fascism were originally and continue to be in poor living conditions. if they are first guaranteed all basic human rights & the required needs to live, talking to them about their politics will be a lot easier.
does this mean people who helped commit genocide should be allowed to live as if they've done nothing wrong? definitely not, they should have all tools that they used removed from them, be separated from their pervious co-conspirators, and all other measures required to keep society safe. does that mean that they should all be forced into concrete boxes with no rights? also no, as that is depriving them of their humanity, and removing any chance of them cooperating.
the real method of removing fascism is very complicated and highly dependant on the specific situation. the consent of the broader community needs to be taken into account, and restorative justice needs to be achieved.
So this often comes up and there's a lot of opinions. I often reference the Nuremberg Trials as an example of how a society expresses the consequences of not changing behavior and ideology. You know, if the failure of their war, and the craven suicide of their fuhrer hadn't already.
But, probably the best example is Pu-Yi and how the CCP handled the Chinese emperor that collaborated with the Japanese.
In short: education and work. Teach them the right way and make them work a job that satisfies the material conditions of a common citizen.
Your suggestion sounds dangerously close to "work will set you free"
It's about what happened with leadership of fascist imperialist movements. Do you know about Puyi? (Or Nuremberg?)
But if you want to build that connection though, of all things, that'd be your effort. That's on you.
I read that while denazification largely failed, the cold war got going and Germany realized they needed to pass pro-Democracy policies to garner aid from the rest of the free world. The next generation of Germans largely turned away from nazism and here we are today.
Someone similar happened in Taiwan. The KMT under Chiang Kai-shek weren't really pro-Democracy either, but they knew they had to steer policy in that direction to win international support.
The Israeli Knesset is democratically elected, too. Under capitalist economies, a democratic system just means that the state is for sale. I'd argue that's why western-backed powers moved towards democracy, it's a progressive-seeming veneer on the reality: these nations are functionally oligarchies.
Fascism is a social disease that is injected by the bourgeoisie into the petit-bourgeoisie during times when capitalism is in crisis. They do this through propaganda and economic warfare like austerity coupled with tax cuts for the rich. This results in an economic downturn that hits the “middle class” the hardest (relatively - poor people are also fucked, but they had less to lose in the first place). Economic woes coupled with divisive and authoritarian propaganda and — boom — fascism.
So how do you stop it? Well, ultimately by dismantling capitalism and removing the power of the bourgeoisie. Otherwise fascist crises will just keep being manufactured.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Not just west Germany. There was also a pipeline from the Gestapo to the Stasi.
The cold war ended up preventing the denazification programs from being concluded everywhere.
At some point the occupation administration realised that if they got rid of all the nazis there wouldn’t be a functioning government, legal system or military.
This is no excuse. The Allied powers could and should have trained up anti-fascists to fulfil those roles. You should be asking yourself why they didn't.
They wouldn't do that because the only durable anti fascists are leftists and they spent decades trying to destroy leftism.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The western nations had a similar problem with debathification in Iraq. When a system invades and takes over a state how do you keep things running while ripping it's influence out?
There's a scene at the end of Band of Brothers where the guy from Easy company is taking to a German who's recollecting the countries he's visited while at war. It's a reminder that not everyone in Germany was a Nazi but it was hard to sit it out in a nation committed to Total War. It might be easy to say you'd never sign up to the party but if the choice was between staying in the civil service or being shipped off into the meat grinder? Where else could you go?
We never really have the luxury of tearing down whole societies and rebuilding from scratch in a more prefect form. Generally the countries that have gone through such radical changes have paid for it with a lot of suffering.
And the anarchists would finally have utopia
That's interesting, do you have a source for that? I'd like to learn more, I did a quick search and I didn't find anything, and the Wikipedia article said this:
In contrast, in the Soviet occupation zone and later East Germany, denazification was considered a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society, and the country was stricter in opposing Nazism than its counterpart.
I'm not defending the USSR by any means, just to be clear, I know Lemmy has a bunch of tankies, I'm not one of them! I just would like to learn more.
The soviets declared the denazification to be complete in march '48, before the GDR was even formed in '49
Btw your quoted wiki section is missing a source :/
While I'm not overly educated in the history of denazification in East Germany, I know that at least later, it was more of a proclamation than something actually happening. That's why so many neo-nazis "suddenly appeared" in the supposedly nazi-free zone after the unification of the germanies.
Supported by the fascists in the west that had never gone away, the unified right made quick progress in their organization.
One example I found is https://www.dw.com/en/book-claims-stasi-employed-nazis-as-spies/a-1760980, but I have seen other sources in the past too.
There is a relatively famous clip of Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, were he said that it was important for him to create a friendship between the German an Jewish people as the Jews are powerful and control so much especially in the USA. I wonder why he opposed Denazification...
West Germany messed up badly, but Austria was worse.
"but it's our heritage!"
The vast majority of the doctors and psychiatrists who participated in and pioneered the nazi genocide of disabled people continued to practice medicine and hold major academic positions of power for decades.
Relevant section of the article: Denazification#End
Relevant quote:
As a result, many people with a former Nazi past ended up again in the political apparatus of West Germany. In 1957, 77% of the German Ministry of Justice's senior officials were former Nazi Party members. Included in this ministry was Franz Massfeller, a former Nazi official who had participated in the meetings which followed the Wannsee Conference, in which the extermination of Jews was planned.
East Germany, in contrast, declared everyone that opposed the state to be a 'nazi' and had them imprisoned.
Even before denazification was officially abandoned in West Germany, East German propaganda frequently portrayed itself as the only true anti-fascist state, and argued that the West German state was simply a continuation of the Nazi regime, employing the same officials that had administered the government during the Nazi dictatorship. From the 1950s, the reasoning for these accusations focused on the fact that many former functionaries of the Nazi regime were employed in positions in the West German government. However, East German propaganda also attempted to denounce as Nazis even politicians such as Kurt Schumacher, who had been imprisoned by the Nazi regime himself.[34] Such allegations appeared frequently in the official Socialist Unity Party of Germany newspaper, the Neues Deutschland. The East German uprising of 1953 in Berlin was officially blamed on Nazi agents provocateurs from West Berlin, who the Neues Deutschland alleged were then working in collaboration with the Western government with the ultimate aim of restoring Nazi rule throughout Germany. The Berlin Wall was officially called the Anti-Fascist Security Wall (German: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall) by the East German government
Yeah that's right, I can quote wikipedia too.
You realize I'm not a tankie, right? I don't care to defend the USSR or East Germany in any way.
the West German state was simply a continuation of the Nazi regime, employing the same officials that had administered the government during the Nazi dictatorship [...] many former functionaries of the Nazi regime were employed in positions in the West German government.
Gotta hand it to them, though, sometimes they do call balls and strikes.
East German uprising of 1953 in Berlin was officially blamed on Nazi agents provocateurs from West Berlin
While I'm sure there absolutely was popular opposition to the increased work quotas, I can believe that this might have some truth to it, too. There's absolutely shitloads of evidence that Western powers love to turn civil unrest into uprisings and attempted coups in socialist and anti-imperialist countries.
Gotta hand it to them, though, sometimes they do call balls and strikes.
What materialist analysis does to a MF
Probably why German born peter thiel is destroying the world now
I recently read the book aftermath from Harald Jähner. In the last chapter he argues that this sort of “clemency” for the nazis was necessary to recreate the German society. After the war there were still 6 million Nazis, and one way or another these had to be integrated in society. That way was to start with a new beginning for everyone. According to the author it was mainly the children of that generation that did wanted to deal with the crimes and horrors of their parents past. Years later, in the 60s and 70s.
Link: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ce8bc276-180b-4c3c-9d79-9585178fd2b1
Think of all the jobs that would have been provided by building prisons to house those 6 million Nazis and give them therapy until the antifascist psychologists declare them safe to return to society?
load more comments
(1 replies)
Yeah, and honestly it worked better than purges have historically.
Debaathification is an extreme and when it and similar practices have been attempted after the destruction of a government, it’s the populace that suffers most.
view more: next ›