#that the SS office will see as “capable of gainful employment”

[lesenbyan]

The great news for me is all the ableists that have been in charge of my department are No Longer and the one I thought was returning went to a different department.

Unfortunately, there is still every chance I'll be shoved back on freight only in a few weeks when another coworker returns from a leave for surgery

[gncrevan]

/post/170127287928/sniper-at-the-gates-of-heaven-wild-how-some I found this post of yours really interesting; where do you see this undercurrent manifesting?

Hey, I left this question unanswered for a while because I wanted to give it the attention it deserves. I am currently on holiday, so I finally have the time to address it.

For everyone else reading: the original post was about the influence of Nazi ideology after 1945 and I voiced the opinion that you still encounter a lot of it, often masked differently. Most of the sources I will link are in German because this is obviously not something that is being dealt with outside of Germany a lot, and many are quite recent because it has taken this long for the public media to address this part of our cultural history. Critical voices were often silenced and are almost forgotten now. In fact, critical voices are still silenced if they dare to say that this recent history is still present our views today. I will translate passages that I quote or paraphrase.

To understand the real effects of Nazi ideology after 1945, we first have to look at the influence Nazis still had in the 50s and 60s. Here is a list of former NSDAP members who went on to have a political career in the FGR (Federal German Republic). Please note that membership in the NSDAP was never a legal requirement and that you only “had” to join if you had any political or economic ambitions in the Nazi state, which meant supporting the ideology at worst and accepting it for your own gain at best. There were absolutely no guilt-free NSDAP members. All of them were Nazis, either because they believed in it or because they considered it to be ok if it benefited them.

In 1951, the Bundestag decided that all civil servants had a right to re-employment. Over 90% of former Nazi civil servants made it back into civil service: as politicians, jurists, teachers, public officials. “Not a single judge and not a single state attorney has been legally convicted for their crimes as part of the NS justice system.”

After the occupation, the old jurisprudence was simply reactivated, with the same staff that had served in the Third Reich. Most of this staff had been members of the NSDAP, all of them had carried out their will. “The young, terribly capable NS jurists experiences the peak of their careers in the sixties. They shaped the young Republic.” They received promotions and political influence. Hans Globke, who wrote an annotation that put the Nuremberg Laws on legal ground, became Secretary of State. Hans Puvogel, whose dissertation advocated for racist cleansing and eugenics, became Minister of Justice in Lower Saxony. Edmund de Chapeaurouge, former judge for race defilement charges, and Rudolf Weber-Lortsch, former SS leader, resided at the Federal Administrative Court until the mid-seventies. Former Nazi judge Willi Geiger served as president of the Federal Court of Justice and associate in the Federal Constitutional Court until 1977.

Germany’s first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was literally a Nazi sympathizer. While he had shown contempt for Hitler and the NSDAP as a politician of the Weimar Republic, and openly denounced them (in favour of monarchism, I might add), he later had no qualms putting a lot of former Nazis in his cabinet, and called SS soldiers “decent people”. Notable Nazis and former Waffen-SS in Adenauer’s/Kiesinger’s cabinet:

Karl Carstens, member of the NSDAP and SA, who used his later position as President to give political positions to other former Nazis, such as Bernhard Hinrichs

Hans Filbinger, a former NS judge

Hans Globke, see above

Kurt Georg Kiesinger, NSDAP member and propaganda liaison of the Foreign Office’s broadcasting department, who went on to become Chancellor in 1966

Theodor Oberländer, SA-Obersturmbandführer, assistant to Erich Koch, strong supporter of the ethnic cleansing of Slavic countries

Franz Josef Strauß, Oberleutnant of the Werhmacht, Nazi educator and “Offizier für wehrgeistige Führung”

Ernst von Weizsäcker, served as Secretary of the Foreign Office and Ambassador to the Vatican in the Third Reich

Maybe the most sinister way Nazi ideology continued to fester was through education. In the 1950s, a large majority former Nazi teachers and professors were allowed back into schools. “Everybody had to fill in a “de-Nazification form”, then everyone who had joined the NSDAP before 1933 was dismissed from service. However, a majority would later be reinstated into schools. That was in part because about 95% of people were somehow conntected to National Socialism, and “you can’t make a state with only five percent”, as contemporary mayor [of Hamburg] Max Brauer once said. Of course many tried to wash their hands of it and denied their involvement in the Nazi system, or claimed they had been acting under duress. If you didn’t have a chance to re-enter teaching [in one Bundesland], you could often do so in one of the others, sometimes under a false identity.”

These teachers continued to work and influence children, often using Nazi disciplinary measures such as excessive violence, putting great emphasis on physical fitness, openly spouting racist, antisemitic and eugenicist ideology, harassing and abusing Jewish, non-white, disabled and leftist children under their “care”. Famous authors Ralph Giordano (Jewish) and Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi (mixed Black) who both had Nazi teachers later reported this made them suicidal, incited violence against them from other children, and affected them for their whole life. On the other hand, as part of the rising interest in pedagogy in the 1960s and 70s, there was also a revival of the teachings of Peter Petersen. The reform educationalist had created the “Jenaplan” which was now the basis for a school reform -- but he had also written about Hitler as the “educator of the people”, sung the highest praise to the SS and SA, vocally supported eugenics and biological racism.

Now I am not saying that every concept is tainted because of its inventor, and there are definitely good ideas in the Jenaplan, but the problem is that Petersen’s Nazi history was conveniently ignored and swept under the rug instead of openly discussed. This behaviour is a constant in the way we have dealt with our living history, and it is the breeding ground for Nazi ideology to go unnoticed, to weasel itself into our minds undetected, to make itself look harmless and totally detached from its violent history.

That is what I mean when I speak of an undercurrent of Nazi ideology in Germany today. Because as long as we do not confront where our ideas and teachings and cultural norms come from, and what might lie behind them, we will always repeat things that have been brought into the world by the Nazis. It was them who introduced Mother’s Day and built our autobahn and we have to be aware of why that is and what purpose that served in order not to romanticize their actions and accept their ideas. It was former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who told us that our history doesn’t mean we cannot be patriotic, and that we should be patriotic, and if you do not question why that rhetoric came from people who openly served Hitler and murdered Jewish people and was eaten up by all those “good and innocent Germans”, you’re really not using your head to think. We still use Nazi terminology like “Endsieg”, “Endlösung”, “Anschluss”, “ausmerzen”, “ausrotten”, “entartet”, “Untermensch”, “Sonderbehandlung”, “Umsiedlung”, “Schutzhaft”, “Führer” and we should really question why we don’t feel sick every time we hear these phrases, why we don’t change our language, what mindset this reflects.

There is a reason why the AfD is in our Bundestag now and why people have no qualms blaming the foreigners and refugees for everything that goes wrong. There is a reason why I hear customers at work openly proclaim that Hitler wasn’t all that wrong, that he did good things for Germans, and that we need a strong leader. There’s a reason why a client who is a Social Democrat is talking about how the immigrants are all criminals. There’s a reason why every week my boss reads news headlines to me about how immigrant men rape German women and how foreigners bleed the German state dry. There’s a reason why they feel perfectly safe doing that. Germany hasn’t changed all that much. Nazis, racists, antisemites, fascists have always been in our midst. And we have covered for them.

The only way to truly oppose Nazism is to be vigilant about the ways in which it still informs our society. To never let anyone forget. Always bring up our history, our crimes. Don’t let the people feel safe in their complacency. Everybody is all too comfortable pretending that this is “over” and we don’t have to care about it anymore. But we do have to care! We have to be critical of ourselves and others! These people were our grandparents, our politicians, our parents’ teachers. These people are still in part alive and those who aren’t made sure to pass on their legacy to the next generation. And we are only one generation removed from that. We are part of it, and that is why we need to confront it.

Further sources (also German):

A collection of news articles from Der Spiegel about Nazis after 1945

Baby rearing methods from the Third Reich are still common

About the recent history of pedagogy

The Nazi jargon of AfD members

German authors returning from exile were shocked that there was “no reaction to what had happened”

Feel free to add if you have any good reads!

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