Very soon after the program started, due to the emergence of the Cold War, the western powers and the United States in particular began to lose interest in the program, somewhat mirroring the Reverse Course in American-occupied Japan. Denazification was carried out in an increasingly lenient and lukewarm way until being officially abolished in 1951. The American government soon came to view the program as ineffective and counterproductive. Additionally, the program was highly unpopular in West Germany, where many Nazis maintained positions of power. Denazification was opposed by the new West German government of Konrad Adenauer, who declared that ending the process was necessary for West German rearmament.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mean like the Mossad?
Can you explain what you mean?
And the anarchists would finally have utopia
France wasn’t clean either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Papon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33rd_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_Charlemagne