As an American, I’d always thought that was just a weird hangup of the Nazis and their allied countries.
As a German, i've noticed that most people just associate the nazis with antisemitism and to a lesser extend racism, that their persecution of people with disabilities, sintizze and romanji, gays, the homeless, sex workers, jehova's witnesses and communists gets treated as a mere footnote. In some of these cases, this is slowly beginning to change, but all of these groups had to deal with massive prejudices in German society for decades after the war, and for some of these groups government repression just continued almost uninterrupted post-war. Homosexuality remained illegal well into the 1960s, communists who had just gotten out of the camps found themselves being banned from working in public sector jobs and their party getting outlawed, police kept databases on "g*psy activities" for decades. The country was still full of nazis, just as any country with a fascist regime of its own or sizeable number of collaborators or pre-war sympathizers. They just learned to be more mask on.
Yes, it took me until the 2000s to realize "de-nazification" was a lie, and to begin applying what I'd learned in college about how ancient history worked to more modern history (I, uh, am not proud it took me that long to apply what I'd learned).
And the fucked up part is that the continued racism towards the targets of the Holocaust makes sense, in that the culture & society that had enabled the Holocaust still existed. And they felt resentment for the crimes that had happened being exposed, alongside some repentance as well. Basically, "how dare you make us look bad by having been in the camps, and even worse, remind us of it by continuing to exist".
And then you think about all the anti-communist propaganda I grew up surrounded by in the 80s, and realized it was a useful fiction for NATO that all the "bad Nazis" had been removed. It feels, as an outsider, that all the reckoning that should have happened about the full scale of the Holocaust was just put into the Jewish part of the Holocaust. I'm glad you say it's changing, however. And I hope American education on it has improved, although I suspect it has a long way to go on the topic.
As a German, i've noticed that most people just associate the nazis with antisemitism and to a lesser extend racism, that their persecution of people with disabilities, sintizze and romanji, gays, the homeless, sex workers, jehova's witnesses and communists gets treated as a mere footnote. In some of these cases, this is slowly beginning to change, but all of these groups had to deal with massive prejudices in German society for decades after the war, and for some of these groups government repression just continued almost uninterrupted post-war. Homosexuality remained illegal well into the 1960s, communists who had just gotten out of the camps found themselves being banned from working in public sector jobs and their party getting outlawed, police kept databases on "g*psy activities" for decades. The country was still full of nazis, just as any country with a fascist regime of its own or sizeable number of collaborators or pre-war sympathizers. They just learned to be more mask on.
Yes, it took me until the 2000s to realize "de-nazification" was a lie, and to begin applying what I'd learned in college about how ancient history worked to more modern history (I, uh, am not proud it took me that long to apply what I'd learned).
And the fucked up part is that the continued racism towards the targets of the Holocaust makes sense, in that the culture & society that had enabled the Holocaust still existed. And they felt resentment for the crimes that had happened being exposed, alongside some repentance as well. Basically, "how dare you make us look bad by having been in the camps, and even worse, remind us of it by continuing to exist".
And then you think about all the anti-communist propaganda I grew up surrounded by in the 80s, and realized it was a useful fiction for NATO that all the "bad Nazis" had been removed. It feels, as an outsider, that all the reckoning that should have happened about the full scale of the Holocaust was just put into the Jewish part of the Holocaust. I'm glad you say it's changing, however. And I hope American education on it has improved, although I suspect it has a long way to go on the topic.