In recent years, there’s been an effort made by Nazi sympathizers to redeem Nazism and Nazis. There are several issues involved.
One is that, as an ideology, Nazism has absolutely nothing to recommend itself. It is a colossal stupidity that should be left entirely in the past. It is based on hokey racist theories that cannot pass a moment of rational scrutiny. They wanted to kill off whole ethnic groups and they wanted to conquer the world. Of all the major ideologies of the world, it is the one with the least merit.
There is however another side to this. And this is as follows: Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state, and the choice that people had was either to be Nazi or be dead. There were a lot of people who were swept up in it who in other circumstances would have never become Nazis, and some of these were good people. These people, after the war, went on to build a beautiful, prosperous, livable country. They should be credited for that accomplishment and not only equated with their war crimes.
So we have people saying that Nazis should not be demonized. That is correct. They should not be seen as demons; they should be seen as people who did something wrong. I have been demonized myself, and I know how it feels. I do not wish such a thing on even the Nazis.
Now to be fair Nazis did a lot to deserve their demonization. They treated Jews and gypsies as less than human as well. They believed that these people were evil and could only be evil whatever they do. There is no excuse for that. Anything human is capable of choice; anything capable of choice can be good. This is as much the case for Jews and gypsies as it is for the people who are being demonized now – the narcissists and the sociopaths.
So that while there is no excuse for Nazism, there should be a better perspective on people who were a part of it. Many of them, once again, were swept up in it when they would never otherwise have been a part of such a thing.
At the conclusion of the Second World War, there were several famous incidents of Nazis being good to the Jews. As Nazism was falling apart all around them, these people regained their humanity. They had behaved in a horrible manner during the war because they were practicing a dehumanizing ideology. With that ideology falling apart, they became human again.
They remained human after that, and they ended up doing a lot of good. For example, they gave a lot of money to Russia during the perestroika. German people went from being the worst jerks in the world to some of the world’s best citizens.
There is no merit in bringing back an ideology that led them to be jerks. There is however merit in having a full picture of people who had been a part of it and seeing them as human.