No, it is not apology for Nazis.

FYI: My initial comment was well into the negatives for a time.

A lot of people simply cannot look objectively at anything related to WW2. They know how it ultimately turned out, so they basically ret-con it as "they were pure evil from the start."

The problem is such mental models foster convenient explanations and justifications, not solutions for making sure such things don't happen again.

Most people's perception of WWII has devolved into 1950's type Hollywood western 'white hat' 'black hat', good versus evil story telling with little understanding of substance. Presumably this is because the generations that experienced it have died or are too senile to discuss it publicly these days. We will never learn

Following WW2, an awful lot of our fictional villains were German. That's changed relatively recently. Germans were the "trope" evil bad guy.

WW2 is actually even inspiration for, say, Star Wars. Darth Vader and his troops are something of a cross between Japanese samurai uniforms and WW2 German uniforms.

It's so deeply embedded, we don't even notice the connection. We don't question where those images come from. We just accept it as "Yup. Totes The Bad Guy! Looks Bad to me!"

There's a rather awkward question about when one thinks Hitler went nuts. To think the early years of the Nazi regime were acceptable requires overlooking the thuggery they used to get power in the first place, the brutal (and not secret) things they were doing to 'undesirables' already, and what Hitler had revealed of himself in 'Mein Kampf'.

On the other hand, I agree that no nation or ethnic group can assume itself intrinsically immune to such things.

My mother was a young child in Germany during WW2. I imagine she had no firsthand sophisticated understanding of politics at the time and was essentially repeating opinions of adults she knew.

But she was also remarking on one of the programs that provided servants to families. I don't recall the details. She could remember her family benefiting in some way from such a program.

Regardless of all those details, Germany was in dire straits and this was due in part to a global depression and in part due to how other nations were treating Germany post WW1. It was the people of Germany suffering because of all that and they likely did not have all the details we now know about Nazi tactics.

This was well before our highly connected modern communications. They used to play news at movie theaters during WW2. TVs were not yet widespread.

My mother's remark is firsthand testimony concerning the perceptions of ordinary people on the ground at the time. That isn't apologist. It doesn't mean any of the ugly political things people are reading into it.

It is interesting to me for that reason. It is rare insight into how and why Hitler could rise to power to begin with. At least some of the people at the time perceived him as doing good things for a country being crushed by outside forces.

Hindsight is 20/20. People pretty routinely are shocked to find where their path has led them. I don't see any reason to question the idea that the ordinary people of Germany could believe he was doing good for the country until things went very wrong and then suddenly feeling like "He's lost his mind and we didn't sign up for this!"

They weren't on Twitter watching political inquiries go down in real time. Things were different back then.

“As a small child, it seemed like Hitler did good things for Germany until he went nuts” would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say. They way you put it makes it sound like she never looked at what happened later and came to an adult understanding of the situation.

Yeah, let's not put my mother on trial here. She's not participating in this discussion. She's not here to defend herself from such nastiness.

I was a minor when the discussion occurred. That no doubt influenced the wording.

It was a private conversation at home between mother and daughter. She had zero reason to think she needed to defend the remark as if it were a PhD thesis or testimony in a war crimes trial.

You posted it to a public forum at least twice. Here, you’re using it as a jumping off point to argue that the perception of Nazis as evil from the start is a “retcon.”

If you don’t want to discuss it, don’t post it. If you don’t want to defend it, don’t base an argument on it.

That's a serious mischaracterization of my point. It's also justification for being nasty to someone who isn't here.

I'm not saying I'm not accountable for choosing to make the comments I've made.

It’s a mischaracterization of your point? You said:

> A lot of people simply cannot look objectively at anything related to WW2. They know how it ultimately turned out, so they basically ret-con it as "they were pure evil from the start."

I don’t know how else to read that other than as an argument that Nazis weren’t pure evil from the start.

Then let me suggest you just walk away from this one. Your tactics are ugly. Your understanding of my point is lacking. This isn't likely to go good places.

I plan to drop it. It's been surprisingly well received so far, by which I mean it didn't turn into a shit show. I see no reason to go there at this late stage in the discussion.

How am I supposed to read it? A retcon is going back and changing the original story. Applied to real history, it means the retcon isn’t true. If Nazis being pure evil from the start is a retcon, then that means Nazis weren’t pure evil from the start. Not so?

I don’t want to walk away from pointing out that Nazis were, in fact, as bad as everyone thinks and were that way from the start. The fact that it’s been well received just adds further motivation to point this out.

Nazi were violent from the start. If you read any detailed history book about what Nazi actually did and how they came to power pretty from around when Hitler joined, you find them being violent and hateful.

They were not only violent group around, that is absolutely true. But they were pretty bad even if you ignore Holocaust itself.

The victors always write the history, but only a few wealthy people actually 'win' a war.

'You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake'. Jeannette Rankin

I think I am among the winners. I would not exist had nazi won and implemented their plan.

How is “Hitler was doing good things for the country” not apology for Nazis? It’s not even subtle!

Nazis being evil from the start isn’t a retcon. Just look at their internal party purges, or how the Enabling Act got passed.

Half my family grew up in the Soviet Union and tend to love Putin, so, though not the above commenter, I can definitely answer this if you're willing to take an analogy.

Yes, a leader can be corrupt and dictatorial, and yes, they can strong-arm many people. To somebody with strong morals and heavily deontological beliefs, they can look at that leader and say "How could anyone support such a person?". The answer is to look at a concept like Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1] and realize that the supporters are likely pursuing an entirely different stage of needs than you. When your kids are hungry and you have to work from sun-up until sun-down to keep the family fed, and somebody makes it easier for you and your family to survive and maybe even have extra money at the end of the week, none of the moral ideologies against corruption or dictatorship really matter to you. That's why Russians give Putin such a high approval rating; they don't deny that he's corrupt, they just don't care, because their lives have improved.

The same can be said of hopeful Trump supporters to a lesser extent, in fact, and linked is a fantastic analysis on that topic (the most fair and analytical one I've read) [2].

My point is: the above poster's mother wasn't apologizing for Nazis. She was likely saying that, as far as she could tell at that point in time, similar to my Russian family, her family's life had improved. I don't see how that becomes false in light of future events.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

[2] http://inference-review.com/article/trump-and-the-trumpists

I totally get how people can support these leaders, and how they can look good from the inside. What I don’t get is taking a really bad one and, long after it became obvious he was horrible in every way, saying that he was good until he went crazy. (Edit: more accurately, I understand how a person can do that, but not without being a sympathizer or at the very least an apologist.) What I really don’t get is taking that and saying that the notion that he and his party were pure evil from the start was a retcon by the victors.