General Discussion

In my little town outside of Düsseldorf, once it was clear the Third Reich's National Socialists were really done and not coming back, some things happened that I have never seen in US history books (it's true that the victors write the history books). The townspeople knew that the NS regime had killed many, and buried them in makeshift cemeteries outside of town. When the Allies were in charge, the townspeople forced the former NS rulers to go where they had buried their victims, dig them up, and carry the remains to one of the town cemeteries for proper burial. The town HQ of the Geheime Staatspolizei (GeStaPo) was later transformed into the Anne Frank Elementary School, where both of my daughters went.

At Allied insistence (and oversight), at least the West did confront their Nazi past, and eventually became the mostly pacifist nation that the Federal Republic is now. The socialist east stayed true to the control freak principles that charcterized the regime that went before it, and conveniently just said, "we're all good socialists now--no need for denazification, no more Nazis here, they are all in the West." Socialists or national socialists, the German control freaks were a nasty, feared regime while they ran things. But the repressed Nazi sentiments in the east that the socialists "solved" by declaring they were no longer there, resurfaced with a vengeance, giving rise to the neo-Nazi AfD (JD's good buddies, as his recent visit to Munich showed), whose greatest support is-surprise!-in the east, where the socialist regime (SED) had "miraculously gotten rid of them." The SED regime even kept the old Third Reich military uniforms, only replacing the helmets with upside-down salad bowls, so as to be able to say, "no we aren't!"