Discussion Main / AllGermansAreNazis

Deleted. Never Mind.

Title change?

This is a good article and definitely still a popular trope in popular culture, but could we add a separate article named "All Germans Are Evil" too? Or instead rename "All Germans Are Nazis" into the broader "All Germans Are Evil"? Because to quite a lot of people Germans still seem to be synonymous with people who are evil by nature. The Nazism aspect, of course, plays an important role in this perception, but quite a lot of people consider Germans to be evil not just because of World War II, but also because they were the enemies during World War I as well. You see people mixing World War I stereotypes like pickelhaube, Der Kaiser and The Red Baron along with Nazism and most of the time it all boils down to the idea that they are all obedient, warmongering soldiers and militaries. Margaret Thatcher infamously protested against the German reunification in 1990, because she feared they would start a new war. Also, I noticed in The Simpsons, for instance, that a lot of times the jokes at the expense of Germany are not solely because of their Nazi past, but referring the so called "fact" that they are all evil. To me, "All Germans Are Evil" reaches a larger summarization of this trope than just "All Germans Are Nazis". Perhaps an idea for consideration?

You think we should say somewhere that the paranoia of this trope is a scourge on immigration in Germany and that it tried to discourage it from happening again via heavy censorship

This is from the main page. I didn't write any of it, and it wasn't under any heading. Can we boil it down and maybe stick it up in the main part of the article, or down under Real Life?

• Many non-professional portrayals of German history, and a few professional ones, divide it into three simple stages: "People who weren't Hitler but might as well have been", "Hitler!", "Not Hitler." Kaiser Wilhelm? Nazi with a good moustache. Bismarck? Nazi with good sense. Frederick the Great? Practically invented Nazism. The whole "but he was gay!" problem is generally glossed over. Barbarossa? You guessed it, red-bearded Middle Ages Führer.
  • To be brutally fair, some of them (particularly Bismarck and Wilhelm) certainly laid the ground for Hitler and shared some goals in common with him, just to a far lesser extent, and helped prepare the German people to accept him when they came along. The weren't Nazis, but they weren't nice happyfluffy people either. Frederick the Great and Barbarossa weren't charmers either, but they were more akin to the mainstream of their time and had a far smaller impact on German Fascism than the Imperial order did.
    • To be absolutely brutally fair, if Great Britain had become a country ruled by Nazis instead of Germany, we would today read about how Henry VIII began the British Sonderweg, and how Oliver Cromwell prepared the country for Nazism. George III would be vilified as an early Hitler predecessor, and the long reign of Victoria would be scrutinized for signs of the impending dictatorship and genocide (like the Boer concentration camps or the clusterfuck in India they would be found and mercilessly used for villification). In short, it's still absurd nonsense no matter how much Germans are still Acceptable Targets.
      • Sorry, but while that is probably true (that we would have read of them as such), there was a qualitative difference between the two dynasties, particularly when you ask the question of WHY would Britain turn Nazi in a timeline while WHY would Germany not? For one, the British monarchy was nowhere near as autocratic or as militarist as the German one was, and generally created systems that did not entirely run on the will of either one man or a cloistered unelected elite at the top (granted, said elite WAS there, but they were far less autocratic- see the fairly early establishment of an independent parliament, particularly after Charles I had his head severed). In many cases, the similarities break down. It is well worth noting that Bismarck devastated the German electoral system whenever it didn't fit his needs while George III- for all the propaganda- DIDN'T (indeed, few people bother noting that he ruled pretty much entirely within the bounds of the constitution and never sought to overthrow Parliament even when it turned against him). Which is all the more amazing when you consider that George III lived in an era that was far more autocratic and generally hostile to Liberal reform than Bismarck was. Victoria likewise ruled within the bounds of parliament and while she exerted considerable informal power, she could not buck Parliament's formal power and by most accounts didn't really care to do so. Oh yeah, and those Concentration Camps? They were first used to far more brutal effect by the Spanish, who set them up with German engineering support. Cromwell WAS a military dictator and a religious theocrat, but he again at least was sympathetic to republican reform and many of his stances in fact are still enshrined in constitutional law. The Medieval comparisons are just stupid, because there was no real "uniform way" for him to start his "separate way" from. The Anglican issue was mainly aytypical for its day in its longevity rather than its unusual premise (see the German wars of religion). And you are also forgetting one inconvenient fact: namely that most of the Nazi leadership came of age during the Imperial Era and assimilated a LOT of its ideas, which they used as inspiration later (who came up with the first industrial gas chamber for use in ethnic cleansing, hmm?). Had Britain actually gone Fascist, it would either have owed far more to a different historical development (particularly a more authoritarian model like what flourished on the continent) or a radical change in both circumstances and results by the existing British Nazis. In short, it would have owed its development to people like the trailblazers of the modern authoritarian German state such as Bismarck, the OHL, and Kaiser Wilhelm II.