How did Germany stop being Nazis after the end of WWII? Did everyone just “snap out of it” after Hitler’s death?
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They abolished the party and made it illegal to be a Nazi. They also tried the leaders for war crimes.
There were a lot of politicians the Nazis had arrested or removed from office. The first leader of West Germany had spent time in a Nazi prison. The US and the Allies had a specific ‘De-Nazification’ program they used. It included things like forcing Germans to visit the death camps.
It was an extensive process of education on the part of the allies and the Russians of average Germans, also holding Nazi leaders accountable
There’s an old German joke and the gist of it is “Who were the Nazis” and the punchline is “someone else’s grandfather.” The joke is that clearly many, many people’s grandfathers were Nazis, but never yours!
It wasn’t like everyone “woke up” and realized they’d been evil Nazis and stopped thinking those things, they just didn’t have power any longer because they were literally destroyed by foreign armies.
They never stopped being Nazis they just lost the ability to be public Nazis. Maybe some of them changed their minds after seeing the results of the war, maybe a lot did, but plenty didn’t too and they didn’t go anywhere.
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A lot of people didn’t stop. They just stopped talking about the past. Or they talked about their views only in private.
Also, a lot of powerful people just kept their influence, and the institutions they worked for helped them by keeping quiet so as not to draw negative public scrutiny to the institutions past (there were a lot of outspoken Nazis in academia for example).
At some point it was then decided that the matter was dealt with and a thing of the past, but in reality victims often did not get justice, and their neighbors still had kept their racist views, and did not treat them better then before.
At least that is what happened where I am from.
Germany was full of Nazi supporters after the war. They just weren’t in a position to say or do anything about it. The country was [occupied](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Germany), its leaders were executed or imprisoned, it was not allowed to have a military until 1955, and it was split into two opposing halves until 1990. The people who emerged from all that were essentially denazified.
The Germans honored their surrender. Many of the leading Nazis killed themselves. Others just stopped fighting. There were no sleeper cells like we see in the Middle East, where the government loses but the fighting never ends.
Evil doesn’t stop being evil. Nor does evil just ‘appear’. No matter what label you put on a group, they don’t disappear when they aren’t the majority in power, nor do they suddenly appear when a political party you disagree with assumes power.
This is the problem with labels. Socialist, Libertarian, Communist, Republican or Democrat…evil people institute evil policies and usually hide it as ‘for the greater good.’
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