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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In addition to what’s been mentioned above, in Germany they teach about the Holocaust. They don’t try and pretend it didn’t happen or that it was just a few ppl participating. They take full blame and teach how it was wrong.
Remember how someone proved you were wrong in front of someone or a group of people and you just got really quiet and felt anger and frustration at that person, because you aren’t wrong at all and they’re just clever with words?
That.
Edit: to be clear, the Nazis were wrong.
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.
A few reasons. A good chunk of Germany didn’t agree with the nazi ideology, they were just in the wrong place. Germany still have veterans earning pensions for serving in ww2. Germany made it illegal to be pro nazi. Another reason is that a lot of Nazis were killed off. Think of it as Darwinism. You also have to remember that being a Nazi was a political party and it didn’t work so people abandoned it. Like how a lot of Russians in other countries are anti communism
Read up on Dreher’s Law… Aside from everything else that’s been commented on, much of the postwar law hindered and buried a lot of the past because Nazi judges and lawyers, themselves not held directly responsible for war crimes, had architected the law and continued to serve in the German legal system.
So it took a very long time to hold these people to account and purge these remnants, to prevent them from continuing to influence German society.
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.’
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.
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.
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It was an extensive process of education on the part of the allies and the Russians of average Germans, also holding Nazi leaders accountable
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