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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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.
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 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.
They abolished the party and made it illegal to be a Nazi. They also tried the leaders for war crimes.
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