German Politics Thread

Top German court rejects bid to outlaw far-right NPD party

Not exactly a surprise....and maybe a good thing. Wouldn't want all the NPD voters to go to the Af D.

NPD members jumping ship to the AfD might actually cause their more moderate voters to abandon them. Most people don't want to be associated with Neonazis.

Though there are talks about cutting the NPD's state funding - because you're not supposed to use this money for anti-democratic purposes.

edited 17th Jan '17 12:15:15 PM by DrunkenNordmann

Speaking of the AfD.

Implied Holocaust denial, implied violence against ethnic minorities, invoking Prussia? Jesus.

I doubt it...there are already a number of former NPD members who are now politicians in the Af D and it doesn't seem to deter the voters in the slightest.

Is WW 2 revisionism still political suicide in Germany? To say nothing of barely veiled Irredentism...

edited 18th Jan '17 8:22:20 AM by Rationalinsanity

Well it thankfully still is,

but in recent years the left wing played the Nazi-card so often that a good chunk of conservatives apparently thought "If criticizing any aspect of liberalism makes me a Nazi then so be it".

edited 18th Jan '17 8:38:39 AM by Kiefen

WW 2 revisionism was never really political suicide as such - just look at the Historikerstreit for evidence, or the really convenient emergence of a cult of Erwin Rommel and the release of Wehrmacht political prisoners and a flood of propaganda praising the Wehrmacht's professionalism that happened conveniently in time to begin rearming West Germany with no input at all from the Federal Republic or the Allied Powers.

Holocaust denial is, of course, still A Big Deal, but if migrant-bashing was political suicide a non-insignificant amout of Bavarian politicians wouldn't have a job.

If your response to people calling you an oppressor is siding with the fascists because your feelings got hurt, I have very, very little sympathy for you or your cause.

Granted, I have a non-zero amount of sympathy for whinging European liberals in general, but that's unrelated.

edited 18th Jan '17 8:41:00 AM by math792d

The party leadership of the Af D has decided to refrain from trying to expell Höcke for his speech.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/populist-called-end-nazi-guilt-stay-german-party-001817102.html

This might be convenient since Höcke is probably the best warning for anyone who thinks of himself a "moderate" but considers voting for the Af D because he is unhappy with Merkel's refugee policy.

On a side note, I think the article about Rommel is now a bit too negative, but I' ll read more about him later on.

I am not surprised and yes, I actually think that this is a good thing. The more obvious it becomes what the party truly is by now, the better.

Rommel was a great captain stuck in the body of a mediocre general. While a keen tactical mind, he undermined the German doctrine by micromanaging his officers, completely ignored his logistics train and was quite predictable, if the accounts of the Australian general he faced at Tobruk is any indication.

On top of that, his 'good reputation' is somewhat unfounded. While he didn't personally hand over Jewish prisoners, he did have members of the Einsatzgruppen with him in North Africa, and didn't exactly try to halt them or sabotage their efforts. He was also a personal friend of Adolf Hitler and a member of the Nazi Party. He was fairly even-handed with British prisoners of war, which is probably part of what earned him that reputation, but that was a constant throughout the War - Allied prisoners were consistently treated better than Soviet prisoners.

Sure, he was 'the good Nazi,' but that's a bar so low even a snail couldn't limbo under it.

I like the way the article is now. It does its part in killing the Rommel Myth, which is a myth that really just needs to die already.

edited 23rd Jan '17 9:50:13 AM by math792d

Rommel is...complicated, to say at least. I guess he was a competent soldier, but his military abilities were exaggerated by Hitler (to give the Germans a symbol to look up to) AND the allies (as an excuse for the Brits dismal performance in Africa...in short, it is not that Rommel was that good, it was that his opponents were so stupid).

I think it is safe to say that Rommel did believe in the idea of a honourable soldier, how much he actually followed this ideal is difficult to tell. It is also safe to say that he admired Hitler as a person (or he admired the attention he got from someone so powerful), but it is important to note that Rommel wasn't a NSDAP member, and he actually understood so little about Hitler's politic that he once suggested that he should give a Jew a high position in the NSDAP in order to appease other countries. I suspect that he was actually a little bit of an idiot, but he just looked so much like the ideal German soldier that Hitler used him as his propaganda puppet.

Also, much like the slew of postwar memoirs written by ex-Wehrmacht general attempting to look apolitically at World War 2 (something that is impossible by the very nature of the warfare taking place on the Eastern Front), the Rommel myth was exaggerated in order to justify West German rearmament in the 50's in spite of, y'know, it barely having been two decades since they'd tried to take over Europe.

This might explain how the Rommel myth has developed, but by trying to rebuke one should not fall into the trap of exaggerating his faults. Rommel was certainly naive in his friendship towards Hitler, believing for the most time that Hitler gave some of his disastrous orders because the OKW painted him a wrong picture of the situation at the front. But there is also evidence that he grew disenchanted with Hitler, starting with his decision to retreat to Tunisia after El Alamein. He was a complicated person and fortunate to not have served at the Eastern theatre, but even disregarding the need to find a "good" German soldier after the war, not everything that is said about him is fabricated (it certainly helped that everyone else on the German side looks so much worse in comparison). His friendship with Hitler certainly helped, but it is not like his promotion to field marshall after Tobruk was unjustified (especially considering that Hitler had previously tried to lower the prestige of the title by granting it 9 generals after the Fall of France).

True...I mean, I recently looked into Nelson, from an English perspective, and came to the conclusion that he was actually an irresponsible idiot who was lucky that his opponents didn't expect anyone to be that careless during attack. Rommel also took a lot of risks, and way too many paid off.

That's not exaggerating his faults, though. That's acknowleding that he was, by all accounts, a middling general and a middling human being who just happens to stand out because so many of his contemporaries were busy being genocidal racists.

It's like finding a nugget of pyrite in a septic tank and mistaking it for gold.

Or, that he was a capable soldier with a consciousness but not the second coming of Frederick II and Georg Elser.

But this is not what the first part of Rommels article describes. It should be at the very least be mentioned, that Rommel's admiration for Hitler was not very out of the ordinary, there are many accounts of people admiring Hitler while being less excited about his ideology. Hitler was a charming, charismatic person, and just like many people in the Gulag supposedly believed that "if only comrade Stalin knew" they'd be freed, many people thought that some of the uglier sides of the Third Reich were not caused by Hitler, but by his underlings. Rommel's respect for Hitler started to evaporate once it became clear to him that Hitler did not care at all for the fate of his soldiers.

The debate among historians has basically evolved from "which side had the greater generals" to "which side had less incompetent generals" in most modern conflicts where we have enough sources, and in particular regarding WWI and WWII,

Edit: Wow, I just read that part here:

"To understand the myth of Rommel's chivalry and honour, we must understand what the German and Anglo-American publics were told about why they were fighting. In Nazi Germany/1950s-70s West Germany the war was considered: A defensive war against Judeo-Bolshevism, so the German people would not be enslaved and exterminated by the Jews at the hands of their Asian Communist puppets/A defensive war against Bolshevism, so the German people would not be enslaved by (Asian) Communists. A war of liberation-by-conquest, to civilise and uplift eastern Europe and racially-Aryan eastern Europeans by making them German/A war of liberation, to free eastern Europeans from (Asian) Communist Barbarism."

With all due respect, but this is simply not true and should be fixed immediately, at least the part "1950s-70s West Germany". I mean let us be honest here, Germans went to great lengths to downplay their own responsibility, but it was certainly not imagined that it had waged a defensive war against the East. I can say this as someone who had to read a lot of articles and speeches in the Adenauer Republic regarding "Vergangenheitsbewältigung".

edited 23rd Jan '17 12:25:31 PM by Zarastro

I wouldn't say that. I'd say it's more of a case of looking at a distance and appraising the general that history and popular media have praised (men like Rommel, von Manstein, Eisenhower, Bradley, Montgomery etc.) and their actual actions during the war, whilst looking at many often-overlooked generals (Bill Slim, Mark Clark, pretty much the entirety of the Commonwealth's command contributions, more or less all of the Soviet commanders) and highlighting their skill and trying to examine why they were overlooked.

Also, study of war has generally gone from appraising only the staff officers to look at logistics, production, training, equipment etc. And in most of those lights, especially the study of production and logistics, the Wehrmacht looks increasingly bad.

edited 23rd Jan '17 1:17:47 PM by math792d

Rommel was also one of the few military officers whom Hitler seemed to genuinely trust and confide in, as not only did the former serve as the latter's captain of bodyguards prior to the war, but Rommel was not born into a Prussian military family and was of a middle-class background unlike other high-ranking OKW members. Henceforth, the realization that Rommel had aided the Valkyrie conspirators proved to be a driving reason in why Hitler lost all faith in his generals thereafter.

Rommel had most likely nothing to do with the conspiracy. Which, in a way, would make him even more the "typical German" during this period. Most of them were neither particularly pro-Hitler or his politics, nor were they actively working against him. They "just" did the best with the world they were given. Some of them managed to make a career out of it, others just survived.

Anyway, I think the process for the Germans was more or less like this: After the war was lost, the allies did their very best to ensure that the Germans couldn't lie to themselves about the war. And that included forcing people to visit the KZ's directly after the prisoners were freed and actual marketing campaigns which hammered in again and again "this war was YOUR fault". And that actually worked very well...perhaps a little bit too well. What the story about the honourable Wehrmacht aso was actually about, was a different kind of lie. It was never about shoving the responsibility away, and more about the level of personal responsibility. If you lost a son, a brother, a father in the war, would you really want to believe that he spend his last days plundering and raping? After Germany won the World Cup in 1954, the Germans developed a sense of pride again and a feeling that yes, they could work their way up again. It didn't cause the Wirtschaftswunder, but it helped the population to stay optimistic about the future during dark times. The 1950s was also a "Don't talk about the war" period. People wanted to forget and move forward. The second phase of coming to terms with the Third Reich happened in the 1970s...that was a movement in the universities, which was about ripping away some of the old lies and actual talk about this period. Remember, a lot of those who taught back then had already taught or learned during the Nazi regime, and the students as well as younger teachers wanted a more open view on the time as well as actually discussing it. Nowadays you have two groups of Germans...the ones who grew up in the West and were raised on learning exactly what happened back then as well as being told again and again "it is your responsible to ensure that it doesn't happen again" and the one in the East which were taught "Russia is great" (if they believed it is another matter) and who lack this sense of "this is your responsibility". Hence the reason why the Af D is so much more successful in the former East and with older people living in the West.

Police raid homes of imams suspected of spying for Turkey

This whole thing with Turkey really worries me...I don't want Germany to become the battle field for the politics of another country.

...Didn't the Grey Wolves used to launch attacks in Germany on a semi-regular basis?

They are the largest right-wing group in Germany (which is kind of ironic) and therefore under constant watch. They are also a huge problem when it comes to integration. But aside from a few clashes with the Kurds, there hasn't been much of actual attacks, but that might be the result of the police taking down groups before they can actually get around to do something with the weapons they collected. I think the last time the Grey Wolves were officially connected to an attack in Germany was in the early 1980s.

edited 15th Feb '17 1:19:55 PM by Swanpride

Not sure if it came up in this thread/how this is being covered in Germany, but I've been seeing stories from today indicating that the whole "mass sexual assault by refugees story was completely false. Seems a bit late since at least in the United States, this was covered by a lot of reputable news outets (i.e.The Washington Post) even though it originated from the Bild, which I understand to be a shady tabloid paper.