someone appears to have done so, which is a shame...the list of people involved was quite nice, including...I believe it was Speer who was to be spared despite some involvement in Operation Valkyrie?
To be a Master
There doesn't seem to be a large emphasis on the origin of the word Nazi (as in the coinage of the abbreviation term) which from what I've glanced, the Nazi Party rarely if it at all used that word to describe themselves as (most of the time, they used National Socialist instead). I found this online, an etymology on the word Nazi
. This what it had to say:
....
The NSDAP for a time attempted to adopt the Nazi designation as what the Germans call a "despite-word," but they gave this up, and the NSDAP is said to have generally avoided the term. Before 1930, party members had been called in English National Socialists, which dates from 1923. The use of Nazi Germany, Nazi regime, etc., was popularized by German exiles abroad. From them, it spread into other languages, and eventually was brought back to Germany, after the war. In the USSR, the terms national socialist and Nazi were said to have been forbidden after 1932, presumably to avoid any taint to the good word socialist. Soviet literature refers to fascists.
There's not much else talking about where or how the word Nazi comes from aside this one, so I cannot say if it's fully accurate. But it does make sense if the shortened abbreviation was originally used as an insult by political opponents.
Edited by Shadao
HGW XX/7
Should we move the section on Wehrmacht members to Nazis With Gnarly Weapons?
Schild und Schwert der Partei Hide / Show Replies
By their political activism and actions, they belong with the rest.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. — Mark Twain
That second paragraph under the section explaining the politics of the Nazi Party (the one about the word "socialist" is the party) is horribly misleading and wrong for reasons laid out in the third paragraph. Saying they weren't "Capitalist and Right-Wing" is in itself wrong since right-wingers in Germany at the time were not expected to be laissez-faire capitalists (which was only associated with classical liberals at the time) but instead something much closer to State Capitalists or mercantilists. Just having a paragraph filled with so much wrong (largely due to trying to shoehorn the definition of right-wing in the modern USA to 1930's Germany) makes me feel it should be removed completely and the last paragraph reworded as to refute this claim before others make it again. Or at least heavily reword the second paragraph but I don't feel comfortable with it staying as it is even if most of it is refuted in the next paragraph.
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Which paragraphs are we talking about, exactly?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
The largest bulletpoint one. The only one with three bulletpoints in one section. It starts off "It is often brought up that "socialist" was in the Nazi Party's full name." The paragraph under that one I think removing that sentence was enough though.
Yep, that one needs de-nattering:
- It is often brought up that "socialist" was in the Nazi Party's full name. In truth, this gets complicated. The full name of the Party - "National Socialist German Workers' Party" - would have sounded to a German living in the 1920s and 30s something like "Democratic Republican Liberal Conservative Party" would sound to an American living today. "National" and "German" were right-wing conservative catchphrases (the main conservative party at the time was called the German National Party), and "Socialist" and "Workers" were of course left-wing catchphrases. The name was meant to sound vague and all-embracing, to attract as wide an audience as possible. This reflected the Nazis' nationalist ideology: they always insisted that they were the party of ALL Germans, and opposed democracy for being "divisive". The one constant element in Nazi ideology and practice was genocidal racism and brutal dictatorship, which is what they are remembered for. On most other issues - especially economics - they were actually quite hazy and divided. They had both "left-wing" and "right-wing" factions on economic matters, with the "left" (led by Ernst Rohm, his SA, and Goebbels) advocating nationalization of industry, while the "right" (led by Himmler, the SS, and Schacht) advocated an alliance with the wealthy capitalists and big business, with Hitler making a pretext at being willfully aloof. At least until it became clear how important the alliances with Germany's old school industrialists and militarists was to gaining power and how much of a thorn and threat Roehm's SA was becoming. At which point Hitler swung behind the SS, the "right-wing" faction quickly gained the upper hand, and Rohm and the SA were eventually killed or driven into hiding during the Night of Long Knives. In the end, the Nazis came to power as part of an alliance with conservative political forces, and they mostly continued the economic policies of mainstream German conservatism (which included a 60-year-old tradition of limited welfare state measures, going back to Bismarck).
- That said, they did always oppose laissez-faire capitalism, along with the Italian Fascists. Like Italian Fascism they advocated a so-called "third way" or "fusionist" economic system, in between state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, so it's economy, though not directly owned by the state, was heavily planned and tightly regulated. (While Nazis were fascist, they didn't want to use the term "fascist" because they felt it sounded too Italian. Essentially, Hitler wanted to establish his own German blend of fascism). Price and wage controls were placed on the economy, industries cartelized, the work force strictly controlled in the government Labor Front when unions were banned, with Four-Year Plans to rival the Five-Year Plans of the Soviet Union. So many regulatory hoops had to be gone through that it severely hampered production. Also, the Nazis in fact never ended unemployment-even with military service and people working in munitions factories, they still had it, but changed the way unemployment statistics were calculated to make it appear better. They also desired to establish autarky (economic self-reliance that did not require foreign trade) but this was impossible since Germany lacked certain essential resources for an industrial economy. This gave them a practical reason, along with gaining living space to contain an expanding German population, for invading and looting other countries of their resources. Author Guenter Reiman named it "the vampire economy" because of this in his book of the same name.
- ...none of which was particularly new in Germany. A regulated-but-still-profit-driven market economy with a heavy military element had been the standard policy of German monarchists and their socialist rivals going all the way back to the 1870s; one of the defining political conflicts was just over where the emphasis was between the reactionary, militaristic autocrats and the (at the time) pacifist socialists. In Germany, and continental Europe in general, there was no association between right-wing politics and strict laissez-faire capitalism, as there is in America today. In fact, state control of industry (as long as the state was run by the aristocratic or military elite) was seen as a bulwark against socialism by them, to the extent that it could be used to break unions and other workers' organizations.
- That said, they did always oppose laissez-faire capitalism, along with the Italian Fascists. Like Italian Fascism they advocated a so-called "third way" or "fusionist" economic system, in between state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, so it's economy, though not directly owned by the state, was heavily planned and tightly regulated. (While Nazis were fascist, they didn't want to use the term "fascist" because they felt it sounded too Italian. Essentially, Hitler wanted to establish his own German blend of fascism). Price and wage controls were placed on the economy, industries cartelized, the work force strictly controlled in the government Labor Front when unions were banned, with Four-Year Plans to rival the Five-Year Plans of the Soviet Union. So many regulatory hoops had to be gone through that it severely hampered production. Also, the Nazis in fact never ended unemployment-even with military service and people working in munitions factories, they still had it, but changed the way unemployment statistics were calculated to make it appear better. They also desired to establish autarky (economic self-reliance that did not require foreign trade) but this was impossible since Germany lacked certain essential resources for an industrial economy. This gave them a practical reason, along with gaining living space to contain an expanding German population, for invading and looting other countries of their resources. Author Guenter Reiman named it "the vampire economy" because of this in his book of the same name.
That's the one. The entire second paragraph is semi-true but mostly seems to exist to imply a no true scotsman that the Nazis weren't right-wing because they believed in regulations. Perhaps part of the second and third paragraph could be combined (The third paragraph is really good as it refutes this infuriatingly ignorant yet common claim)?
Imaginary Hedgehog
The bit that toyed with the idea that gun control sort-of might have facilitated the holocaust had to go. I find that ridiculously simpleminded, even offensive. Some more reasons are included in my edit.
This is nøt å signåture.™ Hide / Show Replies
While I find that entry to be extremely questionable and injecting modern gun politics a bit too much, the "correction" you posted is essentially a Justifying Edit and we don't do these:
However it is a serious fallacy to think that with more weapons, the holocaust wouldn't have happened. For one, the many countries that were occupied had had armies, of the kind with actual weapons, but their defenses were overrun. If afterwards a resistance group would have organised a large scale, armed insurrection to prevent deportation, the nazi forces would have rounded them up and dealt with them mercilessly. Acts of retribution included execution of civilians or even massacring entire villages, such as Oradour-sur-Glane in France. And that's even forgetting general objections like hindsight bias about the holocaust and the Milgram experiment, which was specifically designed to answer the questions who had been Hitler's willing executioners.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Hate to nitpick, but Hitler wasn't really that concerned with Africans. At that point, anyway. He saw them as uncivilized savages that posed no threat to Europe, unlike the Jews and the Slavs supposedly did. I believe he even made somewhat flattering comments toward Africans in admiration of their fighting spirit in the face of a technologically superior European war machine. Not to mention that at that time, very few Africans were even let into the vast majority of Europe with maybe Portugal being the exception. What shaped his racially motivated hostility toward Slavs, Gypsies and Jews came from periods of his life where he was surrounded by those other Europeans. I'm not aware of any atrocities carried out against Africans and I'm pretty well read on this stuff. If it's because he supposedly refused to shake Jesse Owen's hand at the Olympics, Owens himself disputes the claim saying Hitler was gracious and respectful and waved or saluted him on his way out...which is the only reason he didn't shake the man's hand. He was a busy man, planning on conquering Europe...remember?
The only racism Owens experienced at that time was when he came home to the US. I'm not saying Hitler was particularly fond of blacks/Africans but his racism toward them was no more severe than that of any other nation at the time, whether they were European, Asian, friggin' Eskimos...Hitler didn't want Africa. He only sent troops in to rescue Mussolini's worthless ass. He wanted Eastern Europe and Russia. He certainly would have set up puppet regimes in Western Europe but that was the extent of his ambition at the time.
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From what I've heard, the reason he didn't shake Owens' had because he only wanted to shake the hands of German winners. When his advisors told him he had to either shake everybody's hands, or nobody's, he decided on the latter alternative. Owen himself notet the following: "Hitler didn't snub me – it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram."
Sophia Gata Hernandez Lopez
Can there be a section to this page talking about more little known and obscure, but still worth noting Nazis like John Rabe (A German businessman and Nazi Party member who worked for Siemens and set up a protected area for refugees from the Japanese terror during the Rape of Nanjing.)?
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Could Wernher von Braun be thrown in there because he was in the SS?
The NoMouth Nocturnal
Even Evil Has Standards, if Real Life examples were allowed, could be downplayed in the Kemna Kamp. How's that? Welcome beatings for everyone!
Tell Me A Lie...
- Big Bad: Hitler
- The Dragon: Himmler
- The Evil Genius: ?
- The Brute: Rohm
- The Dark Chick: ?
- Big Bad: Hitler
- The Dragon: Göring and Himmler
- The Evil Genius: Goebbels
- The Brute: Röhm
- The Dark Chick: Heydrich
-
Big Bad: Hitler -
The Dragon: Göring and Himmler -
The Evil Genius: Goebbels -
The Brute: Röhm -
The Dark Chick: Heydrich
This is Real Life, stop being tacky.
So is there any way to remove the "Characters" tab at the top?
I'd show you my signature, but then I'd have to kill you. Oh wait...Sorry. Hide / Show Replies