Complaint about overused "Nazi"

[Don Phillipson]

British war historian Richard Overy published an unusual
polemic this month (see
http://www.historytoday.com/richard-overy/goodbye-nazis
complaining about the
"indiscriminate use of the term 'Nazi' to describe anything
to do with German institutions or behaviour in the years of
the dictatorship between 1933 and 1945. . . . The NSDAP
incorporated only a fraction of the German population. Even
those in the notorious SA (Sturmabteilung) did not have to
be members of the party. . . . The blanket assumption of 'Nazi'
characteristics obscures the wide variety of institutions,
organisations, cultural events and social tensions that can
be found at every level under the Hitler regime."

Prof. Overy omits Gleichschaltung (uniformity), the general
policy of the one-party Third Reich of extending Nazi party
control over all social institutions -- ranging past the Boy
Scouts to church associations and clubs for all sports,
from gliding to chess. To the extent that a "wide variety
of institutions, organisations, cultural events and social
tensions" persisted without Nazi control, it was not for
want of trying. Even if Gleichschaltung.failed to capture
every citizen and every club, Nazi party control of German
thought and German culture remained the national policy.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

[Rich Rostrom]

"Don Phillipson" <e9...@SPAMBLOCK.ncf.ca> wrote:

> British war historian Richard Overy published an unusual

> polemic... complaining about the
> "indiscriminate use of the term 'Nazi' ...

I recall one interesting contrast.

RAdm Dan Gallery wrote two books about the
Battle of the Atlantic:

_Clear The Decks_ (1952)

_Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea_ (1956)
(reprinted as _U-505_)

The first was a memoir of his own service
as commander of an air base in Iceland and
a Hunter-Killer task group.

The second was more formal, including both
his own experiences and the service history
of U-505.

In the first book, Gallery consistently refers
to U-boat crewmen as "Nazis".

In the second, he doesn't.

A side point about Overy's comment: a lot of bad
things were done by Germans in 1939-1945 who were
_not_ acting as Nazis. Over-emphasizing the Nazi
influence allows Germany to evade some of its
guilt.
--
The real Velvet Revolution - and the would-be hijacker.

http://originalvelvetrevolution.com

[Mario]

Rich Rostrom, 04:26, martedￜ 23 aprile 2013:

I remember that Wehrmacht was considered "clean" WRT massacres
in Italy.

Then it became clear that WH also was guilty of crimes almost
like the SS.

There were political reasons for covering that: ECM, West
Germany entered NATO etc.


--
H

[dumbstruck]

I decided to cut back on that adjective while discussing german technology,
and hearing how hurtfully it was being taken by german readers. We may be
comparing US, UK, Japanese, Italian, and "nazi" aeronautical engineering and
by that infer that the German accomplishments were especially challenging
competition. But the way it can be received is... oh, so we germans can
only be proud of pre or post ww2 engineering progress, but have to ignore
all our mid century innovations as shameful. So it was taken in the wrong
sense, and an emotionally loaded way.

By the way there is an interesting documentary of non weapon related
inventions and discoveries of German nazi period... pretty useful
stuff like the link of smoking to lung cancer. Also we might consider
that the female half of the German population seems to have had little
participation with nazi war efforts, unlike the munitions workers or
even female soldiers of other sides. The German population did seem
wary of the nazis turning to war, if only in the brief period before
the news of victories. So there was non nazi existence in Germany.

[Don Phillipson]

"dumbstruck" <dumb...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:2532dd8c-7e19-4842...@googlegroups.com...

> . . . Also we might consider

> that the female half of the German population seems to have had little
> participation with nazi war efforts, unlike the munitions workers or
> even female soldiers of other sides.

A practical difference was that Nazi war efforts could draw on
assets unavailable to the Allies viz. (1) production facilities of
conquered countries (e.g. Czech and French manufacturing),
(2) Slave labour on farms as well as in factories. The Third
Reich dictated unilaterally how much it would pay for both
these procurements, but Allied governments had no such
direct power over female labour (except in the USSR.)

So far as civil rights are concerned, there were fundamental
similarities between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, both
different from the "capitalist democracies" of the Allies.
But social attitudes towards womankind in the modern
state were unique in the USSR, contrastingly different from the
similar attitudes to women in German and American society.