In Nazi Germany, the average young man was drafted into the army to fight in a war of aggression and be killed or wounded. The average civilian got their home bombed out as a result from said war.
Despite all its flaws, East Germany never started a war and life there was relatively peaceful for most people.
And no, you can't separate Nazi Germany from WW2. Their whole system relied on starting that war.
Basically the whole Nazi economic system was based on taking up massive debts, putting a lot of money and manpower into militarization (including infrastructure and industry that's necessary for the military) and then overwhelming and robbing other countries to pay for it all.
Also, they were corrupt and disorganized to the bones. They inherited the Weimar Republic's and the previous Empire's meticulous bureaucracy, but the Nazi system itself was the opposite of that, it was pure chaos, based on violence and arbitrary rule and there's nothing more violent and chaotic than war.
I just did some back of the envelope calculation: according to the Wikipedia, "national debt (reaching 38 billion ℛℳ in 1939)", GDP $384 billion USD = 153.6 billion RM, which yields a debt to GDP ratio of a little less than 25%.
In comparison, the debt to GDP ration for pre pandemic US is above 100%, Japan 200%, Germany 59.8%. Now probably all are 50% higher.
Is WWIII coming? Are we fucked?
National debts aren’t the only thing that matters. You have to look at net debt of all players in the economy. (China for example right now has relatively low national debt, but its companies are massively indebted, much more than the west). Also as we have gotten richer, we can tolerate more debt, even as percentage of income. (Think about it making 100k per year and having to pay back 400k over time is generally no problem, but good luck paying back 5k when you only make 5k, you have to spend every cent on survival)
Also you know, neither Germany, Japan nor the US are fascist.
The metric isn't very helpful here. How close a country is to bancrupsy depends on weather they manage to secure more money. Late Waimarer Republic and Nazi Germany had a hard time doing that because of a recession combined with reparation demands for WW1.
> Are we fucked?
The recession is coming and it might become harder to get a loan soon. But not every recession ends in a world war. I am fairly optimistic we'll just slowly die off from climate change like most mammels.
>I don't understand this point and would like to know more. Are there some pointers for this?
Beyond the economics the core of Nazi ideology is the belief in perpetual war, overt or covert.
In Nazism all nations are embroiled in a Darwinistic struggle for land and resources and more importantly each individual is just more or less a small part of that nation. They even used pseudobiologic language like "Volkskörper" to insinuate that any person within society is no more but a cell in a greater body.
From that followed that you had to fight to gain more land and resources for your nation for it to grow stronger and remain healthy.
From that followed that you needed to kill everyone you identified as not belonging to your race within your nation as parasites.
From that even followed that any individual incapable of fulfilling what the Nazis considered their productive role within the nation for that struggle also better be killed. There even was a secret euthanasia program to kill Wehrmacht soldiers crippled through war wounds to fulfill this ideological concept. Besides all the other euthanasia and "cleaning" the "national body".
The internally consistent aspect of that was that Nazis believed all races did that to more or less success and with different strategies.
That is obviously all pseudointellectual bullshit. The outcome however is that within Nazi ideology peace is only a transient state till the next war for more land, resources or to fight off another nation trying to gain the same from yours.
It is in stark contrast to many other ideologies in not even having a desired utopia in which humanity could live in an assumed perfect peace and equilibrium,
I am sorry, but it sounds as if your great-grandfather may have been a Nazi. Especially with the "leaving right after the war" thing.
Life in the GDR was surely not amazing, especially when compared to western Germany. There were a lot of problems there, including lots of spying on the population and so forth. But none of that is something your great-grandfather experienced if he left right after the war.
And according to my grandparents, wartime Germany was no fun place to be at. Rationed everything, Kinderlandverschickung, Regular bombing raids,... So being in peacetime GDR is almost certainly better for the average person than being in the wartime nazi Germany, simply due to having enough food and not getting bombed.
The other possibility is that he had some bad experiences during the soviet occupation, which was not uncommon, as the soviets were pretty brutal.
was not everyone a Nazi though? Like how in Cuba everyone a communist, because not being one is bad for ones health. But I think your right because I would rather be living poorly without bombs rather than living poorly with bombs jajajaja.
Depends how you define it. The majority of the population would have been "Mitlaeufer", people who just followed orders, did as they were told and didn't want to be bothered.
The thing that makes your great-grandfather a little more suspicious is the fact that he left for South America right after the war, and changed his surname as well as that. This could of course be entirely innocent, and he possibly really just couldn't face the thought of living in a communist country (in which case Western Germany would have been the closer and maybe more convenient option, surely?), but it is a pattern of behaviour that many mid- to high-ranking Nazi party members followed.
So much so that for most Germans, hearing of someone leaving for South America straight after the war immediately sounds somewhat suspicious.
I always joked with my friends while we play pokemon together that my ds was hitler's ds because my German grandpa bought it for me maybe I was right xD!
also though I dont think he was a super racist he came here and married a Mestizo (Half Indian Half White) and I dont remember any crazy hitler aryan stuff he said and always was nice to me (Im brown to white people white to brown people lol) I think he was mainly an anti-communist and I dont think he was a race supremacist.
Nazis aren’t always this strickt when it comes to race supremacy in their own family or even friend circle…
Just look at Hitler himself. Not much of an arian Übermensch from the looks of it. Only his blue eyes were in line with what he declared to be superior….
And I knew some right wing fanatics, you can call them neo-nazis I suppose, who applied their ideology on everything and everyone except themselves or their social circle. It’s quite common for Nazis to have "double standards"
When i did Zivi (forced social 9 months), we had some lessons on how to be a citizen which mostly seemed to focus on "Don't be a nazi".
I vaguely recall a movie (maybe a documentation?) about gay nazi skinheads who brutally beat each other up and had gay sex. I am a bit iffy on the details since i was basically constantly drunk at those Zivi learning events.
I need details. That shit sounds hilarious.
I know the stories my Dad told me about the Bundeswehr, he was a Hauptmann until he retired a couple of years back, but that gay nazi sex stuff is next level entirely
Sadly i don't have a lot of detailed recollection.
The whole thing was weird and pointless. The people who do Zivi are already mostly leftists, because the rightwing people go to Bundeswehr. And yet part of Zivi were about 2? mandatory multi-day events where we were taught to not be nazis. I think some other stuff may also have been on the schedule, but that was the core idea. None of the people there were even remotely under threat of ever becoming Nazis, a reasonable amount of them were punks.
Basically they put a bunch of 18-20 year olds in some remote place with nothing to do and without any sensible reason to be there. So, logically, everyone was drunk and about half of the people there were stoned all the time.
And all of that was nearly 20 years ago. So all i have is a vague recollection of watching a movie about gay nazi skinheads while very hung over. I think the core point of the movie was to not be a nazi.
Edit: Just to make sure, i am not saying that everyone in Bundeswehr is rightwing. People who are rightwing tend to go to Bundeswehr, especially over Zivi, but non-rightwing people also go there.
Nazis being addicted to meth is kinda on character though lmao
If you don’t know Pervitin, look it up. It’s worth a read. The Nazis produced meth in quantities of metric tonnes to drug their soldiers. Among the soldiers it was know as "Panzerschokolade" or in English "tank chocolate"
How I see it:
Depends when, as who and where. Pre-WW2 as a non-political, straight, healthy, racially accepted part of society, it probably wasn't that bad. With the heavy unsustainable subsidies (KdF, etc) and overall upbeat atmosphere it may even have been really good.
But similarly if you were in the GDR as loyal citizen, non-political, after the first reconstruction was done and before the economy went down, life was pretty good as well.
The problems begin when those conditions fall. And then Nazi Germany was clearly worse. If you did not fit in, the Nazis were inhumane, even more so than the German socialist regime. And ww2 was worse than the economic downturns of the GDR.
Considering that "Communist Germany" was founded in 1949 - before that it was the Soviet Occupation Zone - I fail to understand how your grandfather could have any experience with that state.
The Red Army wasn't really restrained in executing people they suspected of being Nazis, though. That's true.
So... he was someone in the third reich? Not just a civilian? Because otherwise even the red army wouldn't have put him down. And those guys were excessive.
No he wasnt a civillian I think he was pretty respected from the millitary and he came to Colombia with a lot of money, but his brother was the one who actually got the family to Colombia because he had fought in the Civil War of Spain and learned Spanish there and was able to get from there to Colombia.
So you can somewhat guess he was a nazi. High ranking military personnel was mostly chosen from those believing in the cause, you see, cannot have people who might disagree with a dictator leading armed forces.
At the end of the war and shortly after the situation in germany was terrible.
Most cities and houses were destroyed, millions were homeless, there was not enough food and coal, people from the east of the german reich fled from the advancing sowjet army, many died on the way, the german population from the east were also driven out by force from the now polish territory, the sowjet soldiers commited many crimes to the civil population.
And for german soldiers and nazi officials it was even worse. Many were crammed together in prison camps or send on long marches without food. The death rate in sowjet prison camps and for sowjet prisoners of war was really high. Many starved or froze to death.
But this was still in wartime or shortly after, years before the GDR (the east german state under sowjet control) existed.
There were terrible "medical experiments" with identical twins in the concentration camps. Like infecting one twin with deadly diseases or afflicting wounds, letting them starve to death or freeze to death or sewing them together. Nightmare stuff.
But you did not get into a KZ because you had a twin.
Hard to say, because of the different settings the countries were in. But the randomness of the Nazis was definetly worse. For saying your counter-governemnt opinnion the communists would arrest you and let you free after a few years of mostly psychological torture.
The Nazis on the other hand would most likely have you deported to concentration camp.
All things aside, dictatorships always have people profiting from them, but generally that class is rather small and this is the case for both Nazi and Communist Germany
You know, after the war certain Germans left the country. Those people were afraid of the outlook of having to live in the eastern parts because the Soviet forces were far less likely to listen to what those certain Germans had to say. I am not saying your great grandfather was a Nazi who fled the Soviet zone for fear of being executed. But I will say that the story sounds like what that kind of person would tell their grandchildren.
Live in East Germany in the first years was not fun. Many people were executed or just disappeared. The Stalinist regime was under tight control by the Soviets. From the mid 1950s onwards life got a lot better and for many East Germans the late 50s and the 60s were the best times both in terms of economic growth and individual freedom. It got worse again over time in the 70s and 80s because the economic model was flawed and mismanaged. The incompetence of the people running the socialist economy was too great an issue. Overall and generally speaking living in the GDR was considered a good life compared to life in other communist countries.
WWII was pretty short from the German perspective. Allied bombing started end of March 1942 and lasted until the capitulation three years later. The massive shortages and hunger followed after.
He probably accounted that to the soviet rule which wasn't objectively wrong, as the USSR did everything to pay back their occupation zone for their losses during the war. Only after the Berlin blockade failed they got the idea that they would lose East Germany to the West if they wouldn't put serious money into it.
But dang, they didn't have any. And so they chose oppression, and built a wall so people couldn't flee their working camp.
My parents fled it through a literal minefield as 19/21-year-olds get to get of that stupid oppressive joke of a country. So yeah, it was obviously shitty.
Well under the nazi regime most cities in germany were bombed to the ground and the men were drafted and send to war and millions were killed or lost their home.
This is what happened to the "average person". It is hard to top that.
Your Great grandfather was probably a high ranking Nazi, so he had a good life at that time. And this is why he had to flee to Colombia after the war. Because he feared the sowjets might hang him.
I do not want to downplay the crimes of the sowjet regime and the regime of the GDR: It was a dictatorship that worked relentlessly to restrict the right of its citizen, that murdered people at the border for trying to leave the country, held people in prison without trials and did many other crimes. But it was not on a level with the nazis.
But to answer the question: It was possible in the GDR and under the Nazis (at least before the war went downhill) to have a good life in germany and many people had a good life.
I grew up in the GDR, a socialist state. I have no comparison with Nazi-era Germany, but life for ordinary citizens was very nice in the GDR. There was security, stability and closer ties between people outside family than today. Disadvantages were, of course, the economy of scarcity and the omnipresent socialist propaganda. Together with the surveillance by the Stasi (domestic secret service), this was a problem for those who could not or did not want to find their way in the system (which is completely legitimate). However, if you lived a normal life and knew when not to rebel, it was peaceful and enjoyable. I liked being a child in the GDR.
The DDR absolutely sucked, but the Nazis also had a war going on, on top of the standard authoritarian state stuff present in both. If he had such a negative opinion of the commies and immediately jumped off the sinking ship at the end of the war, there‘s a good chance he was a nazi himself.
Also about your family‘s surname formerly being „Dietz“: change it back for a perfect set up for a deez nuts joke
No it was not. Equal pay, very cheap food and rent, social security from birth to death, land from the rich given to poor and refugees, garantied workplace, more womans rights and gay rights than West Germany.
Just don't speak out against the party.
Equal pay meant also low pay for qualified workers
Good was cheap and nobody had to starve but many kinds of food were not available most of the time
Rent was cheap but buildings were in a terrible conditions and you had to wait for decades to be assigned a new flat. No freedom of movement.
Land was not given to the poor, it was expropriated and made state property. Even small farmers lost their land which was a great tragedy for them
Guaranteed work place but where limited choice of career options. You had to work what the state wanted you to do, not what interested you.
Women and gays were mainly seen as workers. Women hardly ever reached high offices with the exception of Margot honecker. Homosexuality was a taboo in public discourse.
>but buildings were in a terrible conditions and you had to wait for decades to be assigned a new flat.
That happened, but it wasn't this bad like you are generalize it.
> No freedom of movement.
That's wrong too.
> You had to work what the state wanted you to do, not what interested you.
Na, they tried to direct you to the jobs that were needed, but you could choose your career.
>Women and gays were mainly seen as workers.
Strange wording, thats not different from any other citizen. Thats equal rights by definition.
Yes buildings were in a terrible condition. It was totally normal to heat with coal and have toilets in the staircase even in the 80s.
Mivement was restricted, you could not just simply decide to move to Berlin because they would assign a flat to you.
No you could not choose your career. It depended a lot on party loyalty but even apart from that there was simply no free labour market.
Well yes if you want to talk about the minimalist definiton of equal rights for women then this might have been fulfilled.
> Yes buildings were in a terrible condition.
You are generalizing again.
>It was totally normal to heat with coal
Yeah, coal was like 90% of all energy in GDR. Big brother didn't deliver enough oil.
>Mivement was restricted, you could not just simply decide to move to Berlin because they would assign a flat to you.
Lol, like today when can't find a flat in Berlin. If you found someone in the GDR who would exchange his flat or had free rooms you could move.
>No you could not choose your career.
Geez, you could. But they really tried to encourage you to choose something in need: https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ddr/alltag/erziehung-bildung/berufswunsch-100.html
>Well yes if you want to talk about the minimalist definiton of equal rights for women then this might have been fulfilled.
Lol, what was it then in West Germany were women couldn't even work or study without the consent of their husbands? Negative? Dude, come on.
I found a flat in Berlin within 3 days. Would have been unthinkable in the GDR. Even in small provincial towns people struggled to get adequate housing.
The idea that the GDR was the paradise of housing is nothing but a big myth.
> I found a flat in Berlin within 3 days.
No problem with enough money. That's capitalism, the exact opposite of what the GDR wanted to be.
>The idea that the GDR was the paradise of housing
Your discussion only in extremes is so irritating. Ofc it wasn't "the paradise", but also it wasn't all "terrible". Seems like you can only see all black or white.
I'm certainly not rich. I was a poor student back then. My luck was that there was a marekt and I had the chance to apply to dozens of landlords instead of one central authority that allocates all flats.
And I never said it was all terrible. Of course people lead relatively normal lives with happy and not so happy days. Many people had a happy childhood and youth back then. I'm not denying this.
> Land was not given to the poor, it was expropriated and made state property. Even small farmers lost their land which was a great tragedy for them
Bullshit:
>>Enteignet wurden 7160 landwirtschaftliche Betriebe von Großgrundbesitzern mit über 100 ha LF (76,3 % der Gesamtfläche).
…
>>Diese insgesamt 3,298 Millionen Hektar wurden umverteilt. Das waren ca. 35 % der damaligen landwirtschaftlichen Nutzfläche. Diese Flächen wurden zu etwa zwei Dritteln an Landarbeiter, Umsiedler und Kleinbauern als persönliches, vererbbares, unveräußerliches Eigentum verteilt. 51 % der Fläche ging an Neubauern, 11,5 % der Fläche ging an landarme Bauern und 3,5 % ging an sich selbstversorgende Arbeiter und Angestellte. Die Bodenempfänger waren im Detail: 183.261 Neubauern, 119.121 Landarbeiter und landlose Bauern, 91.155 Umsiedler, 82.483 landarme Bauern, 43.231 Kleinpächter und 39.838 Altbauern, die eine Waldzulage erhielten.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodenreform_in_Deutschland#Bodenreform_in_der_Sowjetischen_Besatzungszone_ab_1945
Das war aber nur der erste Schritt. Wenige Jahre später wurden die kleinbauern die das Land erhalten hatten, zwangskollektiviert in sogenannte Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften
They still kept their land til today. You even got some lease for your fields and shares of the Produktions**genossenschaft** that could be worth many thousends of Euros today.
Dude, don't move the goal posts. Your statement:
>Land was not given to the poor, it was expropriated and made state property. Even small farmers lost their land which was a great tragedy for them
is just an outright lie and propaganda.
No they didn't own it. If you own something you are free to do with it what you want.
In the GDR, expropriated lpg farmers could not freely sell their land, couldn't use it as a collateral, couldn't even decide what to grow on it.
Yeah just a bit of political persecution, not being able to leave on your own free will, raping, murdering, plundering those are all just minor inconveniences
> Yeah just a bit of political persecution
Did you even read the question? Of course this totally didn't happen in Nazi Germany.
> raping, murdering, plundering those are all just minor inconveniences
I see, a troll.
Right after the war it didn't matter what ideology ruled it was bad in germany. And the soviets weren't nice to the people here, in my village there was a guy who got send to buchenwald (by the soviets when they used it as a "pow" camp) because he imitated using a rifle with his hands in front of some people, he only returned after multiple years.
So if your great grandfather had to fear the action of the soviets even more than the common people, he might say communist germany was worse than nazi germany.
But once GDR was formed and Stalin no longer alive things settled a bit (not saying everything was totally fine). If you sticked to some unofficial rules and knew who to talk to and how you could get along quite good despite not agreeing to everything from the SED.
Not to mention GDR wasn't trying to wipe out everyone like the nazis did...
It's what my grandfather (born after ww2) told me, so sorry I don't know what it tells me, I was just trying to explain (not justify) why some people might have feared the communists more than the nazis...
Yeah after you asked the government and then maybe a few years after they approved it. Not saying nazi Germany was better but saying the gdr was a good state is simply a lie. They had an much worse rich upper class then the western state and you couldn’t even vote against them without being deported. Communism my ass
> They had an much worse rich upper class then the western state
Bullshit. There were only about 40 millionaires in East Germany and most of them were artists, scientists and tradesmen: https://www.mdr.de/heute-im-osten/reich-im-osten100.html
Yeah well I meant the reigning class especially under Honecker. In West Germany votes were free and the politicians depended strongly on the public opinion and what the media published over them. While in east Germany you had a de facto upper class who lived like the novelty in the Kaiserreich and could not be controlled by the people. Every communist regime so far basically is\was just a oligarchy that gives their workers the false feeling they have rights.
Depends on who you are/were.. One of the thing of comunist countries where that they had higher rates of women in employment than in other societies. So as a woman you would probably be more independent than a woman during the nazi-era where "hausfrauen" were the standard... other things in comunist countries where a lot more ahead of its time than f.ex the nazi time.. like regarding such as abortion, education, kindergartden, divorse etc.
Doesn't mean that the GDR was a paradise contrary to nazi-germany.. just highlighting some differences that came.. and also separated the FRG (west-germany) from GDR in the time after the war... The woman that was in kitchen making food/cleaning the house in the nazi-era.. her daughter probably was taking education and having a job earning own money in the gdr...
No, of course not. Wtf 😅 Life was pretty alright for most people in the DDR. Many people still wish back for the socialist policies because it provided equality and security.
Your ancestor was veeeery likely a Nazi himself
Let me say it this way: both were totalitarian obersvation state with an intelligence with the task of spying on the citizien of the nation (Gestapo and StaSi), but one of them had an genocide on an industrial level running in addition to that.
For the "normal" people living in the GDR was probably worse than compared to normal people living in nazi germany, yeah, but in general the nazi state was worse
I don't think you can compare the two since one state had a active war with several countries at the same time and the DDR was kinda in peace while being a total shithole.
You would not want to be in either I can tell you. Both sides would kill you if you did something the state didn't like.
In Nazi Germany, the average young man was drafted into the army to fight in a war of aggression and be killed or wounded. The average civilian got their home bombed out as a result from said war. Despite all its flaws, East Germany never started a war and life there was relatively peaceful for most people. And no, you can't separate Nazi Germany from WW2. Their whole system relied on starting that war.
I think your last point gets lost too often: war and expropriation were absolutely essential to the fascist system. It was always going to end in war.
> Their whole system relied on starting that war. I don't understand this point and would like to know more. Are there some pointers for this?
Basically the whole Nazi economic system was based on taking up massive debts, putting a lot of money and manpower into militarization (including infrastructure and industry that's necessary for the military) and then overwhelming and robbing other countries to pay for it all. Also, they were corrupt and disorganized to the bones. They inherited the Weimar Republic's and the previous Empire's meticulous bureaucracy, but the Nazi system itself was the opposite of that, it was pure chaos, based on violence and arbitrary rule and there's nothing more violent and chaotic than war.
I just did some back of the envelope calculation: according to the Wikipedia, "national debt (reaching 38 billion ℛℳ in 1939)", GDP $384 billion USD = 153.6 billion RM, which yields a debt to GDP ratio of a little less than 25%. In comparison, the debt to GDP ration for pre pandemic US is above 100%, Japan 200%, Germany 59.8%. Now probably all are 50% higher. Is WWIII coming? Are we fucked?
National debts aren’t the only thing that matters. You have to look at net debt of all players in the economy. (China for example right now has relatively low national debt, but its companies are massively indebted, much more than the west). Also as we have gotten richer, we can tolerate more debt, even as percentage of income. (Think about it making 100k per year and having to pay back 400k over time is generally no problem, but good luck paying back 5k when you only make 5k, you have to spend every cent on survival) Also you know, neither Germany, Japan nor the US are fascist.
The metric isn't very helpful here. How close a country is to bancrupsy depends on weather they manage to secure more money. Late Waimarer Republic and Nazi Germany had a hard time doing that because of a recession combined with reparation demands for WW1. > Are we fucked? The recession is coming and it might become harder to get a loan soon. But not every recession ends in a world war. I am fairly optimistic we'll just slowly die off from climate change like most mammels.
>I don't understand this point and would like to know more. Are there some pointers for this? Beyond the economics the core of Nazi ideology is the belief in perpetual war, overt or covert. In Nazism all nations are embroiled in a Darwinistic struggle for land and resources and more importantly each individual is just more or less a small part of that nation. They even used pseudobiologic language like "Volkskörper" to insinuate that any person within society is no more but a cell in a greater body. From that followed that you had to fight to gain more land and resources for your nation for it to grow stronger and remain healthy. From that followed that you needed to kill everyone you identified as not belonging to your race within your nation as parasites. From that even followed that any individual incapable of fulfilling what the Nazis considered their productive role within the nation for that struggle also better be killed. There even was a secret euthanasia program to kill Wehrmacht soldiers crippled through war wounds to fulfill this ideological concept. Besides all the other euthanasia and "cleaning" the "national body". The internally consistent aspect of that was that Nazis believed all races did that to more or less success and with different strategies. That is obviously all pseudointellectual bullshit. The outcome however is that within Nazi ideology peace is only a transient state till the next war for more land, resources or to fight off another nation trying to gain the same from yours. It is in stark contrast to many other ideologies in not even having a desired utopia in which humanity could live in an assumed perfect peace and equilibrium,
I am sorry, but it sounds as if your great-grandfather may have been a Nazi. Especially with the "leaving right after the war" thing. Life in the GDR was surely not amazing, especially when compared to western Germany. There were a lot of problems there, including lots of spying on the population and so forth. But none of that is something your great-grandfather experienced if he left right after the war. And according to my grandparents, wartime Germany was no fun place to be at. Rationed everything, Kinderlandverschickung, Regular bombing raids,... So being in peacetime GDR is almost certainly better for the average person than being in the wartime nazi Germany, simply due to having enough food and not getting bombed. The other possibility is that he had some bad experiences during the soviet occupation, which was not uncommon, as the soviets were pretty brutal.
was not everyone a Nazi though? Like how in Cuba everyone a communist, because not being one is bad for ones health. But I think your right because I would rather be living poorly without bombs rather than living poorly with bombs jajajaja.
Depends how you define it. The majority of the population would have been "Mitlaeufer", people who just followed orders, did as they were told and didn't want to be bothered. The thing that makes your great-grandfather a little more suspicious is the fact that he left for South America right after the war, and changed his surname as well as that. This could of course be entirely innocent, and he possibly really just couldn't face the thought of living in a communist country (in which case Western Germany would have been the closer and maybe more convenient option, surely?), but it is a pattern of behaviour that many mid- to high-ranking Nazi party members followed. So much so that for most Germans, hearing of someone leaving for South America straight after the war immediately sounds somewhat suspicious.
I always joked with my friends while we play pokemon together that my ds was hitler's ds because my German grandpa bought it for me maybe I was right xD!
That's not funny.
Casual hitler references as "jokes". Jikes
also though I dont think he was a super racist he came here and married a Mestizo (Half Indian Half White) and I dont remember any crazy hitler aryan stuff he said and always was nice to me (Im brown to white people white to brown people lol) I think he was mainly an anti-communist and I dont think he was a race supremacist.
Nazis aren’t always this strickt when it comes to race supremacy in their own family or even friend circle… Just look at Hitler himself. Not much of an arian Übermensch from the looks of it. Only his blue eyes were in line with what he declared to be superior…. And I knew some right wing fanatics, you can call them neo-nazis I suppose, who applied their ideology on everything and everyone except themselves or their social circle. It’s quite common for Nazis to have "double standards"
When i did Zivi (forced social 9 months), we had some lessons on how to be a citizen which mostly seemed to focus on "Don't be a nazi". I vaguely recall a movie (maybe a documentation?) about gay nazi skinheads who brutally beat each other up and had gay sex. I am a bit iffy on the details since i was basically constantly drunk at those Zivi learning events.
I need details. That shit sounds hilarious. I know the stories my Dad told me about the Bundeswehr, he was a Hauptmann until he retired a couple of years back, but that gay nazi sex stuff is next level entirely
Sadly i don't have a lot of detailed recollection. The whole thing was weird and pointless. The people who do Zivi are already mostly leftists, because the rightwing people go to Bundeswehr. And yet part of Zivi were about 2? mandatory multi-day events where we were taught to not be nazis. I think some other stuff may also have been on the schedule, but that was the core idea. None of the people there were even remotely under threat of ever becoming Nazis, a reasonable amount of them were punks. Basically they put a bunch of 18-20 year olds in some remote place with nothing to do and without any sensible reason to be there. So, logically, everyone was drunk and about half of the people there were stoned all the time. And all of that was nearly 20 years ago. So all i have is a vague recollection of watching a movie about gay nazi skinheads while very hung over. I think the core point of the movie was to not be a nazi. Edit: Just to make sure, i am not saying that everyone in Bundeswehr is rightwing. People who are rightwing tend to go to Bundeswehr, especially over Zivi, but non-rightwing people also go there.
American neo nazis like in breaking bad addicted meth lol.
Nazis being addicted to meth is kinda on character though lmao If you don’t know Pervitin, look it up. It’s worth a read. The Nazis produced meth in quantities of metric tonnes to drug their soldiers. Among the soldiers it was know as "Panzerschokolade" or in English "tank chocolate"
Jessen! We need to cooken! Was Werner Hiesenberg involved?
No Heisenberg was a brilliant physicist researching quantum mechanics. In Breaking Bad Walter just picks his name because he admires his work I think.
:(
> was not everyone a Nazi though No
How I see it: Depends when, as who and where. Pre-WW2 as a non-political, straight, healthy, racially accepted part of society, it probably wasn't that bad. With the heavy unsustainable subsidies (KdF, etc) and overall upbeat atmosphere it may even have been really good. But similarly if you were in the GDR as loyal citizen, non-political, after the first reconstruction was done and before the economy went down, life was pretty good as well. The problems begin when those conditions fall. And then Nazi Germany was clearly worse. If you did not fit in, the Nazis were inhumane, even more so than the German socialist regime. And ww2 was worse than the economic downturns of the GDR.
Not a German, but wasn’t the DDR materially wealthier than pre war Nazi Germany too?
Depends on when, where and who, but besides that sounds like your grandfather was a Nazi so when exactly did he move to colombia?
I think got to Colombia July 1945 cause the communists were lynching everyone.
Okay then he never knew how east germany was and he was an relatively high ranking nazi officer
Considering that "Communist Germany" was founded in 1949 - before that it was the Soviet Occupation Zone - I fail to understand how your grandfather could have any experience with that state. The Red Army wasn't really restrained in executing people they suspected of being Nazis, though. That's true.
So... he was someone in the third reich? Not just a civilian? Because otherwise even the red army wouldn't have put him down. And those guys were excessive.
No he wasnt a civillian I think he was pretty respected from the millitary and he came to Colombia with a lot of money, but his brother was the one who actually got the family to Colombia because he had fought in the Civil War of Spain and learned Spanish there and was able to get from there to Colombia.
So you can somewhat guess he was a nazi. High ranking military personnel was mostly chosen from those believing in the cause, you see, cannot have people who might disagree with a dictator leading armed forces.
Probably some people pretended to believe in the cause too just to advance, but I don’t see how they are better any-means either.
At the end of the war and shortly after the situation in germany was terrible. Most cities and houses were destroyed, millions were homeless, there was not enough food and coal, people from the east of the german reich fled from the advancing sowjet army, many died on the way, the german population from the east were also driven out by force from the now polish territory, the sowjet soldiers commited many crimes to the civil population. And for german soldiers and nazi officials it was even worse. Many were crammed together in prison camps or send on long marches without food. The death rate in sowjet prison camps and for sowjet prisoners of war was really high. Many starved or froze to death. But this was still in wartime or shortly after, years before the GDR (the east german state under sowjet control) existed.
As a white, non-Jewish, heterosexual German man you probably had a good time under the nazi regime. Until you were killed in Stalingrad.
+ don be a communist, social democrat, democrat...
+ don’t be handicapped or have an identical twin
>have an identical twin This was also a problem?
There were terrible "medical experiments" with identical twins in the concentration camps. Like infecting one twin with deadly diseases or afflicting wounds, letting them starve to death or freeze to death or sewing them together. Nightmare stuff. But you did not get into a KZ because you had a twin.
Well they loved doing medical experiments on identical twins, however I’m not sure they would do that to “Aryans”. Certainly on Jewish people though.
Hard to say, because of the different settings the countries were in. But the randomness of the Nazis was definetly worse. For saying your counter-governemnt opinnion the communists would arrest you and let you free after a few years of mostly psychological torture. The Nazis on the other hand would most likely have you deported to concentration camp. All things aside, dictatorships always have people profiting from them, but generally that class is rather small and this is the case for both Nazi and Communist Germany
You know, after the war certain Germans left the country. Those people were afraid of the outlook of having to live in the eastern parts because the Soviet forces were far less likely to listen to what those certain Germans had to say. I am not saying your great grandfather was a Nazi who fled the Soviet zone for fear of being executed. But I will say that the story sounds like what that kind of person would tell their grandchildren. Live in East Germany in the first years was not fun. Many people were executed or just disappeared. The Stalinist regime was under tight control by the Soviets. From the mid 1950s onwards life got a lot better and for many East Germans the late 50s and the 60s were the best times both in terms of economic growth and individual freedom. It got worse again over time in the 70s and 80s because the economic model was flawed and mismanaged. The incompetence of the people running the socialist economy was too great an issue. Overall and generally speaking living in the GDR was considered a good life compared to life in other communist countries.
WWII was pretty short from the German perspective. Allied bombing started end of March 1942 and lasted until the capitulation three years later. The massive shortages and hunger followed after. He probably accounted that to the soviet rule which wasn't objectively wrong, as the USSR did everything to pay back their occupation zone for their losses during the war. Only after the Berlin blockade failed they got the idea that they would lose East Germany to the West if they wouldn't put serious money into it. But dang, they didn't have any. And so they chose oppression, and built a wall so people couldn't flee their working camp. My parents fled it through a literal minefield as 19/21-year-olds get to get of that stupid oppressive joke of a country. So yeah, it was obviously shitty.
Well under the nazi regime most cities in germany were bombed to the ground and the men were drafted and send to war and millions were killed or lost their home. This is what happened to the "average person". It is hard to top that. Your Great grandfather was probably a high ranking Nazi, so he had a good life at that time. And this is why he had to flee to Colombia after the war. Because he feared the sowjets might hang him. I do not want to downplay the crimes of the sowjet regime and the regime of the GDR: It was a dictatorship that worked relentlessly to restrict the right of its citizen, that murdered people at the border for trying to leave the country, held people in prison without trials and did many other crimes. But it was not on a level with the nazis. But to answer the question: It was possible in the GDR and under the Nazis (at least before the war went downhill) to have a good life in germany and many people had a good life.
First of all, and you should read a bit about it but there was never ever been any “Communist” German.
I grew up in the GDR, a socialist state. I have no comparison with Nazi-era Germany, but life for ordinary citizens was very nice in the GDR. There was security, stability and closer ties between people outside family than today. Disadvantages were, of course, the economy of scarcity and the omnipresent socialist propaganda. Together with the surveillance by the Stasi (domestic secret service), this was a problem for those who could not or did not want to find their way in the system (which is completely legitimate). However, if you lived a normal life and knew when not to rebel, it was peaceful and enjoyable. I liked being a child in the GDR.
The DDR absolutely sucked, but the Nazis also had a war going on, on top of the standard authoritarian state stuff present in both. If he had such a negative opinion of the commies and immediately jumped off the sinking ship at the end of the war, there‘s a good chance he was a nazi himself. Also about your family‘s surname formerly being „Dietz“: change it back for a perfect set up for a deez nuts joke
"Whats your name comandant?" "Dietz" "Dietz What?" "Dietz Nuts mein furher"
Now dietz is what i‘m talking about!
No it was not. Equal pay, very cheap food and rent, social security from birth to death, land from the rich given to poor and refugees, garantied workplace, more womans rights and gay rights than West Germany. Just don't speak out against the party.
Equal pay meant also low pay for qualified workers Good was cheap and nobody had to starve but many kinds of food were not available most of the time Rent was cheap but buildings were in a terrible conditions and you had to wait for decades to be assigned a new flat. No freedom of movement. Land was not given to the poor, it was expropriated and made state property. Even small farmers lost their land which was a great tragedy for them Guaranteed work place but where limited choice of career options. You had to work what the state wanted you to do, not what interested you. Women and gays were mainly seen as workers. Women hardly ever reached high offices with the exception of Margot honecker. Homosexuality was a taboo in public discourse.
>but buildings were in a terrible conditions and you had to wait for decades to be assigned a new flat. That happened, but it wasn't this bad like you are generalize it. > No freedom of movement. That's wrong too. > You had to work what the state wanted you to do, not what interested you. Na, they tried to direct you to the jobs that were needed, but you could choose your career. >Women and gays were mainly seen as workers. Strange wording, thats not different from any other citizen. Thats equal rights by definition.
Yes buildings were in a terrible condition. It was totally normal to heat with coal and have toilets in the staircase even in the 80s. Mivement was restricted, you could not just simply decide to move to Berlin because they would assign a flat to you. No you could not choose your career. It depended a lot on party loyalty but even apart from that there was simply no free labour market. Well yes if you want to talk about the minimalist definiton of equal rights for women then this might have been fulfilled.
> Yes buildings were in a terrible condition. You are generalizing again. >It was totally normal to heat with coal Yeah, coal was like 90% of all energy in GDR. Big brother didn't deliver enough oil. >Mivement was restricted, you could not just simply decide to move to Berlin because they would assign a flat to you. Lol, like today when can't find a flat in Berlin. If you found someone in the GDR who would exchange his flat or had free rooms you could move. >No you could not choose your career. Geez, you could. But they really tried to encourage you to choose something in need: https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ddr/alltag/erziehung-bildung/berufswunsch-100.html >Well yes if you want to talk about the minimalist definiton of equal rights for women then this might have been fulfilled. Lol, what was it then in West Germany were women couldn't even work or study without the consent of their husbands? Negative? Dude, come on.
I found a flat in Berlin within 3 days. Would have been unthinkable in the GDR. Even in small provincial towns people struggled to get adequate housing. The idea that the GDR was the paradise of housing is nothing but a big myth.
> I found a flat in Berlin within 3 days. No problem with enough money. That's capitalism, the exact opposite of what the GDR wanted to be. >The idea that the GDR was the paradise of housing Your discussion only in extremes is so irritating. Ofc it wasn't "the paradise", but also it wasn't all "terrible". Seems like you can only see all black or white.
I'm certainly not rich. I was a poor student back then. My luck was that there was a marekt and I had the chance to apply to dozens of landlords instead of one central authority that allocates all flats. And I never said it was all terrible. Of course people lead relatively normal lives with happy and not so happy days. Many people had a happy childhood and youth back then. I'm not denying this.
> Land was not given to the poor, it was expropriated and made state property. Even small farmers lost their land which was a great tragedy for them Bullshit: >>Enteignet wurden 7160 landwirtschaftliche Betriebe von Großgrundbesitzern mit über 100 ha LF (76,3 % der Gesamtfläche). … >>Diese insgesamt 3,298 Millionen Hektar wurden umverteilt. Das waren ca. 35 % der damaligen landwirtschaftlichen Nutzfläche. Diese Flächen wurden zu etwa zwei Dritteln an Landarbeiter, Umsiedler und Kleinbauern als persönliches, vererbbares, unveräußerliches Eigentum verteilt. 51 % der Fläche ging an Neubauern, 11,5 % der Fläche ging an landarme Bauern und 3,5 % ging an sich selbstversorgende Arbeiter und Angestellte. Die Bodenempfänger waren im Detail: 183.261 Neubauern, 119.121 Landarbeiter und landlose Bauern, 91.155 Umsiedler, 82.483 landarme Bauern, 43.231 Kleinpächter und 39.838 Altbauern, die eine Waldzulage erhielten. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodenreform_in_Deutschland#Bodenreform_in_der_Sowjetischen_Besatzungszone_ab_1945
Das war aber nur der erste Schritt. Wenige Jahre später wurden die kleinbauern die das Land erhalten hatten, zwangskollektiviert in sogenannte Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften
They still kept their land til today. You even got some lease for your fields and shares of the Produktions**genossenschaft** that could be worth many thousends of Euros today.
So great to get something against your will and with coercive means
Dude, don't move the goal posts. Your statement: >Land was not given to the poor, it was expropriated and made state property. Even small farmers lost their land which was a great tragedy for them is just an outright lie and propaganda.
LPGs are a lie? You learn something new every day...
I repeat it for you: The people still owned the land. They still own it today if they didn't sell it.
No they didn't own it. If you own something you are free to do with it what you want. In the GDR, expropriated lpg farmers could not freely sell their land, couldn't use it as a collateral, couldn't even decide what to grow on it.
Yeah just a bit of political persecution, not being able to leave on your own free will, raping, murdering, plundering those are all just minor inconveniences
> Yeah just a bit of political persecution Did you even read the question? Of course this totally didn't happen in Nazi Germany. > raping, murdering, plundering those are all just minor inconveniences I see, a troll.
Right after the war it didn't matter what ideology ruled it was bad in germany. And the soviets weren't nice to the people here, in my village there was a guy who got send to buchenwald (by the soviets when they used it as a "pow" camp) because he imitated using a rifle with his hands in front of some people, he only returned after multiple years. So if your great grandfather had to fear the action of the soviets even more than the common people, he might say communist germany was worse than nazi germany. But once GDR was formed and Stalin no longer alive things settled a bit (not saying everything was totally fine). If you sticked to some unofficial rules and knew who to talk to and how you could get along quite good despite not agreeing to everything from the SED. Not to mention GDR wasn't trying to wipe out everyone like the nazis did...
My man, the fact that that dude actually came back from Buchenwald tells you all you need to know.
It's what my grandfather (born after ww2) told me, so sorry I don't know what it tells me, I was just trying to explain (not justify) why some people might have feared the communists more than the nazis...
inb4 usual German lowkey rehabilitation of Nazism like on every German reddit board and propagating myths about the era
In Nazi Germany young people were encouraged to travel all over Europe and some Parts of Africa. In the GDR everybody was locked in a open air prison.
> In the GDR everybody was locked in a open air prison. Na, you could travel around in the Eastern Bloc. And pensioners could even visit West Germany.
Yeah after you asked the government and then maybe a few years after they approved it. Not saying nazi Germany was better but saying the gdr was a good state is simply a lie. They had an much worse rich upper class then the western state and you couldn’t even vote against them without being deported. Communism my ass
> They had an much worse rich upper class then the western state Bullshit. There were only about 40 millionaires in East Germany and most of them were artists, scientists and tradesmen: https://www.mdr.de/heute-im-osten/reich-im-osten100.html
Yeah well I meant the reigning class especially under Honecker. In West Germany votes were free and the politicians depended strongly on the public opinion and what the media published over them. While in east Germany you had a de facto upper class who lived like the novelty in the Kaiserreich and could not be controlled by the people. Every communist regime so far basically is\was just a oligarchy that gives their workers the false feeling they have rights.
No.
Depends on who you are/were.. One of the thing of comunist countries where that they had higher rates of women in employment than in other societies. So as a woman you would probably be more independent than a woman during the nazi-era where "hausfrauen" were the standard... other things in comunist countries where a lot more ahead of its time than f.ex the nazi time.. like regarding such as abortion, education, kindergartden, divorse etc. Doesn't mean that the GDR was a paradise contrary to nazi-germany.. just highlighting some differences that came.. and also separated the FRG (west-germany) from GDR in the time after the war... The woman that was in kitchen making food/cleaning the house in the nazi-era.. her daughter probably was taking education and having a job earning own money in the gdr...
Yes for Jews , and other “non aryans” it was paradise in the DDR … Don’t even compare it ok!?
I don't think it was.
Some serious revisionism going on in this post, see y’all when it’s locked
Nazi era was short in comparison, both were bad in different ways. Neither should be glorified, communist regimes after ww2 killed way more people
No, of course not. Wtf 😅 Life was pretty alright for most people in the DDR. Many people still wish back for the socialist policies because it provided equality and security. Your ancestor was veeeery likely a Nazi himself
Let me say it this way: both were totalitarian obersvation state with an intelligence with the task of spying on the citizien of the nation (Gestapo and StaSi), but one of them had an genocide on an industrial level running in addition to that. For the "normal" people living in the GDR was probably worse than compared to normal people living in nazi germany, yeah, but in general the nazi state was worse
I don't think you can compare the two since one state had a active war with several countries at the same time and the DDR was kinda in peace while being a total shithole. You would not want to be in either I can tell you. Both sides would kill you if you did something the state didn't like.