1: East Germany did not handle their Nazis in the way west Germany or the US did.
NOT AT ALL! For all its faults, claiming that the East German republic did not deal with its Nazis is a lie. This was one of the few things they got right.
It was the only part which took the "denacification" thing remotley serious, in fact, the first SED (German KPD) leadership consisted largely out of communists who fled to Russia while the Nazis had power, communists who survived the third reich in Germany and some parts of the social democrat party.
P.S. in the GDR, someone who was a Nazi (as in involved in Nazi crimes during their reeign) may have gotten shot. Someone who expressed Nazi leanings was jailed and "reeducated".
2: For a "normal" German, Hitler is evil because he killed a lot of people (fair amount of Germans within them too).
For a partriotic German, Hitler is the jerk who, against better advice, ended the existence of Germany as something more than a medium power.
Even the non Nazi-rightest hate him because, without this needless cruelty idiocys, WW2 could propably have been won.
The Nazis love him because they are ******* brainless idiots.
i did not claim this, i claimed they did it the same way west germany did it.
you are right, initially the denazification in the SBZ was more rigid. this was a purge, you were a member of the NSDAP e.g., out you go. and several others who were not in line with the new overlords got purged, too. oops. show trials are teh shit.
the denazification process in the western zone was more bureaucratic, they staged the party members into different categories of Mitläufer. Depending on your category you could get a job as a professor or not, e.g. Then they realized, and the soviets did that too, that you cannot fire everybody and not reemploy all the bureaucrats that kept the Reich running. Good example is the total Deba'athification in Iraq which was so successful in keeping the country operable.
So the old nazi assholes who were powerful under hitler just had to lay low for a while and then started new careers. a good case is Hans Maria Globke. He was such a good case for the failure of the denazification, that there was a huge show trial in the GDR. Some old nazis were really successful in West Germany, but East Germany had their share, too. mainly in the NVA and the Stasi. But that was not reported in the state-run media. In the state-run media was reported what evil the western part of Germany did. Almost like the Eastern part of Germany was among the first victims of Hitler, you know, like Austria. My, my, after the total annihilation in the war, no one wanted to be responsible. everyone was in the resistance, no one did know what happened, and no one actually liked Hitler, he wasn't conservative enough.
Motivation for my rant is i won't sit here and let it slide that Eastern Germany was somehow the Nazi-free part, where guilt-free communists where shipped in from Moscow and created a socialist utopia. I read and hear enough of this so called Ostalgie, how nice the GDR was, and how many, even young east germans, wish that the GDR was back. The GDR was a fucked up totalitarian dictatorship which killed and tortured and imprisoned its people. yes.
