What are some common misconceptions about Nazi Germany/Nazism?

Closer to a dystopian-capitalism than anything else really

It's honestly hard to relate it to anything because it's such a weird ideology. It wasn't quite capitalist in sense of the system that was derived from Adam Smith; it was more like the economic model of the Roman Empire mixed with a kind of cock-eyed racial nationalism that you really couldn't find anything else in human history to compare it to because it was just so extreme.
 
I read somewhere(can't recall, but it was a credible source, maybe The Economist) that the Nazis did very little to promote the music of Wagner, and that in fact, under their regime, performances of his music actually decreased. I'm not sure if this was because they actively discouraged people from listening to it, or if they just didn't give a damn(maybe 'cuz it wasn't populist enough?). The impression I get is that Wagner was something Hitler and maybe some of his circle were obssessed with, not neccessarily the whole party.
 
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The one that drives me just about spare is the "Nazis were Christian[, therefore fundamentalists/whatever are literally Nazis]" litany. Just mention the term Kirchenkampf to the morons who claim this and see how they look at you with a confused stare.
 
It's honestly hard to relate it to anything because it's such a weird ideology. It wasn't quite capitalist in sense of the system that was derived from Adam Smith; it was more like the economic model of the Roman Empire mixed with a kind of cock-eyed racial nationalism that you really couldn't find anything else in human history to compare it to because it was just so extreme.

I think the basic idea was that the Nazis said to the the corporate interests: "You let us tell you what to do, and we'll let you keep your profits. If you don't like that, you can try your luck with the Communists."
 
The one that drives me just about spare is the "Nazis were Christian[, therefore fundamentalists/whatever are literally Nazis]" litany. Just mention the term Kirchenkampf to the morons who claim this and see how they look at you with a confused stare.

Did the Nazis ever run a kulturkampf under that name? I thought that was Bismarck.

But yeah, the Nazis were not Christian in any meaningful way, and would almost certainly preferred to govern without the influence of the churches, even if some of them personally identified as belonging to various faiths.

A good way to clarify these things, and to absolve yourself from the charge of being a Christian apologist, is to compare the Nazis to their allies in the Petain regime and other clerical conservative outfits. Those guys WERE explicitly Christian(mostly Catholic), in a way that the Nazis certainly were not.

Though it has to be said that Christianity does bear some historical responsibility for fostering the anti-semitism that the Nazis harnessed. The eugenic pseudo-science, however, was in fact antithetical to the Catholic worldview, though it did have some following among "reform"-minded protestants in Scandinavia and the anglosphere.
 
One misconception that amuses me is that the entire Nazi party is homosexual (that is espoused in "brilliant" works like Pink Swastika), even though they persecuted gay people after dumping the likes of Rohm; though I'm quite surprised that the party didn't always act this way since it's creation.

And of course the idea that the Wehrmacht were "clean" in terms of behavior; though I honestly consider them generally less evil and heinous than the likes of the Waffen-SS but still, war crimes done in the name of an evil regime are still war crimes done in the name of an evil regime.
 
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I hate the whole "Nazi tech-wank" trope--the Allies made far more advances in technology during WWII than Germany ever did, including radar, the first computer and the atom bomb.
 
Some of those allies did some pretty shady stuff too and few seem to call them on it, looking at you Croatia and Albania.

Early 2000s I was a callow youth in a local gaming cafe, me and friends only played a few of the major selection they had on offer. Went in on my own once bored and jumping around I played one of the Rainbow Six series (or another spec-ops geopolitical thrillery game) and the opening cut scene was not about an old Nazi who fled to Argentina but a Croatian Ustache war criminal. What?! I thought.

That weekend I conducted a very enlightening if depressing trip through the history of non-German atrocity in 20th century Europe.
 
These are true statements but please dont mitigate the astronomical command-and-control the Germans had when working with their allies (minus Japan)

It was the German who lead the way in partisan reprisals - extermination camps - etc.
Did their co-belligerents do the same? yes
Did the Germans literally write the playbook for it? absolutely.

This can't be generalized over all the German allies - I am yet to see any indication for the Germans (or German policies) having any discernible effect on how the Finns ran their occupation in Eastern Karelia or treated their Soviet POWs, apart perhaps a slight trend of increasing the dehumanization of Soviets through their propaganda. But then, the Finns could well dehumanize the "Red Ruskies" themselves on the basis of local tradition since 1918. Now, I don't know as much about the other minor Axis allies, but on the basis of the Finnish example, I'd suggest that we shouldn't overemphasize the effect the Nazis had on their allies' actions. I believe all the nations that took part in WWII were, more often than not, perfectly capable of committing their own atrocities even without foreign input.
 
It was a list of countries that did "evil-doings" while allied to the Nazis but are never called out of it.
I thought Albania was annexed by Italy before the war even started and wasn't restored to independence until afterwards. How could they be accused of "evil-doings" while allied to the Nazis when they were not independent?
 
This can't be generalized over all the German allies - I am yet to see any indication for the Germans (or German policies) having any discernible effect on how the Finns ran their occupation in Eastern Karelia or treated their Soviet POWs, apart perhaps a slight trend of increasing the dehumanization of Soviets through their propaganda. But then, the Finns could well dehumanize the "Red Ruskies" themselves on the basis of local tradition since 1918. Now, I don't know as much about the other minor Axis allies, but on the basis of the Finnish example, I'd suggest that we shouldn't overemphasize the effect the Nazis had on their allies' actions. I believe all the nations that took part in WWII were, more often than not, perfectly capable of committing their own atrocities even without foreign input.

I don't mean to be condescending but the fact your literally pick the one co-belligerent that was never a member of the axis powers to prove this point is pretty silly.
In the fog of war, moral lines get blurred on all sides but the Germans turned that shit into a fine art - placing them in category of utter and inescapble blame that I think is justified by the mass atrocities they themselves commit and atrocities they forced their axis allies to commit especially as the war turned against them.

Nazis were scum, are scum, and will always be scum. That can never be a misconception
 
That the genocide was some kind of bug in the ideology of Nazism rather than the purpose.

That it wasn't the most evil regime to blight the Earth.
These two I found especially irritating, particularly the first one.

Anyone who believes that the Third Reich's goal wasn't genocide in one form or another from the start of the war should look up Generalplan Ost and how they explicitly planned to kill 85% of Poles, 50% of Czechs, 50% of Latvians and Estonians, 75% of Russians, 75% of Belarusians, 85% of Lithuanians and 65% of Ukrainians followed by enslaving the survivors as chattel serfs.

We're talking about over 100 MILLION people (not including Jews/Roma/Homosexuals etc) designated for extermination with the stroke of a metaphorical pen. If that doesn't make the Reich the most evil nation state in history then I don't know what does.
 
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I don't mean to be condescending but the fact your literally pick the one co-belligerent that was never a member of the axis powers to prove this point is pretty silly.
In the fog of war, moral lines get blurred on all sides but the German turned that shit into a fine art - placing them in category of utter-blame that I think is justified by the atrocities they themselves commit and atrocities they forced their axis allies to commit especially as the war turned against them.

Finland was an ally of Nazi Germany de facto (and thus "an Axis ally") even if it was not a member of the Axis in strictly de jure terms. In my view the particular responsibility of the minor allies, their leaders and militaries, for various atrocities committed during WWII should not be "disappeared" into the conceptual black hole of Nazi evil. Doing this would disregard the way WWII-era states and militaries were capable of terrible things in the right circumstances, even without Nazis ordering or overseeing such actions or processes. Treating the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany's smaller allies as mere reflections of Nazi evil would, IMHO, not be consistent with good historical research or addressing the actual historical processes in play during WWII. Things were a little more nuanced than that.

The other side of it, of course, is that the states and governments that allied with Nazi Germany during the war did not do it out of mustache-twirling villainy or sheer blood-thirst. These were decisions that either seemed sound at the time from a political, geopolitical or defensive point of view, or then they were made under duress of some sort. More often than not, the states that allied with Hitler's Germany were not privy to the detailed plans the Nazis had for Europe, and in fact even could not be, as much of those plans, like Generalplan Ost, were only made during the war and then only within the Nazi elite itself.

As this is a thread for misconceptions about Nazi Germany, one common misconception in the 2010s seems to be that in the late 30s, just before WWII, Hitler's Germany was internationally seen as much like an evil empire run by actual death-cultists as it is today. In fact, at the time Nazi Germany was seen as a nasty dictatorial state, but as such pretty run-of-the-mill, not that much worse than Mussolini's Italy. It was definitely seen as better than Stalin's USSR as oppressive totalitarian states went, and in the eastern part of Europe, from Finland in the north through the Baltics and Poland, and down towards the Balkans, there was in the 30s much more concern for the Bolshevik threat than the Nazi menace.
 
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Serbia (being Slavic) was never allied to the Nazis, whereas Croatia definitely was. Their Ustache had a reputation for brutality that made the SS Einsatzgruppen look positively liberal by comparison.
 
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