What are some common misconceptions about Nazi Germany/Nazism?

I know what the list lists. Just that Albania should not be on that list, while Serbia might qualify.

Albania should definitely be on that list; whether Serbia also qualifies or not.
Albania was recognized as an independent state by Nazi Germany (unlike Serbia or Greece), did not have an Allied government-in-exile (whereas Slovakia, Serbia, and even Croatia sort of did), and committed plenty of ethnic cleansing and repression. So no worse than the Axis average, but still quite guilty and usually overlooked.
 
What atrocities did Albania commit?

Over 2,000 Greeks in southern Albania were murdered.
Around 10,000 Serbs in Kosovo also murdered and over 70,000 forced to leave their homes.
The Jews of central Albania were usually left alone; but the Jews of Albanian-held Kosovo were rounded up by the Albanian SS Division "Skanderbeg" and sent to death camps.
Medium-level repression against ethnic Albanian dissenters, with hundreds killed.
 
Hey I'm a regular on there.

I'm inclined to recommend my story review of a certain Mass Effect/Nazi Germany crossover fan fic. It was wonderfully terrible.

I've never read Uplifted, but I did read that the author of it did at least some research on the subject to get an idea of the time period and about the Nazi antics in Eastern Europe. And it surely can't be as bad as "If I Was Your Nazi", where it just seems like some bizarre South Park-esque satire often taking itself seriously to me and trying its best to offend people for the sake of it rather than do anything meaningful about the atrocities of the Nazis.

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.

If anything, I like to think the war that they started made them act worse than they had beforehand; like as in, it enabled them to do more damage to its neighbors on an unprecedented level (i.e. the Holocaust and Generalplan-Ost).
 
Puppet Government in Belgrade, led by Milan Nedić, might disagree with that, along with it's prominent 'tool', Dimitrije Ljotić's 'Serbian volunteer Corps'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Nedić
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitrije_Ljotić#Serbian_Volunteer_Corps_and_propaganda_efforts
They might but if they didn't they might loose out on that tasty Nazi funding.
You seem to be confusing my condemnation of Albanian actions during ww2 for defending Serbian actions during ww2 almost as if you have some kind of bias, funny that is.
In truth I have a bit of soft spot for countries that aren't actually any worse than their neighbours but the world pretends they are anyway, Serbia definitely fits that bill.
I didn't exclude Serbia in my list because I think it didn't do anything evil itself, I excluded it because it is often pointed to more than anyone else as the "bad guy" of the balkans, while these two bounce about pretending they are somehow any better.
 
Some of those allies did some pretty shady stuff too and few seem to call them on it, looking at you Croatia and Albania.

I never said they didn't. Mostly Croatia which although I love the Croats but the big U were at times kinda overboard to say the least.

I think the point is that Europe and many people in Europe were so (with reason) afraid of the Soviet Union that they stood steady and died to defend their country from it. Many people do not even attempt to understand why many of these men fought beside "they were all Nazis".
 
I never said they didn't. Mostly Croatia which although I love the Croats but the big U were at times kinda overboard to say the least.

I think the point is that Europe and many people in Europe were so (with reason) afraid of the Soviet Union that they stood steady and died to defend their country from it. Many people do not even attempt to understand why many of these men fought beside "they were all Nazis".
I wasn't accusing you of saying it, just was saying it happens.
 
Also, one more point--the Nazis only appear to have become consistently anti-gay after the Night of the Long Knives; before that, their attitude towards homosexuality--at least in regards to their own members--was relatively ambivalent--indeed, to the point that the open homosexuality of Ernst Rohm and some other SA members was tolerated (including by Adolf Hitler himself).

Not ambivalent - clearly opposed. They stopped a proposal of socialists and communists for legalization of homosexuality in the Reichstag in 1930.

Yeah, it's hard to beat Japan for economic and administrative efficiency.

BTW, how did the Japanese economy do during WWII? Was it more efficient than Fascist and Allied economy?

even though they persecuted gay people after dumping the likes of Rohm

Now an often forgotten fact: homosexuality was illegal in the Soviet Union, the USA, Great Britain and most of the other allied countries. Homosexuality was already illegal in Germany before 1933 (and not only sine Röhm's death), and the ban was enforced during Weimar too, even if the usual myths dismiss the fact. Even im democratic countries, homosexuals were persecuted, with the notable exception of France and other countries due to Napoleonic influence. So saying that the Nazis persecuted gays is right, but don't forget that the whole wolrd was blatantly homophobic in these days.

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.

But they had flying saucers.

Seriously: The computer was co-developed by Zuse, a German.

The nazis did have radar but it was far less advanced

In read on wikipedi that the German radar was much more sophisticated than chain home.
 
In truth, it was a cesspool of rivalries and backbiting that made it difficult at times to get things done. Moreover, fear of being held accountable for bad decisions often led to no decision at all being made, which meant a lot of things were cobbled together on an ad hoc basis with no clear policy at all.
Godwin aside, this does sound familiar.
 
They might but if they didn't they might loose out on that tasty Nazi funding.
You seem to be confusing my condemnation of Albanian actions during ww2 for defending Serbian actions during ww2 almost as if you have some kind of bias, funny that is.
In truth I have a bit of soft spot for countries that aren't actually any worse than their neighbours but the world pretends they are anyway, Serbia definitely fits that bill.
I didn't exclude Serbia in my list because I think it didn't do anything evil itself, I excluded it because it is often pointed to more than anyone else as the "bad guy" of the balkans, while these two bounce about pretending they are somehow any better.

I never asumed that you defended Serbian actions during ww2, just pointed out that, as represented by the puppet government that sided with Nazis, it deserved a place on your list.
Serbia got the bad rap due to the dealings of Slobodan Miloshevic from late 1980s on, and sometimes due to the dictatorship of the Serbian Royal house between ww1 and ww2. However, it is quite a rare occasion that anybody actually talk about the deeds of the puppet government from ww2 era. Compared with Croatia of ww2, that is always connected with puppet government in Zagreb, 1941-45.
 
Asp wrote:
Yeah, the Nazis did find out some valuable stuff about rocketry just because of the amount of money they poured into it but it's greatly exaggerated. Considering that they spent one a half Manhattan Projects on their rocket programs they should have gotten a lot more out of them than they actually did. Goddard taking rocket science as far as he did on a university research budget that was tiny by comparison is a lot more impressive. If we hadn't had any of the Nazis' research I think the USSR and American space programs would have been delayed by maybe two years but not much more.

Von Braun's later role with NASA is also frequently grossly overstated. Initially he wanted to pretty much just toss science aside and blast a rocket at the moon to see what would happen (the "direct ascent" method); lunar orbit rendezvous thankfully won out. He did, to his credit, eventually come around to the LOR way of thinking but still...The primary choice should be the one that needs a bigger rocket than the Saturn? Really?

Explored this question in another thread, (https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/justice-for-von-braun-when-is-there-a-moon-landing.407175/) and I noted that VB's biggest 'contribution' both in Germany and the US was not his engineering or management talent but his charisma. He sold the Nazi's on spending the equivalent of billions in todays dollars on experimentation and research facilities far in advance of what anyone else had to solve problems no one else was even seriously considering. He did something similar in the US where for the first time, (despite extensive efforts by US advocates and scientist) he got a mainstream media publisher in Colliers magazine to take spaceflight as a serious issue and report it as such which in turn made the American government and public take the matter seriously for the first time. Then Disney jumped on the band wagon and people began to believe that space travel and satellites were only a few years away.

Keep in mind that while Goddard did a lot of ground breaking work he was very publicly 'trashed' in the American media, (the New York Times didn't "apologize" and then only half heartedly when Apollo 11 was already on the way to the Moon) over even suggesting space travel was possible and there was so much ridicule and dismissal for rockets that a rocket propulsion company supported officially by the Navy and Army had to call themselves the "Jet Propulsion Laboratory" to avoid NOT being laughed out of financial offices for working on "Buck Rogers" science fiction propulsion!

Despite the very visible use of the V2 on London during the war and serious work being undertaken in the US by the government and industry the average American could NOT take space flight seriously. Not until Colliers.

Not to get too off-topic but I feel the need to correct a few of YOUR misconceptions :)

1) Everyone (including the Soviets) started with direct ascent since it was the easiest method for initial studies. HOW they got the combined ship to the Moon however differed from plan to plan. Von Braun like most assumed that the ship would initially be launched into LEO and there refueled using Earth-Orbital-Rendezvous (EOR) where ground based tracking and control would allow precise positioning of the launches. Lunar-Orbital-Rendezvous wasn't considered early on simply because the Moon would of course lack those tracking systems. EOR didn't 'require' huge rockets and Von Braun's plan was based on the Saturn-1 booster right up till the LOR decision was made. EOR however was going to take time, and time was the one thing the US didn't have given a less than a decade time-line.

2) None of the biology and human factors "experts" in the US were willing to agree that a human could easily handle the rigors of space travel. In fact most of them assumed a human would be incapacitated by the launch or exposure to zero G and Von Braun followed the same line of reasoning as did most of the "top" scientist in the US so originally designed the Mercury as a fully automated capsule. It's no joke that the astronauts had to pretty much twist the scientist arms to get them to allow them any control at all. The Russians did the same thing planning the flight of Vostok to REQUIRE no manual inputs.

3) One of the points I make in the above cited thread is that without the Germans, (specifically Von Braun) the US would have been even LESS prepared both technologically as well as mentally for Sputnik and Vostok which would have had down-stream effects probably making out panic and response worse than it was in OTL. (Apollo was and will always be a great achievement but it stunted the US space effort and without that 'competition' factor it has regulated space exploration to a very low priority in both public and government support)

Randy
 
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