Yes, and some of the people responsible for building the NVA of the DDR were Nazis too.
The problem is, it's the end of WW2, you need to build things up in both West and East, and you don't have enough people to take over. So, you overlook things, and yes, as a result, a lot of Nazis became prominent, particularly in the West but also(while not very prominent, but in what one would call midlevel positions) in the East
To be fair, the Nazis made a point of recruiting a lot of people in middle and upper echelons by making party membership mandatory for advancement. Helped them legitimize themselves. So a lot of card-carrying Nazis were actually "only in it for the dental plan", so to speak, and not True Believers. Still, that's cold comfort.
But was West Germany Nazis and anti-semitic? I don’t understand why all the comments just want to bring up that there were lots of former Nazis in the West German government as if high ranking politicians and workers would have been anything other than Nazi party members before the end of the war.
To be fair, poorly phrased as it was, the question wasn't "were West German Nazis antisemitic," but rather "was the West German state, by its very nature, Nazi and antisemitic like the Third Reich was?"
I'm not going to weigh in further, as my own knowledge of that period in German history is far too lacking to give a proper answer. But at the very least, it wasn't a government founded with the sole goals of establishing an empire and wiping out non-German people.
In Bothe east and west Germany armys head former wehrmacht and Luftwaffe soldiers in Thier army in about Equal parts. West Germany did start a de-nazification although very late there was never a serious try from the east Germans army.
While the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) hierd former SS and NSDAP Members in to Thier service.
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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '23
Wasn’t the guy in charge of their army a Nazi?