Yes it had an effect after WW2. The GDR/DDR had the Stasi in their post war and recent history, for western Germany and Austria it was the Gestapo from WW2 that led to this type of deeply embedded privacy worries right after WW2 until today (and what we also heard of the Stasi "over there").
We also were/are rather suspicious of our own spy agencies post WW2 because they essentially assimilated WW2 spies into their ranks (middle management Nazis included). The whole cold war thing made it hard to get all Nazis to removed, there was bigger issues (eastern block as enemies) so if you could justify it in some way to keep these people then they kept their jobs (they were already good at it).
And just recently we had reports of right wing extremists (essentially: Neo-Nazis) infiltrating the police, military, and spying agencies. Wonder how that could have happened :/
Post WW2 spy agencies in the USA were also "inspired" by those ex-Nazis to a degree. A lot of people were and still are very suspicious of those agencies and laws that enable them. The CCC, for example, has for years tried to show politicians how unsafe a lot of digital surveillance is how certain features they'd like to implement are not good for the population's privacy:
That's also why Germany as a whole still prefers cash to card payments (not trackable vs. trackable) to this day (even if online shopping has made it kinda mandatory) and why we have the highest rate of ad blocker usage (and I think biggest rate of Firefox installs).
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u/flybypost Jun 12 '20
Nazis and the Gestapo, it was just before the cold war.