The Nazis fought to the bitter end because they knew that unconditional surrender meant there would be hell to pay. And there was.
This played a big part in the attitude of do it right this time.
The exact opposite lesson was in fact learned by the Allies from WWI: instead of crippling Germany and the other Axis powers like the French did after WWI, they went with the Marshall plan, rebuilding their economies and making sure they have an actual future.
The Kaiser wasn't the problem after WWI, it was poverty that allowed the Nazis to rise to power.
This isn't really true. Hindenburg was instrumental in Hitler's rise to power. Ludendorff was the de facto dictator during WWI and proceeded to create the stab-in-the-back myth and to fight for the Nazis. There is absolutely lots of continuity between the WWI regime and the Nazis.
Over the next two or three years these orders were one-by-one rescinded and reversed, mostly for national security reasons when the Soviet threat was acknowledged and Germany's role in countering that Soviet threat was understood. But even then, in the end only a small portion of the Marshall plan went to West Germany. Most of it went to the rest of western Europe.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Potsdam_far-right_meeting...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Potsdam_far-right_meeting...
Sorry, but that's utter bullshit. Also, I wonder how you feel about Turkey's plans to remigrate Syrian refugees back to Syria now that Assad has been deposed.
I don't support any forced relocation of groups of people and find even very long prison sentences debatable. I'm also a big proponent of forcing Turkey to recognize the Armenian and other genocides. Nice try to poison the well though.
People build their lives somewhere, relocating them usually means many steps back. If you ever migrated into a complete new country with different values and language, you would understand.
Have you missed the last ten years worth of radicalization in the AfD? They started out as what appeared to be a relatively normal fringe party under Lucke, and then over the years the far-right managed to shed ever more layers of the onion.
Particularly Höcke, a man who you can legally call a fascist, gives me the chills. And the party youth manages to be even more radical than him, enough to scare the adults into attempting to clean up shop before the youth organization gets banned.
Forcibly relocating entirely ethnic minorities? Yeah, that tracks.
That assumes that rational thinking (by, in this case, the German side) is involved. There wasn't any, at the very top.
Hardly. A handful of very high ranking Nazis were tried and hanged. Many of them escaped via ratlines. Nearly all the mid-level officers and civil authorities escaped any sort of punishment or justice, and continued happily serving in the West German state.
This is a misconception. As a result of the "Nuremberg Trials" which concluded in 1946 and focused specifically on high-level defendants, 11 people were hanged. But there were numerous other trials, including what were called the "Nuremberg Military Tribunals" from 1946-1949, the Bergen-Belsen trials, and so on, as a result of which scores of people of decidedly lesser status were executed, easily some 200+.
Nearly all the mid-level officers and civil authorities escaped any sort of punishment or justice, and continued happily serving in the West German state.
This smells like a major numerical fudge as well.
After Berlin fell, soldiers went through all the hospitals and checked every patient for the SS tattoo. Those with them got a bayonet.
SS members were hunted and killed throughout Germany after the fall. Some were hung upside down from lampposts and set on fire.
Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers died in POW camps after the war.
It was open season on German women after the surrender.
Germans underwent forced relocations out of Poland.
The killing did not stop at the surrender, it slowly faded over the next year.
Nearly all WW2 documentaries end with the suicide of Hitler, and maybe the Nuremburg trials. What else happened was savage and not well covered.
The Germans had a saying - enjoy the war, because after it will be hell.
"After the Reich", NacDonogh
"An Eye For An Eye", Sack
"Crimes and Mercies", Bacque
"Embracing Defeat", Dower
"Gruesome Harvest", Keeling
"Justice At Nuremburg", Conot
"Other Losses", Bacque
"The Nuremburg Trial", Tusa
"The Long Road Home", Shephard
Also the Nazis claimed the German army was not losing WW1, but were betrayed by politicians. Perhaps WW2 would not have started if WW1 ended in unconditionally surrender?