this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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I obviously don't expect you to have a positive regard of the Soviets, but equivocating between the East German government and Nazis is frankly disgusting. We can start with something uncontroversial: The East Germans absolutely did not have death camps (probably the closest thing they did was the killing of many former Nazis) and were not engaging in ethnic cleansing.
The modern trend of people from the former East Germany supporting AfD probably has more to do with the interceding decades of liberal rule, combined with the region's historic relative poverty (which preceded even the Nazis).
It should also go without saying that I despise the Russian federation like I despise all liberal governments, and the Russian government especially for its primary purpose being anti-communist suppression. That said, again, "hard Nazi" is a disgusting thing to call them when they aren't doing things like running death camps or engaging in ethnic cleansing. It's just hysterical projection from the liberal masters of a country that has a civil religion around an actual Nazi collaborator and perpetrator of the Holocaust, Stepan Bandera.
Which West Germany didn't face?
Western Germany was more industrialized, because of 2 reasons: 1: access to coal and metal in the Ruhr, 2: Access to trade with Europe.
The former is just natural, the latter is more of that "librul witchcraft" of globalization.
The only difference between the two otherwise is that the Soviets brutalized the East, and that left a legacy of uneducated poverty.
https://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-abstract/52/2/225/107152/Occupation-Reparations-and-Rebellion-The-Soviets?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Basically the Soviets took an impoverished land and squeezed as hard as they could.
Oh, and you're right there were no camps in East Germany, those camps were in the USSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_in_the_Soviet_Union
We already established they had a Nazi problem
Again, the poverty in the region was longstanding and persists even today.
I'm not impressed with your link, remember that the West had the RAF, which enjoyed a fair deal of popular support. I'd also need a source on things like poor education since socialist states historically are the most consistently excellent at things like mass literacy (though of course modern Germany is fine in that regard).
So it's reduced to "They were poor" which was always the case and is still the case, though at least there was virtually no homelessness in the East, which the West and notably modern Germany cannot say.
I said death camps, which the USSR also didn't have. Labor camps are just a form of prison labor that people use the Holocaust's work-to-death camps to sound more brutal than they are. Prison labor was also practiced in West Germany, is practiced in modern Germany, and is practiced in whatever liberal state you like. The equivocation here is really the peak of the "Soviets were also Nazis" bullshit that is of course popular with the aggrieved German liberals and anticommunist historians the world over.
Well no, there's one step further, but I hope we can avoid talking about it because it doesn't concern Germany.