Nazi

This article covers a topic that, by its very nature, is a magnet for flamewars. Try not to get too assmad at what you're about to read.

This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

"I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."

– J.R.R. Tolkien, being a boss

"YOU UTTER FOOL! GERMAN SCIENCE IS THE FINEST IN ZE WORLD!!!"

– Stroheim, an over the top Nazi and the first Guile

Goddamn it, Nazis! Why are you so fashionable, you evil fucking bastards?!

Nazi is the commonly used shorthand version of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party), a political party which took over Germany for a 1,000 years from 1933 to 1945. Interestingly, Nazis did not refer to themselves as 'Nazis', they called themselves 'National Socialists'.

It also refers to people who belonged to said party, their ideology, and their regime in Germany during said period of time. Led by Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party emerged from the uncertainty and political upheaval caused by the Red Scare, the end of the German Empire after the Great War, myths, promoted by the army, that the military had been on the cusp of victory before being "stabbed in the back" by the civil government, resentment at unfair conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, economic uncertainties due to the stock market crash of 1929, German ethnic nationalism, a desire to blame things on scapegoats, and a belief in militarism popular among many returning veterans. They were also aided by their invention of modern campaigning and propaganda, wide-spread dissatisfaction with the status quo, the strategic seizure of the political positions that controlled the police force, the intimidation or murder of political opponents and journalists using glorified street thugs, and more dumb luck than anyone has any right to have, let alone a bunch of genocidal loons.

Overview

Historically Accurate (if you consider checzia polish)

The Nazis' initial success can be attributed to the image of glorious economic recovery, part of which they accomplished by keeping Germany's economy running during the Great Depression. They presented this to the rest of the world, making many people believe the little mustachioed guy couldn't be that crazy since he'd made his country recover brilliantly in very little time. And while Germany did indeed recover, the whole thing was helped and held upright by MEFO bills: basically a Ponzi scheme that allowed the government to loan money on the sly through a front company about metallurgy research (the Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft, or MEFO in short). This allowed them to work at a much higher level of debt flotation than allowed by international regulation, and the idea was to pay back the loans with seized gold and valuables from Jews at first, and then directly from conquered nations after the war, since even state created debt bonds are exactly that: debt, credit, which is trust. Eventually the creditor will want something in exchange (or at the very least get his investment back) or the debtor's credibility will be shattered, stopping the money flow.

To give you a clearer idea of what happened: You are defeated and poor, but are fuming for revenge. To keep you down, your victorious neighbors don't lend you a dime to produce guns and make sure your already meager income is only spent on debt and basic necessities. So what do you do? You decide to spend money in the form of credit, raise the debt higher and higher (making the rest of the world believe you are rich), and keep the charade until the debt becomes irrelevant (who needs to pay the creditor he will declare war on?). So you make up a credit card called Mefocard ("MEtallurgische FOrschungsgesellschaft" - Metallurgy R&D sounds civilian and peaceful, so the world markets play along), borrow even more wildly to look opulent, and to create weapons on the sly promise that you'll pay the debt back... Then attempt to kill the lenders and subjugate their families to share the debt you have. It was simply a continent wide, all-or-nothing robbery attempt even wilder than WW1's trench-fighting Imperial duel.

The Ponzi schemes weren't limited to national/corporate level shenanigans, but extended to the German people as well. The famous Beetle was developed to be a cheap family car (hence “volkswagen”, or “people’s car”), and a part of selling the German public on the idea of an idyllic, cheap-and-cheerful family life, along with things like state-sponsored vacation villages. An elaborate layaway scheme allowed average German families to give the government a few Reichsmark a day in exchange for the promise of a new Beetle and a seaside vacation package. However, all that money actually went into rebuilding the German military, and war began before any of the promises had to be delivered on. Because the illusion of a better future and hope is always easier than just taxing the population directly. And, lastly, the Holocaust itself was also an important pillar of the German economy, especially when the war started in earnest. Jewish (and other undesirables', particularly Slavic intelligentsia) property and land was being confiscated on a scale never before seen or even conceived of. Not even their dead bodies were safe: glasses were taken apart and reused for scopes or similar, hair was used as fabrics for the textile industry, and gold teeth were taken and melted down by the millions. Massive amounts of gold, hard currency and other valuable things like works of art were stolen from Jewish museums, synagogues, households and bank accounts (hence keeping up the Mefo bill's token payments to creditors). They even had to pay for their own transit into the death camps, which would almost be hilarious if it wasn't so unbelievably evil. This ruthless, industrialized way of executing a massive genocide made the Holocaust the standard many people associate the word "genocide" with today - ironically, the Holocaust was in its methods the exception. No other genocide in history built an entire branch of government and industry centered around the mass murder of human beings, not to mention devoting vital manpower and military resources bullets to the project that the overstretched front lines of Germany desperately needed; in essence, the Nazis sabotaged their own war machine, just to kill Jews.

They were also fantastic proponents of lies and propaganda, ranging from bogus race theory (fake archaeology was a particular favorite), to manufactured pretexts for war (the trigger for invading Poland was an obvious false-flag operation- something Japan had used 2 years previously), to simply overstating their successes. For example, the old line that goes "say what you want about them, but the Nazis/Hitler did make the trains run on time"? They didn't. Train service was as bad or worse under fascist leadership as it had been immediately before their rise to power. But they realized that they only had to say the trains were running on time, and strongarm anyone inside Germany who dared to publicly disagree. Doubly funny is that it was Mussolini's Italy that had trains running on time, and even then, it was because of pre-fascism era personnel improving it. In fact, the entire political/industrial structure of Nazi Germany was a nightmarish tangle of private businesses, government organizations, bureaucrats, and ambitious officials with overlapping portfolios and responsibilities. Hitler frequently gave out contradictory orders and deliberately pitted his subordinates against each other as part of his social Darwinist beliefs; the strongest and best would naturally rise to the top through competition while the others were weeded out, thus improving the whole. In practice, this system was dysfunctional, inefficient, unresponsive, wasteful, and full of more backstabbing bastardry than an average game of Diplomacy. People became too scared to make decisions without Hitler around, companies and factories wasted precious time and materials on design contracts that were ultimately awarded to other firms, there was an ongoing multi-way fight between the army, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, and Waffen-SS for resources, manpower, and money throughout the war, and people like Himmler and Goering carved out their own private spheres of influence in the middle of it all, further splintering the government.

Needless to say, this situation was the reason why the scenario of not waging war (like in Hearts of Iron or some alternate reality stories) simply wasn't a realistic option. Despite their multiple annexations of territory, the Nazis couldn't sustain their charade without the influx of riches, heavy machinery (they stripped Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other conquered territories to the bone, grabbing civilian factories' machinery, bolts, nuts and even the metallic building materials like Blood Ravens on meth, literally, Nazis loved their amphetamines) and material from other conquered territories to pay the MEFO bills. So they soon mobilized their armies and launched a war of expansion on the rest of the world, starting with Poland. (The question is still open among historians as whether they annexed and plundered enough reserves with Czechoslovakia to keep the charade up "peacefully" long enough to let their Red "ally" make the opening move instead, but that's a discussion for another place and time.)

Their goal (next to getting gold and industrial materials to pay the enormous gambling debt of an empire) was to impose their militaristic Social Darwinist ideology across Europe, outlaw any dissenting school of thought, enslave all the "sub-human" Slavs (after starving to death more than half of them to make room for German settlers in accordance to Generalplan Ost and assimilating anyone believed to be sufficiently Germanic), and exterminate any "undesirables" (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, etc) on which they blamed all their problems because they felt that they were superhumans without any flaws. Any problem which they suffered had to be the fault of some subversive "other" from outside who tried to cause the Master Race misery according to the Nazi philosophy of believing all ethnicities are a hivemind loyal to themselves and they all collectively fight over resources, therefore "weaker" races resort to social corruption (LGBT, porn, discouraging women from reproducing) of the glorious German master race to get ahead of them. But due to some severe strategic fuck ups from Hitler who often overruled his military leadership and his generals (the situation is more nuanced than that and would be too long and boring to explain fully; basically there was mutual mistrust and both sides routinely fucked up, but after the war the generals used Hitler as a scapegoat because the history is written by the living), Germany ended up in a three-way war with the Soviet Union (who provided blood), Great Britain (military intelligence, enough naval force projection to strangle all Axis naval trade and pure fucking grit) & the United States (more armaments than you can possibly dream of with an extra helping on top), while their allies such as Romania (the dudes with the European oil fields), Hungary (some light tanks and cavalry) & Italy (...more of a liability than bonus, so...) surrendered during the middle years of the war, Finland was doing their own thing the entire time and barely gave a shit about the Nazis beyond asking for supplies, and resource-starved Japan could do little more than be a distraction.

While Germany may have had some areas of technological/industrial advantage (at least initially, and this is often overstated), by the end of the war they were crippled by a lack of many strategic resources and widespread destruction of production lines and reverted to some crude and/or untested/outlandish solutions like using coal liquefaction as an oil substitute, potato alcohol for V-2 rockets and meth-filled chocolate bars for Eastern Front troopers (when they decided to use the logistic volume for ammo rather than thick clothes which they had but decided to workaround with untested drugs-typical Hitlerite solution-). Their situation was made worse by their late-war obsession with Wunderwaffen ("wonder weapons"), such as "flying wing" aircraft, the world's first ballistic missiles, multi-charge megacannons and retardedly big tanks, all of which wasted time, materials, and engineering effort that could have instead been used to churn out more regular tanks, artillery pieces, and aircraft, along with a chronic shortage of oil other than a trickle from Romania, which meant that the panzer divisions were routinely grinding to a halt for lack of fuel by the end. Because of all this, there was no hope of repulsing both the Western Allies and the Soviet Union at the same time; thus the Nazi regime finally met its end when the Russians marched into Berlin and Hitler *BLAM*med himself along with his mad-as-a-hatter common-law wife and their dog. While their hate-wagon managed to go far and temporarily overrun most of Europe, it simply had too much war to fight on multiple fronts, a lack of effective strategic planning in the form of Hitler and his cronies, and the fact that most powerful nations of the time opposed them either because they cherished their political freedoms, saw their economies fail, or simply were on the Nazi "to-exterminate" list.

So with all that baggage, how the hell did they manage to conquer most of Europe?

Two words: operational flexibility. Or "knockout artistry", whichever you prefer. In the early half of the war, the German military operated on a principle they called "mission tactics" (auftragstaktik) or "selbstandigkeit der Unterfuhrer" (independence of the subordinate commander). The field commanders were given clear overall goals (such as: secure this location by such and such time), and then given free rein in HOW they accomplished the goal. Left to their own devices, the German commanders in the field were creative and flexible, using everything they had at their disposal and making high risk, high reward maneuvers. They also entered the war with radios in every tank and the best close air support in the world (at the time). They also had a tactical/strategic philosophy called "Bewegungskrieg" (war of movement) that emphasized mobile operations and front-loaded shock assaults and sought to avoid getting stuck into prolonged fights, since they knew from experience that they couldn't win a "Stellungskrieg", a static war of positional fighting like WWI had been. This paid off brilliantly at first, since they blew through Poland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, the Balkans, Greece, and the British army (twice) without much trouble.

The French and British had stronger tanks, excellent defensive positions, and equivalent numbers, but it didn't matter. The Allies were expecting a war where both sides show up and shoot at each other, while the Germans had worked out that moving fast, surrounding the enemy, and smashing them from all sides was much easier and less costly than the kind of slow, grinding warfare that had bled them dry in WWI. One French general famously spent several days celebrating his promotion to the role of leading the defense, only to finally arrive at his command center and find the Germans one river away from Paris.

The German army did its best work when their commanders were allowed to make the most out of their situation and assets, and only started to suffer when they were micromanaged and squandered in operations that didn't play to their advantages in mobility (even Sun Tzu 2,500 years ago advised against armchair micromanagement and to let field commanders make decisions for themselves). Ironically, their primary enemy, the Soviets, experienced the opposite, going from a crippled military hampered by commissars being suspicious of the officers and meddling with everything due to undeserved authority bestowed by Stalin to Stalin learning to take a backseat and being content with focusing on allocating resources for the better military minds make use of as they saw fit, while he collected the lion's share of the credit like a master politician. This is really only partially true, however.

The problem was that the German generals of the period had inherited the traditional Prussian mindset of "when all else fails, just attack the fuckers" and "proper logistical planning is for pansies and Frenchmen". Also, for all its celebrated flexibility, auftragstaktik also meant that there wasn't much in the way of backup planning, since orders were supposed to be short, simple, and delivered verbally whenever possible, rather than being written down. In turn, this meant that when things inevitably went off the rails, the officers on the scene had to improvise, and not always with good results. For example, Erwin Rommel was basically allowed to do his own thing in Africa because the rest of the German high command was busy trying to stem the bleeding in Russia. While he had some successes early on, he outran his supply lines so often that he had to steal from the British to keep his troops fed and vehicles gassed up. This worked until the Brits got their shit together and kicked his ass at El Alamein. In the aftermath, he had to abandon many of his vehicles for lack of fuel and then made a series of bad decisions that got his army smashed into a bloody mess before being taken prisoner en masse. This same mindset led other German generals to do shit like feed division after division into the urban nightmare that was Stalingrad and beat their heads against the wall in the Caucasus while their overworked and poorly structured logistics pipeline struggled just to keep the troops fed and armed, let alone adequately replace losses in men and vehicles. Hitler and his dumbshittery didn't help any, to be sure, but the German army had exactly one tool in their box and didn't stop using it even when it was patently no longer working.

Neo-Nazis

Despite everything there are still some people out there which subscribe to the Nazi worldview, or at least something which has a lot of it in it's DNA. Yes, there is often some differences between these guys and the Nazi Party of old as well as differences between groups but this is only to be expected. There is no overarching body attempting to enforce a party discipline among Neo-Nazi groups and many people apply it to their context with local leaders putting their own spin on things.

Why do people end up here? Well there were some Nazis which did not give up on the cause even after the Third Reich went down and these guys were still an issue in Germany even after Nazism was formally banned (see the Socialist Reich Party in 1949-52, German Reich Party in 50-66 and a few more "no we are totally not Nazis even though Hitler had some good ideas..." far-right german parties). There are also a few people which by their own are pushed towards Nazism, often with similar fears. The McCarthy era Red Scare produced a number of American Neo-Nazis as a byproduct. Even so, most get led into established groups.

One source of recruits for neo-Nazis has been the edgelords who get off offending society and can't tell the difference between yelling "Fart Butt!" at a school assembly and "Sieg Heil!" at a Jewish Wedding. In and of itself, this does not mean one is actually a Nazi, but legit Nazis can hide among these jerks and try to funnel people towards their ranks. Usually they find success with people in that category who are dealing with a lot of emotional issues and have some fears about life or whatever and exploit those to lead them step by step into radicalization, along with a careful spoon-feeding of ideology. The other main source is blue-collar local Europeans who feel that they have been cheated out of a prosperous life by extensive post-war Gastarbeiter migration to Europe, especially their children who ended up being bullied by said migrants' children and ended up being drawn in to the brotherhood such Neo-Nazi organisations can sometimes offer.

To outline one path people have taken into neo-Nazism, it starts with things like "the Allies were not pure saints"¹ or "those uniforms were cool". Points which are, in and of themselves, not wrong. But in this specific context, they can be used as a stepping stone to other, dodgier talking points ("victor's history", "you're not getting the whole story"), especially those that make the Nazis look better ("Rommel and Manstein were the best generals of the war", "1 Tiger beats 5 Shermans") and the Allies look worse ("Russians only won through human waves", "the Dresden bombings were needlessly cruel"). If they find someone who can accept these claims, other less savoury points and active white-washing ("the cruelty of the Treaty of Versailles") can be added to the mix. Add in some "jokes" which get more and more hateful, then rinse and repeat until your new recruit is wearing a swastika armband and screaming at people about the "Jewish conspiracy". Of course, not everyone will fall for it, and even if someone buys into the first few arguments, there is a difference between uncritically accepting some Wehraboo talking points and going full Goebbels. But some get drawn deeper and deeper into the morass until they end up unironically believing the whole steaming Nazi load. The fact that as people go deeper down the rabbit hole they end up alienating themselves from friends and family more and more aids the process, since they're left with only other neo-Nazis to hang out with.

¹ Definitely true, even leaving aside Stalin. See the Bengal Famine of 1943, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study for stuff done by the UK and US. Allied soldiers also weren't above shooting unarmed prisoners. Even so, these pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by the Nazis or those they had planned.

Nazi Portrayals in Fiction

Nazis are portrayed as an over the top wacky military who like leading extermination wars against the Jews (and other people) and build secret bases on the moon, under water, or some other silly place. Their technology is frequently exaggerated with laser weapons, armored suits, giant robots, walking tanks, and/or Robo-Hitler. Some vidya portrayals even goes so far as to put it all together in a big ball of LOLWUT and add a touch of magical Lovecraftian shit because Nazi propaganda had a weird love for the occult.

Varying opinions on the perceived Nazi character allows them to be looked at from varying points of view, developing their character all the more. Take the Imperium of Man, for example, which tends to blend German-fascist iconography with Soviet politics and a Roman-Catholic aesthetic sense. Some will say that the Imperium's a nuthouse since they're willing to allow an Inquisitor to turn an entire hive spire into a towering inferno if he so happens to find a single heretic in*BLAM* SPEAKING ILL OF THE IMPERIUM IS EXTRA HERESY.

Others will say that the Imperium's just being pragmatic, and such an action is justifiable as the Imperium is constantly beset by merciless foes who will not think twice to bring them down, making their methods for survival cruel but necessary. Which, given the fact that daemons really do exist and can corrupt entire planets in a short amount of time and rape every corrupted soul forever and ever, is pretty justifiable. Even the Imperium's xenophobia is justifiable given how nearly all the major races pretty much want to wipe everyone else out or enslave them to be tortured to death as sustenance.

But that doesn't change the fact that these reasons are often just used as an excuse to torture and kill anyone who's even s*BLAM*

The idea of Nazi Germany being an advanced, sophisticated war machine has been heavily reevaluated in recent years to the point where it's now viewed as propagandistic bullshit. Closer examination of the war has shown that while advanced tactics and technology were used, the actual moment by moment commanding (WITH exceptions of course) wasn't especially fantastic, but relied on one-trick, all or nothing ponies like demoralizing the target country into surrender; it's one thing to knock out France on the brink of communist civil war or run roughshod over small, unprepared countries like Poland or Denmark and another entirely to conquer a country the size of Russia. Plus the same issue of logistics that ended up as the Wehrmacht's undoing during the Russian campaign had been happening since day one. The Third Reich had just assumed that once the Russians were beaten back to the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line they'd roll over and collapse, emphasis on THINKING, PRESUMING which should spell "Doom" by day one. It just wasn't readily apparent previously because all their campaigns up to that point were over fast enough that their lack of a well-organized logistical structure and reliance on front-loaded shock-and-awe assaults hadn't been a huge problem. We're talking about an army that refused to upgrade their paratroopers with steerable parachutes (which is WAY more important for a paratrooper then you would think)! Plus one can't ignore the fact most countries successfully invaded were either very minor powers or horribly horribly mismanaged or technologically stunted as far as the military was concerned. The view of the Wehrmacht as a mechanized force has also been dismantled in recent years. The popular image of the German military as a mechanized juggernaut was fostered by those same biographies mentioned above and below and by the cottage industry of writers, wargamers, and filmmakers who took those men at their word. Only about 20% of the German army was mechanized, mostly its elite divisions, and even they had lost most or all of their tanks and transports by the end of the war; by 1945 it wasn't uncommon for a so-called panzer division to contain few, if any, actual panzers. The majority of the army that invaded the USSR during Operation Barbarossa walked in, and their supplies and artillery pieces were pulled by horses. They didn't have anything like the insane levels of mechanization found in some of their enemies. Even the USSR, with American aid at first, and panic-driven manufacturing later, started outproducing the Wehrmacht around '43 in terms of supply trucks and troop transports.

This view of Germany as this massive intimidating force was mostly put in place by the biographies written by the German generals (Maybe you've heard of this before. "If Hitler just listened to his generals...") and the fact that perpetuating the myths benefited both Germany and the Western Allies. Germany got to feel like the war was a fair fight and all its failings could be blamed on that funny Austrian guy, in no small part due to Nazi officials wanting to clear their names after the war. Many of these men continued to work in the West German government way into the 60s and 70s, with one of them, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, even rising to the office of Chancellor in 1966. The British, meanwhile, got to feel better about the fact that the Wehrmacht had booted them out of France and Greece and nearly did the same in Africa, while America got to feel like the heroes who'd swept in to give those danged Natzees a righteous ass-kicking. And that's just the civilian side. The first generation of generals for the Bundeswehr were exclusively recruited from Wehrmacht and SS officers, many of them war criminals who'd done time in prison after the war, while the Allies just looked the other way because they thought they were assets, while America and Britain convinced the public that Germany could be a impressive threat. Even against a certain group of communists over the border...

Impact on Fantasy

In terms of military personnel, the Germans had hands down one of the best armies of the time, highly disciplined and well-trained with experienced mid-level officers and NCOs; this combined with borderline insane levels of morale at the start of the war due to years of giving the middle finger to the war-weary western nations which capitulated to their demands combined with revanchism from WW1, turned Germany into an unholy juggernaut. The Germans were known to have some of the best tanks in the war, the best darn LMG of the war, and somewhat pioneered several advanced technologies during their time. They also had the inheritance of the Prussian military tradition of relentless aggression and independence in the field. Tactics-wise, their eagerness to experiment with encirclement and mobile warfare while the Allies initially stagnated in Great War formations of firing lines gave them an incredible headstart and utterly broke the back of the French and British armies, shocking the whole world. Even Hitler expected a million Germans to die in the French war, yet France capitulated in weeks and the Germans lost at most 45,000 men KIA in the entire campaign, whereas they'd have lost that many in the last war just trying to take a random village along the Somme.

This, combined with their infamous cruelty have spawned the Nazi-esque villain template where the villains are both powerful and gigantic dicks to everyone else, making them completely despicable. This is because if the villain is significantly weaker than the protagonist of the setting, most people will still feel a few grains of sympathy towards the former or make them a laughing stock. But, when you make the villain both an enormous asshole and just as or more powerful than the protagonist, all bets are off and he's fair game.

Of course, the weaknesses of Nazism also need to be taken into account, in that a lot of their supposedly superior technology turned out to be highly unstable or otherwise impractical (such as behemoth tank designs that wasted time and resources that would have been better spent on dozens of more reasonable tanks), and would frequently be outclassed and definitely outnumbered by Allied designs once the latter got their shit together. This was even true at the start of the war: British Matilda IIs were all but immune to German tank fire (from the early Panzers, before the later Tigers), and a column of them almost stopped Rommel at the Battle of Arras. Add poorly managed industry and the fact that supplies at times were delivered by horse (which was not actually that atypical, since only America and early war Britain were that ridiculously mechanized), and you have a faction that is the epitome of style over substance. This really bit them in the ass later when the Allies, focusing on production and strategy over science fiction and "tactics", managed to get a leg up on the Third Reich, and battle-hardened Allied soldiers became the top dogs without question. To illustrate, by 1945 the typical American infantry division could expect to have as many tanks as a Nazi armored division, and an American armored division could simply zerg-rush their Nazi counterpart (and hell, the Panzer divisions frequently operated at less than half strength, even since the beginning of Barbarossa, let alone after having the country incinerated by firebombing and supply lines fucked by pissed off partisans who understandably did not want to leave the mass murder unanswered).

In fiction, expect the Nazi villains to eventually have their technology and logistics outclassed (FPS and RTS games like Call of Duty, Warfront: Turning Point or Company of Heroes), made irrelevant via gimmicks (Sniper Elite, Commandos, Velvet Assassin) or at least stolen and turned against them (Wolfenstein), and the hardened heroes to turn Nazi soldiers into cannon fodder.

Nazis are the progenitors of all acceptable targets where human bad guys are concerned. Be it in vidya games or movies, nobody has a problem with Nazis getting gunned down by the hundreds by the heroes, and they don't even have to resort to the dehumanizing full helmets that most other villain goons have to wear to make slaughtering them okay.

A more comedic take on Nazis in fiction owes to wartime cartoons, where the soldiers and Nazi command are all bumbling idiots, with comedy brought to you by Walt Disney and Warner Bros. Hitler today has essentially been turned into a punchline with all the gags centered around him, which is kinda awesome when you think about it, as dictators that wish to be feared would never want to be remembered as a joke, just watch any Downfall movie parody (Bruno Ganz's excellent performance in particular has become memetic for having Hitler rant about random things or meta rants about how he was reduced to a joke). The one exception would be Göring, who'd been a morphine addict since the Beer Hall Putsch and was so narcissistic that he thought people making jokes about him sitting on his belly for dinner and taking baths in admirals' uniforms were signs of popularity. Every other high level Nazi, especially Himmler (a failed chicken farmer who spent his last-resort field command in 1944 sleeping until noon, eating, drinking, jacking off and getting massages from a man in a special train) and Goebbels (who basically created all the modern populist tactics of dictators and was born crippled on account of a deformed leg, making him the most obviously hypocritical big name Nazi), took jokes at their expense only slightly better than Hitler did. So joke away and spit on the memory of the fools who bled the world dry.

Examples

• The Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy and later Age of Sigmar borrow many Nazi-esque elements, which in turn makes them the most vile and evil race in the World That Was... Only it's taken to its logical extreme, as with many things Warhammer. Nazis had a hatred for what they believed was untermenschen and believed the "Aryan" race was most pure, while the Skaven hate all other living things, including their own race, with each individual believing only themselves to be worth anything. Pack in some advanced Wunderwaffen, magical nuclear power in the form of Warpstone and chemical weapons as well and you have a solid, if over-the-top, Nazi fantasy faction.

• The Imperium, to the point where they're commonly described as "Catholic Space-Nazis". Complete with gratuitous use of Nazi imagery, a doctine of racial purity and absolute hatred for the "untermenschen" (mutants, psykers, and xenos), rising to power as part of a miraculous socio-economic recovery in the wake of a catastrophe (Age of Strife/Great Crusade), a "glorious rebirth" myth harkening back to a lost golden age Dark Age of Technology, numerous military structures with parallel chains of command that are all at each other's throat due to a culture-wide policy of social Darwinism, an army run by absolute fanatics with horrendously inefficient war machines they barely understand, an SS analogue in the form of the Adepta Sororitas (who coincidentally tend to be depicted as fair-haired, though skin color varies and not all orders dye their hair white). Not to mention the Imperium's justification for xenocide is almost word-for-word the stab-in-the-back-myth the Nazis used to try and justify their treatment of Jews and the Holocaust, only replace "Aryan" with "human" and "Jew" with "xenos".

• The Thalmor from Skyrim are a fantasy equivalent of the NSDAP, with robes that look like SS uniforms, racism, genocide of "impure elves" and religious persecution of an enemy people in a conquered realm.

• The most extensive take on the theme of Space Nazis would be the Helghast from Killzone, where the people of Helgan see the ISA as Imperialist gits who forced them out of their planet for refusing their rule. Although by Shadow Fall, they become akin to Communist East Germans, being filled with political radicals and separated by a wall and all.

• If you have a fantasy/sci-fi world, it will almost certainly have some sort of Nazi analogue floating around. At the same time, Nazis also figure into a lot of alternate history fiction: Nazis invading England, Nazis invading America, Nazis successfully conquering the USSR, Nazis getting the Bomb first, Nazis creating an army of mutant uber-troopers, Nazis on the Moon, Nazis using occult powers to summon demons to aid them, Nazi zombies, all of these have been done. The Nazi obsession in alternate history is largely due to the fact that we consider them evil (for the right reasons), and our modern world is the result of an Allied victory. A Nazi victory would have been an mitigated disaster. That said, most people know the history of Nazi Germany in the broad strokes and can work out some of what that would mean. You might make an interesting story about a world where (for example) Toyotomi Hideyoshi conquered Korea, but most people in North America don't know a whole lot about the Imjin War or late 16th century East-Asia.

Nazis and /tg/

Long ago, /tg/ realized something that most competent GMs have: Nazis represent a great liberating force for any GM, for they represent a force that any player need not feel any remorse over resorting to violence against, because Nazis are the textbook template for villains in most settings. They desire world domination, see themselves as the apex species and view most others with utter contempt, wanton disregard for common life, have an industry primarily geared towards war, are the most powerful warmongers, and they have that evil-yet-sublime aesthetic to their armies. Nazis are a modern setting variant of using slavers as your enemy in a fantasy game: they have little to no redeeming values, so they're great enemy fodder.

The association gives the players a motivation and creates the understanding that these people are Completely Evil™, allowing the GM to focus on other aspects of the story. Indeed, one can get similar results by simply providing details that lead us to conclude that any group you are facing off against are this universe's version of Nazis. That said, that same context makes using Nazis a double-edged sword, and a lazy GM (or author, script writer, or whatever; this is hardly unique to roleplaying) can royally screw up if one uses them incorrectly. Used incorrectly, Nazis become a kitten-eating one-dimensional caricature of villains descended into self-parody, which can work if the world is built for it. Kitten-eating Nazis work best in "goofy" settings where it's fully possible, and indeed expected for the final boss to be Hitler himself riding a cyborg dinosaur, but in a setting trying to take itself seriously, such flat villains do just that - fall flat and fail to incite the proper emotional reaction. Remember that the key to successful Nazi use is that emotional reaction. That exportation of real world baggage is the point, perhaps the sole point to use Nazis over some other villain. Nazis have the additional problem of not even needing to be exaggerated that much to make the worst of them into something like this. So care must be taken when one plays the Nazi card, or it will come off as trite.

Entire stretches of d20 Past are shown various ways to implement Indiana Jones-style Nazis into any campaign during the early 1900s, and Savage Worlds has an entire supplement devoted to thwarting Nazi super-soldier plans during WWII. More clever GMs can do even more interesting things with it, such as backing up the savagery of the Nazis with a humanizing element to make them more understandable, even if antagonists, whilst another interesting setting, proposed for GURPS, starts the players off as Nazis and has them turn against their former comrades as the movement becomes harder and harder to justify. It's also worth remembering that Nazis can be used for comedy as well; they ARE Germans after all, and when they're not conquering the world they're prancing around in lederhosen, drinking beer from steins and boots, and churning out hardcore bdsm pornography. All of these lead to some pretty great storytelling, just so long as the GM knows how to play them correctly and prevent them from becoming a wackier version of an Ork.

...And then you have this bullshit, which misses the point entirely and renders us all stupider for the knowledge of its existence.

Nazi Gear, Weapons, and Vehicles

If you decide to use Nazis as your bad guys at tonight's game, the link below is a brief run down of basic information on Nazi equipment. If you're planning to play them as protagonists, either make sure it's either just a historically neutral such as a combat oriented Axis and Allies game, or well written with an enemy that rivals or surpasses their evil, or you're likely playing Racial Holy War and should thoroughly reconsider your life choices.

Main Article: Nazi Equipment

Things That Are Ruined Because Of Nazis

-The Swastika. Once a visually pleasing design found in many different cultures that almost always symbolized "peace", it is now the most recognized symbol for hatred on earth and it can't be used for anything without attracting negative attention. The only place that could plausibly use the symbol and get away with it would be Southern and Eastern Asia where it's a predominant Dharmic religious symbol. On the other hand, said places have their own issues regarding the other third of the Axis powers.

-The Toothbrush Mustache. For fuck sakes, its now called "The Hitler Stache". It used to be just another style of mustache, rocked by famous people like Charlie Chaplin. Now it's impossible to style one without being called a Nazi. Every guy who shaves in the privacy of his own home will, at some point, give himself a "hitler stache" just to see what it looks like. Imagine the pain certain guys must feel when they realize that it really looks flattering for their facial shape, and how they can never leave the house with it.

-Being Able to Admire the German Army's Uniforms. Face it, the Nazis looked fucking sharp. Crisp, clean, and professional looking, they dressed in various grays and blacks with gold trim. The officers wore leather trench coats! Even the average solder rocked the iconic M35 Stahlhelm. But you say any of this in public and inevitably some self-righteous jerk will be all like "Uhhhh you think Nazis looked cool?"

See Also

• /pol/: Having fanatical adherents who would ironically be the first to be exterminated for being physically frail weebs or obese neckbeards.
  • SJW: /pol/s almost exact opposite in theory, some SJWs frequently accuse their opponents of being secret Nazis. We couldn't possibly comment.
• Communism, which Nazism so heavily opposed that some of the features of the Nazi regime cannot be explained except by its complete opposition to, or imitation of, the Soviet Union or Marxism-Leninism.
• Fascist Italy, Diet Nazi Germany.
• Dictatorship, how it worked.
• The Skaven, who play straight some of the Nazi tropes like the concept of the Master Race and seeing all the other races as inferior "things".
• The Imperium of Man, which despite what most people think is not Fascist, barring planets ruled by shitheads. This does not stop Neo-Nazis from fawning over it, which just shows how little they know of their own ideology, Imperium, or the fact Imperium is supposed to be evil (if the lesser one) and not something to aspire for. Neo-Nazis will try to co-opt anything which could, out of context, be spun as pro-nazi.

WWII Topics
History:	The World Wars
Allied Powers:	United States of America(Equipment) - British Empire (Equipment) - Soviet Union (Equipment)
Axis Powers:	Nazi Germany (Equipment) - Fascist Italy (Equipment) - Empire of Japan (Equipment)
Minor Powers:	China - Ethiopia - Finland - France - Hungary - Norway - Poland - Romania
Games:	Advanced Squad Leader - Axis & Allies - Bolt Action - Flames of War - Ostfront