Editing Nazi (section)

==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 [[Dieselpunk|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 [[Lovecraft]]ian 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*}} {{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 [[Orks|all]] the [[Necrons|major]] [[Tyranids|races]] pretty much want to wipe everyone else out or [[Dark Eldar|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 [[Eldrad|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 [[Chaos Space Marines|style over substance]]. This really bit them in the ass later when the Allies, [[Imperial Guard|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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth| 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|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.