Editing Nazi (section)

===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.