Holocaust denial

[The Mikado]

Jersey, question.  You complain about use of "German" and "Nazi" interchangeably during the context of the Second World War, arguing that it leads people to attribute what the Germans as a whole did in the war with the actions of the NSDAP.

A.  Isn't it fair to do so in the context of the war?  Referring to the Wehrmacht as "German soldiers" or "German forces" makes a lot more sense than saying "Nazi forces," given that they were the army of, well, Germany, which happened to be under a Nazi regime.  I'm not arguing for collective blame, but I am saying that the actions that happened in the war can't be brushed away with "the Nazis did it," because many atrocities were committed by people that weren't in the Nazi Party or, in fact, weren't even Germans themselves (such as Lithuanian, Romanian, etc. Nazi auxiliaries, collaborationists all over Europe...).

B.  Do you take issue to people referring to the Imperial Japanese Army or Imperial Japanese Navy as "Japanese" rather than "Imperial Japanese forces" or whatever?  Sometimes people end up with this weird "the war against the Nazis and the Japanese" phraseology that implies that with the Germans we were only at war with the bad lot running the show but in the Pacific theater we were at war with the entire Japanese nation.

[The Mikado]

What is what?

The genuinely bizarre and utterly novel argument that you just spewed out.

I was about to PM you about this thread.  I've read six books about Nazi Germany within the last three months, and...well...as you can see from my earlier response, I wasn't about to touch most of this s**t.  You can if you want.

[The Mikado]

The leading Nazis where basically either neo-pagan romantics or atheists.

And by "the leading Nazis" you mean Heinrich Himmler, right?  The actual proportion of people with Himmler's silly neo-pagan views in the leadership of the Nazi Party is grossly overstated by people who like to downplay the widespread collaboration of the Christian Churches (both Protestant and Catholic) with the regime, especially Hitler's advocacy of a "Positive Christianity" that celebrated an Aryanized version of the faith and the coordination (Gleichschaltung) of the Protestant Churches in Germany under the German Christian movement.  Even the Catholic hierarchy didn't raise a fuss as Germany plowed into Poland and systematically wiped out Polish Catholic clergy.  The National Socialist regime was compatible with the desires of many Catholics and Protestants alike to end the immorality and left politics of Weimar and restore Germany to military greatness and morals, while outside of a few brave souls (Niemoller, for example), the clergy went right along with him to war.  The myth of large-scale resistance from the Catholic and Protestant Churches derives mostly from the postwar CDU, as the CDU needed to assert its legitimacy as a party centered in Catholic tradition, by making the Nazis seem irreligious and the Churches as a paragon of moral resistance.

[The Mikado]

What we're reacting to is the way Jersey and politicus are trying to turn the collaborators and perpetrators of Nazi atrocities into victims and potential victims of said atrocities.  According to the 1939 census, only 3% of Germany was atheist and only 2% were members of "neopagan" cults.  The German nation, an overwhelmingly Christian nation, enthusiastically participated or turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities and war crimes.  Trying to shift the blame onto only Hitler, or only Hitler's inner circle, or only the SS is propagandistic whitewashing of the first order.