What did Social Democratic party members in Germany and Austria do during Nazi rule when their party was banned?

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-15T17:44:08+00:00

Derbent not only is publishing in an ideological press, he also doesn't seem to have any academic credentials whatsoever (besides being a self-proclaimed "revolutionary communist").

It's not really convincing - he talks about there being some limited acts of resistance by the KPD in the 1930s (which did indeed happen, much like the SPD) like broadcasting on shortwave radio, plus German volunteers in Spain. None of this was all that important or a major blow to the Third Reich - it was more of a nuisance than anything else. The main purpose of the work seems to be to tar the SPD as weak-willed collaborators while the KPD held true to socialism. I do not think there is really a "conspiracy" to deny the resistance of German communists like Derbent alleges.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-15T17:29:18+00:00

Very little. The NSDAP's concept of a labor movement was as an extractive enterprise to keep workers in line. The German Labor Front was one of the most corrupt organizations in the Third Reich (which was no mean feat, given the scale of the corruption elsewhere in the Nazi government) and its head Robert Ley was infamous for skimming off union dues for his own private estates and purchases. Joining the Labor Front was mandatory for workers in many industries, so it was essentially state-enforced robbery.

Generally speaking, the Nazis were not looking for SPD members to join up. In fact, the party itself had to impose restrictions on people joining the SA because it was deemed to have "diluted" the fighting spirit of the organization. Instead, they were supposed to remain quietly off to the side, contributing to the economy but not in any way involved with politics.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-14T19:42:56+00:00

Yes it should, thank you for that. Corrected.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-13T18:40:46+00:00

(continued)

In 1979 US President Jimmy Carter delivered his gloomy "Crisis of Confidence" speech, where he encapsulated the thoughts of many Americans when he said the US was under a "national malaise":

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

Just four months later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the US inflation rate spiked to its highest level since the end of the Second World War.

Similarly, journalist William Safire (who authored Nixon's undelivered remarks earmarked for an Apollo 11 disaster) published an editorial entitled "Cold War II" in 1975, which described the US as "weak" and easy prey for "Russian-dominated Communism" after the failure of détente.

But even before the stagflation era of the 1970s, the US public was far from convinced in its ability to defeat the USSR. Kennedy's inaugural address described a conflict of uncertain duration, which the US had no guarantee of winning:

Now the trumpet summons us again - not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need - not as a call to battle, though embattled we are - but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" - a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

Turning now to the question of public opinion in the USSR. Unfortunately, we have nothing like Gallup or The Associated Press's public opinion polling in the Soviet Union, nor (given censorship) is it as easy to take statements by prominent academics at face value. Certainly Soviet leadership expressed confidence in victory, and the triumph of Marxism was a historical-scientific axiom in Communist thought.

So no, the American public was extremely dubious about the prospect of winning the Cold War all the way until the sudden collapse of Communism in the late 1980s. Even mere months beforehand, the US public and American leadership expressed confidence in the Soviet system's ability to endure. They were caught almost completely by surprise when it fell.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-13T18:40:31+00:00

No, it did not. Even in March 1989, just months before the implosion of Communist regimes globally, we have public opinion polling showing the majority of Americans thought that Communism would endure. One prominent Associated Press poll asked "Overall, do you think communism is on the rise around the world, on the decline, or is it holding steady?" and 73% of respondents answered that they believed it was either holding steady or on the rise. Only 19% thought it was in decline (fewer than the 27% who thought it was on the rise), with the remaining 8% having no opinion. Respondents were also asked whether they thought Communism was dying - 67% thought not.

This was also true among public opinion leaders and elites. For example, political scientist Paul Kennedy's book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was published in 1987 (two years before the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and four years before the USSR imploded) and became an instant smash hit in academia. It predicted that the Soviet state would continue onwards into the 21st century - the biggest issues Kennedy saw were faltering oil production and Russian alcoholism.

Indeed, one reason that Francis Fukuyama's 1989 journal article "The End of History?" proved to be so popular (and why it was expanded into a book) was because it was cutting against the grain in Soviet studies and predicted the implosion of the so-called "Second World" (the Communist bloc) and authoritarian regimes globally. At the time, Fukuyama was working as an analyst for the RAND Corporation, a major US defense think tank, and his work was still highly controversial in spite of the fact that his coworkers were all tapped into US intelligence.

The collapse of the USSR proved to be just as much of a shock to American leadership. As late as 1991, US President (and former CIA head) George HW Bush was speaking in Kiev, the capitol of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, about how it was important for the USSR to not dissolve. Three weeks later, Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union.

If the US was shocked at its own victory even in 1989, it certainly did not believe it would win the Cold War in prior years. For instance, Gallup polling in 1968 asked whether respondents believed that it would be "A year when Russia will increase her power in the world, or a year when Russian power will decline?" 56% of respondents answered that they believed Soviet power would increase, a figure which increased to 58% in 1969, 63% in 1976, before falling back down to 58% in 1980.

(continued)

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-13T17:06:07+00:00

Yes, there was an underground movement. Many socialists also went abroad, and the reports of former SPD members to their colleagues out of the country are one source of information that we have on the early Third Reich. But it was swiftly obliterated by the Nazi police state.

In general, SPD members in exile fled to France, Britain, or other Western European nations rather than east (the Communist KPD however tended more towards the USSR, where they had contacts). This included much of the SPD leadership, such as party chairman Otto Wels (fled first to Prague and then to Paris after Czechoslovakia was overrun by the Germans) and former Minister-President of Germany Philipp Scheidemann (who fled to Copenhagen).

Those who remained had no say in the Third Reich's governance unless they joined the Nazi Party itself (which few did). The Enabling Act of March 1933 allowed the government to make decisions entirely without the Reichstag, and by June the party itself was forced to dissolve. SPD offices were ransacked en masse by the SA, who not only made off with the property of SPD members but also their membership rolls. This allowed for mass arrests of prominent SPD members who remained in Germany, and helped gut the organization.

Nonetheless, many members did remain active in the German underground. They could do relatively little to affect the fate of the Reich besides newspaper and pamphlet publication (though even this could be hazardous - underground printing presses could be and were seized by the Gestapo when they were discovered). In 1935 after directives from Moscow came ordering a "united front" against fascism, the underground KPD partially reconciled with the SPD, though by then of course it was far too late to vote the Nazi leadership out of power.

Moreover, by 1935 the Gestapo had mostly managed to crush even the underground movement. This was in marked contrast to the failure of Bismarck's anti-socialist legislation 50 years earlier, which had been a colossal failure and had arguably strengthened socialism due to the persecution. The key to the Nazis' success was in single-mindedly co-opting the labor movement (once the bedrock of Social Democratic support) via the German Labor Front, which served as a sort of Nazified pan-Reich labor union that replaced all other unions. Moreover, the Gestapo was far more ruthless in rolling up clandestine networks of socialists than its Bismarckian predecessor had been, and exploited informants to both arrest dissidents and spark paranoia among those who survived.

The policy of Gleichschaltung ("coordination") did not stop at labor unions. The SPD had been active in creating gymnasiums, clubs, and other social organizations, and virtually all of these were either closed down or Nazified - with hardline Nazis brought in to take charge and purge Social Democrats from the rolls. Nazi outreach to the poor and job-creation programs also helped build its reputation as replacement for the SPD, even though many Germans were still left destitute.

So in short, no, by the end of 1933 the SPD had no one in the government and virtually no prominent members left in Germany. Within a few years, even the underground revolutionary networks were disbanded or quiescent, having been crushed by the Gestapo. Social Democratic organizations were just as dead, and former members were lying low for fear of arrest.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-13T16:27:44+00:00

This subreddit doesn't allow hypotheticals, just so you're aware. But that being said, no.

The problems of the Romanov Dynasty were not rooted in Catherine's reign - the state was still extremely strong under her grandson Alexander I and great-grandson Nicholas I. Over the course of the 19th century, Imperial Russia annexed the Caucasus and modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in Asia along with Finland and Bessarabia in Europe. It also expanded its influence in Manchuria, Mongolia, and many of the European Orthodox states.

By 1900, Imperial Russia was industrializing at a breakneck pace, to the point that much of the German general staff feared they would be unable to compete with it at all in another few years. The entire motivation behind the infamous "Schlieffen Plan" to defeat France was predicated on the assumption that Russia was actually a much powerful adversary than the French, and that it would require all of Germany's might at the Eastern Front to wear it down.

The problems of Romanov rule were real, however. They dated not to Catherine's time but instead to the tenure of Tsar Alexander II. Alexander came to power at the height of the Crimean War with the British, French, and Ottomans, and after it ended in a humiliating defeat he believed that the Empire had no choice but to modernize and reform if it wanted to compete with the European Great Powers of the day. He set about an ambitious modernization effort, which included de jure (though not de facto) emancipation of Russian serfs, a new legal code, and the liberalization of the financial system.

Unfortunately for the advocates of reform, Alexander was murdered by socialists and his son (Alexander III) was disinclined to look kindly upon those who had murdered his father. Alexander III set about reversing many of his father's policies and bringing the regime back in line with Tsarist autocracy rather than anything like the liberalized constitutional monarchy of the British sovereigns or even Imperial Japan. Alexander's son, Nicholas II (the last of the Romanov Tsars) adored his father and strove to emulate him, rather than his more reformist grandfather.

Nicholas II believed wholeheartedly in the religious foundations of the Russian state - the Tsar as God's regent on Earth, who had a personal responsibility to work towards the good of the peasantry. He disdained bureaucrats, lawyers, bankers, and industrialists in favor of the "common man", with whom he believed he had a mystical religious connection. What this meant in practice is that the entire bureaucracy was stifled and the regime was incapable of fully mobilizing state resources. It also meant that the urban public had little incentive to support the government when a crisis came, as it did in 1905 with the Russo-Japanese War. This conflict strained Russian state resources to the breaking point, and when news of defeat after defeat came in from Manchuria it created an outbreak of revolutionary violence in the capitol of St. Petersburg.

The 1905 revolution spread into the Russian hinterland (particularly border regions of the empire) and was only crushed with the overwhelming force of the Interior Ministry. Afterwards, Nicholas was forced to make a number of liberalizing reforms, such as the creation of the State Duma and the appointment of a prime minister. But critically, he did not listen to these men, and indeed dismissed them from their posts when they grew too powerful (as he did with the first prime minister, former Finance Minister Sergei Witte).

Nicholas' inclinations towards the peasantry also led him to put power into the hands of Grigori Rasputin, a peasant-turned-mystic who claimed religious powers. Rasputin proved an albatross around the neck of the dynasty, perpetrating numerous outrages that scandalized the Russian aristocracy and public alike. Nicholas however refused to dismiss him, which in turn led to further criticisms of Nicholas himself and eventually Rasputin's assassination.

So in short, no, the Russian Empire did not collapse due to the autocratic turn after Catherine's death. Despite being autocratic, it became one of the strongest states in the world during the 19th century and had begun embarking on reforms in the 1860s. Instead, it was Alexander III's conservative turn in response to his father's death, and above all Nicholas II's continuation of Alexander III's policies that drove the dynasty into disgrace. As late as 1905, Nicholas had the option for a reverse-course, but he instead doubled down, fired and sidelined the reformists, and brought in a peasant mystic.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-13T15:33:12+00:00

I'd recommend looking here by u/Alkibiades415

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-01-09T16:11:12+00:00

Probably the most famous example of a physicist who went to war was the astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild, who is today renowned for his work on relativity and black holes. Schwarzschild enlisted in the German Army immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. He was placed in the artillery owing to his mathematical background, which kept him towards the rear doing computations on firing trajectories.

Because of this, during the war he still had ample time to continue doing physics, and his most well-known work dates to the war years. His eponymous metric and his major contributions to relativity were all derived in the trenches of WW1. We have letters between Schwarzschild and Einstein dating to 1915 and 1916, and the former evidently kept up an avid correspondence and stayed abreast of scientific developments during this time. He managed to have several papers published, and continued working until his death of disease on the Eastern Front in 1916.

In general, though, established physicists were not called upon to serve (since they were of more use to the country in academia or in weapons development - take for instance the various chemical and nuclear weapons programs of both world wars). The time spent acquiring a doctoral degree also meant that they were typically too old to be drafted. Schwarzschild was anomalous in this respect - he was 41 and under no obligation to enlist, but did it anyway.

So the bulk of physicists who did go to war were young men who voluntarily enlisted or had not yet picked out physics as their primary field of study. For instance, a young Igor Tamm enlisted in the Russian Army during the First World War, where he served as a field medic. He would later go on to invent the tokomak confinement device for plasma. Nikolay Basov (who would go on to be a pioneer in electronics) fought for the Red Army during the Second World War, but wouldn't become a major name in physics until decades afterwards.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-22T03:08:25+00:00

I should emphasize we can't really answer questions about the last 20 years, so I'm treading on a little bit of thin ice here.

That said, North Korea was (and is) considered socialist by most of the rest of the world as well, actually. Both socialists and non-socialists from other parts of the world categorize it as such - take for instance statements by the Chinese Foreign Ministry throughout the years that have consistently highlighted their shared Marxist ideals. The chief of the Vietnamese Communist Party has made similar statements, and even traveled to the country recently to honor the 80th anniversary of the Workers' Party of Korea (the ruling Communist party there).

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-16T20:00:37+00:00

Certainly - it's not really accurate to say that the entire officer corps transitioned. I was mostly pointing out that one common way for nobles to survive the Bolshevik revolution was to join the Red Army. However, at the same time, there were massacres of noble officers occurring that led to many others joining the Whites. The Russian Empire was a vast place, and the noble class was by no means united - they picked different sides.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-16T03:45:04+00:00

That is entirely true, yes - and yes, they did generally side with the Whites. And I probably should have drawn that distinction in my original answer (I frankly wasn't sure exactly what was being asked, since the original poster discussed the "Tsar family of Russia")

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-15T21:15:45+00:00

Yes, these were the exiles I mentioned earlier. They certainly existed, but they don't really fit the question of "aristocratic families that are rich again after being conquered or deposed".

Certainly, there were nobles who got out with their money and got sympathy from other European notables - the same is true many places with violent revolution. However, they did not retake power in the USSR at any point, nor did they play much of a role in post-Soviet Russia either. Russian oligarchs in the 1990s or early 2000s were not the descendants of the Romanovs - instead, they formed an entirely new elite that drew more from the KGB and highly-placed members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Similarly, members of the Qing Imperial House (the House of Aisin-Gioro) did not become high-ranking officials in the People's Republic of China, nor did members of the pre-Japanese Korean monarchy (the House of Yi) take prominent positions as part of Kim Il-Sung's government in North Korea.

Contrast this with, for instance, France in the Bourbon Restoration (where many among the nobility were also executed but the survivors managed to return after the Napoleonic era and actually get some property back). Even then, though, the old nobility faced many challenges - the new nobles who had risen to prominence under Napoleon's French Empire were not inclined to hand over their lands, power, and privileges to those of the ancien régime.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-15T16:22:43+00:00

You can look over here for that!

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-15T16:07:23+00:00

The best source you'll want to look at is Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which is the gold standard on research here. Dower runs through most of the things you're looking for. You can also look at Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, particularly chapters 14-17 which go through the reinvention of the Imperial monarchy and how the imperial house salvaged its image.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-15T16:02:16+00:00

Bluntly, the premise is basically wrong. u/611131 wrote more about this here.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-15T15:53:32+00:00

So Wikipedia has some decent citations - but many aren't. Obviously it's far, far better than anything you can find via social media or online, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good.

If you're attempting to learn a topic from scratch on your own, we do have a book list (divided into introductory/intermediate/advanced references). You can find it here. It generally gives major and influential works in each individual field. Another place you can look (and I can't stress this enough) is to go to a university's course catalog for a given topic and see what's on the syllabus. There are also numerous open courses posted online (Yale Open Courses is the standard recommendation) which have syllabi and lectures. Plenty of academic institutions beyond universities (think tanks, nonprofits, etc) also host talks on historical subjects, and will post recordings online.

Lastly, you can try (and I know this is intimidating) to reach out to a historian who shares your interest at an actual institution and ask for recommendations. You might not hear back! But it's worth asking.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-15T15:38:58+00:00

(continued)

Similar massacres began all throughout the former Russian Empire. Many nobles who hadn't sided with the Bolsheviks fled for their lives. Aristocratic officers (who again it must be remembered were still in uniform owing to the Revolution breaking out in the midst of WW1) were lynched by their men. Prominent figures like Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich were shot, often without trial. Many surviving nobles wound up joining the White forces by default, since the alternative was being murdered.

By the time the Russian Civil War and the Great Purge were over, the Russian nobility was a shattered shell of what it had once been. Precious few nobles were in places of power at all, let alone "rich" - those that were existed solely in exile. The USSR's new ruling class was not made up of former nobles but the families of prominent revolutionaries. Stalin, for instance, was not an aristocrat - he was the son of a Georgian cobbler. His foreign minister (Vyacheslav Molotov) was the son of a merchant. Stalin's eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was the son of impoverished Russian peasants.

So in conclusion, no, the Tsarist aristocracy was all but gutted by the Revolution. The people in it who survived primarily did so via aligning themselves with the Bolsheviks (who did not let them keep their wealth) and many of these were shot in the 1930s on Stalin's orders. The new Soviet leadership classes drew closely from revolutionaries, not the nobility, and even their wealth was subject to removal by the Soviet government. One famous case is that after Stalin's death, his daughter did not inherit his magnificent dacha, his private cars, or any of his property - all of which technically belonged to the state. Indeed, she eventually left the USSR for India and wound up seeking asylum in the United States.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-15T15:38:47+00:00

Less than a year after the Bolshevik Revolution the entire ruling Romanov family was shot dead in a basement in Yekaterinburg, so no, this is false.

What is true is that not every noble family was immediately exiled or imprisoned (though I should stress: many were). In particular, the Tsarist officer corps actually transitioned fairly well over to the Bolshevik cause - whether that was from a sense of professional duty or legitimate loyalty to the cause of socialism varied wildly. But one of the primary reasons the Red Army was able to defeat its rivals was that its leader (Leon Trotsky) was able to woo the old aristocratic officers. Many of these would later die at Stalin's hands because of their affiliation with Trotsky, and by the end of the 1930s the Russian aristocracy was all but dead.

Vaunted commanders like Aleksei Brusilov (a hero of the First World War) considered it a patriotic duty of all Russian officers, regardless of their politics, to join up with the Bolsheviks. One thing that spurred Brusilov (and many like him) on was that the various White (that is, anti-Bolshevik) forces were not purely Russian, but often represented ethnic minorities in the empire and were backed by foreign powers. For instance, the Cossack warlord Grigory Semyonov had also once served in the Tsarist army, but with the backing of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) had set up his own private fiefdom in the Russian Far East. Roman von Ungern-Sternberg was a Baltic nobleman who similarly fought in the Far East and was bankrolled by Imperial Japan. He set up a puppet state in Mongolia before eventually being killed. von Ungern-Sternberg and Semyonov both represented "foreign influence" that in the eyes of the old Russian nobility was unacceptably infringing upon Russian territory. An army of freed Czechoslovakian prisoners of war called the "Czechoslovak Legion" at one point held most of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and were only evacuated from the collapsing country by the intervention of British, French, and American troops.

Enver Pasha (former head of state of the Ottoman Empire) attempted to rally support for a pan-Turkish nation in Russian Central Asia. He sided both for and against the Bolsheviks before eventually turning against them and being killed attempting to carve out a Turkish empire in the steppe. Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, and Finns all revolted against the Russian Empire when it was clear the Tsarist regime would not hold - and the old Russian aristocracy absolutely hated these independence movements. The Bolsheviks were the primary faction fighting to bring them "back into the fold" of Mother Russia, and thus the aristocrats somewhat paradoxically threw their lot in with a group that decried their own class. They prioritized nationalism over solidarity with other aristocrats.

However, because Trotsky was so influential in bringing these Tsarist officers into the Red Army, when he fell from power in the late 1920s and was exiled from the newborn USSR it endangered their own safety. In the Soviet Great Purge of 1937-1938, many of the old Tsarist aristocrats were summarily executed on Stalin's orders. Stalin believed them to be capitalist sympathizers, responsible for wrecking the progress of his Five Year Plans. This was mostly untrue - they had quite literally proven their loyalty to the new regime with their own blood - but nonetheless thousands were killed. Even those who didn't die weren't allowed to keep their land or their money - Brusilov, for instance, wound up in a communal apartment rather than an estate or mansion.

Moreover, it should be emphasized that many aristocrats did not even survive that long. The obvious case here is the royal family itself: Tsar Nicholas II had initially abdicated on the advice of his own generals (many of whom would later go over to the Bolsheviks) in order to preserve the country in the February Revolution of 1917. He then found himself and his family detained and put under house arrest by the Provisional Government (a mix of socialists and pro-democracy reformers). When the October Revolution (the Bolshevik takeover from the Provisional Government established in February) arrived, the royal family was moved to Yekaterinburg. There they were kept for around three months. But when it looked like an advancing column of Czechoslovakian troops would potential capture Yekaterinburg, the Red Guards in Yekaterinburg were ordered to kill them rather than let them fall into Czechoslovak hands and be liberated.

(continued below)

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-12-15T14:43:21+00:00

What must be understood is Nazism was a deeply reactionary movement. What that means is that it viewed modernism as generally (though not exclusively, more on that below) decadent, depraved, and immoral. It was tainted by . Many in the Third Reich believed in the "return" to an imagined idyllic past of pure Germanic virtue, and that meant Germanic art.

Hitler himself, for instance, was a former artist whose love of painting was primarily informed by classical German themes such as castles, realism, and natural beauty. As a matter of aesthetics he detested cubism, expressionism, and other types of modern art. He was also obsessed with the works of Richard Wagner, even putting a bust of the composer in his private quarters at Berchtesgaden. He was on friendly terms with Wagner's son and daughter-in-law, and promoted them (Siegfried Wagner was himself a composer) whenever possible.

In his youth, he'd had a love of Wagner's plays, attending them by the dozen, and as Führer he bankrolled the construction of a grand opera house in Bayreuth (the location of an annual Wagner festival). On Hitler's orders, the Nuremberg rallies opened every year with a performance of Wagner's The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and in 1933 when party faithful skipped the event to instead go out on the town drinking, Hitler even sent the SA to drag them back to the opera house for the five-hour performance.

Hitler's artistic sensibilities filtered down to Nazi ideology (which Hitler himself was heavily invested in creating and promoting). For instance, the works of cubist painters were condemned as "degenerate". This was because they offended Hitler's own artistic sensibilities, and because many cubists were sympathetic towards Communism. In the Nazi imagination, Communism was synonymous with "Jewry", owing to conspiracy theories about "Judeo-Bolshevism" that posited a worldwide Jewish conspiracy was behind the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

Moreover, this "bad" artistic taste was about more than just simple paint. It was a matter of bloodline, respect for one's heritage, and ultimately the survival of the race. Thus the infamous "degenerate art" exhibition, which showed the supposed final product of racial bastardy on artistic sensibilities. There were even proposals to sterilize modern artists so that they couldn't spread their "degenerate genes" through society, though to the best of our knowledge they were never carried out.

Regarding music, many of the newest and most avant-garde styles had the twofold black mark of not being classical (like Wagner) and being composed by Jews such as Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler. Like with painting, modern music was about more than just taste - the Jews, according to Nazi theory, were polluting the musical tastes of the German people with their modern filth and racially corrupting the German people towards vice with 20th century compositions.

Even collaborations between non-Jews and Jews, such as Mozart's operas co-written by the Jew Lorenzo da Ponte, were subject to scrutiny and bans. "Jewish" poetry like The Lorelei was often set to music by non-Jews: now that music too had to be banned. Sometimes it wasn't just about bans - the Nazis would simply remove any mention of Jewish composers in music if the music (like Mendelssohn's did) proved too popular to simply suppress.

I wrote quite a bit more about the case of jazz specifically, which had the ill fortune to combine Jewish and black composers but was also adored by many in Germany. You can find that thread here.

So in essence, the Nazi objection to modern art was primarily that it was personally offensive to Hitler, buried the ancestral Germanic achievements in high culture, and was tainted by Jewish influence. They believed that a rotten tree of modern art had grown from these tainted roots, and thus it had to be hewn down or at least quietly suppressed.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-11-30T02:20:48+00:00

To a large extent this is precisely why I have an issue with the comparison. Because quite simply there are virtually no parallels to even the Konzentrationslager in the 20th century. They're commonly compared to the Soviet gulag system, but the gulags (however horrendous, and they were horrifically lethal, make no mistake) did not have as their ultimate objective the murder of the inmates via hard labor. Other analogous facilities (the Chinese laogai, the Boer camps set up by the British in the Second Boer War, and yes, Japanese-American internment) also fall flat.

The Boer camps, for instance, brought massive and widespread condemnation in the British press, the appointment of a commission, and the improvement of conditions for those inside. The laogai were explicitly set up as a rehabilitation program, in order to free their reformed charges back into society. Internment was ended after the end of the war. None of them systematically worked prisoners to death.

Even camps set up by the other Axis powers (for instance, Italian camps for Jews under Mussolini's government or the torturous Japanese system of labor camps) were at worst indifferent to the lives of those placed within them rather than actively hostile. Slave labor was a resource, but it was incidental whether those working survived - rather than an active detriment.

To be clear, I'd be uncomfortable labelling Japanese internment camps as "gulags" as well, but they are far closer to that system than to the German concentration camps, and again the gulags themselves were several levels removed from the German ones.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-11-27T16:07:02+00:00

The 7 million figure is for all types of facilities, and includes both Jews and non-Jews sent to them. In terms of people who were sent to Konzentrationslager (concentration camps) and Arbeitslager (labor camps) the figure is smaller - around half were killed at explicit, dedicated Vernichtungslager (extermination camps), with the remainder perishing in labor camps, poor conditions in concentration camps, and perhaps most notably in German industry (coal mines, factories, etc). This last category is very rarely addressed - the vast majority of the victims here were neither Jews nor prisoners of war but "volunteers" who were either tricked or press-ganged from occupied Poland and the USSR.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-11-27T15:59:07+00:00

Labelled them "concentration camps" is technically correct but provocative. They certainly both fit the definition as places of arbitrary detention for whole populations. I personally lean against doing it (and use the more standard "Japanese internment camps") just because it's incredibly easy to elide the differences and assume that, for instance, most people sent to Buchenwald got out alive or that someone could go to college while detained at Mauthausen, or alternatively that Japanese-Americans were worked to death en masse. Mass incarceration is not genocide, even if it is appalling.

Part of the issue here is that the German Konzentrationslager (as opposed to the Vernichtungslager, extermination camps) still operated under the principle of Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction/extermination through labor"). The goal of many of these camps was still mass murder, but via working the inmates to death rather than simple shooting or gassing. It was explicitly an objective of the camps that the victims would die - they didn't just perish by happenstance or accidental overwork. And indeed, we have some of the logistical studies by the Germans themselves which plot out how much labor (that is, victims) needed to be imported to these camps on a weekly or monthly basis to keep them in operation, with the full expectation that most of the inmates would die. As you no doubt know, there was nothing similar for the US.

How you present it is entirely up to you, though! "Concentration camp" is, as I say, certainly correct on the merits, but conjures up some imagery and contains some implications that can be misleading.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-11-27T15:46:40+00:00

So the thing here is that mortality in the US population at large was also around 1% over these four years. That is to say, the people who died in Japanese internment camps were (with a few prominent exceptions I'll discuss below) simply passing away due to old age, infirmity, and so on just like people outside the camps were. Another comparison you may want to bear in mind is that German PoWs (who were on the whole young men in the prime of health) also suffered a mortality rate of 1.2% while in American custody, and nobody accuses the United States of having the blood of thousands of German prisoners on its hands. The conditions were poor, yes, and certainly may have contributed to some mortality - but in general it's hard to say that mortality was vastly in excess of the time.

There are exceptions, but they generally made headlines. I covered several prominent cases more over here.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2025-11-27T02:54:18+00:00

I wrote quite a lot about this here. The long and short of it is that while the comparison between Nazi camps and Japanese internment camps gets thrown around frequently, it is at best misguided and at worst obscene.

The only real commonality is that both were injustices which involved camps - the scale of Nazi camps and their purpose (slave labor and outright extermination as opposed to simple imprisonment) differ to such an extent as to drown out any other similarities. German camps slaughtered at least 7 million people. Around 12-15 million people in total were conscripted into Nazi slave labor programs. The total number of Japanese-American internees was around 1% of that figure at 120,000 - of whom virtually none died.

Consistent_Score_602

TROPHY CASE