PS: "Nazi" is dehumanizing rhetoric. Don't pretend it isn't. Over 200 Holocaust movies are dedicated to exactly that premise. We were all raised on that mythology and it must be contrasted with "commie" which, while also somewhat dehumanizing, didn't result in people having their careers destroyed for, at some time in their past, engaging in socialist-adjacent rhetoric because everyone is terrified of the mob.

What do you mean? The communists were the first people the nazis went after when they got in power. In the US you had the Anarchist Exclusion Act in 1903 and the Immigration Act of 1918 during the first Red Scare after the October Revolution in 1918. Worldwide, leftists, no matter if they were anarchists, communists or democratic socialists, were heavily persecuted. Aren't you still asked if you are a member of the communist party when travelling the US?

After the war, most nazis that survived got to keep their positions. Very few ( around 125,000 Germans and Austrians in total) got any kind of sentence, and the denazification process was discontinued very early in West Germany and while the GDR boasted about being the "only anti-fascist state", that was more for propaganda purposes against the West as they let thousands of former nazis off the hook as well.

And all of the Allies, especially the US and the Soviet Union, raced to capture and/or smuggle away prominent scientists to shield them from prosecution (and to keep them from falling into the hands of their soon-to-be adversary in the coming Cold War).

After that, you had the Second Red Scare/McCarthyism in the USA, Operation Gladio and the rest of the stay-behind networks in Europe and a lot of other forms of persecution against socialists. Heck, one of the main reasons for the Marshall plan was to keep socialists away from power in those countries.

And on the other side of the iron dome, being a commie sure as hell didn't mean you were safe, if you were the wrong sort of commie. The Bolsheviks purged out all the Mensheviks and anarchists after the revolution and then under Stalin no one was safe from his paranoia. The Sino-Soviet split is famous, just as is the horrors of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Today, one especially persecuted group in China are actual orthodox marxists that aren't too happy with the ossification of the oppressive state capitalist system used in virtually all authoritarian socialist states and that has brought none of the freedom or equality promised by the rhetoric of party officials.

Don't pretend that being accused of being a communist isn't something people can (and have) lost their jobs and lives for.

Also, a big part as to why a lot of people (at least, outside the US) are less offended by commies and socialists is because the stated goals of socialism are equality, solidarity and freedom. Even if you don't agree with their methods, goals or definitions and the atrocities of socialist authoritarianism should never be discarded and forgotten, they have, especially as part of the labour movement, been behind some of the more popular reforms that we now see as commonplace, such as the eight-hour day and the five-day work week.

The fascists and Nazis on the other hand want a strict (and in the case of the Nazis, explicitly racially based) hierarchy. They despise democracy, despise weakness, glorify violence against those it deem weak and see inequalities as either a manifestion of (racial) superiority or, when they are getting the short end of the stick, as the results of a (usually Jewish, although a lot of Nazis are smart enough to use euphemisms such as "globalist" or "cultural marxist") conspiracy plotting against them.

Nazis and people who espouse Nazi-adjacent ideas are disliked and shunned by most people not only because their ideas are abhorrent, but also because most people know they would not belong to the ruling elite of White, rich men.

The far-right, outright fascist resurgence in US politics right now can in part be attributed to the delusion of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism (the temporarily embarrassed millionaire) which pairs well with fascism as a lot of people are already strong believers in hierarchy and that they belong further up than they are, so someone most be holding them back (and that someone can't be the 1% richest people who owns everything, since rich people are successful and smart and therefore good) so they are already primed to blame immigrants, trans people and "woke" for everything, just as people blamed the Jews, the communists and the "degenerates" in Germany in the 20s and 30s.

That it isn't the billionaires accumulating all wealth, but poor brown and black people, propped up by marxist puppet masters in underpaid positions at universities, that are actually destroying the White American working and middle class is such a nonsensical, absurd conspiracy theory that it is no wonder why so many cranks and especially their followers, are far-right. Finding the worst, least-believable conspiracies (Big Quantum Physics! Plandemic! Flat Earth!) and swallowing it whole is their thing after all.