The only people invested in posting pictures of their grandparents in nazi uniforms and saying “not a nazi” are nazis.
Every normal person with these kinds of photos simply would not be invested in making such a post.
It’s really damn weird like I don’t have any pictures of my grandparents sitting around and even if I did I wouldn’t feel compelled to post them
if my grandma was one of those wing walkers i’d be posting that shit everywhere but she wasn’t so i can’t.
People really are still using the clean wehrmacht myth in 2025 huh
Clean Wehrmacht? keep up, they gave a SS soldier a standing ovation 2 years ago, they’re doing clean SS now
It’s the only thing their grandfather left them when he passed.
He apparently never talked about his time in the military, if for not this photo and relatives gossip we maybe wouldn’t even know he served
Not a Nazi, but didn’t want anyone to know he was in the Nazi army. The use of the term ”served” here is pretty fucked up.
I wonder if any of the Redditors thanked him for his service like they did in the Nazi grandfather ama
Wtf why are reddit users like that
Because most are American, and most Americans are conditioned to say “thank you for your service” when they hear someone was in the military. Plus the Nazis & Wehrmacht weren’t vilified to the same extent as say, the Japanese were. In fact the Wehrmacht were whitewashed after the war, playing down their role in the Holocaust & mass killings in order to rehabilitate west Germany into a liberal anti-communist bastion.
So the American Redditor reads someone fought the Soviets (which they have also been indoctrinated to hate) and concludes: person in military + fought America’s enemy = “thank you for your service”.
This also applies to Americans Lite (Canadians), they hear some guy fought the Soviets in WW2 and whaddya know they’re giving a standing ovation to a literal nazi
i hate both sides. anyway i’m gonna go fight to the death to defend one side (the nazis) (not a nazi though)
Average centrist
Also OP
In no war ever was a good side. Especially in WW2, yeah Germany did some bad shit, but so did the others
Vietnam and Korea just to name a couple besides WWII.
One of my grandpas was drafted into the Korean invasion - and the only photo I ever saw of it was him with some children he’d given his rations to. Very much a pacifist- the only time I saw him mad was when he saw that my brother and I were playing call of duty, and he talked to us about why glorifying war is so terrible. Which is a funny contrast to my wwii grandpa - the only thing he liked more than glorifying war was hitting us with a belt!
Ps - Actually this is also partially unfair. Since being diagnosed as neurodivergent I’ve reflected a lot, and am pretty sure both grandpas were as well, but one received empathy growing up in a white collar household, while the other did not and was from middle of nowhere in a household of miners/farmers/lumberjacks/blacksmith/whateverpaysthebills. Still no way an excuse, but I know they didn’t just fall from coconut trees. But yeah one side likes to emphasize that the men have been in every war since the English colonized the US
Especially ww2? The war with probably the most universally agreed upon bad side cause they were cartoonishly evil?
So many Nazi sympathiers in that thread. Fuckin’ everyone is coming out of the woodwork to make excuses for this guy and help OP defend it.
Good job reddit I expect nothing, yet you continue to disappoint me.
liberals love the “he was forced to fight for the wehrmacht but he was one of the good ones” so much because they enjoy a politics of having to make tough compromises
Just excuses for the bootlickers in their life. Crazy how intense American propaganda has cooked everyone’s brains
Gonna be making excuses for the people joining ICE because “they needed to pay their bills” by the next election.
why do you think they keep posting “I’m just following orders”?
because they enjoy a politics of having to make tough compromises
God damn that’s a big part of it, isn’t it?
I’ve tried really hard to completely cut reddit out of my life, but it sucks because there’s pockets of it with information I need and it’s gatekept by some of the worst most smug insufferable nazis on the planet.
I’m in the same boat, I got banned off of reddit about a month ago and I had to create a new account in order to view some stuff for a computer project I was working on.
Lemmy is really, really good, but there are still some small communities missing from here.
why would they let a forcefully conscripted soldier drive one of their most powerful land weapons
Why are people so defensive. Like you could just post a picture of your grandpa near a tank. Potentially an interesting historical glimpse. Why do you personally need to make sure gramps wasn’t a Nazi and that everyone knows. So what… Sins of the Father and all that. Unless you’re a Nazi wannabe yourself.
We have pictures of my grandma on display in my house. People will be like “Who’s that?” and I’ll reply “Oh that’s my grandma. She was a racist, misogynistic, anti-semite.”
I don’t get why people always feel the need to defend their shitty relatives. But I might have a personality disorder IDK
I mean exactly. Like remember them, look at old photos, etc. History is interesting… Often even mundane history is interesting. But why pretend it is different than it was?
Maybe just the autism speaking. I do not understand this need to deceive
I don’t think it’s entirely the autism speaking, a lot of people put an incredible amount of stock in, essentially, blood and soil ideology, especially the blood. It’s something I noticed in highschool, that people will treat their family’s, and especially their parent’s, achievements as their own - taking pride in them and ascribing themselves those same abilities. That then extends to treating their family’s shame as their own personal shames, so like this, they try to hide or excuse it - “I’m not a nazi, so my grandfather couldn’t have been”.
I think autism made it more obvious for me, but plenty of neurotypicals aren’t like that, whether they notice others are or not.
And plenty of autistic people get real weird about it too. I’ve met an autistic Nazi before who was perversely interested in tracking family genealogy because that’s what he was hyper interested in. Like, he’d do family trees for other people based on snooping without them knowing about it. I’m not sure what came first, chicken or the egg, but one hand sure washed the other when it came to the hobby and the political beliefs, that’s for sure.
I think it’s a pretty astute observation at the underlying ideology at work here. Whether we’re taken by that meta narrative of self-identity or not though isn’t connected to one’s cognitive neuro-spicy level I don’t think, it’s just brain worms that’ll take root in any soil as people try to develop a sense of identity and community and aren’t given the tools to understand themselves as part of a class so instead kludge together something based on individualistic narratives.
My grandmother started telling me the crime problem in American cities is because of all the black people.
I tried arguing the point, so she called me a “removed-lover,” so I punched her in the head. And that was how I ended up homeless, originally.
No regrets (except maybe that I should have punched her harder, I guess), but there are some practical reasons people tend to fall all over themselves to defend the hands that feed them, as it were.
I mean I would understand if someone was dependent on someone. redditor is not dependent on his grandfather who died 10 years before he was born.
Good on ya for standing up to awful old people damn the consequences. I’m blessed since non of my grandparents seemed particularly racist/sexist/etc
in-group bullshit goes brrrrrr
Why are people so defensive.
People are defensive when their grandparents are provably nazis.
Yes I see that but my question is why? I’m not my grandpa. My grandpa crewed bombers in WW2 for America. If it transpired he bombed a hospital full of babies I wouldn’t feel the need to prove he was a good guy or something.
More of a question of human psychology than one I expect an easy answer to.
Sorry I was being snarky to the redditor. I didn’t mean to be snarky towards you.
It’s the cognitive dissonance and/or backfire effect. People hate feeling wrong or evil, and they get emotional and defensive when some facts says “this dude is bad”, even if the evidence is quite overwhelming.
I believe that leftists are less prone to this, although not immune. We spent time ridding ourselves of bad ideology that we picked up as kids. Liberals have a lot of cracks in their ideological armour, lots of places they’re secretly afraid that they’re wrong, but unwilling to admit to themselves.
Edit: what I mean to say is that the idea that this redditor is related to a Nazi, or himself a Nazi, is secretly quite painful to him.
Ya that makes sense and no worries on the snark. Didn’t feel snarked at.
You are right that I think leftists necessarily (in the west atleast) have to unlearn lots of things to become avowed leftists. This means many of us have already done the work of accepting painful history. I know history so the idea that a normal historical person (even one that happens to be related to me) could be evil isn’t strange.
idgi either. all of my grandathers were dead when I was born, but due to a remarriage I acquired a living grand parent who fought in WW2. he was a friendly guy, but harbored some weird cultish opinions about The LORD or whatever and was very much an uncritical product of his place and time regarding race and gender.
overall, he seems more likeable than the ones that died before I was born… people who were raging, abusive drunks dying from their choices before 50.
I don’t really get the impulse to do reputation management for them. just say who they were and what they were about to any curious party. maybe if any of them left me any $ I would feel like I was supposed to explain or justify something.
Especially in cases like this guy where his nazi grandfather died over a decade before he was born
Ngl i and i suspect alot of people here would still make fun of this guy if he just posted a picture of his nazi grandpa without any caveats unless he was explicitly saying something like “i dont defend anything he may have done” lol
Sure but posting with no commentary at all a photo of a Nazi would just be strange like if make fun of that also. “Here is a Nazi” pretty weird.
If someone posted (to a forum where posting old photos is the point) such a picture and said something explaining the history and condemning Nazis that’s fine.
Definitely not a Nazi, just someone the Nazis trusted to operate a highly valuable and destructive piece of machinery
So either a Nazi, a rube, or someone so servile they’d serve the Nazis anyway
I hate the “clean Wehrmacht” bullshit so much. I think Americans cling to it so they can believe Afghanistan and Iraq veterans didn’t basically commit a war crime simply by participating in illegal wars
“the IDF weren’t dedicated Zionists and didn’t want to commit genocide, they were just brave, loyal soldiers following orders” - something I guarantee people will say 70 years from now.
My bet that he was Volksdeutsche. Germans didn’t trust collaborators to serve as tank crews unless they were considered German too.
He had to have German citizenship to be in wehrmacht. To be fair some minorities like Silesians and Kaszubs were automatically assigned those and then conscripted, but this guy being a Lithuanian i suspect he was literally a Lithuanian German and while he could be conscriped, but Lithuanians did not authomatically got German citizenship, he needed to either have it even before the war or apply after occupation of LSSR by Germany.
Read that as VolksDouche at first. Thought some fun new Nazi insult dropped while I was busy.
Goddamn they’re obsessed with this clean wehrmacht shit. Guess what, they all still pledged their allegiance to Hitler and participated in the genocide. “But they were forced”!! Forced?? Sorry I did genocide but they asked me to 👉👈
The earth is full of people who refused to be forced to help the nazis
Goddamn they’re obsessed with this clean wehrmacht shit.
Nazis lie like used car salesmen. It’s how they spread sympathy for their slop.
Wearing a nazi uniform, driving a nazi tank, fighting for the NAZI SIDE. Not a nazi
People are asking a lot of questions about the “not a nazi” shirt I photoshopped onto this picture of a nazi
My grandpa was a misogynist turd. But he dropped bombs on fascists in WW2 and gave up his arms to Yugoslavian partisans when they crashlanded there. Better then this guys grandpa who was a Nazi
