Germany was never denazified. That’s why it’s siding with Israel today.

Germany’s firm stance in support of genocide in Palestine raises the question: How come the country best known for its supposed reckoning with guilt for its past genocide is repeating such similar mistakes? Understanding what Nazism is — not the crimes it committed, but its very nature as a sociopolitical vision — helps us understand how and why the Allies deliberately failed to denazify Germany and why the specter of fascism continues to haunt Palestine, Europe, and the world today. It also helps us understand how the solution is in our hands.

Understanding the foundational pillars of the Nazi political project

Nazism is not an apolitical criminal impulse, but a criminal political project built on three foundational pillars: the politicization of identity, colonialism, and capitalism.

All states make a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Nazism, however, constructed a separation between insiders and outsiders on the basis of identity, excluding German citizens from identities it considered undesirable. Interestingly, in formulating their political program, Nazi leaders referenced American segregation law. Books such as the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934-1935 and Heinrich Krieger’s Race Law in the United States of 1936 drew heavily on American precedent, finding no other nation with comparable templates for racial legislation. Krieger’s research inspired the Nuremberg Laws, which brought into force the early Nazi Party’s discrimination against Jewish, Romani, and Black Germans. 

Nazism’s politicization of identity also expressed itself in a colonialist way, drawing, again, direct inspiration from American westward expansion when strategizing its conquest of Poland and its Slavic neighbors. Hitler himself carefully studied American eugenics and adopted similar propaganda to justify his party’s genocides. Indeed, Nazi expansionism and ethnic cleansing were nothing new to European nations, the difference being that others such as Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the UK colonized, enslaved, and orchestrated genocides primarily outside of Europe. In European eyes, Nazi Germany’s sin seems not to have been its colonial project itself but where and on whom it was imposed.

Nationalsozialismus, “national socialism”, was no socialism at all; rather, it was profoundly and essentially capitalist. Capitalism played a direct role in Hitler’s ascent to power. Europe’s Great War had ended in heavy restrictions on Germany’s control of its coal and on the size of its army, heavily impacting its industry. It was in industrial capitalists’ interest to support the Nazi political program that promised to defy these restrictions and also to protect them from the growing communist “threat” to their private ownership of the means of industrial production. They funded the Nazi party’s propaganda and political campaigns, pressured President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, and approved the “Enabling Act” that cemented Hitler’s dictatorship. Not coincidentally, German industrial capitalists enjoyed a close relationship with the U.S., not only before the War (over a hundred U.S. corporations had interests in Germany, including its rearmament efforts) but also during it (U.S. companies such as IBM continued supporting Germany’s war production, which actually expanded under Allied bombing, and which U.S. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau noted largely spared German factories) and after it (German industrialists who had heavily invested in the Nazi régime and used the concentration camps’ slave labor received no more than a slap on the wrist).

Did the Allies denazify Germany?

The Allies’ victory over the Nazis led to the question of how to denazify Germany. Instead of recognizing the identitarian, colonial, and capitalist relations of power that had enabled Nazism, and implementing a political program that sought to dismantle these relations, they chose to focus on the crimes that had resulted from them.

This was necessary for self-preservation since, as we have seen, the Allies were essentially guilty of the same forms of political violence. To quote Ugandan academic, author, and political commentator Mahmoud Mamdani on the issue: “By interpreting Nazism narrowly as a set of crimes committed by Germans rather than as an expression of nationalism, the Allied Powers protected themselves and their citizens from scrutiny…lest they be forced to account for their own nationalist violence at home and in their colonies… …by limiting culpability to Germans, the Allies spared their own nationals who collaborated with Nazis. Had Nazism instead been understood as a political project, all of these uncomfortable — but vital — truths would have been on the table, potentially leading to a revolutionary reimagining of modern political organization.”

The failure to denazify and its effects on Europe and Palestine

The smokescreen of the Allies’ nominal denazification program preserved and deepened the normalization of capitalist and colonialist assumptions in the broader European sociopolitical consciousness. Choosing to hold Germany responsible as a country and people instead of Nazism as a political program (that was opposed by some Germans and supported by some non-Germans) was in itself an identitarian repeat. The politicization of identity, the central tool colonialism uses to fragment societies, became entrenched in Europe to its own detriment.

This entrenchment of identitarian mindsets is among the factors animating the recent rise of Europe’s far-right today. For example, the Sweden Democrats (a far-right party) observe a higher crime rate in neighborhoods populated by more recent immigrants. The true reason for this higher crime rate may be the lower quality of social services in these neighborhoods, but instead, the immigrants’ identity is blamed. On the other hand, the European Left often falls for the same trap, throwing unquestioning support behind marginalized identity groups instead of tackling the political roots of the problems they face. In other words, this trap turns “us versus them” into “us with them,” reinforcing the tribal divide of “us and them.”

The failure to depoliticize identity in Europe has also enabled wars, including civil wars, based on the assumption that identity should determine what borders one lives in, meaning that states and societies should ideally be monoethnic. The fragmentation of Cyprus along ethnic lines or that of Yugoslavia into Muslim Kosovo, Catholic Croatia, and Orthodox Serbia are salient examples. More recently, Russia invoked East Ukrainians’ ethnicity to justify its war there.

Europe’s support for Zionism is also an identitarian repeat. Instead of offering compensation for all of Nazism’s actual victims, including, of course, the European Jews it harmed, and breaking free from Nazism’s singling out of Jews, Europe accepted Nazism’s premises and compensated the Zionist movement that claimed to represent the will of all Jews in the world, materialized in Israel, the so-called “nation-state of the Jewish People [where] the realization of the right to national self-determination is exclusive to the Jewish People.” And so Europe enabled, even caused, the partition and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, down to today’s holocaust. The fact that antisemites share Zionism’s sectarian vision of Jewish identity sheds light on why Herzl said that “antisemites are Zionism’s allies.” Is there any fundamental difference whether it is Hitler, Netanyahu, or the Paris Grand Synagogue rabbi saying that “Jews have no future in Europe”?

Germany’s support of the genocide in Gaza thus shares the same sociopolitical roots as support for other genocides perpetrated by the “West” throughout its history. The Allies failed to denazify Europe by failing to dismantle the political foundations their own nations shared with the Nazi régime. Europeans need not repeat that mistake. Denazifying Europe today means establishing states that are functional tools to administer the affairs of society rather than states that weaponize identities, inwardly or outwardly. This can only be accomplished by political movements that do not merely seek to treat the symptoms of unethical statecraft, but that recognize the politicization of identity, colonialism, and capitalism as the underlying maladies. Such movements must strive for nothing less than the complete upheaval of the past hundreds of years of European history — an endeavor that will make possible a free Europe, a free Palestine, and a free world.