Just saw your reply Boriqua, bit late but I find the topic at hand quite interesting.
BoriquaSNK said:
I read something a little while back that was really interesting regarding modern German culture in the East vs West. Basically, it said that most of the neo-nazis today come from East Germany, because those from West Germany were raised with a sense of identity and responsibility towards the Third Reich and the Holocaust, those living in East Germany were told that since they were good communists they had no reason to feel guilty, hence the increase number of extreme right wingers in the East following the fall of the Soviets.
Coming from Germany, do you think there's any truth to that?
There is truth to that but it is just one aspect of the whole problem with increasing Neo Nazism in Eastern Germany. In it's core, the East German youth organisations (namely the FDJ = "Freie Deutsche Jugend") were not that different from their Nazi counterpart Hitlerjugend, they both were created to indoctrinate kids and youngsters in order to breed willing worker and soldier bees for their communist hive.
Then the iron curtain fell in the early 90s and all of a sudden, the flowery promises of politicians like the then Chancellor Helmut Kohl turned to ashes. People were moving Westwards to escape their desolate situations and that's still going on, there are small towns in the East with only a handful of old folks while the younger people all went to work in West German cities.
Life became increasingly difficult for those who remained, jobs were and are scarce and there is a general feeling of being left alone. There are a lot of government support programs but none of them seem to work.
However, there always was a relatively strong Nazistic current underneath the communist and socialist layer of dangerous delusions but for the GDR government, Nazis simply did not exist, they even went as far as blaming responsibility for the cruel Nazi war crimes entirely on West Germany and their "corrupt capitalist system". In this light, the article you've read about East German Neonazis made a valid point, there never was a "de-nazification" like in the West over there.
After the wall came down, a giant vaccum appeared and sucked in all those politically homeless people, those were the days when all major political forces of the West moved Eastwards and simply overwhelmed the people there with their overly optimistic prophecies. Unable to see through what we Westerners would have called false political promises, many of them literally believed in what the Western politicians told them and voted for Helmut Kohl's party CDU.
A few years later when the last of these giant dream bubbles bursted, many East Germans slowly and quietly changed their minds about the GDR regime which they brought down with the peaceful revolution of '89, some of them fell into endless GDR nostalgia and started to long for "a strong hand", i. e. definite guidelines to live by. For decades, their quasi-stalinist government told them what to do, then democracy came and forced them to take responsibility for their actions, and not all of them could cope with that. This may sound strange to us but it's quite common in the aftermath of a dictatorship, Russia still has many social problems due to this very fact.
It's a shame what happens over there in East Germany... I've experienced these things first-hand when I was in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, if you happen to look not Aryan enough (I'm tall but I have long black hair and look more Greek than Teutonic) you may be in for serious trouble; some small villages are 100% Nazi. Police do nothing, how should they, they simply have too few officers, and even if they had enough men and equipment, it's doubtful wether a district attorney would shoulder the responsibility.
