Germany Has Never Been Free of Nazism, and This Explains Its Support for Israel Today

A report published by the website “Mondoweiss” argues that Germany never underwent a thorough denazification process, which explains its current pro-Israel stance. The Allies failed to purge Europe of Nazism due to their neglect in dismantling the political foundations that shared commonalities with the Nazi regime.

The report, translated by “Arabi21,” questions Germany’s unwavering support for the ongoing genocide in Palestine. It asks how a country supposedly held accountable for past genocidal crimes can repeat similar mistakes today.

Understanding Nazism—not just its crimes, but its essence as a socio-political ideology—sheds light on why the Allies deliberately failed to eradicate Nazism from Germany. It also explains why the specter of fascism continues to haunt Palestine, Europe, and the world today, offering insights into possible solutions.

Understanding the Core Pillars of the Nazi Political Project

The report emphasizes that Nazism was not merely a criminal, non-political force; it was a criminal political project founded on three core pillars: the politicization of identity, colonialism, and capitalism.

While all nations distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, Nazism created a divide between insiders and outsiders based on identity, excluding German citizens deemed undesirable. Notably, Nazi leaders referenced American apartheid laws when formulating their political program. Works like “The National Socialist Handbook on Law and Legislation for the Years 1934-1935” and Heinrich Krieger’s 1936 book “Race Law in the United States” heavily relied on American precedents, as no other country offered similar models of racial legislation. Krieger’s research inspired the Nuremberg Laws, which institutionalized early Nazi discrimination against German Jews, Romani people, and Black Germans.

Nazism’s politicization of identity also manifested in a colonial manner, drawing direct inspiration from American westward expansion in crafting strategies for the invasion of Poland and its Slavic neighbors. Hitler himself studied American eugenics closely, adopting similar propaganda to justify the genocidal actions of his party.

Nazi expansion and ethnic cleansing were not new to European states; the difference was that other countries like Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom primarily committed their colonial atrocities outside Europe. To Europeans, Nazi Germany’s sin was not the colonial project itself but the location and the people upon whom it was imposed.

National Socialism was far from socialist—it was fundamentally capitalist. Capitalism played a direct role in Hitler’s rise to power. The Great War in Europe ended with severe restrictions on Germany’s control over coal and the size of its military, significantly affecting its industry.

Industrial capitalists had a vested interest in supporting the Nazi political program, which promised to challenge these restrictions while also protecting them from the growing “threat” of communism to their private ownership of industrial means of production. They funded Nazi propaganda and political campaigns, pressured President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, and endorsed the “Enabling Act” that solidified Hitler’s dictatorship.

It is no coincidence that German industrial capitalists had a close relationship with the United States, not only before the war (with over a hundred American companies having interests in Germany, including efforts to rearm it) but also during the war (with American companies like IBM continuing to support German war production, which expanded despite Allied bombing, as noted by U.S. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, who observed that Allied bombing largely avoided German factories) and afterward (with German industrialists who heavily invested in the Nazi regime and used slave labor in concentration camps receiving little more than a slap on the wrist).

Did the Allies Succeed in Denazifying Germany?

The Allies’ victory over the Nazis raises the question of how Germany was purged of Nazism. Instead of recognizing the identity-based, colonial, and capitalist power relations that enabled Nazism and implementing a political program aimed at dismantling these relations, the Allies chose to focus on the crimes that resulted from these relations.

This approach was necessary for self-preservation, as the Allies, as we have seen, were fundamentally guilty of the same forms of political violence. As Ugandan academic, author, and political commentator Mahmood Mamdani put it: “By narrowly interpreting Nazism as a series 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 held accountable for their nationalist violence at home and in their colonies … By limiting responsibility to the Germans, the Allies spared their own citizens who collaborated with the Nazis. If Nazism had instead been understood as a political project, all 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 Impact on Europe and Palestine

The smokescreen of the nominal denazification program adopted by the Allies perpetuated and deepened capitalist and colonial assumptions in broader European social and political consciousness. Holding Germany accountable as a nation and people rather than Nazism as a political program (which some Germans opposed and some non-Germans supported) was itself a reinforcement of identity politics. The politicization of identity—the central tool of colonialism in fragmenting societies—took root in Europe to its own detriment.

This entrenchment of identity politics is among the factors driving the recent rise of the far right in Europe today. For example, the Swedish Democrats (a far-right party) note the high crime rate in neighborhoods with more recent immigrants. The real reason for this high crime rate may be the lower quality of social services in these neighborhoods, but instead, the blame is placed on the identity of the immigrants.

On the other hand, the European left often falls into the same trap, offering unconditional support to marginalized identity groups instead of addressing the political roots of the problems they face. In other words, this trap turns “us versus them” into “us with them,” which further entrenches tribal divisions between “us and them.”

The failure to depoliticize identity in Europe has enabled wars, including civil wars, based on the assumption that identity should determine the borders within which one lives. This means that states and societies should ideally be monoethnic. The fragmentation of Cyprus along ethnic lines or the breakup of Yugoslavia into Muslim Kosovo, Catholic Croatia, and Orthodox Serbia are prominent examples of this. More recently, Russia cited Eastern Ukrainian ethnicity to justify its war there.

European support for Zionism is also a repetition of identity politics. Instead of compensating all actual victims of Nazism, including, of course, European Jews who were harmed, and freeing them from the Nazis’ targeting of Jews, Europe accepted Nazi assumptions and compensated the Zionist movement that claimed to represent the will of all Jews worldwide, embodied in Israel, the so-called “nation-state of the Jewish people [where] the right to national self-determination is exclusive to the Jewish people.”

Thus, Europe enabled and even caused the division of Palestine and its ethnic cleansing, continuing the genocide to this day. The fact that anti-Semites share the sectarian vision of Zionism and Jewish identity sheds light on why Herzl said that “anti-Semites are allies of Zionism.” Is there any fundamental difference between Hitler, Netanyahu, or the Chief Rabbi of the Great Synagogue in Paris who says, “Jews have no future in Europe”?

Germany’s support for the genocide in Gaza shares the same social and political roots as the genocides other “Western” powers have committed throughout their history. The Allies failed to denazify Europe because they failed to dismantle the political foundations their countries shared with the Nazi regime. Europeans should not repeat this mistake. Denazifying Europe today means creating states that function as tools for managing societal affairs rather than states that weaponize identities, internally or externally.

The report concludes by stating that this can only be achieved through political movements that seek not only to address the symptoms of immoral governance but also recognize the politicization of identity, colonialism, and capitalism as the underlying diseases. Such movements must aim for nothing less than the complete disruption of the past few centuries of European history, a pursuit that would make possible a free Europe, a free Palestine, and a free world.