Thread by @Paulatics

(Thread alert.) I think a lot about the rise of Nazism, in no small part because my father's Jewish family was persecuted & killed by Nazis, and because my mother's family were ethnic Germans from Ukraine, some of whom served in the Wehrmacht and the SS. This stuff is in my DNA.

So I've long been puzzled by the argument that the Nazis were good for Germany's economy. I heard it at debate tournaments when I was in high school. A generation later, when my daughter was a competitive debater, other teams were still making that tired debate point.

Of course, any defence of Nazis or Nazism is prima facia offensive and stupid. But this particular point? It's also factually incorrect. Because the Nazis destroyed Germany's economy.

It was, for example, a very bad economic plan to exile, chase away, imprison, or straight up murder Jewish scientists, artists, writers, filmmakers, inventors, entrepreneurs and investors. I mean, it was obviously hateful and genocidal. But also bad economics.

It was also - news flash - a terrible economic plan to fight and lose a two-front war, have all your factories destroyed, see your country divided in half, and leave your people to starve.

By 1946, Germany was a hollowed out wreck. My mother, by that point, was a child living in a refugee camp in the American area of occupation. So I grew up on stories of the privation suffered by German civilians, especially women, children and the elderly, in that time period.

So. Any hypothetical social studies curriculum that argued Nazis were great economic managers wouldn't just offend me, as a person of Jewish descent, as obvious Holocaust apologia. It would also offend me as a person of German descent - and a student of history.

My redoubtable Oma, a widow with three young children, fled post-war German for a new life in Canada, because of the ruin wrought by Hitler. She could not forsee the Marshall Plan or the successes of Konrad Adenauer in restoring West Germany.

So. It is long past time to put to rest the argument that the Nazis were great economic managers. It's not just a form of passive-aggressive anti-Semitism. It demeans and diminishes the Germany of today, and all those who fought for its post-war reclamation and redemption.