[CleanedStar]

> Relying on Neumanns Behemoth, which depicted modern capitalism as Nazisms main basis, they argued that the revitalization of German democracy depended on a socialist overhaul of the countrys economy, failing to anticipate the possibility of a fresh recalibration of capitalism with liberal democracy, along the lines that emerged after the war in the Federal Republic of Germany...

Huh? First off, Germany was divided in two after WWII, something almost no one anticipated. There was no German renewal because there was no Germany.

As far as the FRG being capitalism with liberal democracy...capitalism - the FRG was dominated by works councils, Mitbestimmungsgesetz and the like since World War II, and to some extent still is. How the economy worked in the FRG after World War II is closer to how it worked in Yugoslavia than how it worked in the United States. Although even in the US how the US economy ran under the New Deal/Square Deal/Great Society into the 1960s is different than how it is now.

As far as liberal democracy...the FRG reinstated the Nazi ban on voting for the communist party...some democracy - you're OK, as long as you vote for a pro-capitalist party. This was a time when French and Italian workers almost voted in communist governments, something American's today tend to forget. The FRG's federal Intelligence service was run by Reinhard Gehlen and his crew, the Confederation of German Employers' Associations and Confederation of German Employers' Association were run by former SS officer Hanns-Martin Schleyer (later kidnapped and killed by the Red Army Faction). Not all that much changed in western Germany after 1945.

[_delirium]

Der Spiegel published a summary last year of Nazi influence in postwar West Germany: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/from-dictatorshi...

[Kudzu_Bob]

> Germany was divided in two after WWII, something almost no one anticipated.

Nonsense. Haven't you heard of the Society for the Prevention of World War III, not to mention the Morgenthau Plan, both of which advocated the dismemberment of Germany well in advance of Berlin's fall? The real surprise is that any Germans whatsoever managed to survive the post-war forced expulsions and near-genocidal 1,200 calorie per day rations.

[cafard]

"The real surprise is that any Germans whatsoever managed to survive the post-war forced expulsions and near-genocidal 1,200 calorie per day rations."

And yet they did, there's a bunch of them last time I looked. The expulsions were in the east, chiefly East Prussia and Silesia, or of Volksdeutsch from the former Hapsburg lands.