Did German People Who Lived Under National Socialism Think Life Was Better During That Time?

[Unregistered]

Question to the German members and members who have relatives who lived under Hitler's Germany. Is it right to assume that old people are nostalgic about the era? Even people who disagreed with the master race stuff are shown in documentaries to appear nostalgic about the economic and social situation.

I'm no nazi, but truth be told, it's impressive to watch those marches under NS, even communism. What happened to the German people's pride?

[Nachtengel]

It depends how much the respective person has been reeducated by political correctness, but usually older people of those generations have a lot of still vivid, happy moments.

Here's something that partly explains it. Under NS, everyone had work. There was something for everyone to do so you didn't have people on welfare and the level of crime that goes with it.

How Hitler Tackled Unemployment And Revived Germany’s Economy

^ A good read

[ReinekeFuchs]

First of all, you have to keep in mind that from 1918 to the very day Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Germany was engaged in an internal armed
struggle among political factions, which was carried out more in line with civil war conditions.
The armed civil unrest was exclusively about the future political course the country would be taking - communist (with the communist militants acting under direct instructions from Stalin), versus those forces seeking a continuum of at least a semblance of the previous social order.
The new post-war republican government in Berlin was weak, and unable to remedy the economic crisis of hyperinflation and mass unemployment.
More often than not, although common knowledge to those with a keener than superficial interest in history, these pre-cursors remain dicreetly tucked away unmentioned or mitigated when the usual guilt cult sermons are being ramped up to the newer generations of Germans by either their own government, or Hollywood.

Getting directly to your question, a great deal of older people I know or knew, who are democratically inclined and do not subscribe to Marxist shaded persuasions, tend to view the economic policies of National Socialism favorably. The doctrines of racial superiority and purity where generally viewed as an unpleasant aftertaste of a needed medicine, that would soon
disappear. And certainly at no time did Hitler or his party campaign on the
platform that people, or a whole people, should be physically obliterated.
Germans were told that undesirables (Jews) would eventually be resettled
in a future Jewish state located on Madagascar.
NS brutality evolved gradually. There were constant power struggle between
its princlings on the one hand, on the other Hitler instinctively perceived the Wehrmacht as a threat to political power and therefore created the SS as a check on the army.
If you lived in rural areas, most of the hoopla hoo of the Third Reich probably passed you by like a distant fog. Your kids went to school as usual, but now, on Saturdays they also engaged in sports or learned some productive skills
as obligatory members of the Hitler Youth.
For farmers it was a good deal too. Suddenly there was price stability for produce and cash crops. Livestock could only be sold by weight, increasing
profitability for the farmer who, before, had to contend with racketeering livestock dealers.

I think it's noteworthy that in the West Germany before unification, this nostalgia among older generations you mention, did not exist. It's likely because the ones who remain were children during that era, and they are reconnecting with their childhood in their old age, which is normal.
But it is also because the old prosperous West Germany was not seeped with cultural Marxism, in the process of conquest by culturally agressive Muslim invaders, or subjected to a despotic Merkel government that's systematically
dismantling German democracy to something heading in the direction of the former repressive East German model.
And finally, what is an old person who has led a productive life, has adhered to the common values of decency and morals, supposed to feel when they see a Merkel government sponsered mob of Leftists and Green Party members unfurl huge banners with "Deutschland verrecke!" (Germany: croak! [die])???

[Mööv]

but usually older people of those generations have a lot of still vivid, happy moments.

My grandfather usually avoided speaking anything of the time (probably out of fear of getting himself and possibly the entire family executed by the reds). He spoke a bit near the end of his life and it was all nice things and he would get all dreamy and lost while at it, and then suddenly just sad and he would stop talking. Guess it put him down the fact that it all ended and how everything turned out to be.