Nazi Nobleman: Difference between revisions
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* Gustav Mannerheim, Field Marshal of Finland and former Czarist flunkey was an ally of convenience of the Nazis. He did not particularly like them so much as he disliked Communists.
* The military proper (as opposed to the [[Praetorian Guard|SS]]) was more sympathetic to the old traditions and had a number of old-style nobility in it who were [[Just Following Orders]]. This was a great bother to [[Adolf Hitler]] who couldn't get along without them but absolutely hated officers; partly because he had once been an enlisted man, partly because they often had minds of their own within the confines of their profession, and partly because they deflected loyalty away from ''him''.
**[[Reconstructed Trope]]: However the military in general went along with the thing including often cooperating directly with atrocities. A lot of that was from simple bribery and [[I Have Your Wife| other methods]] and of course an old-school officer that was to horrified at the whole thing would simply have done a [[The Sound of Music| Captain von Trap]] long ago and ended up gambling away the war in some [[Casablanca| neutral city]] somewhere. Moreover the number of atrocities done by the Wehrmacht is not always telling. Out of hundreds of thousands of armed adolescents, hungry, horny, and frustrated at hardship you can always find someone willing to take it out on civilians if professional standards are not enforced rigorously especially if they are actively encouraged by the regime in power. There [[Zig Zag| were in fact]] officers who made some effort to enforce [[The Laws and Customs of War]] and even one or two who managed to get written up on the Yad Vashem. [[All Germans Are Nazis| being born between the Danube and the Rhine]], [[You Should Know This Already| does not automatically make you exceptionally evil.]] But there was more pressure to be evil on Germans in those days. And that included the Junker class.
* The German tennis player Gottfried von Cramm, despite playing Davis Cup matches for the Nazis, was did not represent the "Aryan ideal" that the Germans sought from their athletes. Von Cramm, openly opposed the Nazis' dismissal of his Jewish doubles partner Daniel Prenn from the Davis Cup team. Furthermore, he lived his life as a closeted gay man and narrowly avoided being sent to a concentration camp because of his sexuality.
* Lazlo Almasy the Hungarian Egyptologist came from a family with a castle of it's own and an exploring tradition, as well as a curious legacy of occult speculations(one could bet on one of his family being a vampire if one believed in such things and wanted to bet on that for anyone). He served as the Hungarian liason to the Afrika Korps as an expert in desert special operations. There is no evidence that he was ever a Nazi or even an Arrow Cross(the Hungarian version) and the likelihood is highly improbable. Insofar as he had an ideology it probably would have been monarchism, and the main reason he served with German forces was that Hungary happened to be allied to Germany.
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