Denazified

Denazified is the English translation of the German word "entnazifiziert". Denazification was the process after World War II where people were re-educated so that they realised that their attachment and allegiance to the Nazi party and ideology was wrong and at the end they were judged to be denazified.

It also refers to the removal of the physical symbols of the Nazi regime. For example in 1957 the German government re-issued World War II Iron Cross medals without the swastika in the centre.

Due to pressures of the Cold War, the western allies realized that they could not hand West Germany over to the small minority of Germans who had been dedicated anti-Nazis during the war because many were seen to be Soviet sympathisers, so the denazification program was curtailed. By 1952 members of the SS like Otto Skorzeny could be declared formally "denazified" in absentia without any proof that this was true.

In the 1960s the radical left who chose to use terrorism, e.g. Red Army Faction (RAF), against the West German government and society, used the argument that the West German establishment had benefited from the Nazi period and that it was was still largely Nazi in outlook. They argued that "What did you do it the war daddy?" was not a question that many of the leaders of the generation who fought World War II and in the post war " "Wirtschaftwunder" (German Economic Miracle) encouraged their children to ask.