Pro tips: If you ever ask yourself "Why does (bad thing) exist", you can just answer it with "The CIA" and be correct 90% of the time
Why do stinky feet exist?
CIA.
:isaac-pog: got something to blame other than sweaty little piggies!
It's the CIA. But also if you're the leadership of a newly bourgeois country in Eastern Europe, then you'd probably want to do everything in your power to prevent socialism from returning. Including funding Nazis, looking the other way when they make gangs, and allowing them to fill the ranks of police and military.
Several countries in Eastern Europe have explicitly criminalized socialist organizing by the way. Latvia and Lithuania don't permit the display of communist symbols, nor do they allow parties based on Marxism. I believe Hungary has similar laws. Ukraine has strict laws as well, their communist party (which was somewhat large for what it was) was banned from standing in elections in 2015, then all of their assets seized and the party dissolved in 2022.
so yeah I wonder why all these countries with laws to prevent socialism keep developing Nazi ideology
Anti communism and Nazism are so close as to be indistinguishable
Nazism is just the logical end point of right-wing thought. It's pretty universal and which races are superior, what counts as white and what doesn't is pretty arbitrary and interchangeable.
The core essence is the same everywhere: Take from the weakest to enrich and empower an increasingly smaller in-group. Justify it by invoking "natural hierarchies" that prove that your race/religion/nationality/gender/sexuality/hair color/mario kart main means that you're just naturally more deserving to own all the property and have all the rights.
This desire to exploit those weaker than you is universal and not something the Nazis invented. They're just representatives of fascist thought.
That may as well have been extermination, though. Physical since the numerical majority of people were considered "unsalvageable" and slated to die (either by deliberate famine, mass murder or overwork through slave labor) and cultural as "assimilating" the survivors accomplishes the destruction of the Slavic/Baltic nations. Which, aside from self-hating Krautophiles, is a contradiction for Neonazis who also happen to see themselves as Russian or Ukrainian or Lithuanian patriots.
What! No. Slavs were destined for slavery and to work the farms of the farmer-soldiers the Nazis planned to plant all over the former USSR. They would be serfs and their education would consist of knowing that obeying Germans was good in life and being able to count to 500. The minor Axis allies like Romania and Finland would be allowed to continue to exist as second-class members of the empire, kind of like the relationship between UK and US.
"Yeah no, the Nazis only planned to kill, deport or forcefully assimilate every second person on the street (and enslave the remaining ones), it's no wonder they're not seen as that evil"
Eastern European Fascists conveniently forget that, in order to glorify the fools that did the collaborationism. Poland is basically the only country that doesn't, because it didn't really have collaborationists... except for the occasional local antisemites ratting Jews out to the Nazis. The actual amount of "Let's try to get along with the Germans" was very low.
they did not plan “extermination” for eastern europe
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8m3ja4/why_did_the_nazis_consider_slavs_to_be_subhuman/
When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, the SS Einsatzgruppen immediately started to execute Polish intellectuals, clergy, and politicians by the thousands. The idea behind that was to deprive the Polish people from any future political leaders or intelligentsia so that they could serve as slaves to the German master race. In the Soviet Union, not only did the Nazis plan to let millions of people starve
Besides all the very good comments here I'll also point out something missing which is that there is also an underlying desire of the working class in the global south to join up with the global north worker aristocracy and therefore not only be part of the "group" but also achieve the percieved superior social-economic status.
Its why you see people that are from the global south still defect to imperialist forces against their own interests.
Take the white immigrants in South America for example, Brazil/Argentina is full of white supremacists and fascists despite imperialist powers, actualy even the same old colonial powers doing nothing towards them except to exploit and subjugate.
The Brazilian Bolsonaristas don't understand the American right wing hates them and thinks they're all dirty "Mexicans", no matter how "white" they think they are.
I'll say unironically don't be surprised in 100 years people will write books explaining early 21st century US fascism where they'll will note how Trump also repeatedly disrespected and showed open disgust towards his own base and yet...
It is generally very popular here in the west and we did a war about it. People just think he was a radical dude
When education is not liberatory, the oppressed dream of becoming their oppressor.
Decades upon decades of anti-communism. Anti-communism always ends with fascism, and all these countries that got mildly annoyed about being under the Soviet umbrella began telling themselves that yeah the Nazis were bad, but at least they weren't the dreaded, evil Soviets who'd come in and massacre people randomly.
Then throw in the incomprehensible collapse of living standards in the 90s and you've got the perfect breeding ground for Nazi scum
