I am reading a fascinating book entitled Eichmann before Jerusalem. This book chronicles his life after the fall of the nazis and before his capture. One element the book goes into was the attitude of the various exiled Germans, and a belief that nazism would eventually become popular in Germany again. Needless to say, it never happened.

Part of the reason why was the sudden onrush of the communists in east Germany, to which the only chance of survival for the rest of Germany lay with the other allied powers. There was also a very successful effort by the allied governments to ensure that Germans knew exactly what had happened on the eastern front and in the concentration camps.

Finally there was the fact that the continual slow collapse of Germany starting in 1942 which led to a long long psychological torture as the allied nations in general and the Soviet Union in particular slowly decimated Germany. The violence, rape and murder, especially in the bloodlands to the east was often viewed by the German populace as punishments for their sins in how the nazis treated others. Once the nazis where dead, there was not all that much interest in recreation b that experience.

The books I would recommend are the Eichmann book, and also Richard Evans trilogy for the end of Hitler.

As a follow-on, today, a German high school will teach kids about the rise of Nazism and the crimes, such as the holocaust. This has been part of the mandatory school curriculum. When did this start? Was it the same in both the FRG and the DDR?

{Note: this answer largely deals with West Germany and the issues of continuity with Nazism. Although recent historians (myself included) have sought to bring the GDR back into the narrative of German history, the bulk of existing scholarship has focused upon the Federal Republic.}

The issues of ideological continuities between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic is an incredibly difficult one because National Socialism eschewed the structures of formal intellectualism. this is not to say that Nazism lacked any ideology or that its paladins did not style themselves as intellectuals, far from it. However, National Socialism often lacked a coherent ideological program and and substituted a nebulous set of political ideas like Führerprinzip to justify its often chaotic rule. This means that the popular conception of what constitutes "Nazism" is often associates its ideology with its actions. To an extent, this is fair given that the enormity of the National Socialism's crimes outweigh its contributions to global political thought. Furthermore, it also holds the Nazis accountable to one of fascism's precepts, that it was not an ideology of thinking, but action.

However, this emphasis upon actions can generate more heat than light when trying to disentangle the imperatives of the Third Reich. For example, genocide was not an end onto itself for the Third Reich, but inextricably linked to how it conceptualized geographic space and its plans for the New Order. Alan Nothnagle has cogently asserted that the island of Rügen provides a better window into the mentality that animated the Third Reich than Dachau or Auschwitz. Although heavily racialized, the Nazi's utopian vision of a capitalism stripped of its competitive element with the state guaranteeing a level of material prosperity was something that was quite popular among the German public. This attitude had some degree of continuity within the postwar FRG, in which state investment in infrastructure, assurances of a general prosperity, and a welfare state predicated upon achieving social equality for all Germans became the bedrocks of the FRG's social policies with regards to economics and class.

The American occupation government (OMGUS) conducted a number of surveys within its occupation zone in the immediate aftermath of the war and found that National Socialist mentalities had a certain degree of staying power even if the regime and its leaders had been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of German public opinion. Approximately 48-55% of respondents agreed with the statement Nazism was a "good idea badly carried out," in 13 OMGUS surveys conducted between 1945-47. Surveys carried out in the 1970s also found that when asked to specifically exclude genocide, around 36% of West Germans surveyed felt that Nazism had not been bad at all. What was most popular about Nazism was not its dictatorship (although some liked its organization, very few respondents agreed that Germany needed a national leader), but its social welfare programs and creation of new job opportunities.

Given this level of acceptance of a positive legacy for certain precepts of the Third Reich, the continuities between the regimes become a little more clear. For example, the postwar German design principles systematized both functional modernism and German cultural mores like Gemütlichkeit as presented them as alternatives to American-mass consumerism. Such ideas had their genesis in both Speer's Beauty of Labor Bureau and the Nazi regime's coordination with German design firms, both in universities and in the private sector. Other cardinal principles within the Third Reich also remained if not intact, but palpable within the FRG's society and culture. Emphasis upon the importance of leisure time, the assertion that German capitalism emphasized craftsmanship and quality over crass mass production, the emphasis upon German blood as a right for citizenship and a host of other typically German attitudes and policies of the FRG had antecedents within National Socialism.

Nevertheless, the issue of continuity is still a tricky one, akin to nailing jelly on the wall. However much the Third Reich denied it, it often took preexisting ideas and policies of the Weimar Republic and presented them as their own by adding a völkisch veneer. There are examples of fetishizing German craftsmanship in both the Weimar Republic and the Kaiserreich. So in some cases, continuity is an issue that questions the neat periodization of German history by virtue of the fact these ideals often transects political movements and governments.

Sources

Baranowski, Shelley. Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Betts, Paul. The Authority of Everyday Objects A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Logemann, Jan L. Trams or Tailfins?: Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Merritt, Richard L. Democracy Imposed: U.S. Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945-1949. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Olick, Jeffrey K. In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Remy, Steven P. The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Wiesen, S. Jonathan. Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer did appeal to antisemitism after the war. Revanchism and Nazi aesthetics were still very popular in the post-war West German political culture.

During the protest movements of 1968 this was lampshaded by the intellectuals in what is now termed «Vergangenheitsbewältigung», or «coming to terms with the past».

The German public previously was critical of Nuremberg trials, of the Eichmann trial and of the Auschwitz trials since it was perceived to constitute a useless national humiliation of the Germans by the victorious countries of WW2. Now there was a broad consensus something they have done was wrong indeed. Amongst West German historians it wasn't until the «Historikerstreit» in the mid-80s that they ceased to do apologetics for the nazi regime.

source: Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture. London. 1999.

The GDR emphasized the role of the German heavy industry in the rise of Hitler. Accordingly it claimed fascism was rooted out together with capitalism. Still it was very much preoccupied with the Jewish state in particular. And this vendetta they shared with a large part of the West German left. After the unification of the two German states the left wing movement in what used to be the GDR did not want to associate with West German leftists exactly because they were critical of the attitudes German Communists have inherited from National Socialism, because they didn't want to do away with the nazi past by merely declaring it an antic of the interbellum industrialists. Therefore the East German leftists formed an «Anti-German» movement as opposed to the «Anti-Imperialist» movement common in the West. While the «Anti-Imperialists» are preoccupied with the what the Jews have done in Palestine the «Anti-Germans» emphasize the role of the German nation in this entire ordeal along with all the other unpunished and unrepaired wrongs done by the nazi era Germans.

There was an interview over on the New Books Network with an author who wrote about the war generation years later in associations that were kind of senior associations. It was interesting. Obviously it varied, but he asked them about living in apartments that had been taken from Jews, watching Jews get rounded up, etc. The methodology is unorthodox, he compiled interviews to create composites, but you might find it interesting. http://newbooksinhistory.com/crossposts/thomas-kohut-a-german-generation-an-experiential-history-of-the-twentieth-century-yale-up-2012/

I was just thinking about this actually. We're there any benign public policies enacted by the nazis which continue to this day? If so, were any adopted as a model for other countries?