You can hardly find a German, aged 80 or over, who’d admit to sympathy or even nostalgia fror the erstwhile Nazi regime in today’s Germany, as it’s a CRIME. Were this officer a member of the Hamburg Stadt Polizei, he’d not only have been dismissed for getting such a “Nazi” tattoo (actually, unless you can see a swastika below the Eagle, it’s a German rather than a ‘nazi’ emblem), he’d have been charged with possessing Nazi regalia (for non-academic or theatrical purposes, in Germany, a crime) and ‘promoting’ Nazism…so the modern FederalRepublikDesuchtesland combats the ‘thought crime’ of the Nazi era with its own ‘thought crimes’. They would even try to find out where he got the tattoo, and if it was a German studio, that artist and/or shop owner would be fined, jailed, and stripped of the applicable licenses.
Though obviously Hitler and his Nazi Party and SS were some real honest-to-God SOBs, they honestly believed that what they were doing was good for ‘Das Volk’ und ‘Das Reich’, and saw each other as “Kameraden”. Hence why Hitler was so bitterly angry and vengeful about he 20 July 1944 failed plot to kill him; he considered it a PERSONAL affront, a betrayal of his once FRIENDS. Even at the end, when Himmler attempted (he actually believed that if he made his way to SHAEF at Reims, France, that Eisenhower would see him, such was his delusion) to negotiate a surrender to the Western Allies only, and Goring, upon escaping Berlin himself (narrowly having his retinue cart off some 20 truck loads of stolen artwork from his KarinHall estate near Berlin as the Soviet 3rd Guard Tank Army closed in), declared that he would succeed Hitler as the latter was now trapped in Berlin and doomed to capture or death. Hitler likewise was personally affronted at this last ‘betrayal’, even then seemed to be surprised that it’d happened.
With Stalin, there was NO pretense of friendship or loyalty. There is strong evidence he’d had his second wife murdered. When his own son from his first marriage, Yakov, was captured by the Germans in July 1941, they offered to trade him for a German general, to which Stalin replied, “but why should I trade a General for a mere Lieutenant?” Being successful, and especially having peer recognition, could be DEADLY under “Uncle Joe”. Witness the case of one Marshall Tukaschevsky, a contemporary of Georgi Zhukov and a pioneer in tank warfare, whom the hallowed German ‘tank generals’ like Guderian, Hoth, Rommel, and Von Manstein studied. The Marshal, in 1937, ordered a series of maneuvers in the Moscow Military District, which happened at the same time of the ‘show trials’ under Vishinsky. Stalin freaked out and believed that Tukaschevsky was going to storm Moscow with over a thousand tanks and depose him. He got the Marshal to see him at his dacha, where he held a great feast, and, once the tank pioneer was well-sated and drunk, had him arrested and shot forthwith. The result was that only four years later, when Operation Barbarossa commenced, though the Soviets had almost TEN TIMES the number of tanks that the Germans had (and most of their stock was better, including the new T-34s just rolling out of the factories), their handling of them was so inept that what tanks didn’t either break down or simply run out of fuel on the way to the battle, were easy meat for the German guns as they fought in tactically insensible manners, time and time again. And how Stalin dealt with Tukaschevsky was common. If a prominent official, Party leader, or military officer was summoned to see Stalin, he’d either harangue and lambaste the poor fellow, and have him sent to either the Lubyanka prison or to the Gulags, which meant either a slow death or at least lifelong debilitation; or, he’d praise the man vociferously, decorate him lavishly, and feed him copiously and ply him with much drink (part of the reason for Stalin’s long-term survival was that few could out drink him, especially his favored ‘Pertsovka’ vodka), and then promote him…or have him shot. The saying when, “There’s three possible outcomes with a meeting with the ‘Boss’, and only ONE is ‘good’!”
Say what one will about Stalin’s ultimate successor, Khrushchev (the Soviet Union was at first, after Stalin, ruled by a ‘troika’ which also included Nikolai Bulganin and Grigory Malenkov, until Nikita asserted both the Premiership and the General Secretary post in 1958)…though he was loyal to Stalin, he was disgusted by the Purges and the brutality, and vowed that the Soviet Union would be ruled under law and not terror. Though the USSR was still hardly a paradise nor a bastion of freedom; it did get a lot better for the average Soviet citizen during his regime, hence why when he was deposed by the Politburo, led by Brezhnev, for his many embarrassing failures, he was quietly retired and pensioned off (but for all practical purposes under house arrest until he died in 1971, and the official mention of his passing epitomized the term, “Damn with faint praise”) rather than assassinated, unlike what happened to Romania’s Ceausescu in 1989.
At least Nixon, after his own ‘fall from grace’, managed to ‘reinvent’ himself as the ‘elder statesman’, even being asked for advice by his successors on foreign policy matters. And even Stalin, though still largely despised as a brutal aberration of Russian history, STILL has his apologetic and his ‘personality’ cult, especially as the man who ‘saved’ Russia from the Nazis.