Very good post, except I wonder how much of the above claim is true. It is one of those topics that was hushed up after WW2, but it seems that quite a few of the researchers bringing light to this topic may have exaggerated as well - maybe partly due to anti-Soviet sentiments during the Cold War.
Good catch, this is one thing I never looked into and just pulled from vague memory. Very likely that there is an element of anti-Soviet propaganda in there. The thing is, horrific killings of civilians and rapes, often on a large scale, happen in these kinds of chaotic (post-)war situations, on all sides. So it's easy to point to certain atrocities of one side as a form of propaganda, even if they are true. All sides tend to engage in it, so it's very hard to see through the fog of war. There are some historians for example who doubt the numbers of Soviet casualties during WWII, claiming that while they were no doubt very high, they weren't as high as claimed and that Stalin mixed in the deaths from his own cleansing operations. I haven't looked into these things, might be just historians being biased against Russia, but then again the Russians have their own WWII mythology, like everybody else, so you would have to deeply look into it to get an accurate reading of the situation.
Generally, part of the problem with many of the newly-minted Hitler fans on X and TikTok is that every participant in both World Wars has their own version, their own myth (the Brits, the Poles, the Russians, the Americans etc.), where each nation paints itself as some combination of hero and victim. Whether such narratives are right or wrong, or to what degree, is another matter of course. Usually national myths are quick to point out the atrocities of others, but slow seeing their own atrocities and complicity, or acknowledging the grievances of the other side. We naturally feel this is some sort of zero-sum game, where the other side's suffering somehow diminishes our own, and our own atrocities justify our own suffering, so we rather don't want to look. But we know here that there is a wider game plan at work that seeks to sow chaos, division and pathology everywhere. And we know that psychopaths know no borders or nationalities.
Now the problem is that the Germans were denied airing their version of events, including their grievances, whether about WWI or WWII. It was simply suppressed at all cost. And this isn't healthy: it should have been out in the open, to be discussed and known. Understand it, criticize it etc. Then perhaps people would have come to terms with the nuances and the different sides of the story and wouldn't be so shocked when they suddenly encounter the revisionist story and go full "Hitler was good".
It's understandable I suppose, because people come to it having this absurd propaganda story in mind that Hitler was just a madman, and Germans inexplicably followed him into his insanity. Then they learn that Hitler actually made some good points and are shocked - as if the whole thing could have worked out the way it did without him making some good points! They learn, for example, that Hitler didn't wake up one morning and decided to invade Poland just because, but that there were massive grievances of the ethnic Germans in Poland who were suddenly cut off from Germany after Versailles, and the Poles did everything they could to make them suffer in their own grandiose ambitions, fueled by the Brits who actually wanted the war and to escalate it, and that Hitler actually made reasonable offers for peace that they probably should have accepted. And so on. It's almost as if Versailles was designed to cause conflict and blow up Europe...
The fact is there is always another side: and like all others, the German version paints itself as the victim, too. Again, if this had been allowed to be aired and discussed, people wouldn't be so surprised that this other version exists and could deal with it without suddenly becoming Nazi-lovers.
Another thing is that since the German version of events from 1914 to 1945 was suppressed, at this point the argument against Hitler pretty much boils down to "Hitler evil, because Jews and racism". But this is not enough to counter the Hitler apologists (for one thing, everyone was a racist back then, and ethnic cleansings weren't invented by Germany). We actually have lost our knowledge about all this, and the ability to develop a nuanced, grown-up take. And this makes it easy for the TikTok Nazis to capture the imagination of a whole generation who think "well, they sure lied about Covid and pretty much everything else, and turns out that Hitler was a hero too".
It's funny though that the Nazi defenders also are the ones who hated the whole Covid regime. But if you know about life in Germany under the Nazis, while yes, it was a huge relief for many Germans that the Nazis finally did something about Versailles (although why they were funded from abroad to pull it all off is another matter), this was Covid on steroids where you weren't allowed to deviate from the party line, had to put up with dumb and cruel bullies telling you what to do and what to think, and so on. Hitler was no Putin, and not even a Trump, or Napoleon. He was an unimpressive guy who was duped and puppeteered, and ultimately allowed Germany to be destroyed because of his defects.
