I'm from one of the worst post-soviet countries in terms of nazi apologia. You hear constant anti-Soviet ramblings from every politician. They whine about how oh so many people fled in '44, from the Soviets. Any critical mind could parse together how this is problematic. Why did these people flee? Out of fear of prosecution? Why? Why did they not fear such prosecution during the Nazi occupation? The logical conclusion here is that they were either Nazis (SS or Wehrmacht), collaborators or sympathisers.
There is of course the deportations, or 'genocide' (funny) that the Soviets supposedly commited. I'm not gonna touch on this much, just gonna say this. If there was a concerted effort to commit 'genocide', there'd be evidence of this in the Soviet archives. And, if anyone is wondering why these people were deported... I think it's pretty obvious why.
The most common case of Nazi apologia here, I feel, is the complete forgetting of what the Nazi occupation was about. Of course, they say it was bad and all, but then they, for some reason, feel the need to mention how harsh the Soviets supposedly were. That many of us actually fought against the Soviets (with the Nazis, of course), because they treated us better.
I remember a specific massacre in which they made concentration camp inmates build wooden pyres which they would shortly after use to burn their bodies after they had shot them in the back of their head. Witnesses told that screaming was heard after the fires were lit, meaning some survived the shot and were burned alive. The total number of people murdered in this massacre was ~2000. Usually they had enough time to cover up what they did, burn the victims bones to dust an scatter them in empty fields, but this was done out of haste, as the Soviet army was fast approaching.
These acts have been completely forgotten in popular memory. More accurately, forced to forget.
The folks who did this, the SS, now have memorials built for them. Same with the forest brothers, who were petty anti-Soviet terrorists covertly aided by western intelligence to destabilise the union with Nazi origins. They're now venerated, not liking them is something of an oddity. You have state funded museums calling these Nazi bandits heroes and freedom fighters. Of course they never mention how most of the people they killed were civilians or anything like that
Fortunately in the UK almost none. Clean Wehrmacht myth comes out of some of the people that like to collect models from time to time but even then that's pretty rare. You do hear the idea that Hitler fixed Germany even if his methods were horrible and the sort of "made the trains run on time" thing (but not in those words).
None of it is really defence of the nazis though, and I have genuinely never met or seen a single person who would claim communists are more evil than nazis. The UK is fortunate to have had many figures on the left who have openly supported and defended the USSR over the decades which has really prevented the nonsense from setting in here.
I would say it's also an important foundational myth of post-war Britain that the UK was basically the main enemy of Nazi Germany. If you never went beyond British historical education you would probably think that the RAF more or less singlehandedly defeated the Nazis (the Yanks helped out a bit too).
A lot of teachers will try to emphasise the soviet contribution and explain that the UK's resistance and harassment of German forces helped the Soviets win, but that tends to get lost in the fact that the actual soviet actions are barely touched upon, almost everything instead concentrating on the events of the western front.
Yep definitely true. There's some negatives to this but I feel like the negatives are greater for fascists than they are for leftists so I'm disinclined to try correcting it.
Yeah but it leads to the weird situation of people saying the most vile, xenophobic shit imaginable and then denouncing the Nazis for the same in the next breath. Kinda wish they'd just be honest about it.
Yeah brits tend to only think about the holocaust as the bad thing the nazis did. Nationalism and anti-immigration are rising because they're not well connected with the hate of nazis that people have in their minds. It's a weird mismatch.