No Nazis?

The view many people have of Berlin in the 1920s was that it was crowded with Nazis, swastika flags, etc.

We do actually NOT hide this part of history away, for those who are willing to look there are traces of the NSDAP history to be found in our sim and they are often part of the discussions we have.

Of course Nazism played a big part in Germany back then but maybe not as big as many people may think.

Much of the 1920s the NSDAP was in a lot of trouble, they had been forbidden, Hitler spend time in jail and up till late 1928 he was not allowed to even talk in public.
When he was allowed to do so again this caused a lot of tension and indirectly was part of why there were such bloody riots in may of 1929.
Walking around Berlin as a Nazi could be rather risky that year.

By 1929, the party had less then 200.000 members in a country of 64 million people, Berlin alone had 4 million inhabitants.

Besides that Berlin was not a Nazi stronghold, but more of a working class ‘red’ and bohemian kind of city, during the 1920s it was filled with artists, socialists, Jews, refugees, foreign tourists, the cultural elite, scientists, foreigners looking for the hedonistic pleasures of the most liberal Western City on earth.
Even during the later (war) years, support for the Nazis was not strong there.
In the 1920s they appealed more to the rural conservative areas and after their failed Putsh they were trying to be more political and less like the street fighting revolutionaries they used to be.
Berlin was avant-garde, cosmopolitan, modern, decadent, liberal.
Most Berliners liked their city the way it was, what they didn’t like were these outsiders (Many Nazis were not locals) coming to their city telling them everything they were doing was wrong.
Nazis hated the place.
In 1928 they called Berlin “A melting pot of everything that was evil”.

When Goebbels came to berlin in 1926 to ‘take over the city’, he found that the Nazis could maybe scrape together 200 members while the communists had over 250.000.

We have an excellent documentary style movie showing in our sim, filmed on the streets of Berlin in 1929, showing daily life as it was.
Not a Nazi uniform in sight (or swastika for that matter), for most of the 1920s Nazis dressed like everyone else, the few that did wear uniforms often just wore brownshirts and on several ocassions they were forbidden by law to wear any kind of uniform.

You can watch this movie  here at the bottom of this post.

But even if the Nazis were all over Berlin in the 1920s we would not be showing them like that in our sim.

Linden Lab does not allow swastikas and experience has taught us that everyone interested in ‘playing a Nazi has trouble portraying this in a balanced acceptable manner.
To be honest, our experience with this generally consists of some griefer running around shouting Heil Hitler while wearing a Second World War uniform.

We are not saying we will never allow anyone to bring this part of history to the streets of our sim.
But when we give someone  permission to ‘play’ a Nazi with us in Second Life, this will be a person that has been a member of our project for a long long time, someone we trust completely and can be sure about that they handle this sensitive part of history in a responsible manner.