As seen in: Captain America, Man Of Steel, V For Vendetta, The Avengers Aside from the obvious and the aforementioned (X-Men is about Nazism and racial purity, Captain Americas HYDRA are super-Nazis), Zods speeches nod toward Nazi ideology in Man Of Steel, V for Vendetta features about as obvious an ersatz Nazi state as its possible to get, and Loki gets called out on his megalomaniacal pretensions by an old German bloke in The Avengers. You'd have thought that after little Magneto Jr. got separated from his parents in literally the first scene of X-Men that everyone else would just dodge the Nazism for a little while, the full horror of the Holocaust and its legacy being so comprehensively and affectingly dealt with in that film. Alas, it merely opened the floodgates. When youre trying to think of a supervillain, its not really that imaginative to reach for Nazism. Even if its just using an eagle or a red-and-black colour scheme as a signifier, its been done to death and carries next to no weight now. It also kind of undermines the actual horror of the Nazis, part of which was the fact that most of the atrocities they committed were perpetrated or silently condoned by the millions of ordinary people who absorbed nationalist policies. The idea that all Nazis and everyone in Germany at the time are totally, unyieldingly evil suggests that its not a problem we could face now, because, hey, theyre all dead now, and were not evil, are we? Nah, we shop at Oxfam sometimes and bought the last Band Aid single even though it was rubbish. It definitely couldnt happen here.
