Nazi/Psuedo Nazi-Themed Dolls

I don't think it's too over the top. But everyone has opinions and it's a bit of a sensitive subject. To be honest, it is all about the uniforms for me, not at all what it represents.

I would probably have the swastika replaced with something else. C:

 

I'm really not sure how to wrap my head around the idea of "innocent" Nazi garb. I think that if you go so far as to use swastikas and SS insignia, there is nothing innocent about the portrayal. At that point, it is an intentional reference: you specifically want to evoke the Nazis and everything that means to viewers. You can't dictate the reactions of others, but you can pretty much guarantee that you will offend a larger percentage of your viewers with that choice than with the choice of a different uniform. There are other military uniforms that have a similar silhouette if you look hard enough, and parody can be acceptable in some situations, but the line into distasteful is exceedingly easy to cross here.

 

I love dolls in uniforms and see nothing wrong with that, however Nazi themed dolls would be a no no if that is something you want people to see. I do not know how you would make it innocent at all, I do not think there is away. Nothing good has come from Nazi's and there is alot of hurt and emotion out there and will continue to be in the future.

I myself am part German and I have had bad things said just because of that, and one of my great uncles was arrested in Germany for being a spy and ended up hanging himself. At the end of the day if I can have things said to me for being part German imagine the repercussions of a natzi themed doll. Not worth the upset and pain in my opinion.

At the end of the day it is your choice but please think carefully before proceeding.

 

I have nothing against those who love Nazi-themed dolls or BJD Nazi-uniforms pegs for fashion but
I have these kinda of eefy and unsure feelings towards historical figure/concepts since it may be too sensitive and complicated to deal with since some of us can't help but still see them as murderous tyrants
specially in those countries/race that conquered them before in the past. Well I think this goes for those Japanese generals during the dark days too fashioned out in Volks dolls. I'm sorry if I'm over-thinking too much but this is just my opinion.

 

I can understand appreciating the cut of the uniform-- I mean, Hugo Boss, I get it. And I can understand a general love of historical accuracy as well. But I do have to say that swastikas really creep me out and make me feel ill, and I would have a hard time accepting as 'innocent' an accurate SS uniform (I'm assuming SS, the run-of-the-mill army uniforms were far less spiffy and would not have carried the same symbols or had the same menacing look).

I mean, if you want your doll to have a uniform because you like it, and you want it and all the accessories to be as accurate as possible because you're a history buff and it would bother you that they weren't, that's fine, but... maybe in photos that you share, put a clear warning in the header and/or pose and shoot in such a way that the swastikas themselves don't show, because it can be immensely triggering for some.

I know there are a lot of people who collect military figures, and WWII is one of THE periods that people want to recreate. They do so with faithfulness, and not out of any sympathy for Nazis, but because for them, the whole point of their military figure collection is the accuracy. They even make sculpts of various historical figures from both sides of the war in addition to generic soldiers from different nations. So it's not that I believe that wanting an accurate small-scale uniform means you yourself have those sympathies! More that I would feel creeped out by the doll in question, I think, and especially on a tiny, it might be off-putting to a lot of people.

I do love history, and historically-inspired dolls. Putting them in the party, though, might cross a line for a lot of people. Now, if you had a story in which one of the characters was an allied spy, and they were in the uniform as part of an infiltration or assassination, it would put a different spin on things and make it more palatable to some, but if you just enjoy the look of a particular type of military uniform and want to be accurate, then I would say just show very cautious judgment in sharing pictures.

And if you want 1/6th scale historically accurate weapons, you can go here:
http://www.gijoeelite.com/f_home.asp

Elite Brigade covers at least Civil War through WWII (both sides) with their weapons. Not everything would work scaled to a tiny since they're meant to work with large-scale action figures (helmets would be way too small, for instance), but the weapons themselves should. And Dragon and DID have some stuff as well. I often find myself wishing the french and british things came in larger scales...

 

There are so many issues here:

a) A Nazi-uniformed tiny would definitely look *odd*, like a chihuahua with a bulldog's spiky collar.

b) Feel free to dress your dolls however you like, but understand that other people may react to them in unappreciative ways. These may include, for example, people whose parents or grandparents were killed by the Nazis, either in combat or in extermination camps. I would personally wait for a century and a half before doing a realistic military uniform-- few people nowadays will take an exception to Napoleonic uniform (I certainly don't, and his armies laid waste to my hometown two centuries ago), but the Holocaust is still in living memory.

c) The Nazis didn't invent the swastika. There are conceivably character designs that include the swastika in their Asian meaning of good luck (in India) or Buddhist symbol (China, Japan), but in a Western environment, character designs that feature a swastika or a manji will still have to explain that design choice. These are the closest things that may be counted as an "innocent" swastika, and they belong to an Asian context, not an European one.

d) If you *must* do a German WW2 uniform, a Wehrmacht uniform is different from an SS or Gestapo uniform. Probably you'll catch less flak if you don't go the black/grey Hugo Boss with the SS runes and the totenkopf insignia route. Probably. But don't count too much in it.

 

I am German, and I feel this is no way to cope with this horrible part of our past. I do not like much even the cut of Nationalsocialistic uniforms, but if that's what you need...with some fantasy badges, for heaven's sake.

But please never, ever the real thing! I feel it is just insulting to everybody. Both of my grandpas where high-ranking soldiers in WWII, my husband is a citizen of the former GDR. Thus, these exactly copied uniforms are absolutely no fun to me. I generally ignore e.g. gallery threads, I even have ambivalent feelings about companies such as Ringdoll.

Sorry if this a super-sensitive topic for me, but there is just absolutely perfectly no artistic or glourious content for me.

 

This is a tough subject and a good one to discuss. Personally, I am torn on the idea of using Nazi imagery in an "innocent" or even titilating context.

I attend fetish clubs and SS uniforms are popular there. When I first saw one, I was absolutely appalled and actually berated someone for being so callous. However, I have now seen so many that it has perhaps lost some of its association in that context. I can now see real Nazis and fet Nazis as two, separate things. And, yes, fet Nazis can be titilating, for whatever complex psychological (and NOT ideological) reasons.

However, I have good reasons to continue to find Nazi imagery appalling. I am very interested in WWII and have read pretty extensively around the rise of the Nazi party and the atrocities committed in the name of their ideology. I am a left-wing liberal and part of the LGBT community and would have been one of the very people who would have ended up in the camps. My family has also been directly impacted by WWII. My father was nearly killed during the Blitz, for example. However, I have a number of German WWII action figures. I also have some uniforms for my BJDs and some real, historical memorabilia. I don't know if it is morbid fascination or the desensitizing impact of the fet Nazis, but I don't find any of this problematic. However, I remove any swastikas from my (otherwise historically accurate) action figures and am sensitive to other people's potential feelings about them (they don't come out on meets, for example).

So, I can fully understand the negative attitudes of people towards any use of Nazi imagery in a recreational setting. However, I still do it, with care. Conflicted? Definitely.

ETA: And going back to the project that prompted this, 1:6 military caps fit tinies, such as Pukis. I would post a picture, but it was taken ironically and, given the sensitivity of this subject and the serious discussion going on here, I don't think it would be appropriate. PM me if you need to see.

 

Well...I will inherit "memorabilia". Guess I will keep them, as I did not even know my grandfathers. But display them? No.

I have to admit that there maybe some deadly fascination about this part of history. The comraderie, the unity...but you can find that elsewhere, too.

But too many people where killed in their name. And they are still not dead...that's the worst.

 

Ipledreamer, I agree. One has to proceed with care on this. But I think the appeal of the Nazi, particularly in SS uniform, is the appeal of the ultimate, sadistic dom. Hence its popularity in fet culture. However, it is transgressive, for very good reason, and I think one has to be sensitive to this and its use outside the settings where this is understood. I now realise that I was in the wrong to berate someone for role-playing in the very special, protected setting where this is understood and the people are abiding by a very particular set of rules. But displaying Nazi imagery in more mainstream settings is very problematic.

Because of this, I can't vote on the poll. My answer would be "It all depends".

 

Obviously you have the freedom to do what you want, but Nazi-themed photos make me really uncomfortable and I tend to click away from them in a hurry. Even if the Nazis are being portrayed as the bad guys in a photostory or whatever, it feels like making light of recent historical atrocities. Like MadameMauMau, my grandparents were in London during the Blitz, and my grandfather was in the army there, so it doesn't seem like all that long ago.
Also, sorry for playing the "Won't somebody think of the children" card, but Den of Angels is a 13+ forum, and there are a lot of young teenagers here. This isn't an open-content forum. So while Nazi references (with a lot of context) might be workable on DeviantArt or something, my personal opinion is that they're inappropriate for DoA.

 

No reason to have Nazi insignia on an SS-cut uniform unless as someone pointed out this was a photo-story about WWII, w/spies & w/Allied soldiers fighting them etc. Using swastikas in their ancient context (before the psycho-killer absconded w/it) is fine w/me. Also, using the basic uniform styles for fantasy troops seems a good idea. Oh, & Nazi/SS HORROR cosplay seems perfect - they ARE the stuff of nightmares after all.

 

Honestly, you can do whatever you want with your dolls.
Will it offend a large portion of the people who see it? Probably.
Is it in bad taste to glorify mass murderers? I think so.
I will admit that the uniforms were pretty cool looking, and I can understand why you'd want to do it, but people will get offended by it. And there is no such thing as an innocent portrayal of nazi garb.

 

Honestly, I think this would be in really bad taste. Now, that in and of itself isn't dreadful - sometimes I love bad taste stuff - but really, if you're going to walk down the "potentially highly offensive" road you have to do it well. And most people don't. If you're going to dress anything in SS uniform, make sure it's obvious it's for purely aesthetic/fantasy reasons and you're not some kind of neo-nazi idiot. I don't see why you have to make it explicitly SS. Emulate the cut of the uniform, the sharpness of the style, without reverting back to the horrible imagery. Yes, the Nazi uniforms are beautiful - designed by Hugo Boss, after all - but no matter how beautiful something looks, if it's stained with such ugly ideology nothing can redeem it.

And plus - on a tiny? What are you trying to do, make a statement about the brain-washing of children? I don't know, I'm for people doing whatever they want with their dolls, but seeing as you're asking for opinions, I think it's very distasteful.

 

Funnily enough I remember seeing a photo from a Dolpa not too long ago that had little Nazi uniforms for YoSDs.

I also JUST discovered a site called war-toys.com with all kinds of tiny 1/6 scale stuff for 12" action figures which is all WWII, with plenty of German uniform bits for people to make authentic reproduction soldiers. So people DO make historic Action Figures and things. And of course they also had Allied army stuff, not just Axis.

I think it just depends what your DOING with the doll. If you're into history then whatever. If you're using it as some kind of neo-Nazi propaganda then not cool (not that you are...). But I'm not sure I'd post them in their regalia unless you also have a Yo dressed as Indiana Jones kicking some Nazi butt.

 

I think this is a good point regarding other historical periods.

I think it's too easy talk about living memory in terms of those who lived through things and are still alive (I have aunts and uncles whose earliest memories of childhood are from the German occupation of Belgium during WWII, so I get that we're still so close to that), but I think it ought to extend back farther still since older generations still remember the stories of their own grandparents (and their grandparents, and so on). Even aside from the fact that we still see certain Americans talk about the US civil war or certain South Africans talk about the Anglo-Boer war as though they were much more recent (and nearly every country has examples of those), there's also the issue of post-colonial/post-imperial politics, so even if the people who lived through those periods are all dead the effects are still ongoing.

I also think it's a little fetishizing of the Nazi era to give those images so much more social power than we would to similar outfits of say an imperial Japanese or an English colonial or a Spanish conquistador and so on.

ETA: Which isn't to say that I think those things should all be off-limits (I put my dolls in a variety of military garb because I'm a bit of a military history buff myself), but just that they should (ideally) all require equal sensitivity.

 

But this is what it is all about and why any old uniform won't do. There is a fetishisation of the idea of the Nazi, as I said above. The question is whether it is OK to express this fetish by dressing one's dolls as Nazis and possibly to post the pictures. It is clear from this thread that there are strong feelings about this.

And there are many, many WWII action figures out there. One of the main companies who produces them is Dragon in Dreams. They lately prefer film Nazis and have made (uncredited, but obvious) interpretations of Hans Landa (Inglorious Bastards) and Amon Goeth (Schindler's List). However, presumably because of the strong feelings surrounding this episode of our history, they produced a second company called 3R specifically to produce representations of the actual people involved. So you can buy a 12 inch Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebels, if you so wish. The fact that figures from this episode of history had to be dissassociated from the parent company shows how controversial a topic this still is, even though the people who collect these are most likely not fetishists but interested in military history.

3R, in case you wanted to be scandalised or are interested in action figures of this era. And notice that their tagline is "Your extreme collectibles" and the disclaimber at the bottom, "Our product is for historic education purposes only, and is not intended to glorify, nor exploit the horrors and atrocities of war." The Nazis have to rank amongst the most taboo of subjects, and probably will for a long time to come.

 

I think the reason that Nazi themed stuff is so offensive is because a lot of people from there era are still alive. A lot of Jewish survivors are alive, and a lot of us younger people had grandparents or other relatives either in the camps, that had to flee to America, or fought against the Nazis.
Then there's the horrible experiments that the Nazi scientists performed.
So it's kind of a gut reaction to be offended by it.

 

I think if you want to make a Nazi uniform for your tiny, then go ahead and do it. I would advise you not to share on these boards since it is a very sensitive subject to many people because WWII is still alive in living memory. It is just too close in history still and people still have very strong feelings against it.

I do like the cut of the uniforms, but I would be far more likely to do a steampunk-inspired version of the uniform and just don't put any Nazi symbols on it. That way it would be more removed from the original subject manner and it forces people to acknowledge it as a more historically inspired fashion piece.

So yeah. My vote is that an accurate uniform is just too close to the era still and I don't like making people upset myself. And I wouldn't feel comfortable with a Nazi uniform in my house anyway because my family has links back there.