Poor Momoland. They only deserve all the success and best, just unfortunate that after all the member changes and drama they still find themselves in “scandals” due to other people’s obliviousness.

I don't mean to come off as a Nazi sympathizer by disagreeing with this article, but to be accurate, the Iron Cross is not inherently Nazi symbolism. The Iron Cross predated WWII by more than half a century. In 2008, Germany's armed forces created a new military award for active duty soldiers and kind of resurrected the Iron Cross design. The part of the Iron Cross that made it a Nazi symbol was the swastika in the middle of the Iron Cross. Since modern German law prohibits the production of items with Nazi insignia, you can still produce Iron Crosses, but you have to remove the swastika in the center or replace it with an appropriate insignia.

But, at what point does the perceived association of a thing become more important to factor in than the actual association? The Germany armed forces obviously are of the camp "actual association." But there are clearly a significant amount of people who consider the Iron Cross to be another piece of Nazi symbolism. I can see the argument for pushing back and insisting the Iron Cross isn't Nazi symbolism, because it was a prestigious military metal before WWII and those men who earned the Iron Cross then shouldn't be painted as Nazi's because they fought in an earlier war and Hitler copped the Iron Cross from Prussian military history for his Nazi regime.

But we also know that there were probably plenty of the badges out and about and I'm sure a lot of people started to associate the Iron Cross itself with Nazis, which is totally understandable. If you see an enemy soldier wearing a badge for being so good at their job when their job is to intimidate, threaten, coerce, and even kill you, you hate that medal. You don't want to see them succeed. That medal is a sign of exceptional brutality and hatred now, because the enemy, the oppressor is wearing it. No one's going to look at the middle of the cross to identify a Nazi insignia or Prussian military honor insignia.

I personally think a soldier without a medal would be worse though. I think once you have the medal, it's like that stereotype of teachers receiving tenure. They start to slack off. They don't have to put in the work anymore. Their medal is their job security. So a soldier without a medal would become more rash, quick-tempered, violent in an attempt to earn that badge to get that feeling of leisure that he sees comes with it, not that that matters. A lazy and complacent Nazi is still a Nazi.