WT: In this case, yes, the first and only 'World War” in Animalia is still referred to as the Great War. However, while World War II did not happen in the sense that there was a Hitler, or Nazi's, or a push for global domination, there was a nearly, if not equally as bad period in Roarope that led to the extermination and displacement of millions of rodents over a period of ten to fifteen years.
Much like in our own universe, the Great War was followed by a Great Pandemic. The Manish Flu, which would quickly become known as the “Rat Rasp”, assaulted an already ravaged continent, and stirred up a lot of resentment for the mammals that were presumed to have caused it; rodents. By this point, rodent communities had been the established starting point for many of history's greatest plagues that made the jump to larger mammals, including the infamous black death, and this hadn't been forgotten by many Roaropeans. Coupled with the fact that rodent communities had massive, ever-increasing populations that they refused to curtail, and that would often end up putting a strain on local resources for everyone else, there was already a baseline resentment for rodent kind. The Rat Rasp was simply the latest in a long string of 'slights' to the rest of mammal kind that would fuel anti-rodent sentiment across Roarope. Over the next few years as the crises worsened, mammals who spoke ill of the rodent population would become political powerhouses, with a groundswell of support coming from the most affected communities allowing them to rise to positions of prominence.
Germamy was the first nation to start enacting curfews for rodents, and other social limitations, which would quickly escalate to outright segregation and the forced relocation of rodents and rodent-related mammals to rodent-only ghettos. But unlike our timeline, Germamy wasn't alone in setting such restrictions, merely the first, as even Kingland would come to adopt rodent ghettos to protect their populace from future pandemics. However, Germamy would be one of the first to escalate its efforts after a resurgence of the Rasp in 1923. And thus rodents were 'exiled' from Germamy, causing them to scatter to neighboring nations and forcing them to adopt their own 'hard measures'. In regards to Germamy, it's estimated that half of the rodent population never actually saw themselves exiled. This is because it is now known that Germamy had created a secret 'exterminator' squad, whose job it was to wipe out the various rodent communities and kill their inhabitants. This was upheld under the guise that any time they were caught, it was to be explained away as a highly infected community where all the residents had already succumbed, and this was to protect the rest of the Germam populace from infection. But in the years since the Great Rodent Extermination, many documents have been provided to show that this was also their method of dealing with rodent dissenters and those who refused to leave Germamy. Worse still, Germamy would not be the only Roaropean nation to make use of “Exterminators” to deal with their own “Rodent Problems”
Other rodent-heavy populations saw themselves split up, as in the case of North Itaily, and South Italamb, which split at the Ratican line as the rodent population was too entrenched to be able to successfully exile. Italamb also saw the use of exterminators to keep the newly established border free of illegal migrants.
It would take at least another decade for the hysteria to die down, and for some of the countries in Roarope to relax rodent restrictions, however, almost all Roaropean nations maintained a child limit in regards to rodent families, with even the most liberal of nations taking the stance that rodent overpopulation is what allows pandemics to sweep through nations so quickly. Some nations still segregate rodent populations from the rest of the mammalian population, but nations like Germamy still maintain a 'no entry' policy to all rodent class mammals, an edict that is highly criticized but upheld nonetheless.
So, all that was my roundabout way to say that when it comes to “Nazi” imagery in the pop culture of Zoot, the most vivid and terrifying image is the jack-booted state sanctioned 'exterminator'. The kind that a startling number of mammals in Roarope still see as 'regrettable but necessary', and an alarmingly high number of North Mammalians are starting to feel is 'needed' to cull the currently unchecked rodent population that threatens to kick off a new plague on their shores.
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