the ideology was what endured and became self sufficient.
Dear Brett, you're partially right. You'd reinforced ideology they have already been sticking with for almost six centuries, namely something like Protestant view on life. Yes, it worked and still works. We tried to offer something new instead, and it didn't work. Our mistake? Probably so, but we then had nothing better. Dunno, maybe still haven't. Communism has historically been rooted in the same Protestant logic and originated from the same Germany, but those seeds dropped on Orthodix Russian soil gave awful results. Never been religious man, but I have no better explanation.
But they the Germans are your allies just formally. By case, you may visit Germany and look at the bar crowds at some weekend in the most rich (and Catholic, by coincidense) federal land of Bavaria, from where the Nazi movement originated. I'm not good in German, but I have already heard several times the sentence "finally, we can speak in the only true language that is able to unite the Europe and not that fucking English". It was shock to me.