Shinook: It's a common political ploy in the United States to call your opponents Nazis or associate them with a popular Nazi leaders. I die on the inside every time it happens, it really does make me sick.
In German politics, there's more or less a consensus that the Nazi crimes were so uniquely atrocious that comparisons to contemporary people or events are not appropriate. They do happen from time to time, but they usually cause an outcry from the political opponents of whoever makes them, and there's a high risk that that person's reputation will be damaged.
In private, people are naturally more lenient with comparisons than in public.
Shinook: I've always been curious what modern day Germans thought about the denazification, especially in this era. I'd be interested to hear how the laws are viewed by the German population (censorship arguments aside).
Most Germans probably only have vague knowledge about the denazification process, too vague to have opinions about its details. The majority of Germans agree that the allies did free Germany from a dictatorship that should never have happened in the first place, so the general opinion about the denazification will probably be positive, though there is also skepticism about how successful it actually was (even nowadays we sometimes get news about someone's hidden Nazi past).
Shinook: It seems to me, not being German, that the likelihood of the Nazi party rising to power again, in one form or another, would be highly unlikely. Is that inaccurate?
It's unlikely as long as the political and economical situation is stable, but I wouldn't take that for granted. The Nazis rose to power in the 30s because the country was hit hard by the world-wide economic crisis, the politicians were deadlocked and separated into the extreme left and the extreme right, who were unable to even talk to each other, and Nazi rhetorics offered the people a scapegoat and seemingly a way out ("Our glorious country has been held down by the Versailles contract war reparations, and by a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, we will remove these shackles and return our country to greatness."). While this won't repeat itself in every detail, I believe we have to be wary especially in times of economical crises.
There are neo-nazi (or at least extreme right-wing) parties in Germany who get around 5% of votes in elections - sometimes more, sometimes less. In some regional administartions they got up to 10% of votes, but usually they prove themselves as so inept and self-destructive that they lose most of their voter base in the next election. There are, however, areas in Germany where the potential of extreme right-wing voters is 30% or more, and where neo-nazi parties are extremely active with their youth organizations. There is also a nazi underground which, for whichever reason, managed to operate largely undisturbed from the state security departments that are supposed to have an eye on such developments, and there was a neo-nazi terror cell who was active for years, killing foreigners throughout the country, without the police even noticing them (the killings were sometimes attributed to inter-familial conflicts, or to conflicts inside the foreign communities).
I agree that it's unlikely to see a Nazi or Nazi-like party rise to power again in Germany anytime soon, but I am concerned about what may happen when the country gets hit by a severe economical/political crisis again, especially 20 years down the road, when we will have whole families consisting of people to whom the neo-nazi youth organizations were the ones who cared about them, and organized events and vacations for them, whereas other parties seemed to have abandoned the area they lived in. I believe that a charismatic, politically able leader in this part of the political spectrum would be able to garner about 10-15% of votes, possibly more in the future - we are kind of blessed that right-wing leaders in the past few decades have been so inept.