Ok folks,
to settle down things a bit:
If you like to understand how people thought these days, it might be worthwile to take into consideration that Germany had already lost a war some 20 years ago when the second big war was started by themselves. Upon Germans there was imposed the guilt and debt, owing to the first war (which, generally speaking, had been a war of colonial powers against colonial powers). Other colonial powers, like the British and the French, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, somehow already felt that their time had come when they were urged into the second war. Others, like Spain and Portugal, simply kept out of it, only to loose their colonies in the 1970s.
Germans, in general, were quite fond of somebody telling them a great future of power, strengh and economic wealth was lying in front of them only to be picked up by those who would be willing to do so. Unfortunately, this somebody was called Hitler, and almost nobody cared about the side-effects of that very pill they were about to swallow. Nobody read the receipt properly. Grandpa did, he read "Mein Kampf" and was quite determined, from 1932 on, that a big mistake was about to be made. But the Nazis proved to be very successful in their heyday. And who cares about side effects when the pill seems to be a cure? So people were sent off to be settlers wherever the Nazis gained influence or power, the Protektorat Boehmen & Maehren (Tchechoslovakia), Yugoslavia, later the General Gouvernement (Poland), the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and so on. Meanwhile, dictatorship was so well organized and advanced that it meant to risk your life to oppose frankly and in the public. So it was a deathly mixture of ignorance, belief and, of course, fierce mischief, that brought about the unspeakable atrocities and made people join in and accept or even support them. The killing of some thousands, later millions of people seemed like the side-effect of war, and it was the insidious and deceitful intention of the Nazis to let the killings happen in the penumbra of war, only to make ordinary Germans intimidated - and caring for their own lives, first place.
A typical answer came from my father, a Nazi party member since 1932, when, some 25 years ago, we saw "Holocaust", an American TV series, together. "Did you know about these things?" I asked. - "Well, I didn't", he replied, "but I must admit I could have known if I had wanted to."
Guys and Gals, there is no use counting up against one another what Nazis and Commies or Displaced Persons or Allied Forces or who-so-ever has commited - or omitted to do - in those days.
Whoever has put guilt on himself, whoever has suffered (or both, which, in those days, could well happen to the same person), try and find peace in something, your family, your children and grand-children, your later achievements, whatever.
There are only three big mistakes that can be made about this:
(1) Thinking that your family was perfect and was the only one that suffered,
(2) Thinking that the little bit of opposition that came from your family would make up for the great crimes committed,
(3) Thinking that forgetting about all of that stuff might help for the rest of one's life.
I find it ever so moving when people from the U-boats or Air Forces from both sides join in mourning and remembrance, when trees ar planted in the "Walk of the Righteous" in Israel
and when we - as their offspring - prove that we have learned something, to respect others as human beings, and not let ourselves be forced into being enemies by a government.
Jesko