re: #197 HappyWarrior

That’s correct and why the Are we the baddies comic sketch works so well. It’s easy to reduce the Nazis or any tyrannical regime bent on genocide or democide to comic book villains cackling evilly in an underground lair but the Nazis really thought they were being moral and righteous just as this administration insists it is moral to do what they are.

The myth of the “Good German” is largely that, a myth that was conceived in post-war Germany to allow those who’d participated in the horrors a means of defending their actions. So much of it came from the need of the former Allied nations to rehabilitate their German counterparts in order to build up West and East Germany as part of the Cold War. We scoff today at the “Nuremberg Defense,” but for many of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who went on to form the nucleus of the new German armed forces, it was accepted as a valid excuse to ignore their war-time exploits. Likewise government officials and businessmen who’d taken part in the regime who weren’t drug off to the gallows got to spin themselves post-war as “quiet dissenters,” who’d wanted so badly to bring down the Reich but lived in constant fear of death or worse.

Really, if we hadn’t had to turn Germany into the frontlines of a potential WWIII, it’s very likely that we would have spent a generation de-Nazifying the entire nation, as it would have taken that long or longer to undo all the crap crammed into the heads of the children born into the Reich.