German nazi heritage

[Cyberowl]

Economical control?

Germany is a strong economy. Do you wonder that they wanted to save their currency or about the fact that they don't want their efforts to be for nothing?

And Cybran, what is so bad about a greater European military? A bigger military which would be cheaper for the individual countries? The greater influence by Germany, UK, France? Seems legit to me, who contributes more, gets more influence.

Seems like you search the web for news about the EU and everytime you can twist an event in disfavour against everyone but Bulgaria (?) and Greece, you jump at it.

[Cybran]

A bigger military which would be cheaper for the individual countries? The greater influence by Germany, UK, France? Seems legit to me, who contributes more, gets more influence.

The problem is that Britian, France and now Germany want to play a role in the global scale. They need to project power and to get involved into regions like Mali, CAR, Algeria and the Middle east.

Germany especially has been hiding the fact that it's the 3rd biggest arms supplier in the world very well. They just signed a 100 billion dollar deal with Saudi Arabia for patrol boats, despite objections from a lot of western countries.

The problem is that for their (France and Germany to be fair) new centralized union to work they need everyone on board, even nobodies like us that have our own problems and don't have the resources to play world police.

[Sforza]

My grandfather from my mother's side fought the entire African campaign in Rommel's Afrika Korps.
He used to tell me the stories of war when i was a child about the battles he fought, but that was only in private, he never spoke too much about it.
Can't say im proud of it but im surely not guilty of any of his actions, if that is your point.
Also i dont live in Germany so i dont know what they learn in their educational system but they should learn about their past, like it or not.

[MerinPally]

My grandfather from my mother's side fought the entire African campaign in Rommel's Afrika Korps.
He used to tell me the stories of war when i was a child about the battles he fought, but that was only in private, he never spoke too much about it.
Can't say im proud of it but im surely not guilty of any of his actions, if that is your point.
Also i dont live in Germany so i dont know what they learn in their educational system but they should learn about their past, like it or not.

You have no idea what people with interests like myself would give to sit down to speak with your grandfather about what he saw and did. All matters of morality aside, it's just so interesting. Morality wouldn't even come into it. Was so upset, because I did a GCSE in History and there was a guy in the local area who fought for the Polish Resistance but he got ill shortly before he could come in and talk to all the students like he usually did most years. He died soon after.

Sure your grandfather was on "the other side" or may have done bad things but it doesn't matter any more. It's just fascinating.

By "people like myself" I mean most British men aged over 18 with a remotely decent education and an interest in history.

[Anguished]

the current generation's grandparents were born in 1940 or later, their grandfathers were children during the war.

Not really. It depends on how old their parents and grandparents were when they had kids. For instance, my sister's going through school now. Our Grandad fought in the war, he was born in the 1920's.

[JayJay09]

The problem is that Britian, France and now Germany want to play a role in the global scale. They need to project power and to get involved into regions like Mali, CAR, Algeria and the Middle east.

Germany especially has been hiding the fact that it's the 3rd biggest arms supplier in the world very well. They just signed a 100 billion dollar deal with Saudi Arabia for patrol boats, despite objections from a lot of western countries.

The problem is that for their (France and Germany to be fair) new centralized union to work they need everyone on board, even nobodies like us that have our own problems and don't have the resources to play world police.

And despite objections from actually the whole population of Germany. It's just being done and the people have no say in that matter. It's not Democracy when your country does stuff you really don't want it to do. This money... It's a lot of money, but it's blood money. Sell the trigger and you bath in blood and money.

What are objections worth when there is money to be made? Exactly.

Sure your grandfather was on "the other side" or may have done bad things but it doesn't matter any more. It's just fascinating.

Oh I hope it still matters. It must matter. It's not about his person but about his type. Those things do not stop to matter.

I know how you meant it but I just think it's not how you should say it.

[Wixwix]

No, sorry. Just NO!

I blame the German atrocities because they were way worse than any of the allied.
That does not mean things, allied forces have done don't have to be blamed, too. Of course they have to! But you simply can not compare some rapes, bombing of civils, closing borders against refugees or even using two nukes, against the well planed genocide of an entire ethnic group and the start of an war of aggression.
The main reason is, because what the allies did in WWII was during a war. Bad things always happen during a war. That does not legitimate it of course, and by no means do I want to trivialize it. But none of these things would have happened if Nazi Germany (and Japan in the Pacific part of the War) hadn't caused this war and mass murder.

I completely agree that what is done in Gaza and the Westbank is terrible and it has to be stoped, but it is a different thing that can not be compared to the holocoust - by no means!
Actually it's quite a problem here, that in Germany as a German, you can not criticise the israeli government without immediatly being accused of being an anti-Semite by either the central jewish council or the yellow press.
Of course this is a bad thing. You have to be able to criticise things a government does (especially if these things are that bad!) at any time! A government isn't the representation of a religion, it's the representation of a county.
This just as a side-note.

Except there were never a systematic genocide of an entire ethnic group. Only towards the very end of the war did some of the concentration camps actually carry out mass-executions, if you will, before the russian/allied forces reached their camps.

And if you can't compare that to the planned genocide of some 1,9m+ germans, bombing of civilian targets specifically, such as cities and towards the end of the war at that, the two nuclear bombs and such I don't know what to say. What about the mass expulsion of German post war, with many of them sent to labor camps?

That can not compare at all? Only one side is evil and the other sides, what they did is not even comparable? Because apparently they're the good ones. Right.

May I remind you that the UK and France were the ones to declare war, not Germany. So to blame them for starting the war is very naive.

[Deleted]

Germans are very aware of the nazi and WW2 era. Whole generations have been practically brainwashed into thinking that any kind of national or cultural pride (other than gay pride) is super bad and automatically leads to racism, concentration camps and genocides.

It seems to me that the guilt is so immense that they even hesitate to take action to defend themselves, being hysterically afraid of nazi/fascist/militarist allegories.

And this weakness is being shamelessly exploited by the political Left. Violent left-wing anarchism and radicalism and trouble with muslim immigrants are the biggest security threats in Germany these days. But any decisive action against them is being held back by the fear of nazism. This problem isn't restricted to Germany only though; to lefties all over the world anyone who doesn't agree with them is a nazi.

[Kryos]

Also i dont live in Germany so i dont know what they learn in their educational system but they should learn about their past, like it or not.

We learn it exessivly. It's a national trauma and if you turn on TV there is always some documentation about that time.

[Ravenblade]

Except there were never a systematic genocide of an entire ethnic group. Only towards the very end of the war did some of the concentration camps actually carry out mass-executions, if you will, before the russian/allied forces reached their camps.

And if you can't compare that to the planned genocide of some 1,9m+ germans, bombing of civilian targets specifically, such as cities and towards the end of the war at that, the two nuclear bombs and such I don't know what to say. What about the mass expulsion of German post war, with many of them sent to labor camps?

That can not compare at all? Only one side is evil and the other sides, what they did is not even comparable? Because apparently they're the good ones. Right.

May I remind you that the UK and France were the ones to declare war, not Germany. So to blame them for starting the war is very naive.

Personally I don't care at which time the genocide became official by the book because the Nazis ran many extermination programmes before and barely could keep it up so high were their self-imposed demands. Even the death camps later were constantly rebuilt, changed and expanded and the reason it peaked at end of war was that they have got to a stage where the killing machine was so optimized that they did not have to resort to mass shootings, gas vans or or putting them into work camps anymore. They could simply throw people directly into the gas chambers built to "process" a high amount of prisoners. Usually before that the SS Einsatzgruppen just rounded up whatever minority they could find and executed them in the open long before 1944. So there was systematic targeting and killing already.

The mass bombings were part of a doctrine where it was believed that shelling and destroying civilian areas will kill the morale of the enemy which explains why the USA used two nuclear bombs over Japan: they knew the Japanese would never break so they wanted to hasten the process. Back then it was seen as a lesser evil compared to the greater evil continuously being committed.

This is why the plain good guys vs. bad guys scheme in the long run does not work when you are analyzing that part of history. You have to first understand under which pressure the Allies had to act and they had limited options in how to proceed. Especially the Soviets took some heavy blows and suffered millions of losses until they found the Germans to a standstill.
Neither side spared innocents when it came to proceeding with their goals but the side with the least concern for innocents were definitely the Axis powers at that time who unlike the Allies excplicitely targeted civilians on purpose and principle as per ideology they were acing under. In retrospect it was a simple "us or them" scenario for the Allied powers as well who knew that if they didn't stop the Axis nobody could.
Based on their motives the Allies were the good guys, based on their methods the Allies were the lesser evil. As a whole the entire war was initiated and fought out of motives which will never get a positive spin except by revisionists, relativists, apolegetics, people constantly living in the past and those having their red-white-tinted swastika glasses on. The Allies at least tried to help in reconstruction also by forcing terms of leniency on countries which suffered a lot, well, the Western Allies at least, I grew up in the Eastern part which had to pay their reparations in full and rise from the ruins on their own (as indicated by their chosen national anthem).

[Wixwix]

Personally I don't care at which time the genocide became official by the book because the Nazis ran many extermination programmes before and barely could keep it up so high were their self-imposed demands. Even the death camps later were constantly rebuilt, changed and expanded and the reason it peaked at end of war was that they have got to a stage where the killing machine was so optimized that they did not have to resort to mass shootings, gas vans or or putting them into work camps anymore. They could simply throw people directly into the gas chambers built to "process" a high amount of prisoners. Usually before that the SS Einsatzgruppen just rounded up whatever minority they could find and executed them in the open long before 1944. So there was systematic targeting and killing already.

The mass bombings were part of a doctrine where it was believed that shelling and destroying civilian areas will kill the morale of the enemy which explains why the USA used two nuclear bombs over Japan: they knew the Japanese would never break so they wanted to hasten the process. Back then it was seen as a lesser evil compared to the greater evil continuously being committed.

This is why the plain good guys vs. bad guys scheme in the long run does not work when you are analyzing that part of history. You have to first understand under which pressure the Allies had to act and they had limited options in how to proceed. Especially the Soviets took some heavy blows and suffered millions of losses until they found the Germans to a standstill.
Neither side spared innocents when it came to proceeding with their goals but the side with the least concern for innocents were definitely the Axis powers at that time who unlike the Allies excplicitely targeted civilians on purpose and principle as per ideology they were acing under. In retrospect it was a simple "us or them" scenario for the Allied powers as well who knew that if they didn't stop the Axis nobody could.
Based on their motives the Allies were the good guys, based on their methods the Allies were the lesser evil. As a whole the entire war was initiated and fought out of motives which will never get a positive spin except by revisionists, relativists, apolegetics, people constantly living in the past and those having their red-white-tinted swastika glasses on. The Allies at least tried to help in reconstruction also by forcing terms of leniency on countries which suffered a lot, well, the Western Allies at least, I grew up in the Eastern part which had to pay their reparations in full and rise from the ruins on their own (as indicated by their chosen national anthem).

Gas vans is a proven myth, there's no evidence of Germany ever using such methods. However vans were used to kill people by the Stalin regime in Soviet during the great purge, according to Pjotr Grigorenko in his memoirs. As for gas chambers there's little to no proof that these actually existed. What there is proof of though is Zyklon-B which was used for delousing. I may add that not only the Germans used it for delousing but Americans aswell during the 20s and 30s, most commonly for freight trains and Mexican immigrants. Soviet was also known for their rampant propaganda during and after the war, faking pictures of German soldiers executing civilians and such.

I'm not denying anything by any means, I'm merely asking for factual proof that these things actually existed and happened, which I am yet to see. What I do see is lies and false claims such as gas vans, lamp shades made out of humans, faked pictures used for propaganda and such. I also find it weird that in many countries yet to this day it's illegal to question the holocaust, yet any other historical event is free to investigate. It is also very weird to me that these concentration camps would have kitchens, hospitals, dental care, cinema, orchestra bands and such along with.. gas chambers? Not to mention the Red Cross monitoring. Now, they Germans mostly refused Red Cross medical staff to visit Soviet POW's because Soviet had not signed the geneva convention, thus making them unentitled (is that even a word lol) to Red Cross visits, according to Germany.

The bombing that went on during the war I understand, Germany bombed Britain, they bombed back and back and forth it went. The bombings early to mid 1945 however I do not understand, since they weren't targeting anything military at all, all they wanted to do was kill civilians.
Based on motives and methods the allies were the good guys and the lesser evil? After all of the above, the allies even let their own soldiers rot and die in Soviet and conceded to many Soviet demands regarding what would happen to Europe post war. For example the US, although having signed international agreements to oppose forced repatriation, they excluded all the people from countries that they gave to Soviet post war, basically letting millions of people die in labour camps, in the name of "democracy". Not to mention the mass starvation of Germans and then the forced expulsion post war, how is that more humane, if humane at all?

I don't think any side can get the title 'good' or the title 'bad'.

[Deleted]

Based on their motives the Allies were the good guys, based on their methods the Allies were the lesser evil. As a whole the entire war was initiated and fought out of motives which will never get a positive spin except by revisionists, relativists, apolegetics, people constantly living in the past and those having their red-white-tinted swastika glasses on.

I can't do more than giving this a 100% /sign.

Sadly, Wixwix seemes to be one of thes guys, finding a positive spin.
And even if he says that he isn't denying anything by any means, that is exaxctly what he does in his first passage. "There is no prove"....
In germany this isn't just "illegal", it's a crime (sedition or "incitement of the people") in the criminal code, punished with imprisonment up to 5 years (§130 StGB III).

[Kryos]

Gas vans is a proven myth, there's no evidence of Germany ever using such methods.

Wrong, they used them in Chelmno starting December 1941 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chełmno_extermination_camp ) bu it was too expensive in the long term since you need much fuel, fuel needed by the tanks on the eastern front, to create enough carbon monoxid. And it was too slow - 20 minutes to kill 100 people in the biggest vans. This is how the vans looked like they used for the gasing:

The exhaust fumes were diverted into the sealed rear compartment where the victims were locked in. The camp was a center for early experimentation and development of methods of mass murder. Since Zyklon-B was cheaper and much more efficient they switched to that method later in other camps.

[MerinPally]

Oh I hope it still matters. It must matter. It's not about his person but about his type. Those things do not stop to matter.

I know how you meant it but I just think it's not how you should say it.

I won't lie, I was kinda drunk when I wrote my post. I suppose a far better way of saying it is that on a personal level it doesn't matter very much if at all, but on a large scale it does. The individual responsibility is diminished by now provided that appropriate punishments were carried out at some point.

[Ravenblade]

Gas vans is a proven myth, there's no evidence of Germany ever using such methods. However vans were used to kill people by the Stalin regime in Soviet during the great purge, according to Pjotr Grigorenko in his memoirs. As for gas chambers there's little to no proof that these actually existed. What there is proof of though is Zyklon-B which was used for delousing. I may add that not only the Germans used it for delousing but Americans aswell during the 20s and 30s, most commonly for freight trains and Mexican immigrants. Soviet was also known for their rampant propaganda during and after the war, faking pictures of German soldiers executing civilians and such.

I'm not denying anything by any means, I'm merely asking for factual proof that these things actually existed and happened, which I am yet to see. What I do see is lies and false claims such as gas vans, lamp shades made out of humans, faked pictures used for propaganda and such. I also find it weird that in many countries yet to this day it's illegal to question the holocaust, yet any other historical event is free to investigate. It is also very weird to me that these concentration camps would have kitchens, hospitals, dental care, cinema, orchestra bands and such along with.. gas chambers? Not to mention the Red Cross monitoring. Now, they Germans mostly refused Red Cross medical staff to visit Soviet POW's because Soviet had not signed the geneva convention, thus making them unentitled (is that even a word lol) to Red Cross visits, according to Germany.

The bombing that went on during the war I understand, Germany bombed Britain, they bombed back and back and forth it went. The bombings early to mid 1945 however I do not understand, since they weren't targeting anything military at all, all they wanted to do was kill civilians.
Based on motives and methods the allies were the good guys and the lesser evil? After all of the above, the allies even let their own soldiers rot and die in Soviet and conceded to many Soviet demands regarding what would happen to Europe post war. For example the US, although having signed international agreements to oppose forced repatriation, they excluded all the people from countries that they gave to Soviet post war, basically letting millions of people die in labour camps, in the name of "democracy". Not to mention the mass starvation of Germans and then the forced expulsion post war, how is that more humane, if humane at all?

I don't think any side can get the title 'good' or the title 'bad'.

You are mixing a lot of things together and whilst you may not actively want to deny you are buying solely into denial arguments.

In Germany - contrary to belief - it is allowed to discuss history or historical controversies altogether. What is not allowed in public is using it to incite people, to defame,to belittle, to violate the memory of the dead and maliciously maligning groups of people. Which altogether explicitly is valid for holocaust denial. For an outsider this may seem harmful, double-standard and non-constructive because in their eyes any denial is fair game and that society would have a healthier debate if it allowed holocaust denial altogether. However this is not true, in the instances where people ignored the laws they would exactly use that for this purpose. There is no healthy debate in this because every public denial serves a purpose and in this one it's because some supremacists cannot cope with the fact that they are denied the right to deny that their nefarious doctrine actually may have led to the termination of rights of existence of millions of innocent people. Which is the old problem with armchair nazis: They want to enjoy equal rights but once they got them they are the first ones to oppose equal rights. We have a crystal clear historical proof for that and there is a reason why far right-wing parties here constantly defer their full allegiance to the constitution ("Basic Law"). In this sense: Some rights are not the same and not seen as important. In German context it would be more harmful to let holocaust denial becoming the new accepted standard than actually pursuing the publishing of it and they cannot even afford slow creeping in. This is simply a national prerogative and a measure which however isn't unique to Germany alone just that Germany has the harshest laws in this regard. It's Germany's version of no tolerance for intolerance.

Gas vans have been "disproven" by Alvarez/Marais et al through their populist and revisionist Holocaust handbook series which consists of two main books. The credentials of the authors usually do not give much insight (other than being "scholars") and it's probably an pseudonym for people like Rudolf and Weckert et al although their play with mistranslations like "gas oven" which has no representation in German either because there is only gas chamber and crematoriums, omitted and cut statements which would actually prove the opposite , citing people who were deemed unfit for trial and simple their own disbelief. They also are focussing on people like Becker (who was actually an ex-SS officer) and Beer. Fortunately people who have a far better grasp on German can see through their laughably bad play with word twisting based on their "translations". His/their arguments also hinge on dismissable facts like typos like "z" and "y" being mistyped based on the assumption that German typewriters all had a QWERTZ layout but in fact typewriters were far from standardized then and a lot typewriters used had a QWERTY layout. My father used to own such an old thing as well which also caused "z" and "y" confusion. Example here. This is one issue I have with deniers, they get hung up on little details like these even if these things in the greater picture actually had no causal relationship with the events which followed after.

The usually starting point for controversies is this. The original document is at the bottom as a photography. Anyone familiar with German nomenclature knows that Germans never tend or for a long time tended to name things as they are in professional context. They would not refer to their gas vans as Gaswagen but just as in this document as Sonderwagen (special vehicle). There is also a mentioning of request of an additional acquisition of steel flask of carbon monoxide kind of as requisite for use. Requests like these are unusual and only make sense if you follow up on the early inefficiency of motors to produce enough of it. Here's the Saurerwagen version of it with what appears to be a visible warn sign on it.

On a side note many photos depicting a gas van are not necessarily legit ones, very early versions or incomplete ones without given functionality. This especially is true for the Chelmno vans for which no physical evidence has been found yet. The physical findings included Magirus Deutz wrecks which may or may not have been used for gas vans. These are usually being used to disprove their existence but it would be too easy if that were enough. It does underline however that Germans did not waste material and repurposed vehicles a lot. They were also fairly efficient at destroying physical evidence as per testimonies of people involved in such processes.

What's left are in fact testimonies. Witnesses of Chelmno recognized vehicles by type once photos were shown to them and they described as black/lead-colour and there is a detailed testimony of a Polish mechanic Jozef Piaskowski and his team forced to service vehicles describing unusually large engines with sophisticated exhaust system with one tube being mountable to the floor. It turned out they were also designed to burn 75l/100km of petroleum which was unusually a lot even for that time. These testimonies cross-matched with those of other witnesses and one can deduce that asking outsiders for repair service due to lack of trained mechanics inside the SS was a rare phenomenon but tells a lot about why they were given up because they raised too much suspicion already, it got harder to cover up their purpose and more difficult to service. Especially their use was rather based on iterative process rather than a finite and established procedure. Lack of reliability was a main factor they were given up as cynical as this may sound.

Other testimonies like that from Walter Burmeister or Adolf Eichmann further proved that they existed and were used. I also suggest reading this. Historically these testimonies and related documents - even though the Nazis tried to destroy most of them - outweigh the need for an actually still existing vehicle of that kind.

This should also be an excellent time to dismiss the delousing theory. This is all based on the Leuchter report which already has been debunked 20 years ago. I don't get why grumpy old nazis like Zuendel require their dubious henchmen like Leuchter and Irving wasting time on something like cyanide levels which in lab tests have supported that levels were not the same as in living rooms but matched indeed those in the gas chambers. Irving also lost in court against R.J.Green who based on scientific facts was able to dismantle Irving's and thus also Leuchter's arguments with them.

The other myth is that crematoriums and chambers were not suited to "process" as many prisoners which is based on documents showing the operation cycles as designed by the original builders (Topf & Söhne). Truth is however they were capable of operating beyond that since neither gas chambers nor crematoriums requires a cooldown as long as you had enough personnel available in this case in form of special prisoners who were forced to work over-hours there (and were usually killed eventually via phenole injection by the camp "medical" personnel). Heck, Wikipedia is an excellent source for it (if you can speak German because the English version does not exist).

The fact that fake stories exist doesn't automatically mean every story you see is a lie. You will always have some myths and fake stories revolving around big events. Lamp shades for instance have not been proven to exist, gas van existed based on testimonies and quotes (even by Himmler himself who advocated their use over firing squads) but does the fact that the lamp shade myth (which actually involved the wife of the fraudulent concentration camp commander of Buchenwald) has been debunked mean everything revolving around it has been debunked too? No! Far from it, it just means that another myth has been selectively debunked.
The fact that you find it weird that Germans maintained a fully organized living complexes with medical care, entertainment and kitchens around concentration camps is not enough to call it a lie either. German concentration camps in the early days were little more than super-sized prisons in which prisoners lived under more or less under strict supervision by the SS first only after 1943 special extermination camps were erected or current ones turned into such. It doesn't mean that those prisoners lived a golden live, on the contrary. Depending on your status, ethnicity and deemed worth you probably didn't get to see any of this, prisoners who got to "enjoy" these privileges were under so-called protective custody, do not let the name fool you though. It was more custody than protection. If you do not believe these things to be true though then I recommend visiting KZ Buchenwald for instance which is perfectly conserved.

The reason why you are more likely to read denials than actually factual reports is because the media in the Anglosphere tend to be awfully apologetic in these matters and with old nazis usually behind either from Canada or Australia and a herd of an intensively germanophile zealots and deniers/revisionists/apologetics/"truthseekers" whereas media in German and French tend to be less favourable even in their least critical papers. Critics regard it as work of some Jewish conspiracy in order to submit Germans into eternal shame. They remind me a little of those DDR politicians who even after the reunification would stubbornly praise the DDR as the only and best Germany ever denying all wrongdoings and involvement into them. Even early West- and East-German post-war historians differed, the Western part tried to explain it via the Sonderweg (special way) theory which many revisionists and old national-conservatives liked a lot as it conveniently put Germans into a victims role being forced to endure a constant Darwinist struggle, the Eastern ones were blaming imperialism and fascism of previous regimes and did not waste time to put both on equal footing. In short the process of working through heaps of documents, testimonies, physical proofs and other material took generations.

The bombing that went on during the war I understand, Germany bombed Britain, they bombed back and back and forth it went. The bombings early to mid 1945 however I do not understand, since they weren't targeting anything military at all, all they wanted to do was kill civilians.
Based on motives and methods the allies were the good guys and the lesser evil? After all of the above, the allies even let their own soldiers rot and die in Soviet and conceded to many Soviet demands regarding what would happen to Europe post war. For example the US, although having signed international agreements to oppose forced repatriation, they excluded all the people from countries that they gave to Soviet post war, basically letting millions of people die in labour camps, in the name of "democracy". Not to mention the mass starvation of Germans and then the forced expulsion post war, how is that more humane, if humane at all?

There were certain doctrines at these times which were utilized by both sides and seen as legitimate such as bombing civilian buildings, either in retaliation or as attack. The reason why powers did that was that they wanted to demoralize the population and hamper their ability to continue with their lives and thus force a change from the basis. Where people refused to fight for the government or even oust it. Nobody is using that anymore since civilians are not allowed to be targeted deliberately anymore. According to the 4th Geneva conventions which were established in 1949 that is.

What the Soviets did even to their own people is in no way excusable either but it cannot be compared with what Germany did because it's an entirely different chapter only related to the Soviets themselves. It's part of their history and how they deal or dealt with it is entirely up to them. Historically it is their duty not Germany's. The only times where it concerns both is when it's about events where both sides suffered immensely as well and when it comes to reconciliatory talks.

By the way may be I was not clear enough: I dislike the term good and evil myself but I can see why in the greater picture of things one would call Nazi Germany evil and Western Allies at least as good even though excluding the Soviets who fought with honestly good motives as well shouldn't be excluded. It was a war of desperation for them especially as they took the heaviest blows and bought time for the Western Allies. The same reason why people are using that term is because they also want to draw a difference between people who actively helped and actively opposed the regime.
Honestly, I never got why some germanophiles believe that it's a good idea to listen to deniers, revisionists, relativists, old and unrepentant nazis and apologetics and then start appealing to Germans to accept the real truth like the best historical anti-depressant being an embrace of old militarist and fascist ideologies. Thanks, but no thanks.

[Eläin]

You have no idea what people with interests like myself would give to sit down to speak with your grandfather about what he saw and did. All matters of morality aside, it's just so interesting. Morality wouldn't even come into it. Was so upset, because I did a GCSE in History and there was a guy in the local area who fought for the Polish Resistance but he got ill shortly before he could come in and talk to all the students like he usually did most years. He died soon after.

Sure your grandfather was on "the other side" or may have done bad things but it doesn't matter any more. It's just fascinating.

By "people like myself" I mean most British men aged over 18 with a remotely decent education and an interest in history.

Thats the problem with old age Im afraid. Remember asking my grandpa about german soldiers in Finland, during early highschool, and he said he loved them as his brothers. He said they never talked about antisemitic things. Neither racism more then any soldier would have done about their enemies at that time.
When you talk about the heritage burden you should leave Germany alone already, shift your focus to more unexplored territories like Finland and Austria.

[Yunru]

Well i got a small story:
My gradfather had the idea to play with nazis. He and his friend went on a hill and hide behind a tree and start yelling bang bang bang. Now the funny part was that german soldiers were thinking the hill was under attack so they started blindly wasting ammo everywhere. They probaly shot like 200 mortal shells till they find out kids were making a joke. Well the good part is that nazi officer only yelled on them, then he turned on a soldier who said they were under attack and he send him on a russan front.
Kinda sucked to be him at that time.

So yeah not every person was bad.