I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.
I have a lot of respect for Germany's honest portrayal and study of its past. It is a rarity, perhaps singular.
You might want to check out the new podcast Day X. It's about resurgence of far right extremism in Germany going on right now. Sadly, the same thing seems to be happening in my country (US).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/podcasts/far-right-german...
Of course both sides committed atrocities in war. But only one side committed mass genocide on an industrial scale.
The attacking party holds the moral responsibility for what is required to stop them.
If you have to kill all the civilians supporting the industrial side of the war in order to stop the war machine supplies (whether in Nazi Germany or under the Empire of Japan), the moral responsibility rests with the party that initiated the war.
Your moral duty as a defending nation is not to trade your people's lives at a equal proportion so that you feel great about not killing too many people. It's to make the attacking party stop, capitulate, give up, surrender their efforts, and that is all. If that requires killing their civilians at a 100 to 1 ratio, that is entirely morally rational and just. The guilt of those deaths entirely rests with the attacking nation.
Which is also not the same as saying that the defending side should kill as many civilians as possible, just to do it. It means they're absolved of civilian deaths on the attacking side as a concern morally, so long as the civilian deaths serves the purpose of helping to end the war.
It's absolutely wrong to attack civilians, like the allies did in numerous bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan.
There is no point getting depressed from one's ancestors past - if one looks in the past far enough, there will be probably something utterly horrible that given nation/tribe/group did to somebody innocent. Basically all western european democracies fall into this category, and many, many other nations too.
Don't forget about it by any means, tech your kids as I will do, but don't put emotions into this just because your nation was the culprit. There were similar things happening to innocent civilians en masse in the past elsewhere. Genocides are not an invention of Germany or 20th century, life was often pretty horrible and violent in the past.
Time and entropy (empires dissolving or population groups migrating) definitely diffuse the responsibility for a horrific act. Of which there are many in history. But this specific thing happened in living memory, was performed by an organization that still exists (a German speaking nation state, with almost the same borders as before), and by people the OP knows personally. In fact, it's a very wealthy nation that OP has gained a lot of advantage from living in. It's subjective and graduated, but I don't think it's been nearly "long" enough that the Holocaust just background noise next to all other events that have happened in human history.
Modern Germany is awesome btw. Really respect how they've reckoned with this awful time in their history.
I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were.
The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost.
Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day.
Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.
Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do.
Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything.
The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
Read the biography of Stanislaw Lem for instance, who grew up in Lwów(current Ukraine, back then Poland) - Nazis frequently recruited local population to both kill and then bury anyone they wanted to get rid of, under a) promise of reward b) threat of being killed themselves. But you don't need to trust the biography of one man and his experiences - we also know this because Nazis kept extensive video and photo evidence of those executions, which they would show back in the 3rd Reich as "evidence" of the barbarism of the local people in places they were occupying ("look at those stupid Poles/Ukrainians/Jews, killing each other for a scrap of food!").
"Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them."
Again, because some of them were given a choice of either joining the ghetto kommando unit, or being shot there and then, along with their families. It didn't matter at all in the end of course, because they all got executed in the end anyway. Can you say with with 100% confidence that you wouldn't make the same choice in the same situation? And I do mean 100% confidence?
Polish nobelist, Wiesława Szymborska, said something about these choices people faced in WW2 that I will always remember - "we only know ourselves as much as we have been tested - and I pray that my moment of trial never comes".
I think she's absolutely right - it's easy to judge what people have done from the comfort of our homes in 2021. But I do hope that I am never put in front of the same choice. I hope I will never be tested in the same way those people were.
And I will clarify here - of course there were willing collaborators too. 100%. But your comment reads as if that wasn't the case and the "myth" of unwilling collaborators was purely made up. I see no reason to believe such a thing.
10000% confidence
Like I said above - I hope my moment of trial never comes.
Yet they themselves were eventually murdered by the germans..
The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good.
One go kills random innocent people — he is bad.
Many/most of the Lubaks (local SS) were from the area, and he'd gone to school with some of them. That's part of the story, but I don't know exactly how it fits in.