He held no grudges by the time I knew him, certainly not against unborn generations. He visited in Berlin in the 70s, as a tourist, spoke german, had german friends and felt sorry for those who (like him) had their communities destroyed after the war. We were brought up to believe the remembering does matter, fwiw.

I have a lot of respect for Germany's honest portrayal and study of its past. It is a rarity, perhaps singular.

Hey fellow European. Please allow me to thank you deeply for that. You cannot be held responsible for anything that some people 3 generations before yours did, but nevertheless your sense of responsibility is really truly inspiring.

> 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.

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...

Playing the "both sides" card is a hell of a take regarding WW2, especially when the article is literally about liberating Auschwitz.

Of course both sides committed atrocities in war. But only one side committed mass genocide on an industrial scale.

I was responding specifically to the German poster above. Crushing guilt laid on a generation that wasn't even alive at the time is unwarranted.

Germany has an extremely healthy attitude towards the Holocaust; it would do most western nations well to model it as regards their own historical atrocities.

If someone initiates war, brings war to your people, threatens the destruction of your people (I mean as a nation state) - you are morally entitled to do anything required to defend your people. Anything. Without exception, and up to including killing every single person of the attacking nation if that is what is required to stop the war (which you did not initiate). Realistically you won't have to go that far, however there is no scenario where you can have total war on the scale of WW2, and civilians from the attacking side are not likely going to die in very large quantities. All of those deaths, without exception, rest on the moral back of those who began the war.

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.

All arguments of just war and the morality of self defense aside: this a disastrously foolish way to go about being a sentient species on a single planet.

Nothing that you wrote matches the Geneva conventions. Or more properly, almost everything you wrote would be in violation of the Geneva conventions.

France and Britain declared war on Germany, and I'm glad Germany has shown more restraint than what you are describing here.

It's absolutely wrong to attack civilians, like the allies did in numerous bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan.

Like the Allies did? lets not forget the German Bombing campaign against the UK in the Battle of Britain. Bombing population centers for years until after the US joined the war. Or the Rape Nanjing by the Japaneses troops, a act so brutal the Nazis found it disturbing and inhumane.

I would suggest avoiding some sort of self-inflicted trauma from this horrible past (which might not be happening but it reads like that to me).

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.

I don't know if personal guilt or shame is the correct feeling either, but I also don't think OP should feel nothing.

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.