I’m going to try to give a little history lesson. In no way is this trying to downplay what the nazis did in any way, but I believe that in hindsight and as outsiders who grew up decades later, who are exposed to non-expert level education about it, we have a distorted view of them.
The Nazis absolutely made antisemitism a big part of their platform and a rallying cry. It was a big part of what got them early support. Nazis were almost all very anti-Semitic. I say almost because, as I said about Landa earlier, I’m sure plenty of people claimed to go along with Nazi ideology simply to use the party to advance their own power but didn’t really care that much about Jews or other parts of Nazi ideology. Advancement in the Nazi party was a fast track to advancement in German society as a whole, because the Nazis dominated the power structure.
However, the holocaust was hidden from the average German. This is not something anyone seems to be taught. What we seem to be taught, or at least given the impression of, is that Germans happily and openly all marched Jews off to the gas chambers. But that’s not accurate.
The Nazis said that they were relocating Jews. They wanted to purge Jews from their society, but weren’t openly murdering them. They tried to sell it to the German people that Jews were evil and the cause of the world’s problems, so we’re going to conquer some wide open land and force them to go live there and stay there. Yes, they may have a hard new life, and but we’re giving them a chance to thrive in a Jewish society, separate from our German society. They went to great lengths to hide that they were murdering them.
So when Jews were rounded up and sent on trains, the Nazis claimed they were being sent “out east” where there were huge swaths of newly conquered land, where they could be segregated from the rest of the German population. They even went to the effort of doing stuff like sending post cards back to their old neighborhood, claiming to be from some Jews that they forced to move, and the post cards talked about how they were happy living out in the middle of the Ukraine or whatever where they could be among their own people, they got a fresh start, and not to worry about them, they’re doing alright.
The original form the holocaust took was death squads called Einsatzgruppen who rounded up Jews and murdered them generally with small arms. But this didn’t work very well. While maybe there was a small core of absolute Jew haters who wanted to murder all Jews, most of the soldiers, even SS soldiers, who were already generally more fanatical and political and Nazi-ized than regular Wermacht soldiers, began to refuse to do it. The psychological toll of rounding people up and murdering them, even if they were moderately or strongly (but not extremely) anti-Semitic, was something causing them great psychological stress. Even a lot of staunch anti-Semites didn’t want to actually exterminate Jews, they bought into the idea that they should just be segregated and kept out of Germany.
The plans for the holocaust as we know it, the industrial, impersonal untermenschen murdering machines, didn’t occur until the Wannsee conference of 1942, and wasn’t implemented until a while after that. Until then, some fairly limited Einsatzgruppen murdering of Jews occured, but most of them were forced into ghettos in Poland. This is still plenty evil - I’m not trying to say what they did wasn’t that bad - I’m just trying to give the correct information about it. The ghettos were very unpleasant places to be, you’d starve, you’d be mistreated, you had no recourse if the local nazis decided to rape or murder you. But the industrial murder horror that became the holocaust hadn’t yet been implemented.
And when it was, it was secretive. It was run mostly by the Algemeine SS (as distinct from the Waffen SS which is what people mostly think of) who were basically screened to be a highly motivated and compliant Nazi ideological security force. The camps were hidden from everyone they could practically hide it from. Dead Jews were explained by resettlement, and some degree of supporting evidence of this was faked.
So while antisemitism, and evil, virulent, horrible antisemitism played a big role in Germany in that time period, our idea that every German knew about and was cheering on the death camps is false. Dwight Eisenhower actually made a special effort to collect photographs and document other proof to prove what had happened to the German people, because it was hard to believe even though they’d supported a rise to power of evil, extremely anti-Semitic men.
Additionally, the Nazi party was an actual political party. You weren’t a member of the Nazi party simply because you were German in that time period. In fact, the total membership of Germans in the Nazi Party was about 10% at its highest. Now, I’m sure there were plenty of non-party members that were generally supportive of the nazis, but the impression that Americans and British kids are generally given (I don’t know how non-English speaking countries treat it) are that all Germans in this period were nazis, and that they all knew about and enthusiastically supported the death camps. That’s just wrong.
Not that the nazis weren’t evil, but this perception we have that being German from 1935-1945 means you were a nazi is wrong. Our perception that death camps were openly known and celebrated is wrong. Our perception that the average German soldier was fighting for nazism is wrong.
The average German soldier was motivated by mostly the same thing that the average soldier going back through all of history was motivated by. Their country was at war and they thought it was their duty to serve that effort. Or they were drafted, and had little choice. Especially true of later recruits from mid-1943 onward, when it was clear that Germany was going to lose, and Russia was coming to invade their homes and they were bringing some real unpleasantness with them. At that point, people were just signing up to protect their own towns and families. Late in the war, the Volkstrum was created by boys too young and men too old to be in the army, again, because they felt it was their duty to give a last ditch attempt to defend their home.
Your assertion that a) all Germans are nazis, and b) because of that, no Germans could have behaved honorably is just wrong by pretty much any definition. Most Germans in the Wermacht (or Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine) served for the reasons that anyone has ever felt compelled to serve their country. There were plenty that were honorable by any reasonable definition, probably most. No one likes to correct this incorrect perception that the layman public holds, because who wants to try risk blowback for trying to humanize Nazis? We’re basically programmed all our lives to treat WW2 Germans as pure evil. And Germans themselves are so deeply shameful and regretful about it that they don’t even care to fight this fight.