Do they lament the great loss? Are they ashamed of their Nazi past? Are they also memorializing the brave Allied servicemen who gave their lives to free western Europe of the Nazi occupation? Do they just kind of pretend it never happened?
I know about how they treat the Holocaust, but what about Germany’s part in WWII?
There’s a smaller and a bigger question there.
Smaller: how do Germans view the Normandy invasion?: as a moderate size event at most in the whole history of Germany’s 1939-45 war effort. There were greater defeats especially in the East, and earlier in the war ones which had more chance to have gone either way. A defeat of the Allied landing in 1944 while not impossible was unlikely given the correlation of forces so heavily in the Allies’ favor and there’s little reason to think it would have prevented a total German defeat in the end anyway. Just a few weeks after D-Day the Soviets launched Operation Bagration which shattered the German Eastern Front over a huge area and started the race for the German eastern border. A couple of weeks after that the Allies decisively broke out of the Normandy bridgehead and started the race for the German western border. But Germany’s goose was cooked by summer 1944 either way, save for the invention of some truly transformative super weapon, an idea which gave some hope to ordinary German fighting men and public at the time, but we know now was not in the offing.
Bigger: the modern German view of the Nazi period and WWII: a book length topic which I’m sure has been chewed over in many long threads here already. The anniversary of the Normandy invasion just isn’t that prominent as a special occasion in Germany to revisit the topic, expect maybe at the margin due to ex-Western Allied media attention to it.
This was a generation ago but when I was in US History in high school one of my classmates was an exchange student from Germany. When we got to the WWII section she was asked how the subject was treated in German schools. She said, “Up until college, not much beyond, ‘There was a war; we started it; we lost.’”
Yeah, I was going to say that I suspect that the Germans probably don’t really note D-Day overly much, but probably rather the breakout (Operation Cobra) and subsequent encirclement at Falaise, along with Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front as the two big hammer-blows that hit the Wehrmacht in June and July of 1944.
Bagration was June 22- August 19th, and Operation Cobra was June 25-31, with the Falaise Pocket battle being August 12-31. The upshot of those two battles is that in both the east and west, the primary German field armies had been crushed, and the Allies were in pursuit mode chasing the remnants toward Germany. In both cases, the only thing that stopped the Allies was that they outran their supply lines, causing them to pause and resupply.
Both are pieces of info, but it could also be read as example of internet oversimplification via linky linky. 
Any Germans participate in D-Day commemorations or it has a place in German memory of the military aspects of the war remotely comparable to its prominence in the ex- Western Allied countries and the US in particular (since Britain too has more other things to remember about WWII in Europe military history)? I think it’s worth mentioning that the answer to the latter question is ‘no’.
And again what Germans really know or think about WWII is a much bigger topic than ‘they acknowledge responsibility’. If the answer had to be a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ OK ‘yes’ is closer, but there’s more to it depending who you are talking about, responsibility meaning what exactly, how to characterize postwar generations who basically don’t care, whether it matters what the wartime generation thought (often sympathetic to Germany’s position in the war and willing to say so once you got to know them, IME) now that it’s largely gone, etc. Also ‘they acknowledge responsibility’ is sometimes presented as a binary v ‘Japan does not’ and that comparison would also be oversimplified IMO though again not outright false.
But D-Day per se is an easier question: it wasn’t nearly as big a deal in Germany’s whole war effort as it’s viewed of US effort in the US nor has it become symbolic of the German war effort beyond its military importance the way D-Day is viewed in the US.
This is what the Germans need to remember about D-Day. It sums up the Nazis perfectly.
Not quite what the OP is asking, but Holger Eckhertz’ D-Day Through German Eyes is a fascinating read. Eckhertz had been a Nazi-propaganda-magazine reporter who wrote about the heroic Aryan defenders at the Atlantic Wall, then ten years after the war looked up men he’d interviewed then, and interviewed them again about their memories (without having to propagandize them anymore, of course). A number of them said they most remembered waking to see a wall of ships covering the horizon, several more at how they knew the war was lost when they saw the Allies unloading trucks instead of horses, meaning they weren’t fuel-constrained. There were some excellent descriptions of the terror of the phosphorus bombs dropped by P-47’s on their positions - people burned to death and couldn’t escape.
Most of the troops in the Wehrmacht’s “Stationary Infantry” there were described as either disabled or simply idiots, of little use in fighting forces, and were unable to act effectively. But one of the officers there related that there were tens of thousands of Russians in it too, who had surrendered and agreed to serve the Wehrmacht in what all considered to be safe, harmless positions, freeing German soldiers to fight. But none of the Russians captured by the Allies seemed to make it to POW camps - rumor had it that the Red Army had commissars in Normandy who would identify them and ship them back to Russia to be shot as traitors.
Another story I’ve never seen corroborated was that the Germans had nearly perfected the air-blast bomb using fuel oil, and was just a few days short of being able to use it on the beaches. It might have been used on an Allied tank concentration shortly afterward, but the vehicle with it was disabled.
Angela Merkel was at Southsea, along with QE, May, Trump, Macron, Trudeau and leaders of all the other nations involved.
And she she thanked the attending allied veterans for the sacrifice they made in that operation. It has been the mainstream view in Germany that we weren’t defeated as much as liberated from a terror regime at least since federal president Richard von Weizsäcker’s famous speech on the 8th of May 1985, the 40th anniversary of the German capitulation or, for von Weizsäcker, liberation.
Germans today know and acknowledge that the allied invasion was an important part of that endeavor. Short of neonazis (which sadly are not as rare as they should be), no one in his right mind today mourns that the Germans were defeated. It’s not as if we are still “rooting” somehow for the German side when we look back at the different theaters of WW2, but we also feel no shame to have been militarily defeated. The Third Reich simply was another entity (a criminal regime) than the modern democratic federal republic.
If the question is about Germans’ attitude about WWII in general, then I would second what EinsteinsHund said. Nobody in their right mind in Germany would regret that the country lost WWII or would deny the moral responsibility arising from it. This feeling still drives much of present-day German policy.
If the question is, however, about the attitude of Germans concerning D-Day as opposed to other events of WWII, then I would say it does not stand out as much as it does in British and American perception. Germans know, of course, that D-Day was an important event in the War, but it is outranked in its perceived importance by others. I would, for instance, say that - round anniversaries aside - Stalingrad gets more attention in the collective memory than Normandy. It’s viewed as the big turning point when the German campaign eastwards was brought to a halt and changed to a big retreat which, ultimately, culminated in the surrender of May 1945.
Exactly, the first battle of WW2 I remember to have heard about as a kid was Stalingrad. It was and still is THE symbolic defeat of a German army in WW2 with its devastating aftermath that is ingrained into our view on WW2. There is for instance no German movie about D-Day (at least that I have heard of), but an important one about Stalingrad.
That’s really curious and I am not sure you didn’t misremember. A German would not put it in the terms of ‘up until college’ because German tertiary education does not have a noticeable liberal education component. You are supposed to have your general education under your belt when you finish school. At university you have history courses if and only if you study for a history degree.
Overall in Germany ‘history of World War 2’ has a significantly smaller component of ‘military history of World War 2’, i.e. the interest in campaigns, smaller battles, units etc. is considered a narrow academic specialty within the history of the period. The focus is more on policies, grand strategy and how they came about. Less maps with blue and red arrows, more focus on the Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlass and similar policies. Less Hill Something Or Other, more Oradour.
Within the war proper the Eastern front has a much larger mindshare in the German collective consciousness than the Western one because the Eastern front was the major meatgrinder for our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations.
As for history at school, there is a large focus on causes and policies; any German school leaver ought to have a good grounding in Third Reich history, but alas a lot of people are fundamentally incurious or plain stupid. I’d like to make a comparision with quite another subject here: (a) all German school leavers (outside of special education) would be taught quadratic equations, and (b) most German school leavers could not solve a nontrivial quadratic equation to save their life.
This response kind of boils it down to exactly what I am wondering about:
Veteran on the radio today, saying “I heard the invasion had started from a French farmer I was buying food from (our food was very bad). I was glad to hear it.” He was 18 at the time.
He was later injured by German shelling, and recovered in an Allied hospital, which probably influenced his thinking a bit more along the same lines.
In a multi-front, years-long war like WWII, people are often most affected by where their relatives are fighting (and especially, killed). By far, most of the German casualties were on the Eastern Front. So for most of them, that is the major part of the war, thus Stalingrad or Bagration would have been major battles to them. I know my older relatives (gone now) always considered Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Pacific island-hopping as the major battles, since relatives died there.
And D-day could arguably be considered a German victory. The Allies lost twice as many men as the Germans, and achieved none of their initial goals. They had only some tiny beachheads occupied. And the German General staff (except for Rommel) had expected this – they thought the real battle would come after that, as they moved inland.
Oh gosh no. No, there is no argument to be made there. That’s just not an argument at all.
The Allies did not, according to any source I can find, lose twice as many men as the Germans.
Casualty rates are not how you measure victory and defeat in war. Who won the Eastern Front war; the USSR or Germany? Who won the Vietnam War?
It is plainly not true that the Allies “Achieved none” of their goals. No Allied division achieved all their D-day goals, but obviously they achieved some of them. The primary Allied objective was to take a beachhead and load in a force sufficient to repel a counterattack, and they did exactly that.
“Many people forget that the first nation the nazi’s conquered was Germany.” Sadly, I can’t remember the origin of the quote (possibly ‘Captain America: the first Avenger’) and I’m definitely mangling it pretty badly.
This is, with all respect, utter nonsense. The strategic goal of D-Day was to establish a second front in the West (when seen from Germany), in addition to the Eastern front, to force Germany into a two-front war - something Stalin had long demanded. This Western front would then serve as a bridgehead to bring on more troops and material and ultimately as a starting point for the liberation of France and the invasion of Germany from the West. D-Day achieved exactly that.
At the time I took it not so much as a comment about the liberalness of a college class vs. a high school’s but rather, the depth. I was in grade school during the centennial of our Civil War. You bet, it was covered in history class but I have little doubt a college course would dive deeper into the subject.