I think when Mops said that German higher ed has no “noticeable liberal education component,” the “liberal” wasn’t meant in the political sense but rather in the context of what used to be called a “liberal education,” or one that provided a solid grounding in the seven liberal arts. “Liberal education” can also be used to distinguish the classic(al) liberal arts college experience from trade school or professional school. But maybe you knew that already.
It does seem odd that the Nazis have come to be seen as an alien conquering force imposed on a freedom-loving people, rather than as an indigenous popular movement driven by real people in real conditions. It’s not easy to accept that ordinary people can be so susceptible to going along with hatred, as long as they think they’re benefiting from it, and that Germans of the 1930’s were not fundamentally different from people anywhere else. It can happen anywhere and at any time, and it often has.
I’m sorry, but while this is a good question, it doesn’t feel to me like a “General Question” with a factual answer, and more like IMHO, or a Great Debate.
I don’t know about odd, maybe natural, but this seems to me is a significant complication to the typical German explanation (I assume some of the posters who gave it here are Germans) of the country’s attitude: that everyone learns and believes the Nazi’s were bad and the war their fault and it’s as simple as that…but it really isn’t.
From direct person experience and that of one of my kids who lived in Germany and speaks remarkable German (from all I’ve heard) it’s not quite that simple. The part about the German people mainly enthusiastically supporting the war, when it was going well, tends to be de-emphasized in favor of ‘the criminal regime’. And there’s some corresponding conflation of Nazi atrocities not directly related to the war (though not necessarily opposed by the general population either) with the war. Plus IME plenty of sympathy for the German position and even Hitler among the war time generation which is now mainly gone. ‘He did terrible things, but he was trying help his country’. Not so simple, and like you say painting it as just about ‘criminal regimes’ (though the Nazi’s were) distracts from the true source of this danger going forward, human societies not only ‘criminal regimes’.
Whereas again the place of the Normandy invasion in the post war German mind is much simpler: it doesn’t stand out remotely as much in German memory as in American, in the military history and mythos of the European war. It doesn’t even stand out as much to Brits who have more other major victories and ‘glorious defeats’ of WWII in Europe to commemorate (such as the Battle of Britain and the Dunkirk evacuation respectively).