After 10 years of escalating, self-fulfilling propaganda, youth indoctrination and a meteoric path of success? I’d like to hope so, but…
Agreed. I’m sure Germans ran the gamut of attitudes, from being horrified by official policy and hiding Jews when they could, to enthusiastic participants in the slaughter.
The only real question is whether the proportions skewed towards enthusiastic participation more than they would have in other countries. I am not able to answer that question.
First off, you can’t paint the German people with that wide a brush. There were resistance groups who risked their lives and their family’s lives daily to fight Hitler, and there were people biting at the bit to sign up and be a Nazi. But on that spectrum - actively fighting the Nazis at one end, actively joining them at the other - the majority, maybe even the vast majority, fell into the area in between of not particularly caring. Yes, there were things happening on the streets, there were neighbors there one day and mysteriously gone the next, but if you kept your head down, everything would be alright in the end.
And that aspect of human nature - most people just wanting to live their lives and not bother anyone - hasn’t changed. I don’t know if you can blame those Germans who had a vague idea of what was happening but chose to ignore it. In condemning them, you condemn quite a lot of modern people who would do the same.