[Retric]

I think it's important to realize mistakes 10+ million people make are far from character defining.

All governments do good and bad things and it's important to judge them in that context. What separated the Italian fascists from the German fascists was not necessarily obvious at the time. Further, while history reasonably judges German connections harsher, that's filtered through both bias and information people simply did not have.

[matt4077]

No. I’m sorry, but the Nazis were, objectively, „the baddies“ in every moral system but their own. And Germans of the time knew enough to come to that conclusions.

It’s possibly right that there is not much use in blaming the opportunists of the time, mostly because there were to many to punish them all. But there also were a significant number who risked or lost their lives in opposition, and this “history is written by the winners” cynicism does more to besmirch the latter, than it absolves the former.

(Am german, have asked grandparents the tough questions)

[Retric]

I am not making that argument. It's not about who won, it's a question of who had what information when.

So, yes the Nazi party line had some frightening implications, but at the time you could easily assume some basic human decency would prevent what actually happened.

To use a recent example many people assume Trump is saying things he does not actually mean. A friend said "Wait he actually wants to build a wall, but that's stupid."

So, my argument is people are willing to overlook implications when they agree with other things you are saying. We often look for the worst of our enemies and ignore what our allies are doing.

Further, this has real word implications and we need to be more careful than simply assume we will know if we are placed in a similar situation.