Notably thousands of Irish soldiers did fight the Germans in WW2 but via joining the British Army... an act that was frowned upon at the times. Many were killed.
I had heard of the blacklist, but thought that it was for those who deserted the Irish military to join the British. Punishing deserters is understandable, no matter the motive.
That said, if I understand the article correctly, those who did this were punished worse than deserters who did not go fight?!?
A lot of governments took the side of the Nazis. Including the EU's founder, Robert Schuman, ex-Nazi collaborator of the French Vichy government. But that is nothing compared to many others.
Things get so much worse. The Dutch Child protection agency has in it's historical archives, not just that they collaborated with implementing the holocaust against children, but actually organized it. Jewish (and various other groups, like Romani) children were "invited" to summer camps, that turned out to be death camps (and the "east front", which you also didn't return from). They even set a trap to deport Jewish and mentally and physically disabled children to extermination camps, including a number of their own personnel, and even went so far as to hunt their own personnel that "chose the side of the children".
Austrian child protection agency selected children to be sent to death camps. That, Austrian psychiatry before and during the holocaust, is where Autism comes from. The first children diagnosed with Autism were not just sent to death camps, that was the only purpose of the diagnosis of Autism. To mark the child for death to "protect (something about race that I will not repeat)".
In case you ever wonder why the child protection agencies of those countries still reserve the right to lie about the death of children, even today, that is why. Because both mass-murdered children out of racism, and if a concrete case, of which there are many, were to come to court even today ...
And yet, it gets worse. And extremely confusing. Many things boil down to what everybody actually kind of knows. Ideas, especially implemented on the scale of a state, come from a long history and trials. Everything around WW2 was, justly and correctly, blamed on the Nazis. Nazis did those things. But they got the idea, and in many cases personnel, from somewhere. And a LOT of groups have used that to absolve themselves of what they did before, often long before, WW2. Look up "industrial psychiatry" sometime.
Well, one can look at this as at least a step in the right direction, compared to the active collaboration with Germany during WW1 by the people who became Irish government by the time of WW2 arrived.
The two world wars were not the same. WW1 was a stupid war that happened for stupid reasons, and there were no real moral differences between the sides. Many nations tried to use the war as an opportunity for independence by collaborating with the opposing side. Some of them were successful.
In Finland, we still call infantry Jägers in honor of those who went to Germany to receive military training and to fight against Russia.