Surely it is not ok to say this..?

[CristinaYang]

I was out with a large group of work colleagues on Friday night. They all seem to be normal, nice people.

We were talking about places in Europe we had visited, and our favourite places. I said my favourite city so far was Berlin. I absolutely loved Berlin. The people were so friendly and welcoming and, I mentioned, that on the walking tours we did I had admired how they didn’t shy away from Germany’s role in the war. I liked the way the dealt with it in terms of their monuments and the way tour guides spoke etc. Granted I was only there a couple of days and I certainly wouldn’t claim to be any kind of expert but I felt it was sensitively and honestly spoken about but there were no attempts at denial or justification. This is a summary of the conversation, a few people chipped in and agreed with me etc.

Anyway one woman then pipes up “I’m sorry, is anyone else just not ok with Germans, even now?!” I was aghast and thought oh dear that’s awkward. I was then even more aghast by the people that nodded in agreement, made comments about relatives killed in concentration camps and how they still “feel weird”, “can’t warm to them” etc.

But how can they blame Germans for that these days? It’s an entirely different generation of people and things have moved on. You can’t blame individuals for it. I realise that may be simplistic but as I said I’m no expert and I don’t want to spout off about things I don’t fully understand.

Drink was taken (not by me, i wasn’t drinking) but no one seemed to be out and out hammered.

Is this a secretly commonly held view these days? I can’t imagine that it is...

It’s amazing how history is rewritten to suit of purposes of the current day

Isn’t it amazing that just after Brexit we end up with a load of people banging on about how amazing Germany and the Germans are and how awful the British are.,

Apparently the Second World War was waged by murderous British people on innocent Germans.

I suppose none of you remember ‘Peace in our time’ and how much it was welcomed by a Bristish public desperate for peace.

It's happening right now. I get asked my background all the time and get suspicious stares from a certain type. These people are NOT sorry for what they did in WW2 (and all the other times). The neoconservative crowd has exacerbated that and has raised very important questions about previous collaboration for geopolitical purposes. Things can turn in an instant. It's just so depressing.

No nation is exempt from horrific actions; all empires have been built on subjugation and "othering", from the Roman, through the British, to the US actions in the world today. No country has a spotless history but the British aren't taught the dark side of their own history in school, only the jingoism of right-wing rags like the Daily Mail or Sun seeps into society.

My parents were of an age to serve in the war. My father went through the Battle of the Atlantic, the Arctic Convoys, the Mediterranean and the Pacific at the time of the fall of Japan. My mother served in London during the Blitz and went out to South Africa in a troopship, hearing the depth charges around as the escorts hunted the wolf packs. My father recalled the crowds in Times Square in New York cheering the fall of Crete to the Germans and my parents only met because his ship was sabotaged in a US dockyard and had to put into dry dock in South Africa. After all that, neither of them held any grudges against the mass of the US or Germany. In fact, one of my father's closest friends after the war was a former Luftwaffe pilot, and they continued to exchange cards until my father died in 2005.

My best friend since a child is half German. Her mother escaped on the Kindertransport and her grandmother died in a concentration camp as a political prisoner. While she is immensely proud of her grandmother, she doesn't see it as the fault of Germany as a whole and in fact is considering claiming a German passport since Brexit.

I really don't see why racists such as the numpty in the op's post should feel that they should get away with saying such things when people with far greater reasons to be affected by German actions in the 1930s and 1940s feel no reason to blame the ordinary people then, let alone now.

NC for this.

I take exception to the figure of how many Germans were, apparently, part of some sort of Nazi organisation. The figure does not suggest lack of choice, which there often was. Every child in the school system in Germany was made to be part of the Hitler Youth. That's a Nazi organisation with no doubt millions of 'followers' alone.

My grandfather was part of it. He grew up thinking this was normal, just like a North Korean child now would grow up thinking their lifestyle is normal. He was sent to fight in the war the moment he turned 16. There was no choice; this was towards the end of the war where any male was used as cannon fodder and if they refused they got treated as traitors and risked being executed, together with family members.

I don't know how many 16-year-olds you know. For the most part, he behaved like any teenager would; he told me stories about how he and his friends in school used to make up all sorts of words, which rhymed with 'heil Hitler' and took the piss whenever they dared. But to go to war? There was no choice, no backing out. He was a scared teenager, then, and only survived through luck where many others didn't.

I didn't hate him for being part of all that. He was a very gentle man and did a lot of good with his life after the war.

Raw numbers just can't show reality.