At the end of the Second World War, many Germans who actively supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis acted as if they actually had nothing to do with genocide inflicted on the Jews.
They pretended that Hitler and a few handfuls of Nazis had suddenly come down from Mars and had taken over the bodies and souls of ordinary, innocent and decent German people.
In his masterful book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” Daniel Goldhagen destroyed that myth and proved conclusively that Hitler and the Nazis had widespread support among ordinary Germans, and that many, if not most, of them were aware of Hitler’s final solution.
This historical reality did not necessarily justify the deliberate killing of German civilians by Great Britain and the United States in Dresden and other German cities, but it made the civilian adult “victims” of these bombings somewhat less sympathetic, and it…
