Uwe, I'm curious. Is your knowledge of German WWII history common to people our age (and was it taught that frankly in school)? If so, is it still being taught that way? If that's the case I commend the German people for being willing to face history in a more honest manner than many.
George, no, German schools do not teach the difference between SS- and Panzer-uniforms, not back in the sixties and seventies and not today!
Any teacher who would have then or now would have been either sent to the funny farm or put under observation of our intelligence services for being a Nazi apologist!
What you are taught in school are the historical surroundings, how the Weimar Republic, though a good state idea in principle, was unloved by large parts of the population, how it was governed by weak administrations and how save for the social democrats and the communists (already forbidden and prosecuted by then) all political parties, whether conservative, Kaiser-oriented, liberal or catholic sided with Hitler's NSDAP in the end in the hope that he would maintain "law and order" only to see any kind of lawful approach by the Nazis evaporate almost immediately. And the saying of a clergyman that
"We were silent when they took the communists because we weren't communist, we were silent when they took the social democrats and union members because we weren't social democrats or union members, we were silent when they took the jews because we weren't jewish and by the time they came to take us, there was no one left to help us". You are taught about the raging anti-semitism and the oppression of the jews, the inability of western democracies to initially cope with Hitler and his early successes of putting Germany "back on the map" (also how the exploding defense spending and Germany's rising isolation on the world market made war an economic necessity, the Reichsmark as a currency was doomed). The system of terror as concentration camps sprang up everywhere in the country. Hitler Youth and propaganda.
What you do not learn about is any kind of military technology aspects or much of how the war went, just the battles that were turning points, initial Blitzkrieg successes, Battle of Britain, the entry of the US into the war, El Alamein, Stalingrad, D-Day and the long and painful, vastly destructive final year of the Reich. The holocaust, the genocide atrocities in the East and West, the failed assassination of Hitler. The turning of German cities into rubble.
By and large a sensible curriculum I'd say as it is more important to learn and know these things than to be able to tell the dif between a King Tiger and a Panther!
My parents were both in their teens during the Nazi era. My dad, although a Hitler Youth, despised the Nazis coming from a well-to-do middle class (his dad was like him a construction engineer) family with a social democratic conscience. He saw the US soldiers that entered Dieburg in 1945 truly as liberators, made friends with them and engaged in black market trading as a youth (plus crashing a Jeep in drunken stupor when driving around US officers and their German Fräuleins)! My mom came from an unskilled labor background, her dad had joined the Nazis early and made somewhat of a career as a public servant after they came to power before - the idiot - volunteering for the army even though as a father of three girls he wouldn't have needed to initially. The NSDAP stamp in his soldier pass had him languish until 1949 in Soviet hospitality, but he never said a bad word about the Russians ("they had nothing to eat, we didn't have anything either") and was always careful to mention that "I wasn't beaten once during captivity with the Russians" and "the Russian peasant women gave us potatoes in winter". That is partly why I think that setting off German atrocities against Russian ones is ill-founded, the Russians didn't invite us to attack them (Stalin preparing to attack the Reich is historically false) and their atrocities had nothing of the genocidal single-mindedness of German atrocities, but were mostly based on callousness and revenge. The Stalingrad POWs were near death when they were captured and while every second Red Army soldier died in German captivity, only every third German soldier died in Soviet captivity and most of these during the early days of the war. Russia also offered reciprocal Geneva Convention treatment for the prisoners of both sides after Stalingrad, it was turned down flatly by Hitler and the Wehrmacht who are therefore to blame for what happened to German POWs from then on. They wanted heroes and victims not survivors that send Christmas cards from Russian camps (historical fact: German POWs in Russian camps were allowed to write home during the war but the Nazis would not deliver those letters to their families which led many families to despair thinking their loved ones were killed or MIA).
Both my dad and my mom were outspoken ant-Nazi at any time I knew them, they always spoke of the era and the people in power then with distaste. With my mom, given how she had come from a "Nazi household" and had been an active and affirming member of the female Hitler Youth (Bund Deutscher Mädel), there was an added feeling of having been abused as a teen. She always felt ashamed for a photograph of her class where she had handmarked two classmates "as terror bombing victims of the Americans" and would sigh "my mind was manipulated back then".
When my dad and my mom married it was in fact an issue that he from the anti-Nazi family would marry "the daughter of that old Nazi".
My knowledge of WW II things stems mostly from my teenage youth (though I have read the more recent Hitler and Goebbels biographies with great interest and still get stuck on whatever channel shows something on WW II), model plane building leads you to war (hero) books and so forth. My parents shook their heads at this, but did not interfere. When I was visiting The American School in Kinshasa (TASOK) there was of course some typecasting of me as the "kraut" and "hun" (never in a mean way though) and I kind of lapped that up and decided to make myself smart about that era. Consequently, I read both - in English from the TASOK library, it's not legal in Germany - Hitler's Mein Kampf (deemed a dumb book by me even then), Marx' The Capital (deemed an interesting book by me even then though as a 15 year old I could hardly understand parts of it), survivor literature from the death camps and military history stuff like "Waffen SS Uniforms from 1939-45" at the same time! I devoured it all, but the background from home never let me forget that every downed Me 109 was a step towards the liberation of Auschwitz.
These days, my low pc comments on German WW II history are mostly taken with headshaking good humor by people who know me and my left-liberal background, but people who don't sometimes cautiously ask "You are not really serious about all this, are you?". Edith for one is prone to say: "Sometimes you have me worried, your obsession with this stuff just isn't normal." And I understand that there are certain circles that discuss Waffen SS insignia as if it was "just another military outfit" which it wasn't, it was one of the military arms of the vilest and most criminal and inhumane regime (as was the Wehrmacht any any other military or civil organisation of the Third Reich) and you can remove the technology of a King Tiger only that far from the technology of the gas chambers, it's all tainted and besmirched by the same intolerable ideology behind it. But perversely intriguing at the same time.
