>I didn't call anyone a nazi except the nazis in this debate so far. Be more precise if you wish to get a specific statement out of me that you want to jump on.
OK, I wouldn't agree to you generalizing me into some group or putting some responsibility or any other burden on me just because my people has a certain history and a certain result in a poll. Which brings me to....
>I don't feel like explaining it more concisely to you because honestly it feels like I am wasting my (and maybe your) time trying to.
No, please try to explain. I really am interested in seeing your point. This discussion hasn't stopped being civilized yet, so let's continue. And let's stop pointing out the way in which things are said, but rather look at what is said (I believe everyone has participated in the "meta-discussion" so far).
>You mentioned children for the sake of them being children and killing them is oh so horrible.
Ah, actually that wasn't my point (although from the phrasing it probably looked like it). My point was that you can't inherit something if you're dead. I think this takes away some of the status of the supposedly priviliged Germans..
>About what did happen or did not happen in Germany: That largely depends on eye witness accounts of whom most have been German. It's pretty difficult to come to any objective figures here,
Somehow I doubt that the only source of information on German death and destruction from the period would be eyewitness accounts. Surely lots of data on families survived, and the allied military no doubt accurately tried to asess the situation, both from air and ground.
The "depends only on [people's] eyewitness accounts" line of reasoning bothers me, because I've heard the exact same words from Holocaust deniers. They tend to say that "only jews are telling the stories from the camps" - unfortunately for them, historians don't "prove" the Holocaust through only that: they can see the profound societal change, in documents and otherwise. If there is a flaw in the process of documenting the second something happened, it isn't necessarily a problem.
>It's not about feeling guilty but about taking responsibility if you feel free to take over the material and historical benefits of the past, too.
The west inherited a destroyed country that had to be extensively rebuilt with Marshall aid - I can't see why the Germans would be to blame for the strategic aid system thought up by the US at the start of the cold war.
The East had to live in a totalitarian system until fairly recently - not as bad as the nazis, but clearly a state without freedom. Most support for far-left and far-right parties comes from the poorest areas in the East, I believe.
Finally, how are the Germans to take responsibility? How can they do it when apparently the generation which actually did something bad apparently couldn't do it well enough?