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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Would you do that without Germany's soul searching? Or would they do soul searching if they won or the war ended up in tie? Would you be easily willing to forgive?

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Japan lost the war, yet they still can not educate their population about the horrors performed in Korea and China. They pretend nothing happened. That kind of response does not foster forgiveness. Germany on the other hand _really_ have taken a responsible path after the war, and I also believe there is an understanding (at least in northern and western Europe) that a big part of the blame that Hitler could take power was on the victors of the first world war (England and maybe more France).

I guess better forgiveness for German aggression are due to good behaviour from post-war Germany, okay education in north and western Europe, and also that Germany behaved _relatively_ good on the western front. Of course it will take longer for eastern Europe mostly due to the extreme ugliness of the eastern front, and the huge economic differences.

This is not about Germany, please don't get defensive and apologetic ;-) Please read my comment again and substitute Germany for some other nation. Would that change your perspective? What post-war Germany did is admirable; now we are discussing two other nations which don't adhere to the same principles and don't go to same great lengths to fix it. Germany was used just as an example of a "repentant nation" which might deserve forgiveness. Would that be different if you weren't a repentant nation, which was the previous question?

I am not defensive, even though it might sound so, you see I am not German, in fact, my grandfather did flee Nazi Germany. I believe they deserve credit for how they are handling their history.

Many countries have done terrible things and then lost wars and empires. How many of them unambiguously and thoroughly confronted their past, memorialised it, sought to make amends with their victims, and then built an entire state centered on protecting those principles whose violation was their business a few decades ago. It's practically unheard of.

The amends with victims are, at least in case of Polish people, more of an excuse than anything else. For example - my grandma’s father was bestially exploited and murdered in Auschwitz, leaving her without a father at the age of nine. Moreover, Germans closed the school around the same time, which left her uneducated for life. Add years of stress and malnutrition (hunger) as a child on top of that. If US government did such thing to its citizen, the damages awarded in court would be astronomical. Meanwhile, my granda got exactly $0 from the German government. And there are millions of people like her. So, when I hear about Germans making amends, I call it more a propaganda in action than anything else.

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