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Comment by andischo | Hacker News Reader

As a German, born roughly 40 years after the war, I still cannot fathom the atrocities we Germans brought to the world at large and to so many million individuals. I grew up learning the history, I know my grandparents (as well as probably great grandparents) played their part in what happened. I am deeply sorry for what they/we did and even saying it these words just sound hollow in light of the magnitude of cruelty and injustice that happened.

I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.

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He held no grudges by the time I knew him, certainly not against unborn generations. He visited in Berlin in the 70s, as a tourist, spoke german, had german friends and felt sorry for those who (like him) had their communities destroyed after the war. We were brought up to believe the remembering does matter, fwiw.

I have a lot of respect for Germany's honest portrayal and study of its past. It is a rarity, perhaps singular.

Hey fellow European. Please allow me to thank you deeply for that. You cannot be held responsible for anything that some people 3 generations before yours did, but nevertheless your sense of responsibility is really truly inspiring.

> I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.

You might want to check out the new podcast Day X. It's about resurgence of far right extremism in Germany going on right now. Sadly, the same thing seems to be happening in my country (US).

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/podcasts/far-right-german...

I would suggest avoiding some sort of self-inflicted trauma from this horrible past (which might not be happening but it reads like that to me).

There is no point getting depressed from one's ancestors past - if one looks in the past far enough, there will be probably something utterly horrible that given nation/tribe/group did to somebody innocent. Basically all western european democracies fall into this category, and many, many other nations too.

Don't forget about it by any means, tech your kids as I will do, but don't put emotions into this just because your nation was the culprit. There were similar things happening to innocent civilians en masse in the past elsewhere. Genocides are not an invention of Germany or 20th century, life was often pretty horrible and violent in the past.

I don't know if personal guilt or shame is the correct feeling either, but I also don't think OP should feel nothing.

Time and entropy (empires dissolving or population groups migrating) definitely diffuse the responsibility for a horrific act. Of which there are many in history. But this specific thing happened in living memory, was performed by an organization that still exists (a German speaking nation state, with almost the same borders as before), and by people the OP knows personally. In fact, it's a very wealthy nation that OP has gained a lot of advantage from living in. It's subjective and graduated, but I don't think it's been nearly "long" enough that the Holocaust just background noise next to all other events that have happened in human history.

Modern Germany is awesome btw. Really respect how they've reckoned with this awful time in their history.

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