No no, you see, the Germans were EVIL and were knowingly doing terrible things because they enjoyed them. Hitler was drinking the blood of children while the wehrmacht paraded guns around going "BLITZKREIG! BLITZKREIG!", and everyone supped from the skulls of slaves on a daily basis.

Sadly, this was the vision promulgated by western propaganda, as the notion that a civilised group of people could end up where Germany ended up was unconscionable, and incomprehensible to most - and this visage is still stuck in the mind of most as "how NAZIsm happened", rather than the very slippery, very real slope they found themselves tumbling down.