They may not.
Personally, I will make jokes about these wars, and these jokes are no offenses for the deads and victims.
That is because you are a tactless boor.
Obviously, the mass-slaughtering, bombings and expellings were military actions, but not in the military part of the war.
Denial is not a river in Egypt. They were, by every measure, military actions. The plans were conceived in the military and executed by military personnel for military gain.
My Grand-Pas had nothing to do with these actions. They even didn´t know it. The one fought in Russia as a tank engineer and the other was sailor.
Then they were blameless. They still might want to refrain from Holocaust jokes, though.
I have every right to make the same jokes like anyone else. And I have noone to apologize for my words.
Yes, I do not deny that you have every right to be an offensive clod with utterly no tact whatever.
There is no collective guilt.
Untrue. In America, we bear a certain collective guilt as to the way we dispossessed the Indians from their land and infected their populace with European diseases on purpose. There aren't a lot of 'smallpox in blankets' jokes over here.
Btw, WW1 was NOT the fault of the Germans alone. It was the fault of whole Europe. All Europeans wanted that war in 1914, and they celebrated the beginning in London, Berlin, Paris and Moscow.
Strange.
But we are talking about WWII, and Germany can certainly shoulder much of the blame for that one.
That's not what they said at Nuremberg. No, Germany's coveting of an entire continent so it could have some "lebensraum" was not fair.
My Grand-Pas had nothing to do with these actions. They even didn´t know it.
Yeah, I'll bet they were real good little Nazis. Germans downwind from Dachau to this day claim they didn't know anything about it either, even though they were choking on the crematory soot. We've heard it all before.
MY society has paid for the crimes . . .
Fifty million people perished, Michael. Germany can never adequately pay for that crime.
It's only been a few generations and already Germans are yukking it up over the war (actually, we both know they were yukking it up long ago). East and West is reunited and I don't expect it'll be too many more generations before we see German soldiers goose-stepping down the Kurfurstendamm. The last few months has made it quite clear Germans still don't know right from wrong.
But please spread the word, Michael: America is always ready and willing to give Germany another good thumping. Only this time there will be no reconstruction. Fool us once and all that crap.