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You can't say "I was only obeying my orders" when what you're doing is no longer war, but just mass-scale crime. The soldier who's ordered to rape a woman or kill a newborn child indeed must stand up against this order. But only a fraction of German soldiers - from the Wehrmacht, not the SS outfits - did things like that.

Most of them were just waging war, a war they had been told was a just cause. Officially, Polish troops attacked Gleiwitz. Then France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. Even if some soldiers may have had some doubts about the Polish attacks, the fact is two European powers had declared war on Germany, and so, I suppose, fighting this war to the very end was seen as a patriotic duty. And when the tide reversed, and the fighting came closer to their homes and families, what German soldiers would have refused to fight ? I guess at that time it no longer mattered if the war was just or not.

My grandfather lost a brother in 1940, in Belgium. He was from a mechanized division, and he faced German armored unites. He had been mobilized and did his duty. The German soldier who killed him had been mobilized and did his duty. Now that times has passed, what can I say of this German soldier ? Their two countries were at war, each side thought he was waging a just war, one died and one lived.

Now, if you want to talk about the SS panzer troops that wiped Oradour sur Glane from the surface of the planet, or that organized mass hangings at Tulle, I won't ever forget or forgive what happened there, that's for sure. But I won't allow these sorry excuses for a human being to cast a shadow over all the soldiers, who, even if they were fighting for the Axis, showed compassion and humanity. When the cadets of the Saumur cavalry school fought to the last cartridge in 1940, the German soldiers that had fought them bitterly for days presented arms to them when the defenders finally surrendered, and treated them well. When the Italians ceded occupied Provence to the Germans in 1942, the Bersaglieri took many French Jews with them, because they feared the Nazis would kill them.

You guys make some good points, and my arguments are not complete. I think we are talking about two different things here:

National guilt. Touchy and maybe wrong for an American to bring up just after the D-day anniversary, and I apologize.
Personal guilt. This is the burden a war criminal faces.

Figuring out what #1 means is a major undertaking. I do think the principles outlined in the Magna Carta make it clear that governments ultimately get their power from their people. Once we agree that people supply the force behind a government, then they must take on some sort of responsibility for evil geopolitical decisions such as the deeper invasion of China or Operation Barbarossa.

I'm not accusing the fictional Herr Mueller und seiner lieber Frau of being war criminals. I'm accusing them of loving Hitler or shuttering their windows and ignoring the truth. Either or both were all that was required for WWII to occur. Of course the Treaty of Versailles was critical in shaping the thoughts of Herr und Frau Meuller. So would Weimar socialism.

In 1919, the Big 4 met in Paris to negotiate the Treaty Lloyd George of Britain, Orlando of Italy, Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the U.S.