" These men may have fought "bravely" and so what? They may deserve a grudging respect for being good fighters but they earned no "honor" and do not deserve any at this late date "
It's easy to tar these mostly footsoldiers with the evil policies of an evil regime. But of course, it is simply wrong to deny Germans the opportunity to honor their war dead.
That you would deny them this speaks volumes, and by the way, your way is and has been repudiated by history many times.
The neuremberg trials were about finding and punishing war criminals, which it did reasonably effectively.
Apparently, you would have every German punished as a war criminal for all eternity. It was your thinking that precipitated the reparations disaster in the wake of world war I that spawned Hitler.
I'm sure you, like many folks here, also think that honoring Confederate soldiers is tantamount to treason in the modern age, which is equally wrong and misguided.
It's not about hate, it's about a fundamental pillar of Western Civilization, for better or for worse, that allows for the clash of different national interests yet the integration of the defeated into a productive, hopefully more peaceful post-war world.......
Sorry, no good.
Surely the cause for which one fights must form the foundation for determining the worth of the effort. That the German soldier fought bravely and well is not in doubt. They fought for a regime that practiced mass-murder, enslaved millions, engaged in openly aggressive war and for which I can find no redeeming features at all (even the much vaunted economic recovery under the Nazis was the result solely of Hitler's drive to rebuild and rearm the nation so as to engage in war).
I don't much care if the Germans of today want to "honor" their dead soldiers or not. I simply believe that these men earned no honor because the cause for which they fought was one of the most loathsome in history and any effort to "honor" them is rendered empty for that reason.
The comparison with the Confederacy is very inexact. The south had slavery established a good two centuries before the war. The south did not wage an agressive war of conquest against the north but fought defensively. The south did not engage in genocide as a national policy. Slavery was certainly a blight on the cause but was not the sole reason that most southern men fought. I think U.S. Grant said it right when he said of general Lee(to paraphrase) that "The cause for which he fought was one of the worst for which any man has fought." but that Lee himself was an honorable and noble figure who acquitted himself bravely.
But if you want to honor the men who fought for the Nazis please don't let me stop you.