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the Germans played dumb and acted like they didn’t know what we were talking about

Yup, exactly the same here. It was my first visit to Dachau in 1968 and I saw a German woman walking down the street looking for all the world like she was actually afraid the carload of GIs (that's us) would ask her where it was. Must've been a common occurrence on her way to the Nazi meeting down the street. So I pulled over and asked, "Wo ist Dachau, bitte?" Boy, did that ever p*** her off! We couldn't have been half a mile away, but she wasn't about to help us. If you ask me, we let the Germans off waaaay too easy after WWII. They've never demonstrated the least bit of genuine contrition for the millions of innocent lives they took.

I think having close to 50% of their male population killed, wounded, or missing, coupled with their country being bombed to hell and divided up into zones after the war, and many of the surviving leaders and generals executed, was probably close enough.

To this very day Germany provides diplomatic support and subsidized weapon-systems for Israel, along with monetary reparations that only ended shortly ago, and may be extended.

If anything, Germany is too caught up in the past, unable to move on. Amends can never truly be made, so they may as well accept that what happened, happened, rather than simultaneously hyper-focus and pretend that the Holocaust didn't exist.