This is absolutely a complete and utter tangent but you touched on something I've really been wondering about: Watching a lot of ken burns lately, heard him tell quite a few stories of German regular army officers going out of their way to protect enemy combatants/POWs from being killed/taken to death camps to the extent that there seemed to be quite the little power struggle from among the nazi ranks; naturally (but unfortunately) since it was an American documentary it wasn't the primary focus, but I'd love to hear of any german made documentaries that do justice to the "people" side of things from the non-american point of view. (maybe this is assumptive and rude but I figured a German on HN would be the best person to ask; hope it wasn't too out of place!)
I don't mind the question at all. But I'm not sure there are many German documentaries portraying German soldiers in WW2 in a positive light. There's a strong cultural fear of making Germans in the Third Reich appear too sympathetic, although I think this hinders properly understanding what got us into that situation in the first place (other than the "obvious" answer that Hitler and his nazi troupe mind controlled us and everybody suddenly became evil overnight) and how we can prevent similar things from happening in the future (aside from the "obvious" answer of censorship and knee-jerk overcompensation).
A lot of the stories I'm aware of are hearsay, but it's not exactly easy to get reliable accounts about this kind of thing. One example is that in Eastern Europe in the early stages of WW2 the Wehrmacht soldiers would allegedly often not care much for the orders regarding the jews (they were just regular soldiers after all, often ones that had been soldiers before the nazis came to power) and would initially often be greeted with sympathy because the locals thought they came to kick the Soviets out. But then the Wehrmacht would often soon be followed by the SS who would of course be far less friendly to the civilians.
As far as I can tell, things generally got progressively worse throughout WW2 as the older soldiers died out and were replaced by younger soldiers who had been raised under the nazi rule and were thus far more likely to just follow the orders and believe the ideology.
An extreme example of this is the last ditch attempt at the end of the war where they tried to raise a militia of what were essentially still children to protect the mostly defeated fatherland against the "invaders".
I think it helps to remember events like the Christmas truce in 1914 when thinking about WW2: yes, the nazis were far worse than any of the powers in the Great War before that, but initially a lot of the soldiers were simply German soldiers, not "nazi" soldiers. And even those that would eventually "earn" that label would often do so for far more complex reasons than just being "evil demon soldiers".
For example, the idea of racial supremacy (which was popular in many other places than Germany at that time, btw) coupled with the economic changes caused by the seizure of Jewish properties, horrible as it was, meshed well with the less educated and less well-off segments of the population. If your life is in the gutter, it can be very uplifting to be told you're special because you're part of the master race. Especially if that is combined with a clear enemy (the treacherous Jews sabotaged the wealth you deserve) and what at that moment superficially seemed like a change for the better (look up the opinions of other European leaders about Hitler in the years before WW2 if you find the time -- it's pretty disconcerting).
Basically, Hollywood tropes aside, I doubt that there were as many hardcore nazis as you'd think. There were a lot of war crimes and a lot of crimes against humanity, of course, and the Holocaust is one of the worst things that happened in the last century, but I don't think you need to be a truly evil person to do unspeakable things -- and IMO that's the real lesson here.
As a German I'm anxious about the direction the US (in particular) is heading, not because I worry they could become Hollywood-style "evil" but because it's so easy to end up in a situation where you don't even realise what you're contributing to until sufficient time has passed. I'm certain most people who ended up contributing to the horrors of the Third Reich had no idea what they were doing even if from the perspective of today you'd think it must have been crystal clear to them at the time.
Thank you for such a complete and well written answer.
Your last two paragraphs really touched on the heart of my curiosity, since the aformentioned documentaries I saw did convey what you described about "normal soldiers", their experiences and the changes their society underwent is as you say a critical piece of understanding how to avoid it, one which we're taught very little about (at least in my American education.)
