If a child did ask, “Mommy and Daddy, what were you doing during Nazi times?,” those parents answered their children with responses similar to those that older Germans willing to talk gave me in 1961: “You young person, you have no idea what it’s like to live under a totalitarian state; one can’t just act on one’s beliefs.” Of course that excuse didn’t satisfy young people. The result was that Germans of Jahrgang around 1945 discredited their parents and their parents’ generation as Nazis. That helps explain why student protests also took a violent form in Italy and Japan, the other two
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