As a result, denazification alienated all parties in Germany—ex-Nazis, many of whom were nominal party members, who had joined not out of conviction but because their employers required them to; bystanders, who, like most people, are disengaged from politics and could feel some justification for rejecting the idea of collective guilt; and homegrown idealists, who could have been the vanguard of a new politics. It is no wonder that, during the years of occupation, most Germans felt little remorse about what had happened to the Jews of Europe. Ordinary Germans—already defeated, already crippled
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