Because they won the war. That, plus they are the top dog internationally, or one of the top dogs. So they can continue to march around as morally superior despite what they have done (and continue doing). I mean, had the Germans won the war, they would have done the exact same thing.

From agent orange to nuking civillian towns, to having segregation until the sixties, to insisting on capital punishment, to shoving their black population in jail (through systemic racist imbalances and injustices to people their 2-3 generation ancestors they f* up as slaves), to toppling legitimate governments and supporting dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, to "world cop", to drone attacks, to "patenting" farming seeds and genetic material and enforcing it world-wide, to mass-surveillance and creepy related laws, and what have you.

And when all else fails, they can always blame it to the acts of their "bad government" (or to some "bad apples" in the government) all the while benefiting from those actions, supporting them, voting those people in office, and maintaining that they are a democracy (which implies citizen responsibility in state actions).

>Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

>“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

We all know that the allies were almost oblivious to these concentration camps during the war.[1] I would be surprised to learn that the allies did not have agents, spies or informants stationed in Germany during the war. How did these people also fail to notice what - according to Dr Dean - would have been obvious?

Even 40'000+ sites takes few people to pull off in a country of over 50 millions. It was a very different time, and as the parent correctly points out, people accepted genocide, torture and blatant racism. Not just in Germany, but everywhere.

A lot of people seem to think that it is something inherently German that made the Holocaust so terrible, but truth be, any other country could have fallen victim to the same propaganda had their situation been similar.

That being said, I still find the Second World War rather uninteresting.

[1] Although, as their progressing through German held Europe moved forward, the true picture began to emerge.

If not "any other country", surely, "a lot of similarly thinking countries".

Belgium, France and Britain for example, also committed terrible atrocities and countless murders and deaths in their colonies at the same time (and even after world war 2).

I'll quote a drunk Austrian friend: "All Germans are Nazis. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say, if there must be Nazis, Germans make the best ones"