I understand it sounds shocking to you but for an Austrian or a German, it is just a fact of life that the overwhelming majority of our grandfathers were in the Wehrmacht and didn’t have much of a choice about it either.
Thankfully, my own grandfather was spared the most horrible experiences like Stalingrad and was not a „broken man“ as Arnie put it. But I completely get what he means by it. When a whole generation of people is part, with conviction or not, of something like the Nazis, it casts a long dark shadow.
What is happening in Ukraine right now are the seeds for decades of hate, mistrust, shame and repression.
