Every now and then the Mudcat throws up this kind of personal statement, that throws a light on some troubled aspect of the past or the present. I remember Big Mick's piece about being a soldier in Vietnam. Quite remarkable, and so is what Wolfgang has given.

I have often wondered how it must have been to grow up in Germany, with an older generation, including parents, who had been implicated in Nazism.

The crucial thing I have always tried to hold on to is to remember that there are no reasons for thinking that our own parents, or ourselves if we had been in that situation, would have kept ourselves free from the corruption. And the same goes for other crimes of history, such as slavery and its aftermath.

We can fantasize that we would have been among the "saving minority"; we would have escaped abroad to fight the Nazis, like Wilhelm Brandt, or helped run the Underground Railway in American slave times. And some people would have, but we have no right to assume that we would have been among them, and the historical record indicates that it is very unlikely that we would have been.

And the lesson to draw from that is to look at the world today, and try to see whether there are things happening for which the same applies, where future generations will look back at us with horror and disgust for what we tolerated and what we colluded in, and even took pride in.