sIx - If they were marching through my neighborhood, I would ignore them. I think confrontation is exactly what they are looking for, and I see no benefit in giving it to them.

I agree that every Nazi was, to some extent, responsible for what happened in World War II, but the Final Solution (the decision to actually kill millions of Jews and other people) was not arrived at until the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. It would have been a small number of key Nazis who made that decision in committee, in the midst of a country already embroiled in over 2 years of a world war...and fighting desperately on 2 fronts.

It was in Russia that mass killings of Jews began, in 1941, as a sort of unofficial policy carried out by Einsatzgruppen in occupied areas, following the German advance. The Russian campaign was notable for its utter brutality on both sides, and that is where the organized killing of Jewish communities began. It is unclear exactly who ordered it.   (maybe Heinrich Himmler?)

That killing was then sanctioned officially at the high levels of the Nazi hierarchy at the Wannsee Conference in '42, which led to the creation of the infamous concentration camps.

If Rommel was a Nazi (and I think he was, but cannot confirm it at this point) then he would have joined the Nazi Party probably in the early 30's, some time before the war. His rationale for doing so would probably have been, "these are the men who are going to restore the German armed forces and put the country back on its feet, and I want to be on their team". That was certainly the rationale for many thousands of German professional soldiers who became Nazis, and I imagine it ranked way higher in their perception than any opinion they had regarding Jews. That's what happens when a political party starts running a nation. People join it because it is the prevailing order, and the road to professional success (at the time). That doesn't mean they take conscious notice of its every ugly undercurrent of weirdness.

I mean, hell, Stalin's Communist Party was an abomination...but how many ordinary Russians belonged to it? Hundreds of thousands, at least. That's what happens. Had Stalin lost the war to Germany, those people would have been regarded exactly as the Nazis have been regarded.

Stalin killed more of his OWN people in pogroms than Hitler ever managed to kill with the Final Solution.

If you want to look for evil in this World, it ain't hard to find...and the Nazis did not copyright sole claim to it. Yet they seem to have inherited the special title of "Greatest Villains of all Time". I think that's a sort of mental knee-jerk that causes people to stop thinking in a certain way when the word "Nazi" jars their consciousness.

How many of them would have BEEN Nazis had they been living in Germany at the right time? More than a few, I'd bet.

Self-righteousness is saying to yourself: "I would never do that. I would never make that mistake. I am inherently better than those people. They are monsters."

Such thinking leads directly TO things like Naziism, in my opinion. We are all capable of making tremendous errors of judgement in our search for what we term "liberty", "justice" or "security".