This makes me wonder how many surviving Heer and Wehrmacht regretted their actions?
I mean there were soldiers and officers who were loyal to Germany rather than the cause of Nazism, but the line between the two is very blurred.
I'm sure there were soldiers who did not want to raze Paris to the ground, seeing the city as a cultural icon of western liberalism and intellect.
The sad truth about history was said by ol' Uncle Addie himself: if you win, you don't have to explain, and if you lose, you're not there to explain.
The simple fact is that if the Nazis had achieved a victory in World War 2, almost all the German soldiers would've bought the propaganda. If your country manages to fight off all of Europe and crush the largest contiguous landmass in the world, you might think there is something to this Nazi ideology.
I'm sure the German soldier might have regrets, but if he gets to live on a massive estate in the city formerly known as Warsaw with hundreds of Slavic serfs to his farming, his regrets won't be that strong.
Most Germans OTL weren't upset about the atrocities, but more that they lost for the second time and while the postwar German prosperity mitigated those hard feelings, it wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s that Germans showed genuine regret.
TTL Germans, even when their government did objectively idiotic things like punch America unprovoked, still went along with their government. Yes, there was more than a bit of coercion, but even when their standards of living collapsed, there wasn't some mass revolution to topple the Nazis. The Allies had to give up a ton of blood to get rid of them.
I'm guessing older people who remembered a time before Hitler, like Adenauer and Von Papen, might have some regrets about what went down.
And "loyalty to country and not party" is, and should be seen, as a really shitty excuse for atrocities. Lee justified joining the Confederacy along those lines as did Reginald Dyer when he massacred those poor Indian protestors. As harsh as the occupation and division of Germany may seem to us, the fact is that the German people did little to resist the Nazis, and so the A4 will conclude that there is something deeply broken within Germans.
And again, the Nazis are an example of how poisonous the concepts of nationalism and loyalty to state can be: it turns your country into a cult and where there is no other purpose than serving the cult leader.
As one person said, the worst slaveowners are the kindest ones, and so a "nice" German officer who tolerates his fellow soldiers' crimes is the worst one of all.