

Post-war, the orthodoxy in German historiography was that Nazism was a crime committed by a small criminal group, that the German people were the victims of this crime, and that there was nothing specifically German about Nazism.
While functionalism emerged in left-wing historical thought in the 60s, whereby the wider population were held not merely victims but enthusiastic participants in Nazism, the orthodoxy sought to rehabilitate the Third Reich.
This culminated in the Bitburg incident in the mid-80s where Reagan and Kohl participated in a public ceremony to honour all the war dead including the SS buried there. Reagan’s justification was that the SS were just as much victims of the Nazi criminality as the European Jews, and that Germany must shed its war guilt.
So no bullshit at all.





That would be a war crime.