I think it's more that Germans, unlike most nationalities, had great psychological and political incentives to imagine themselves as the victims of human rights abuses, but unlike real victims of human rights abuses, didn't face an entrenched establishment designed to keep them from asserting their rights.
It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw first hand' the atrocities of the Nazis, unless you count the perspective of the perpetrators. A large part of the post-war German identity was based around the idea that they did not know what was being done, that they would have never allowed it if they had known, and so on.
My opinion here is obviously controversial (especially in Germany), but it goes a long way to explain why Germany, unlike most post-genocidal nations, has very robust defence of human rights at the core of its state. Most survivors of genocide (e.g. the Armenians) face an establishment committed to defending itself against any assertion of wrongdoing, and a society committed to keeping hold of stolen property and lands. In Germany, there were essentially no survivors, and no advocates for the dead, so there was no real pressure either to bring the perpetrators of the holocaust to justice, or to defend them. In Turkey, recognition of the genocide would have been extremely expensive, both in terms of reputations of establishment figures, and in terms of property and land. In Germany, most Nazis and Nazi businesses (VW for instance) could simply go on.
In any case, I'm not sure how you would respond to the Holocaust within the framework of human rights. Retroactive justice is against the german constitution, and what the Germans did in the second world war was predominantly legal. It would have been very hard, even if there was a great desire to do so, to convict anybody of doing acts which were fully lawful at the time.
> It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw first hand' the atrocities of the Nazis, unless you count the perspective of the perpetrators.
On the contrary, the vast majority of the Germans alive today are the descendants of those who saw these things 'first hand'. You have this about as backwards as it gets.
No in relation to Nazi victims in general. Jews were not only German victims of it all and most killed Jews were foreign. (German Jewish minority was rather small). As any other regime, it had huge amount of other victims too.
The crimes against non-jewish germans are part of the whole thing and part of reason for robust rights. So was the destruction of Germany after all of that which was pretty profound.
makes for interesting reading. Particularly the line: "some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps". Although it's hard to say if that was the Germans or the Allies who were responsible. Perhaps both?
It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw first hand' the atrocities of the Nazis, unless you count the perspective of the perpetrators. A large part of the post-war German identity was based around the idea that they did not know what was being done, that they would have never allowed it if they had known, and so on.
My opinion here is obviously controversial (especially in Germany), but it goes a long way to explain why Germany, unlike most post-genocidal nations, has very robust defence of human rights at the core of its state. Most survivors of genocide (e.g. the Armenians) face an establishment committed to defending itself against any assertion of wrongdoing, and a society committed to keeping hold of stolen property and lands. In Germany, there were essentially no survivors, and no advocates for the dead, so there was no real pressure either to bring the perpetrators of the holocaust to justice, or to defend them. In Turkey, recognition of the genocide would have been extremely expensive, both in terms of reputations of establishment figures, and in terms of property and land. In Germany, most Nazis and Nazi businesses (VW for instance) could simply go on.
In any case, I'm not sure how you would respond to the Holocaust within the framework of human rights. Retroactive justice is against the german constitution, and what the Germans did in the second world war was predominantly legal. It would have been very hard, even if there was a great desire to do so, to convict anybody of doing acts which were fully lawful at the time.