Leg End said:
Children conscripted to military service are not Nazis.
They probably were though.
The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. The defence of Berlin was in 1945. An entire generation of German children grew up under Nazi rule, constantly exposed to the propaganda and ideological control of a system which was designed in a calculated fashion to instil them with Nazi values. Eugenics (meaning Nazi racial theory) became a core part of the curriculum taught to children in school. Before Jewish children were banned from education in 1938, children were encouraged to humiliate and abuse Jewish classmates. Outside of class, membership of Nazi youth organizations became compulsory for all "Aryan" children in 1936. One of the explicit goals of youth organizations was to encourage loyalty to the state over traditional social bonds. Children were encouraged to denounce their teachers, family members and neighbours for ideological crimes. Many people of this generation have been fairly open about the effect this ideological indoctrination had on them.
Here are some more Nazi child soldiers. They are not conscripts. They are enlisted soldiers of the 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitlerjugend" (note their SS patches). The 12th division was formed before the normandy landings, with the majority of its enlisted soldiers being boys under 18, like these kids (although this photo was taken later). These were mostly willing combatants who enlisted themselves. They had been raised to be willing to fight for Nazi ideology, and so they did. Although the Volkssturm, the conscript army formed later which also employed many child soldiers, were conscripts, do not assume they were unwilling conscripts. They were children who had been raised within an ideological system which viewed fighting for the Nazi cause as the ultimate virtue.
Children are not pure innocent creatures whose natural goodness and innocence will win out against the ideological forces of tyranny. They are, in fact, incredibly vulnerable to ideological manipulation. Totalitarian regiemes have intentionally sought to used children as soldiers, torturers and informants precisely because they are so vulnerable to ideological manipulation.
Anyway, the point..
See, by fixating on the idea of the poor innocent child soldiers forced to fight against their will, you're actually dodging the meaningful question of rehabilitation. Many German children of this generation were successfully rehabilitated. Over time, they were able to process what had happened to them and to understand how they had been manipulated. Some, however, could not. Some were never able to square that the society they had grown up in and the way they had been taught to believe was wrong. The liberal idea that rehabilitation is always possible, that all people have some intuitive spark of goodness in them which will naturally come out if they're "educated" or "informed", is nonsense. Children can be Nazis, and some children who were Nazis will never stop being Nazis.
The children you were try to show were almost certainly committed, ideologically motivated Nazis. Even if they weren't, the fact remains that they were doing Nazism just as if they were. They were participating in a regime that murdered tens of millions of people, including children. Saelune's point, which is a valuable point I think, is that the possibility of rehabilitation doesn't absolve people of what they've done, what they've tolerated or what they would be willing to tolerate. It isn't hard to see those who have made their way into extremist ideologies as victims, we're naturally going to want to question how a "normal" person got there. Saelune's point is that it doesn't ultimately matter when you are the victim of those people.
