I think it is rather shameful how we treated Germany after the war. We applied much the same logic as German Nazis had applied to Slavs and Jews. This idea that some people are inherently bad.

Not that somebody people had merely acted bad but that their whole bloodline was bad. In my native Norway we treated children born to Norwegian mothers and German soldiers basically as "untermensch". They got mocked, mistreated, given inadequate schooling. Many suffered trauma until old age from their treatment in postwar Norway.

My mother was born in 1945. It took her years to understand that a German was a human being. The way she was used to hearing the Norwegian word for German "Tysker," mean her think a "Tysker" was some sort of viscious animal, like a kind of malevolent wolf.

Even though I was born in the late 1970s, I also grew up with a lot of negative steotypes about Germany. It is only has I have gotten older that I have realized that us Norwegians are in fact culturally very similar to German. For a long time nobody have wanted to acknowledge they have anything in common Germans. Fortunately I think we are putting those attitude behind us.

I think we have done a lot of wrong both towards people of German and Japanese descent. I think it is time that the victors also offered an apology for their behavior. That the German state started the war is a not a license to kill and rape civilians.

It is an important principle in war, that we should engage armed forces. If terrorizing civilians is okay, then we are no better than terrorists. That is the logic of terrorism: That because somebody oppress you, you are somehow entitled to kill civilians.

This is what I think of Germans today: I think today's Germans should be extremely proud of their country. They have managed to rise above a very dark history and proven to the world that they can be something different than their stereotype. Germans today are some of the most pacifist people, and least nationalistic. So many of the Germans I have met are model citizens. People who have marched against war, better environment and all possible good causes. Germans today are not their forefathers. They don't carry any guilt for what their forefathers have done.

It is easy to be citizen of a country which has never done anything bad. What German has done turing itself around it something few if any country has pulled off in the past.