[CCIP]

Alright, that's fair enough then. On a personal level, holding some bitterness at lost family members is acceptable. And I read further up and definitely agree with you on the point of the merchant seamen, they definitely deserve praise above all.

But I think the side they fought on shouldn't be dismissed outright. 'Heroes' might not be a totally appropriate term depending on how you define heroes, and certainly I don't think sinking Allied merchant ships is something you want to take as an example of heroism to future generations. It's not. But some of the things done on U-boats might be far more admirable, if you can look past the side of the war they fought on.

I'd be the last to bring Nazi forces up as heroes of course. To put it in likewise-personal perspective, I was born in the city of Leningrad - that should say something about what I feel about the war. But you can't look at it as some war machine that was composed of completely brainwashed millions. It was not. It was composed of people. Again, this is also very personal to me, being of mixed Russo-German-Finnish ancestry and with my family having lost a lot of kin in the war in all sorts of awful ways - from dying of wounds, to dying of hunger, to dying in a concentration camp.

I'm completely and utterly opposed to the 'demonization' of even the highest Nazi leaders in that way. If we don't acknowledge what they did as part of the fabric of humanity, then we've learned nothing from the war. Even the worst enemies of our sense of humanity have something to teach us about being human. Forget U-boats, crewed mostly by 20 year olds who couldn't begin to make sense of what they were getting into, nor had any logical way of avoiding it. Cursing them on the battlefield is acceptable, cursing them some 60-odd years after the fact is just plain rude. As long as the survivors acknowledge that their country's cause was criminal, they deserve none of this dehumanization today. And if they do, then so does every other wartime submariner in history.