For a foreigner it always depends on the historical empathy coming from his own country's history to get the whole picture.
Germany is one of the few countries that constantly tries to deal in several ways with its own history.
Many countries haven't lost a war during a dictatorship and therefore didn't have to start that process in the beginning. (not to mention the following split of german society in two parts for nearly 40 years with different ideologies)
Superpowers like USA will never openly work through several wars of the last century, neither will russia or china discuss the deaths of thousand's of people under the reign of stalin and mao.
A lot of countries' societies today still don't deal completely with its history after a dictatorship, if it is chile, cambodia or others. (North Korea will be an interesting case when it finally falls)
As long as a country doesn't fully experience the consequences and collapses, its society is never forced to come clean with its own history,
because there is never an occasion to honestly question its actions in the first place.
I admit that this process of coming to terms can often derange into hyperbolical ways in germany (esp. seen at the higly controverse "Wehrmacht" exhibition), but looking at the dimension of inhumanity during those times I have no clue what would be a better way to raise awareness for the future.
Luckily there are also a lot of documentations on people like Stauffenberg, the White Rose, Georg Elser and others which show that some individuals didn't adopt the propaganda and tried to stand up against the regime and help its victims.
(At this point I recommend the documentary
"Shoa" if somebody is interested)
Say what you like. The German reaction to its role in WW2 is serious cultural over-compensation. It is not natural and like all psychological over-compensation effects, simply must have a swing back effect at some point in time.
As you stated nobody else is made to feel bad for historical events that their governments have perpetrated. Did Russia ever apologise, did Japan ever apologise? Did the US ever apologise for nuking Japan (twice) when everyone knows they never had to? Nope, they just spin a whole lot of propaganda justifying their actions and the whole world swallows it. But then, that is the benefits and perks that come with being the only real winner of the whole sorry affair.
The problem that the German national psyche has had to deal with, is that they picked on the wrong ethnic group. An ethnic group that were perhaps once persecuted and discriminated against, but have risen to generally exist in the most privileged strata of western society and and ethnic group who are massively over-represented in positions of power, especially in media and most certainly in finance. All throughout my childhood and teenage years, before my brain started to work properly I seem to remember being bombarded with holocaust films, media, and guilt inducing propaganda, leaving a deep and lasting imprint on my mind of the horrors that had been perpetrated upon the Jews. I could have been forgiven for believing that there were no other victims in this war except the Jewish people, yet they represent only a small fraction of the casualties. Being British (Scottish to be precise), I could console myself with the fact that we were 'the good guys'.
And whilst the vile media continues to spin these vile atrocities in way that suits the West's Zionist puppet masters, Germany continues inducting it's youth into their cultural WW2/holocaust guilt trip program, whilst Israel has spent the past 70 years quite frankly acting like fucking Nazis with anyone in a position of influence too scared to speak out against Israel's actions for fear of aligning themselves with the great holocaust-nazi anti-semite stigma, propagated by the vile Zionist media over decades.
