Interview mit Joachim Fest

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(...) reality becomes all the harsher for those exposed to it out on the streets, the civilian population. I emphasised that very strongly more so than is normally necessary in books,
and of course immediately attracted the familiar accusation, at least from some reviewers,
that I wanted to turn a nation of perpetrators into a nation of victims. Such nonsense, these are all people who grew up in comfortable conditions and have no idea what it means to find yourself in a situation like that. Of course many quite innocent people got caught up in it, and of course so did Nazis and officials and not-so-leading supporters of the regime, but the innocent victims are always in the great majority, and this case was no different.
At the very least one must be able to see the misfortune of these thousands or millions of people. You can't simply brush it off by saying they deserved it.
That is a new kind of inhumanity that is fashionable in Germany today.