For me, the problem isn’t so much Hitler’s citizenship, but of any remaining Germans who voted for him.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be a German citizen, with that black stain in my history. Not just in the distant past - where most nations have stains of various sizes - but in living memory. And not just any stain, but the biggest, blackest stain in history. Russians get a pass, a little, because the Commies siezed power. But the Germans, a modern, civilized people, elected Hitler. And then they started a war that resulted in the deaths of what? Over a hundred million people? Plus the unmitigated horror of the holocaust.

I don’t think I could live with that. I’d have to stop being a German.

Hmmn…Mr. Buckethead, you are a much better man that the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Nazi, Gunter Grass:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/12/wss12.xml

I could make a crack about how being better than a former member of the SS and a current leftist isn’t terribly difficult.

But his work, which won him the Nobel prize for literature, is part of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past movement. Since he was part of that ugly past, well, I suppose that’s appropriate.

Being an American, which while is natural considering that I was born here, is different from being German, or in fact most other things. America is a volitional thing, a philosophical construct - rather than an ethnic group. I imagine that it is easier for me to consider not being American if there was something that I couldn’t accept in my nation’s past than it would be for a German, or a Frenchman, or an Indian.

Apparently, and this is off topic a bit, a slew of Arab intellectuals signed a letter praising his admission of membership in the Waffen-SS as a sign of bravery, worthy of respect and recognition. They go on to say:

the criticism at Grass is interpreted as a campaign “with the goal of diverting the attention from the crimes the Israeli, which are committed in Palestine and Lebanon.”