Sometimes I feel like a terrible person

I saw this on facebook:

 

 

My first thought was not "wow! what a risk that guy was taking!". No. My first thought was "Well maybe he was an ardent Nazi, he just lost an arm in battle defending the Reich".

 

I actually met an old German soldier who did lose an arm on the Eastern front, when I was in Hamburg. He considered it a blessing - he said there was a big Soviet offensive the next day (he had been taken off the front line because of the injury), and that he was sure he would have died if he didn't get injured the day before.

 

He was a nice guy, and claimed he was never a party member. He certainly wasn't SS or anything like that. Who knows if that's really true but I didn't see any reason to assume otherwise.