The Nazi party lost the popular vote in Germany, and overthrew the government. Also, many German citizens opposed the Nazis and sabotaged their movements.
IIRC (And I'm going on memory here, so bear with me), the Nazis failed to gain a majority in the Weimar parliament in 1928 and 1930, though the 1930 election gained them about a third of the seats in the Reichstag. They won a slim majority in 1932. By 1938, however, they had engineered enough popular consensus that there was very little resistance to their programs. Of course, you wouldn't expect them to. Once they got rid of the Jews, the Communists and other left-wing types, the homosexuals and Gypsies, and other undesirables, and made life better for everyone else, there would have been very little resistance to their programs. In general, I think when someone says that the German people supported the Third Reich, it is the enfranchised Germans that remained citizens in good standing by 1938 that they refer to. And there were plenty of those.
There were a few people who acted against the Third Reich from within Germany. Kurt Gerhardt comes to mind.
I'm of two minds about the German people. You have to understand where they were coming from to understand how Nazi Germany behaved. The poverty of the Weimar Republic was crippling for the average German. The treat of Versailles imposed such reparations that there was little hope Germany could ever lift itself from poverty. And though the damage done by Germany in WWI to much of the rest of Europe was considerable, it wasn't as if WWI was entirely the Germans' fault.
But how does this justify the actions of not only the Third Reich itself, but Nazi Germany in general? The short answer is that it doesn't--nothing does or can. It is clear to me that the German people were happy not only to get out of poverty, but also to have someone to blame not only for their failure in WWI, but for their situation in general. The Jews were an easy target because anti-semitism went back to rogue elements of the First Crusade. Such was the religious zeal of the crusaders, and their frustration at failing to secure the Christian East as they envisioned, that slaughter of Jews became fairly common, along with the folk tales that "justified" those slaughters among the common people. Given Germany's relative political disunity compared to other countries in Europe from roughly 1450 through 1750 (Italy excepted), it's not surprising that these tales, and the traditions of anti-semitism, survived among the common people.
Joseph Goebbels siezed on this, and painted the Jews as the reason that the average German family was struggling in poverty and despair. All of that said, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the horror of the holocaust. But it did happen, we know it happened, though why it happened continues to puzzle.
The Einsatzgruppen were made up of ordinary people from all walks of German life. They were neither especially rich, nor especially poor. They were often not from occupations that would be used to dealing out death and mayhem. Yet, the bald fact is that these ordinary German men raided peaceful villages of sleeping peasants, rounded up the Jews, and took every last man woman and child into the woods, where they shot them in the backs of the heads. I think it must take a genuine sociopath to feel good about shooting a little child as he or she lays naked on the corpses of people who they knew, and who were alive only moments before. I have tried my absolute best to understand this act and what it might take to drive me to it, and I must conclude that the people who did those things were not remotely like me, because I just couldn't do it. It would take a monster, a thing black and devoid of reason, of heart, of soul, to commit such acts, day in, day out. The imagining of it makes me sick. But the bald fact is that this is what ordinary Germans did with great zeal and vim.
I think we can only go so far in understanding this kind of brutality. And that scares me more than anything, because the lesson we ought to learn from Nazi Germany is that, with the right buttons pushed, almost anyone can be made to abandon all sense and commit acts unspeakably bloody and horrific.
As to the original post--I agree that firebombing the German cities and killing civilians was horrible. What the Germans did to other countries they invaded or bombed was arguably worse. The two do not balance each other and both ought to be decried. There was nothing good about World War II, and it still controls our destiny more than most people realize.
