Interesting to hear this from Germany, of all places. Within your parents' lifetime, your country's "professionals" murdered around six million Jews, about three million of them citizens of Poland. In total, more than five million Polish citizens were killed under German occupation: Polish Jews and roughly two million ethnic Poles, most of them Catholics. Add to that about 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, millions of Soviet civilians, hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti, and 250,000–300,000 people with disabilities.
Germany built thousands of camps, including extermination camps with gas chambers and crematoria, and sold the victims' hair to industry for textiles and mattresses. All of this was done by paid, trained, uniformed professionals. So leaving the guns to the state is not, in itself, proof of a civilised country.
And that memory is fading. In a Claims Conference survey, 12% of Germans aged 18–29 had never heard of the Holocaust, and about 40% of them didn't know that six million Jews were murdered. In a 2024 Ipsos poll, 59% of Germans believed most Holocaust victims came from Germany, and only 28% named Poland. In the 2025 MEMO study, more Germans wanted to "draw a line" under the Nazi past (38%) than opposed it (37%), and in a Die Zeit poll 28% said the Nazi era "also had its good sides".
Only for discusion...