For what it's worth, when I was a child, "German" was used pretty much as a synonym for Nazi (though the opposite was regarded as bad taste even then).

But I've come to believe that using "German" in that way was not a generalisation. It was in fact the opposite-a linking of the Holocaust to a specific nationality.  In other words, I am not German and the mass of UK subjects are unlikely to become German. The Holocaust is therefore safely "other".

Link the Holocaust to something far more general-like an ideology: worse, an ideology admired by some British establishment figures-and it all gets a lot less clear cut.  We might even have to accept that Nazism did not spring from a vacuum and consider whether some of our own historic ethnic crimes and attitudes predict we would have been immune in the same circumstances.