My grandfather (mother's side) was 16 when he was conscripted. There are two stories he told me, and I never asked for more, because those two times were the only occasions on which I saw my grandfather cry, and as a kid I didn't know how to handle that. He was shot twice and a POW in the USSR. He was caught when he was separated from his unit in a wood, still suffering from the badly patched up first gunshot wound, happened upon another kid fighting for the soviet army, and wasn't able to shoot him. He said that the soviet kid reminded him of his brother and looked even younger than 16. When I asked him how all this ended, he told me of his time as a soviet POW and especially about the group of women who smuggled Christmas trees and soup into the camp for the German and Austrian POWs, and spoons and shoes. He said that they made him feel human again. My grandfather was ashamed for the rest of his life because he felt he had failed his fatherland. He never managed to completely leave his childhood indoctrination behind. At the same time, he refused to play any game with me that was even tangentially concerned with war. He was generally inconsistent and held paradoxically opposite opinions about the Nazi era. My grandmother (mother's side, too) was in the BDM, but that was more or less mandatory. She claimed until she died that she had no clue what was happening. She organised parties for soldiers and later helped with food distributions, but claims that she never knew of the uglier side of Nazism. I don't know if I believe that, but then again she was 19 when the war ended, and had been responsible for her two younger sisters since she had been 15, as her mother died at the beginning of the war of some unrelated illness and her father died early on the eastern front, so perhaps she was just to busy (and naive) to really think about her life.

The other side of my family was active in the resistance. My father's grandfather was summarily executed for printing anti-Nazi pamphlets in 1943. He was the owner of the only printing press in his area, and the local schoolmaster. My father's aunt was sent to a concentration camp because she wouldn't shut up about the lynching of young deserters she witnessed one day. We have no idea what happened to her. My father's mother is still angry about the people in her village, and how they tried to act as if nothing had happened after the war. She still distinctly remembers the neighbours trying to invite her mother and her for supper to talk about the "accidents" and "tragedies" her family suffered. Her best friend when she was a small child was a Jewish girl. Officially, she "emigrated", but my grandmother thinks she remembers when the local police came to take the family away. She is the only one in my family who experienced the Nazi era and is still alive, but she was so young then, the above is pretty much all she really remembers.

So I guess I have both in my ancestry - old people who were in a strange manner semi-proud and ashamed of the times simultaneously, and staunch resistance fighters. Coincidentally, my girlfriends family is similar. Her father's family were opposed to the Nazi regime, while her mother's were opportunists and bettered their social standing.