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For many years I have pondered what those German citizens who supported Hitler thought about after the war was over.

Six million Jews died at his hands because they were Jews. An estimated 50-85 million people world-wide, mostly civilians, were killed in the war or died from causes related to it.

And Germans who supported and voted for Hitler and survived the reign of terror he brought to the entire world helped to make it all happen.

Not alone, of course. Political leaders assisted Hitler in his rise to power. Every member of the Nazi Party did, too, and at particular points circumstances conspired to help him gain power.

But at the end of the day, ordinary German citizens voted to make Hitler the Fuhrer (leader) of Germany. What did they think about after it was all over as their country lay in ruins and the blood of millions of people, in particular the Jews of Europe, was on their hands?

No doubt many of them chose not to think about what they did or what happened in its totality. They wanted to move on, put it in the past, attribute it to the times in which they lived.

Others could not so easily put what they had done in the past. They were deeply troubled by their own complicity in it. After all, they had voted for this evil man, even liked his message of German pride and had sung Hitler’s National Anthem, “Deutchland, Deutchland, über alles, über alles in der Welt” (Germany, Germany Above All, Above All In The World).

Being decent people as most people were, they asked themselves what people always do in such circumstances, how they could have been so blind?

It was true that Hitler made them proud again to be German, and hearing him talk about making Germany great again resonated with their sense of pride for their country. But afterwards it was easy to see what they didn’t see when they needed to, that it was all empty rhetoric. He had lied to them, hiding his intention of using his military to try to take over the world.

It was easy to see later what they failed to see or chose not to see, that Hitler was a deeply disturbed man for whom power was a tool to destroy rather than to build up. So they asked themselves again and again, “How could they have been so blind?”

And, yet, the deed had been done. The horrible, horrible damage they helped make possible could not be undone. The images of men and women, babies and children, being loaded into box cars and taken to death camps where they died of disease, starvation, or killed in gas chambers disguised as showers had actually happened and they were part of the reason it had.

Even as Christians they had supported Hitler, listening to their church leaders who told them it was right to show deference to the state as the instrument of God on earth and elect a pro-Nazi pastor named Ludwig Müeller as their Reichsbischof or “Empire” Bishop.

Only later did they understand that when Müeller merged the Protestant churches youth organizations with the Hitler Youth he was extending the corruption of the faith to the next generation.

Worse, they could see now how truly astonishing it was that within their church was a group who formed what was called the German Christian Movement that supported Hitler’s anti-semitic policies and principles of Arian supremacy.

Looking back, surely Germans who were still alive after the war felt some level of shame as they looked upon the consequences of what their own hubris and moral blindness had spawned.

It wasn’t what they had wanted to happen, or imagined would happen, but they had to feel at some level a moral responsibility for the unintended consequences their support of Hitler had wrought.

As a reader of German history I constantly think about what all those Hitler supporters who survived the war and saw the aftermath of Hitler’s madness thought about in 1945 and thereafter.

Some of the people who supported Hitler did in fact realize afterwards that they had been wrong, very wrong, and admitted it, willing to accept responsibility for their role in it. Others, though, refused to take any responsibility for what happened. I have seen taped conversations of some of them who still believed in Hitler, even his attitude toward the Jews. They died having never admitted their mistakes, and, thus, never learn from them.

I also wonder what the children and grandchildren think about today as they remember the fact that their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents supported a man like Hitler, refusing at the time to listen to the people who were warning them about who he really was.

I suppose I’m raising these questions because I think our country is at a critical point in history of its own, and because I believe the impact of Trump’s second term as president is an unmitigated disaster for America and the world, I wonder what the people who voted for him are thinking now.

It’s possible that, like the Germans who stuck with Hitler even after the war, they are sticking with Trump, but those who still have some moral decency might be asking themselves why they were so blind to who he really is, why they ignored facts and evidence that were telling them the truth.

We can hope so, but one thing is clear. History has a way of revealing the wisdom of an ancient proverb that says, “No one is so blind as those who refuse to see.”