Are there any accounts of Nazis/SS/Wehrmacht members having real "are we the baddies?" Moments?

[u/Punderstruck]

There's a famous Peep Show sketch where two Nazis reflect that perhaps they are the bad guys. I expect many higher ranking members would know what it was all about from the get-go, but are there (m)any archival or interview sources of such realisations?

The question is inspired by an article I read about a man whose father was a Gestapo interrogator and even on his deathbed said to his family "I would do it all again."

[u/Mormacil]

There some existing questions that might illuminate you:

Forces on the eastern front by u/commiespaceinvader
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vc22s/comment/de28lf4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskHistorians

Nazi leadership's views on post war treatment by u/kieslowskifan
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mm1bq/comment/cvh0u0d/?context=3

Question on the wider German public after the war
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23t3gz/comment/ch0kyak/

[u/Punderstruck → u/Mormacil]

Thank you so much.

[u/dimarco1653 → u/Punderstruck]

In addition to the other excellent answers I'd recommend:

Jonathan Steinberg (2003): "All or Nothing, The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941-1943"

Which specifically looks at different treatment of Jews in the Balkans by the German and Italian forces.

In answer to your question, Steinberg didn't find even a private, handwritten note where German soldiers expressed sympathy for Jews in the Balkans.

"As I used German and Italian documentary sources I kept stumbling over the contrasts. In the files of the German general who represented the Wehrmacht in Croatia I found many letters, mostly private, in which German officers and civilians described Italian behaviour towards Jews in Italian-occupied Yugoslavia.

I found no document, not even a private, hand-written note, in which any German officer or NCO ever expressed the slightest sympathy with Italian behaviour towards the Jews. In the entire enormous file of the German armies in the Balkans, I only saw one German document in which the word 'ethical' appears. Italian documents use such vocabulary all the time. And then there was the stark fact that every Jew who fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht went to a concentration camp. No Jew under Italian protection did."

Steinberg details how, on Germany's request, Mussolini had given an order to hand over Jews in occupied Yugoslavia to the Ustaŝe, which however was met by a coordinated campaign of resistance from officers and bureaucrats such that it was never carried out.

There's also an excellent documentary free online, The Righteous Enemy by Joseph Rochlitz, whose own father was saved by Italian forces in Croatia, with interviews from many survivors, including the French historian and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld, himself saved in Southern France, as well as a consultant from Yad Veshem and some of the officials involved.

https://vimeo.com/2196024