History can be dangerous if people get too fixated on looking backwards rather than looking forwards.
For some years I worked for a German multinational and had a boss whose family had been killed in the bombing of Dresden. Only my boss (aged 10 at the time) and his younger sister escaped alive from his family. I am sure that it must have been an horrific experience, but one for which he held me personally responsible and frequently demanded that I apologise for the wrong doing of the English.
I refused to apologise and thankfully the company I was running provided all the profit for the group so he was unable to fire me, but this continued for some years until he retired. At his retirement do, he was somewhat drunk and we had a very long conversation about what he went through and how he felt about English people. At the end of this conversation he did apologise to me and it seemed to lift a huge burden of hatred from him. We stayed good friends until his death.
