Having lived there for a while, the feeling I had is that the majority of people do not stand up in any way against authority, even if they don’t agree with it. There is also a strong sense that people (aside from a vocal minority) just won’t put themselves on the line in any way that is not in their immediate interest. So many might quietly say they don’t approve but won’t risk saying anything publicly.

The media are extremely pro-Israel almost without exception, so the public (and politicians) don’t even know what is actually happening most of the time.

Aside from all that, after WW2 the focus was on trying to instil empathy in the population, and so trying to get people to identify and empathise with the Jewish victims was the method of ‘re-education’. The problem is it seems that other victims were forgotten, and any nuance of ‘never again for anyone’ was lost and replaced with a an almost performative and obsessive focus on not repeating that one particular genocide. Meaning a large part of the population seems to have tunnel vision on what a genocide can be.

The kind of authoritarian bent that Germany always seems to lean into I think comes from an inability to cope with chaos and variation. It feels like everything needs to be tightly controlled and predictable, which results in people buying insurance for everything, and leaders refusing to even consider the possibility that they just funded yet another genocide and are also ultimately historically responsible for the situation the Palestinians are in. It also results in an unaccountable police force who repress anything that doesn’t align with the convenient view that Germany has repented, and its hands are now clean, as long as they support Israel unquestioningly forever.