I lived in West Berlin for 5 years as a young man. My German peers and I talked about this sometimes. They were remarkably introspective about the problem of authority, having grown up with the knowledge that their own grandparents, and in some cases their own parents, had either acquiesced to or participated directly in immoral brutality against fellow human beings.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing like having a family dinner with your 21-year-old friend while his grandfather sits at the table, and then retreating to a beer garden to discuss morality and the fact that Grandpa had been a Nazi bureaucrat who kept concentration camp trains running on schedule.

It focuses the mind.

The German people collectively seem determined not to ever let something like that happen again. School children learn about the problem of authority from the time they are about 10 years old. People get the idea that German kids are just shamed, taken on tours of concentration camps and given texts to read that focus on the brutality of the Nazi era.

But I think that what actually happens is much more sophisticated than that. Kids are encouraged to think about the problem of authority, to actively role play how they would respond in similar, contemporary situations.

I don’t know how well that works or if there’s any real answer to this, but it’s interesting that a very significant plurality of German people are much more liberal today on the subject of refugees and immigration then much of the rest of the European population. I think they are less likely to succumb to populist anti-immigration sentiment because they are more likely to resist authoritarian urges to hurt people — because of the moral training they receive as children and teenagers.

I don’t know if this is true, and I don’t know if there’s any way to demonstrate that it is, but I know some of my German friends think it’s true.