Do you think we should forgive Germany for their war crimes?
That's an easy one: the country did not commit the crimes, people did. Not the nation, people. You might be able to say "the Nazi Party" but you can't say "Germany" in either the sense of the country or the nation. And the vast majority of the people who committed the crimes are dead. I don't think it makes much sense or does much good to bear grudges against the dead. Note that I am not saying that what happened in the war should be forgotten. Nor do I subscribe to the view that only Germans committed war crimes. What you get in history is always victor's history. We can and should learn a lot of lessons from what happened both between 1918 and 1936, and during the war, and after. We should apply what we learn rationally to guide future behaviour, what is and is not acceptable, for individuals, political parties and nations.
I'm also worried about the "we" in the question. The crimes were not committed against us. Forgiveness is an option for the wounded party, not someone else on their behalf. In this case, you might consider the blitz a war crime, the bombing of civilians, but if we do, then Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bigger ones. You might consider the murder of Dietrich Bonhoeffer a war crime - but who can forgive for him? His relatives? The church he was a member of? At the time? Of course the biggie is the holocaust. Who was this a crime against? Who can stand for the murdered millions? Their relatives? The Jewish nation? Or was it a crime against humanity? If the latter, how can humanity (or even the Jewish nation) agree together? And who is to be forgiven? The perpetrators are mostly dead. Are we told hold the living responsible for the crimes of the dead? That is indeed what the Pentateuch says, that God visits retribution upon the children of sinful fathers. And the church has taken the same line and charged every Jew since AD30 with the death of Jesus, which is nonsense, but that's where anti-Semitism really took hold. (I am aware, of course, that these days most Christians are decent and not anti-Semitic at all, but that is what happened for the first several hundred years of Christian history, right up to quite recently.) At the time, in ancient history, the individual counted for very little and the clan or tribe for a lot. If an individual committed a crime the family/clan/tribe was guilty - it was their collective responsibility. We value people differently today. We are strong on individuality and there is a debate about what a nation, a society, is. In my view it is immoral to treat a group as responsible for the errors of an individual.
Now, beware of generalities. There are times when an individual can't be seen as responsible, say if they are under age, or mentally disabled in some way, so they are not fully in charge of what they do. In such cases we may say "I blame the parents" and a little while ago there was a fuss about parents being jailed for their children's truancy. There's something to debate! How just was that? But having said that, there is something out of kilter in holding one group of adults responsible for the actions of another group of adults. You're 6th form - legally under age for some things and not for others. Are your parents responsible for what you do? In what sense are present day Germans responsible for what a previous generation did, and to whom are they responsible, for it is only those to whom something is owed who have any right to give or withhold forgiveness.
