Using the terms 'Germans', 'Nazi' etc. is a lot more complicated and heavily-loaded than people realise. I think there are several reasons as to why we often hear ‘Nazi’ used - e.g. ‘Nazi bomber’, ‘Nazi pilot’ etc. – even if the individual's political beliefs were not established https://twitter.com/warbird_nerd/status/1282095004782071808

I think the biggest reason for media using 'Nazi' so often is that it's immediately evocative. It encapsulates everything that has been used to justify the Second World War as a just war for the Allies - territorial aggression, political oppression, the Holocaust, eugenics etc.

This fits in neatly with the rose-tinted and, perhaps, even jingoistic nature of some media outlets which we get around big wartime anniversaries. Listeners will also reliably tune in when they hear 'Nazi' because their crimes eternally attract the morbid curiosity of humanity.

Yet it is more 'convenient' to generalise about the political orientation of an entire country than it is to recognise that some Brits will have been even more violently fascist and far-right wing than certain Luftwaffe airmen who openly defied & even plotted against the Nazis.

That's not to say that the Luftwaffe wasn't steeped in National Socialism from the start until the end. But being a 'Nazi' wasn't as simple as mindlessly subscribing to NS dogma - one could support Hitler because of his early military successes, but abhor Nazi Party principles.

Even some Luftwaffe men of Jewish descent admitted they fully supported the Nazis and lamented their heritage. Wartime field letters demonstrate that some Luftwaffe airmen considered themselves separate from the 'Party people', whilst others consistently spouted Nazi ideology.

The Luftwaffe had anti-Nazis, non-Nazis, pro-Nazis and fervent Nazis. But this qualifier doesn't help tell the story of how an RAF pilot shot down a Junkers 88 over the south-east coast of England, and thus it is disregarded in favour of simplicity to appeal to base audiences.

I tend to use 'Nazi' when referring to events that were directly impacted by the Nazi leadership and conformed to its ambitions (e.g. Operation Sea Lion = a 'Nazi' invasion plan), but to use 'German' for the stories of individuals unless we know they were National Socialists.

If we are happy to put up Luftwaffe veterans in Spitfires and have them talk at UK festivals, then it is hypocritical to lazily rely on the term 'Nazi' all the time to refer to the Luftwaffe - as some scriptwriters do - because it implies we shouldn't give such men that platform.

And yet we do give them that platform because most people recognise that not all Germans were Nazis, and not all Nazis are Germans. But, although the Tory analogy is interesting, no party seduced the British public to the extremes & on the scale that the Nazis enticed Germans in

The Luftwaffe wasn't a 'clean' force in the way the Wehrmacht was traditionally presented after the war - but neither was it entirely politically dirty. Rather, it's perhaps better to describe it as having been grimy around the edges and stained in the middle.