But then you have a get out of jail free card based on the semantics. You cannot excuse either Rabe or Plagge of being Nazis post hoc. They were Nazis at the time and you cannot redefine what a Nazi is because they don't suit your worldview. This is the complexity and nuance that comes into play here.

There were paid up Nazis who didn't do what they were told, showed compassion and humanity and did what they thought was right. They were still Nazis. It isn't the label Nazi that makes people inherently evil.

Likewise, there were plenty of people who 'participated' as you've pointed out, but who weren't Nazis, the Catholic Church has a lot to answer for, not because it did anything - but because most of the time it failed to do things it should've done. This is more interesting and when we get to the Ukranians and Latvians in particular, we have to apply nuance - we do that because of what the Russians were doing between 1925 and 1939. The enemy of my enemy is my friend (even if he is a Nazi). Huge cognitive dissonance, huge psychological complexity.

There were many collaborators who weren't Nazis, and there were subversives who were. My argument is essentially 'Nazis are bad' is meaningless, you have to drill down to the individual level and question the nature of what it means to 'be evil'. There were Nazis capable of great good, but they were still Nazis, and there were people who 'followed orders' and who committed acts of great evil without being Nazis - there is a banality at play - and it comes to play when people don't question things they are told, when people use generalised language and heuristic mental shortcuts to condemn everyone in a given group. This is what we do when we presume everyone who 'fought with the Nazis was a Nazi' - individuals are more complicated than that, stories are more complicated than that - and when we condemn entire swathes of people by giving them a name (then sometimes excusing them from that name if they don't fit our model) then we are in danger of becoming the monster we are pointing at.