That is a part of what I meant with the "varied takes on it;" perhaps the youngest generation is going into forgetfulness, but a lot of the Left orientation in adult German politics comes from a turning away from the crimes of the Reich. At the same time there is a large body of thought among the older adults that while they realize the genocide against the Jews was very wrong, they don't regret much else about it (especially as you go farther south it seems), and throughout the land there is a certain hidden pride that they totally kicked France's ass in the space of a month in 1940, nor do they feel they were beaten by anything besides overwhelming numbers and materiel when they ended up pitted against both the US and the USSR. Not that they think Hitler was anything but a whack job, they pretty much blame him for getting them at war with both of the big boys at the same time.
There is an element of truth to the Soviet extermination camps thing, in that between Lenin and Stalin, something like 30 million Soviets died by their own government's hand before the War by execution or in labor camps, exceeding even their devastating war losses later. Of course they were all Soviets and it really didn't have much of anything to do with their ethnicity.
Reading the books penned by Germans after the war, you do get the impression they believed the invasion of the USSR was an exercise in jumping the Russkiis first, before the Russkiis jumped them, based both on the intel they had as well as first-hand observations of the depth and nature of Soviet military dispositions in the first weeks of the attack. They were very likely right, but for various shifting reasons this point was totally glossed over in the US then and since. Certainly the Soviets were not going to be ready to do it in 1941 and unlikely to be ready even in 1942. If Stalin regarded the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as anything more than a temporary convenience, it would be the most exceptional document in the entire history of Stalin-era Soviet diplomacy.