I feel we're riding a knife's edge and there's a hurricane brewing in the gulf of absurdity.
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Incidentally, I feel like this is why it is so hard to actually learn from history. You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.
Also, if your grandpa likes telling war stories, it's only because he survived.
As someone whose parents, grandparents, and entire family lived in Italy through WWII (and one grandfather who lost an eye in WWI), nobody liked talking about it.
If they did talk about it, it was usually brief and imbued with a feeling of "thank God it's over. what a tragedy that we were all used as pawns by the political class for nothing more than selfish ambitions."
There was a prominent component of political scheming to his rise to power, and it was a totalitarian state that murdered political opponents even before it got to genocide, but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.
I can't tell you what my relatives were like leading up to the war (I certainly wasn't born at that point), but they were illiterate peasants from the south, far removed from the cities and politics.
My suspicion is that, if anything, they were like most southern Italians, who seem to have a profound distrust of the government and politicians.
If I'm honest, they didn't have any moral objections to the war--they just felt used.
Up until the last century, violence was seen as just another necessary part of living, and morality only came into play when it involved you're own community.