Sgt. Pepper's sorry hearts club band

Liebe means always having to say you're sorry — even if it's bupkes.

Germany’s Apologizer-in-Chief is on another sorry tour of Europe. This time, it’s Kandanos, on the Greek island of Crete, which German forces occupied in World War Two. Last week, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier went there — not just to apologize for that ol’ spat, but also for the “many decades my country failed to punish these crimes.”

It’s hardly the only case of Nazis reinventing themselves to go on to lead successful post-genocide careers without a peep out of anyone, but go too far down that rabbit hole of memory and the legitimacy of post-war Germany might start to fall apart. Best to leave those memories where they are, trapped in 1941, to indulge in the performative ritual of contrition without the trickier substantive part of it.

And maybe not even that, as Steinmeier himself acknowledged: “In Germany, few people know about the crimes of the Wehrmacht against the Greek civilian population and the murder of the Greek Jews in the Holocaust. And few know about the terrible fami…