but I don't find the History Channel's obsession with all things Hitler "nuanced" in any way, shape or form.
Mostly it's superficial fluff with re-enactments, oversimplified to the point of actual distortion of the historical record.
The focus, from what I've seen, tends to be on "superweapons" and the occult and glorification of Nazi militarism. And yes, "desensitization" is absolutely one of the outcomes, intended or not.
And while "all things Nazi" may be banned in Germany, this doesn't mean the era is ignored. Far from it. From the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin to the "remembrance stones" to programs such as "The Wansee Conference" (the German version, not the inferior English one) to the depictions of the White Rose to movies like "Down Fall" (popular in America as the basis of a thousand Hitler meltdown parodies) there is at least an attempt to depict the era in ways that don't fall into the fluff driven romanticism of American programming such as seen on the History Channel.
Not that there aren't flaws and controversies surrounding all this. The TV series "Heimat" certainly provoked some criticism. And the responses of the general public detailed in "My Father's Keeper" by Stephan and Norbert Lebert shows that there is much heated back and forth on the worth and meaning of revisiting the history. But in general I find German treatments of the era far more nuanced--and factual--than anything I see on American TV.
Check out Alon Confino's "Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History" for an examination of how German culture has dealt with the history.
Like I said, I see your point about American treatments of the era, in particular the History Channel's programming. But I think the response shouldn't be to ignore the history, which after all is about one of the worst and most cataclysmic times of human history, but to engage honestly and in depth into the hows and whys of what happened.
By the way, I find the same American tendency towards the superficial in our depictions of the Roman Empire. These tend to be "romanticizing" in the extreme, superficial and lurid glorifications.
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