I recently read a book by John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down. In the book, there are some characters who invade a small town, clearly modeled after the Nazi invasion of Scandinavia (doesn't really matter where in particular, because it's an allegory, and never explicitely refers to the Nazis or the location of the story). In the story, the invaders are portrayed rather sympathetically. They miss their families, they don't like being at war, one of them loves the British, another dreams of building a bridge for his toy train, one writes poetry to one of the village women...we understand these men, and we understand that they don't really like what they're doing. They were only following orders.
Even with this sympathetic portrayal, this book was wildly popular with the Allied Nations, and banned in Italy and Germany because it was also a tale of resistance. With, I note again, sympathetic Nazis.
As for Indiana Jones. Except for Elsa, Belloq, and Donovan (who, I will note, are Austrian, French, and American - not a single one of them truly devoted to the cause, it would seem, but to self-interest), all of the Nazis are rather cartoonish, especially Vogel and Toht. The possible exception is Dietrich, who is portrayed as an ideological weakling worried about a Jewish ritual - this, of course, is in it's own way, a likewise cartoonish portrayal. The butler is a traditional cariacture of the arrogant servant. The individual soldiers are simple goons. As for the German citizens in certain segments of Last Crusade, they all seem to be people of means - I would peg them as limitedly affected by the Depression and willing to wait out the storm until something affects them. The heartless nobility - another cariacture.
Then we have the others - the poverty-stricken Indian villagers, the bug-eating Indian merchants, the Satanic child-enslaving Indian cult, the gleefully murderous Chinese gangsters, the clamoring, grade-concerned students, the dreamy, sex-obsessed coeds, the rickshaw-pulling/riding Chinese citizens, the shady American bureacrats, the punchy sailors, the Wild West bandits, the well-dressed American black market dealer, the American partygoers, the idle Italian diners, the senile librarian, the cute Arab children watching a monkey, the drunk bargoers, the shifty Hispanics, the nearly-naked natives, the hard-working mass of submissive Arabs, the sword-wielding, crooked-toothed Arabs, the submissive, sex-alluding black sailors, the duplicitous prime minister, the laughing shaman, the frightened starlet, the old flame, the Anglophile Arab, the baseball cap wearing American concerned with backbone, the Americophile cute Chinese kid, the estranged father, the British mentor, the drunk Australian, the slightly prissy British colonial, the loyal-to-death Chinese man who refers to the Great Unknown - have I forgotten anybody? Ah, yes, the greatest cariacture of all - the devil with the little mustache!
