You're right, but probably not for the reasons you think. Nazi empathy was popular among the Jewish emigre academics of the postwar era, and empathy took on particular prominence as things like the Banality of Evil and the Milgram experiments entered the public consciousness. The problem was that Germany couldn't be written off as a political, economic, and social backwater where Hitler was a thug exerting his will over an ignorant and unorganized population. That the German public went along with the horrors of the Third Reich was proof to them that Western Enlightenment epistemology was fundamentally flawed and in need of replacement. The Marxism that they offered as an alternative, however, was verboten during the Cold War, and this interpretation would only take hold among committed leftists.
For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications. The idea of being empathetic to the circumstances of a criminal's upbringing would become a punchline.
I touch on this in another comment, but this idea isn't exactly a conservative coup. Blaming bad things on bad people is easy and doesn't say anything about society as a whole. Did slavery exist because of flawed individuals, or because the United States Constitution is a fundamentally flawed document that allowed such an institution to exist in the first place? Does amending the Constitution to prohibit slavery actually solve the problem, or only mask the symptoms of a system based on the kind of power dynamics that allow for that kind of exploitation? Is the past 150 years of postbellum racism and inequality due to our inability to adequately address this basic issue?
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