HITLER moustaches and swastikas defiling pictures of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, have become a recurring motif in the iconography of the euro crisis, most recently in Cyprus. Scapegoating is inevitable during financial upheavals, says Marcel Fratzscher, president of DIW Berlin, a think-tank. Germany, he suggests, has taken the place of the IMF during the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, with Mrs Merkel playing the role of Michel Camdessus, the then IMF boss who was pictured in 1997 with folded arms, standing over a humbled Indonesian president signing up to harsh austerity measures. But scapegoating can be dangerous if the goat is powerful and it begins to feel victimised.The Germans are not yet openly angry. That would be out of character in a people who have, since the second world war, been eager to atone for the past and be good European partners. In one recent poll, 34% of Germans even said they empathised with the wrath of the southern Europeans. But the mood is shifting. The southerners may see Germany as forcing excessive austerity on them and showing insufficient solidarity, but Germans have a different view.First, they feel they have already shown…