Of course we’re not more civilized but I do mean that a large part of why we even won against the Spanish back then is that we were more practical minded about certain things. If anything that means we were less civilized at the time.
Of course not we taught the Belgians everything they knew about slavery and then, once they were independent, they turned around and did the Congo…talk about the apprentice outstripping the master. 
What I will say is that there were conservatives of all things who opposed the death penalty and mutilation, not on any humanitarian grounds, but because you can extract more useful labour for longer if you don’t kill or maim your prisoners or slaves.
In fact it was our arch-conservatives who introduced laws allowing corporal punishment to be spread out over multiple days, just so people didn’t end up permanently maimed, though of course the aim was not to protect them so much as to extract more useful labour and thus money from them.
Well…it’s not just that there’s also a caste system that needs to be broken. That in itself pretty much prevents any “alliance” with the “noble” and priest castes.
They are also not deserving of the positions of power and luxury (decadence to my mc) they presently enjoy however and the “war” with the Xthonic church and its caste system pretty much is existential to my mc, since their codex and doctrines of faith determine that his only “destiny” is to be a farm animal to be slaughtered in the most horrific manner possible and not fit to use magic or even be who he is (gay). So to my mc there is pretty much no compromise possible with those people.
The Belgians certainly did make for much more fearsome Nazi’s than we did, our fascists back then were pretty much limited to the utterly pathetic Brownshirts of Mussert, whose only real achievement prior to the Nazi invasion was denying our returning volunteers from the Spanish civil war all sorts of benefits. 
Ironically it was our practical lower officials mostly passively cooperating with the Germans that doomed most of our Jews, rather than any real ideological fervor (starting with the refusal of some reasonably high up civil servants to burn most population registries on a technicality, because it was given by the wrong minister while the legitimate government was mostly busy fleeing into exile).
Of course being Dutch the part that we always have the most trouble with is not so much saying sorry but actually paying compensation, that is something the government deliberately strung out until there were not so many survivors and even then they paid pennies to the dollar, as the Americans would say. On the other hand the homosexual victims of the Nazi occupation still aren’t even recognized on the grounds that homosexuality was flat our illegal back then even under our own laws. 
Our main Nazi camp was Westerbork (which started out as a charitable refugee camp for German Jews) and back when I was in school every school class had at least one mandatory trip to the place. My school also had one to the US war cemetery, but that one was not mandatory (fun fact that one literally was a trip to the USA due to the full extraterritoriality that place enjoys).
