I often think about Bertholdt & Armin.
“You all are precious comrades to me. And I intend to kill you.”
Despite Bert blatantly stating his plan to kill Armin & all his former comrades, Armin still had enough empathy and objectivity to understand that, truly, neither of them really had a choice in the atrocities they had to commit.
“Are these the kind of things you saw, Bertholdt?”
Armin carries all of Bert’s memories. In a sense, Bert survives through Armin. Armin doesn’t condemn Bert for the choices he was forced to make, even though Bert’s choices caused direct harm onto Armin’s life, likely because nobody else truly understands Bert’s hopes, desires, dreams, and regrets more than Armin. Likewise, Armin understands that he and Bert are two sides of the same coin. Just as Bertolt destroyed Shiganshina to meet an objective, to protect what little family he had, Armin decimated Liberio for the same reasons.
The two are more alike than they are different and I feel pitting them against each other or condemning one more than the other misses the whole point of their characters.