In a recent column, I explored Truth Commissions and similar initiatives as ways for oppressors and victims to process conflict and achieve justice. There were no such commissions created in Germany after World War II. Nevertheless, Germany eventually came to grips with Nazism and became a leader in remembering the Holocaust and preserving Jewish culture.
“Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil” by Susan Neiman, published in 2019, provided me with a clearer understanding of what happened.
Neiman introduced me to the German term ‘Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung,’ meaning ‘working off the past.’ The term places the responsibility for reconciliation entirely on the oppressors and their descendants. It calls on them to face the facts of their crimes and atone actively.
As her title hinted, Germany’s post-war evolution provides a model that post-slavery America might consider and emulate.
West Germany tried, convicted, and executed relatively few Nazis for war crimes. The Allies tried but soon abandoned efforts to ‘denazify’ government ministries. West Germany paid reparations (termed “compensation”) to Holocaust survivors in 1952, with a statement accepting responsibility but no commitment to seeking the truth.
East Germany, being a satellite communist state of the Soviet Union, was more aggressive than West Germany in prosecuting and executing Nazis and purging them from government. They made no payment of reparations or admissions of responsibility.
Progress toward justice for millions of victims was stalled for decades, and governments would not start the process. What obstacles blocked the acknowledgment of responsibility?
Despite West Germany’s 1952 reparations and admission of guilt, the general population saw themselves as innocent victims of Nazism. They denied knowledge of, or responsibility for, Nazi atrocities. Neiman noted that the same was true in the South following the failure of Reconstruction. This attitude was crystallized as the ‘Lost Cause’ myth in the 20th century.
Nazism and the Confederacy were justified as attempts to protect a way of life.
A transformation in popular attitudes began slowly and in many places across East and West Germany. It started in the 1960s, when German babies born during and shortly after the war became teenagers and college students. They began asking parents and grandparents uncomfortable questions about their war experiences. It became harder with time to avoid these conversations.
As members of the older generations died, family members who survived them had to process their belongings, often revealing Nazi memorabilia and records of involvement in the Nazi Party.
Families either discussed what really happened or risked the alienation of younger members.
Popular culture reinforced and accelerated this national awakening.
The American four-part miniseries “Holocaust” was televised in the U.S. in April 1978, and then on German television in January 1979. Approximately 20 million German viewers watched it. It expanded the portion of German families willing to discuss the Holocaust.
The reunification of Germany in October 1990 added critical mass to a chain reaction that had started in the 1960s.
In March 1995, a German exhibit, “War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944,” opened in Hamburg. The Wehrmacht was Germany’s regular army, mostly made up of draftees. Members of the elite SS were volunteers wh9 were widely blamed for committing atrocities. In contrast, the Wehrmacht was considered innocent bystanders, heroically protecting the Fatherland. The exhibit documented the Wehrmacht’s involvement in killing Soviet prisoners of war and even mass murders of Jews and Slavs. The exhibit travelled to 33 German and Austrian cities over the next six years, and it attracted strong opposition, even one bombing.
The exhibit dispelled the myth that members of the SS were the only wrongdoers. It forced many German families to face up to what members of the Wehrmacht did.
Once the truth seemed inescapable, working off the past became a task that most of the country needed to own. Government was no longer the leading force in pursuing truth and reconciliation.
“Unsettled Ground: Reflections on Germany’s Attempts to Make Amends” by Jeffrey Katz (published 2026) provides a well-documented example of a German community working off the past. Katz’s family came from the Augsburg area of West Germany.
After reunification, small pockets of non-Jews took on the task of assembling documentation from Katz’s former Jewish community that had disappeared. Similar ‘Memory Movements’ were springing up across Germany. They led to the restoration of synagogues, establishment of Holocaust memorials, and museums devoted to Jewish culture in the region.
Neiman documents parallel initiatives in Mississippi to ‘set the record straight’. In this case, the record was about the experience of being enslaved, the Klan, Jim Crow, lynchings and other forms of terrorism, and race riots that killed entire Black communities.
Neiman juxtaposes the complete removal of Nazi symbols from Germany and the preservation of Confederate statues in the South.
Germany’s grassroots memory movement has lessons for America to consider. Who bears the responsibility to unearth buried memory?
7 Responses
Makes a rational person wonder how history is going to deal with the racism, Islamophobia and anti-semitimism our Nation is suffering through today. Just sayin’…
It is not true that East Germany was more aggressive than West Germany persecuting Nazis, on the contrary they claimed that all government members and most of the population were communists and hence victims of the Third Reich. It was well known in East Germany that once influential Nazis had simply changed their former brown shirts into red shirts. It hence was not surprising that the new right wing party, the AFD had its origin in the eastern part of Germany and is most popular there at this moment.
Our nation certainly has a lot to answer for. Not only slavery, Jim Crow and its continuing aftermath. But the genoside and brutal repression perpetrated against the native Americans whose descendants continue to suffer from poverty and dysfunction. We, as a people have a lot to answer for. The best way to right past wrongs is to enable coming generations to gain access to the same privileges enjoyed by white people. But alas this is a politically unpopular choice. In our current environment the mere mention of diversity or equality or inclusion triggers a massive blowback. Just ask anyone currently working in a nonprofit seeking funding. Circling back to David Schindel’s excellent post, we in the USA are far behind our friends in Germany in coming to terms with our racist past and we seemingly doubled down in the 2024 election on our nation’s commitment to bigotry. We can only hope that eyes are beginning to open to our folly and that we can start to address the real problems and opportunities in front of us
Another excellent article that raises profound questions of honesty and integrity in America today.
Denial doesn’t erase the past or change the present, it merely prevents healing and correction.
Denial demands that blame be placed elsewhere, hidden from view. Honesty requires that we look and see.
The attempt to overthrow our election to remain in power on Jan. 6, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the surprise attack on Iran, without provocation, without even consulting Congress, and threats to destroy a whole civilization. And all the rest, the chaos, the corruption and incompetence.
Now we are witnessing an ongoing attack on the American Republic by the administration in Washington DC. Confronting this crisis requires honesty, integrity, and willingness to accept the situation just as it is, which is the first step in dealing with it.
There’s an elephant in the room.
Gaza has been leveled, the West Bank and Lebanon are on the way (also genocide), ironically by the offspring of the victims who relocated to and renamed their new home “Israel” after WWII. Those immigrants and their leaders forcibly displaced/murdered the natives of that land and it continues to this very day. The victims became the oppressors. Our government, using our tax dollars, is acting as the willing accomplice to the genocide being committed as we write.
Why aren’t the victims of the current genocide or their oppressors mentioned since it’s happening on our watch with our government’s participation? What have we done to prevent “never again” from happening again?
History is repeating itself – with our complicity, and we don’t seem to have learned a thing, which is even more disheartening than that it happened in the first place. These atrocities are on us. Our future generations will have to similarly grapple with how we could have allowed it, again.
This Holocaust survivor says it beautifully and compassionately.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Atv7kn6ks/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Thank you Mr. Schindel for highlighting the fact that America has work to do in coming to terms with its past. Most of us were raised with the myth of “land of the free and home of the brave” It’s not until we can be honest with ourselves that we can move forward in the spirit of reconciliation.