From Nazism to Never Again How Germany Came to Terms With Its Past by Richard J Evans

Defeated regimes are not only swiftly removed from power but often immediately erased from memory also. When Adolf Hitler's "thousand-year German Reich" came crashing down in 1945 with the Allied victory in World War 2, reminders of the 12 years of its actual existence were hastily scrubbed abroad as Germans scrambled to adjust to life after Nazism. Rock swastikas were chiseled off the façades of buildings, Nazi insignia were taken down from flagpoles, and, in towns and cities across Germany, streets and squares named after Hitler reverted to their previous designations.

Meanwhile, millions of old Nazis hid or burned their uniforms, and in the final days of the war, the Gestapo set fire to incriminating records all over the country. Many of the almost fanatical Nazis did non survive: they either perished in the concluding conflagration or killed themselves, along with Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and many others, in one of the greatest waves of mass suicide in history, unable to imagine anything across the all-encompassing world of the Third Reich, the only thing that gave their lives purpose and meaning.

In stark contrast to the countries that the Nazis had conquered during the war, Germany saw no resistance to the Allied occupation. Every bit wartime gravestones eloquently testified, many Germans had fought and died "for Führer and Fatherland." But with the führer gone and the fatherland under enemy occupation, in that location seemed no bespeak in fighting on. German language cities had been reduced to rubble, and millions of Germans had died; every bit a result, everyone could see what Nazism had ultimately led to. The Allied occupation was vigilant and comprehensive, and it quickly suppressed even the slightest act of resistance. The Allies put in place an elaborate program of "denazification," war crimes trials, and "reeducation" measures that targeted not only former Nazi activists and beau travelers but too the militaristic beliefs and values that the Allies believed had allowed the Hitler authorities to gain back up and come up to power in the kickoff identify. In 1947, to symbolize this forced reinvention of German language political civilisation, the Centrolineal Control Quango, which governed Germany at the time, formally abolished the state of Prussia, which "from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany," the council claimed.

Germans by and large wanted to focus on the gigantic task of rebuilding and reconstruction and to forget the Nazi by and the crimes in which, to a greater or lesser extent, the vast bulk of them had been involved. The twelvemonth 1945, many of them declared, was "goose egg 60 minutes"—fourth dimension for a fresh start. However, politicians and intellectuals also reached back to older values in their quest to construct a new Federal republic of germany.

In the throes of the Cold War, the country divide into the capitalist Federal Republic in the West and the socialist Democratic Republic in the East. From 1952 onward, a fortified fence separated them; in 1961, the last remaining links were severed with the edifice of the Berlin Wall. On either side, rival visions of the new Federal republic of germany emerged. Konrad Adenauer, the leading politician in Due west Germany, sought to rebuild the state on the footing of "Western," Christian values, while Walter Ulbricht, the leading politician in the East, looked to the traditions of the German labor move, formed in the mid-nineteenth century under the inspiration of Karl Marx. The democratic traditions of the U.s.—and, to a lesser extent, those of France and the Great britain—exerted a powerful influence on West Deutschland, whereas the Russian Revolution, Leninism and Stalinism, and the social and political precedent of the Soviet Union provided the model for the socialist state in Due east Germany.

Yet postwar German efforts to forge a new identity could not merely bound across the Third Reich equally if it had not existed. Germans ultimately had to confront what the Hitler authorities had done in their name. The process of doing and then was halting and hesitant at starting time, and complicated by the country's division during the Cold State of war. In recent decades, however, Frg has accomplished an undeniably impressive feat: a collective acceptance of moral responsibility for the terrible crimes of its recent past. The country has given material expression to this acceptance by preserving concrete traces of the Nazi era and building fresh memorials to its victims. These memorials serve more than just a symbolic function: in the face of increasingly influential far-correct groups and parties that reject contemporary German norms of tolerance, seek an end to what they consider the "shaming" of Germans, and encourage pernicious forms of historical revisionism, these monuments to the past act as constant, unavoidable, and visceral reminders of the truth.

At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, October 2015.

Carlo Allegri / REUTERS

AFTER HITLER

In the aftermath of World War Ii, the victorious Allies moved swiftly to prevent any of the sites associated with Hitler and the Nazi leadership from becoming pilgrimage destinations for those who however adhered to Nazism. The Soviets blew upwardly the remains of the bombed-out Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The underground bunker where Hitler spent his final weeks was progressively demolished or filled in. Deliberately bearding and unremarkable new buildings were constructed around the site; today, if visitors manage to find the spot, all they will see is a children's playground and a parking lot.

Yet even when the concrete harm of the war had been repaired, past the 1960s, many reminders of the Nazi government persisted in almost German cities; quite a few of the physical remains of the Hitler government proved simply besides massive to dismantle easily. It was one thing to remove a concrete Nazi hawkeye and swastika from a public building, only quite another to demolish the huge stadium constructed for the rail-and-field events of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for case, or the grandiose and largely intact Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, originally designed past the Nazis as one of four terminals that would serve what they imagined would be the "World Capital letter of Germania" after their eventual victory. What is more than, both of those structures were just too useful to eliminate. A postwar role was even found for the concentration camps, the sites of the government's worst crimes, equally some of them were used to business firm Nazi prisoners awaiting trial or even to provide temporary shelter for German refugees and exiles from eastern Europe.

There was a limit, as well, to what the Allies could achieve in encouraging or forcing the Germans to come to terms with what they had done. Due west Germans, the vast majority of the formerly united country'due south population, seemed to suffer from a generalized historical and moral amnesia in the postwar years; on the rare occasions when they spoke about the Nazi dictatorship, information technology was usually to insist that they had known nil of its crimes and to complain that they had been unfairly victimized and humiliated by the denazification programs and the "victors' justice" of the war crimes trials. Many nonetheless seethed with anger at the Allies' carpet-bombing of High german towns and resented the expulsion of eleven one thousand thousand ethnic Germans by the postwar governments of Republic of hungary, Poland, Romania, and other eastern European countries. An opinion poll carried out in West Germany in 1949 revealed that half the population considered Nazism to be "a good idea, badly carried out." In the East, the country'due south new Stalinist leaders wanted the public to identify with the memory of the communist resistance to Nazism, which had been existent plenty, but which the government massively exaggerated. As a outcome, East Germans were non really forced to confront upwards to their involvement in the crimes of Nazism at all.

In the 1960s, however, things began to alter. The much-heralded "economic phenomenon" transformed W Germany into a prosperous and flourishing lodge. Germans reconciled themselves to democratic institutions because they were finally delivering economic success, as they had not managed to exercise under the ill-blighted Weimar Democracy in the 1920s and early 1930s. A new generation of young Germans, born during or after the war and brought up in a democratic society, began to need the truth almost the Nazi era from their parents and teachers. Historians, most notably at Munich's Found for Contemporary History, began to inquiry the Nazi flow seriously and critically, every bit the documents seized past the Allies for the Nuremberg prosecutions were returned to German archives. The West German authorities themselves launched numerous prosecutions for state of war crimes, culminating in the trials of Auschwitz camp personnel in 1963–65. Massive publicity was generated past the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, i of the primary administrators of what the Nazis had euphemistically chosen "the terminal solution of the Jewish problem in Europe." The German educatee rebellion of 1968 and the coming to power of a Social Democratic government led by Willy Brandt, who had spent the Nazi years in exile, further opened the way to a more honest confrontation with the Nazi past. The neo-Nazi National Democratic Party emerged in 1964 to challenge these developments and won a few seats in state parliaments but never managed to become the five percentage of the vote necessary to secure representation in the national legislature.

East Germans were not really forced to face up to their involvement in the crimes of Nazism.

These developments lent urgency to the question of what to practise with the remaining relics of the Third Reich. In Nuremberg, for example, there was the roughly 7-foursquare-mile site where the Nazi Party had held huge rallies, one of which was immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl's spooky 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Municipal officials converted the Luitpold Loonshit back into a public park, every bit it had been before Nazi times, and blew up the massive grandstand known as the Tribune of Honor, where 500 Nazi dignitaries had seated themselves to spotter the mass choreography of party rallies.

By the finish of the 1950s, nevertheless, some groups in the city began to contend in favor of preserving some of these buildings every bit sites of retention, rather than obliterating them—and with them, not unintentionally, the memory of Nuremberg's role in the Nazi motion. Although some members of the metropolis council were keen to dissociate the metropolis from its Nazi links by appealing to a more distant, medieval past, others thought this smacked of dishonesty and deception. At the Zeppelin Field, some other vast arena used for the Nuremberg rallies, the Allies had blown upwardly the huge swastika that topped the main grandstand, which had been constructed past Hitler'due south builder, Albert Speer. Just the buildings encircling the field were preserved, and the arena itself was used for sports practice, camping ground, and other open-air activities. Parts of an unfinished smashing hall became the home of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra. In view of the harmless nature of these new functions, it seemed wasteful to annihilate the structures that housed them. In 1994, the city quango decided to put upwards a permanent exhibition about the Nuremberg rallies and the surviving buildings in the complex, housed in a fly of the keen hall, placing the events in their historical context and explaining the function and impact of the rallies in winning over people to the Nazi movement.

The concentration camps went through a similar series of phases after the war, reflecting changing High german attitudes to the Nazi past. For example, in 1948, the British occupying forces returned the camp at Neuengamme, nearly Hamburg, dorsum to the Germans, who immediately converted information technology into a state penitentiary, removing the wooden huts and replacing them with a large new prison circuitous. The authorities pledged that the facility would be run in accordance with standard legal norms and penal practices, dissimilar its predecessor. Simply the fact that it incorporated the old concentration camp unsaid that the latter, likewise, had housed a population of criminals rather than the innocent victims of a genocidal government. Meanwhile, the culvert that camp inmates had been forced to build was leased to a commercial enterprise, as was a wing of the one-time camp'due south brick factory.

The few memorial sites that appeared on the grounds of the old concentration camps in West Federal republic of germany said little or nothing almost the camps themselves, instead paying homage to the victims with Christian monuments organized co-ordinate to religious denomination. Merely later groups formed by ex-prisoners pressured state authorities did they agree to open exhibition centers at the camps: at Dachau in 1955, Bergen-Belsen in 1966, and Neuengamme in 1981. But these exhibitions framed their messages in Cold War terms, decrying totalitarianism even so making little mention of the fact that many of the prisoners were held at that place because they were communists. The contrary was the case in the concentration campsite sites in E Frg, which focused on the (oftentimes overstated) resistance activities of communist inmates, with whom the visitors were urged to identify.

Soccer fans visiting the main grandstand at the onetime Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg, June 2006.

Toby Melville / REUTERS

THE TRUTH Will OUT

The landscape of memorialization had thus already changed considerably betwixt the immediate postwar years and the 1980s. But a far more dramatic transformation took place following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Federal republic of germany in 1989–90. This alter was accentuated past a 2nd generational shift, as the senior members of the German professions (medicine, law, education, then on), who had started their careers during the Nazi period, reached retirement age and relinquished power to younger colleagues, who had not been implicated in the crimes of the 3rd Reich. The 1990s saw a far-reaching reckoning with the past, equally new research, ofttimes accompanied by public controversy, exposed the role of doctors in the killing of mental patients; of academics in planning the extermination of the Jews, Slavic peoples, the Sinti, the Roma, and others regarded by the Nazis as inferior or dispensable; of civil servants in the implementation of the Holocaust; of judges and lawyers in the condemnation and execution of political offenders, "social deviants," gay men and women, and many others who roughshod afoul of discriminatory Nazi laws.

Such revelations were not uniformly accepted. At that place were public demonstrations against a touring exhibition that exposed the crimes of the German language war machine on the eastern front during Earth War 2, which included the massacre of Jews, the killing of civilians, the wanton destruction of enemy holding, and much more than as well. However, by the late 1990s, nearly people in Germany accepted the validity of these accounts, and a majority of Germans had come to believe that their state diameter the major responsibility for the extermination of some six million European Jews past the Nazis.

A moving ridge of memorials accompanied and encouraged this commonage embrace of the truth. In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig launched the Stolpersteine ("stumbling blocks") projection, in which small brass plaques the size of cobblestones were laid into the sidewalks of German towns and cities exterior the houses where the murdered victims of Nazism had lived until their arrest. The plaques conduct the names of the victims and the dates and places of their nativity and death. The project quickly became pop every bit a way of memorializing the dead. To appointment, more than than 56,000 Stolpersteine have been placed in urban locations in some 22 countries, the vast majority in Germany itself. Past placing them where people would walk over them, the creative person intended to remind passersby of the complicity of ordinary Germans in the violence. Although some towns however resist their placement, the number of these small but powerfully evocative memorials continues to grow.

By the tardily 1990s, most Germans believed that their state diameter the major responsibleness for the extermination of half-dozen 1000000 Jews by the Nazis.

Larger, more elaborate forms of memorialization took shape, besides. The sites of old concentration camps were turned into large-calibration memorials to the victims, with elaborate exhibitions that now took a more comprehensive arroyo to their discipline, replacing the partial view of the Common cold War years. The modern Neuengamme prison was closed in 2006. A supermarket built on the grounds of the Ravensbrück women's concentration military camp was never opened after widespread protests (although the building itself was not demolished). The campsite at Sachsenhausen, to the n of Berlin, in the former Due east Germany, was cleared of rubble, and a new exhibition center was opened there in 2001. And in 2005, perhaps the highest-profile of these projects opened: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located in the center of Germany's new capital, Berlin.

VICTORS AND VICTIMS

A shared sense of responsibility for the crimes of Nazism arguably aided the process of reunification, equally Germans had to observe a new source of national identity beyond the liberal democratic values or communist visions that had shaped the respective political cultures on either side of the Berlin Wall. Of class, at that place are still some who insist that the Germans were themselves victimized, to a higher place all by the Allied strategic bombing campaign that killed over one-half a million German language civilians during the war, or past the expulsion under cruel and often murderous conditions of some 11 million ethnic Germans from eastern Europe in 1944–46. But this remains a minority view, and significantly, it has not found expression in permanent memorials: indeed, a program to create a museum in Berlin to commemorate the victims of the expulsion had to be abandoned after protests lodged past the Polish government, in item.

At the aforementioned time, a number of memorials created during the Nazi period have not been removed and take aroused considerable controversy and fence. One example is the memorial to the soldiers of the 76th Infantry Regiment at the Dammtor train station, in Hamburg, a huge concrete cake commemorating the men of the regiment who vicious in Globe War I. High german veterans managed to frustrate Allied plans to demolish it, and and then information technology remains intact. There are many monuments to the World State of war I dead in Frg, most of them politically more or less neutral, only this i, erected nether the Nazi regime in 1936, is openly militaristic in grapheme, carrying the inscription, in Gothic lettering, "Germany must alive, fifty-fifty if nosotros must die."

For the Western powers in the Common cold War, this sentiment was not wholly unwelcome. But the sight of such an unmistakably Nazi memorial, which depicts 88 steel-helmeted infantrymen in relief marching round the side of the block, brandishing their weapons, aroused growing protests from the 1970s onward. The response of the Hamburg authorities was to committee an "antimonument" by the Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka, which since the mid-1980s has stood side by side to the chief block, commemorating the victims of war, and especially the 40,000 inhabitants of the city who lost their lives in the gigantic firestorm created by Allied bombing raids in 1943. Only partially completed (for financial reasons), it nonetheless poses an constructive criticism of the original memorial: war, it reminds viewers, is more often than not non the glorious and heroic enterprise claimed by the monument to the 76th Regiment.

At a demonstration organized by Pegida in Dresden, October 2015.

Hannibal Hanschke / REUTERS

TESTING TOLERANCE

Non surprisingly, an understanding of state of war'south costs has deeply affected gimmicky High german political culture. Since 1945, no European country has been more pacifistic in sentiment or more opposed to military intervention outside its ain borders. No land has placed more weight on stability and continuity, a preference expressed most succinctly by Adenauer's famous electoral slogan of the 1950s: "No experiments!" And no European land has been more welcoming to immigrants and refugees, including Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish Gastarbeiter ("guest workers") drawn by the economical boom of the 1960s and more a one thousand thousand refugees from the Centre E and elsewhere looking for a safer and better life who have flooded Germany in recent years.

Today, such values are being tested as never before. The refugee crunch has sparked an intense backlash against postwar norms of tolerance. Ii organizations in item accept emerged to object to the regime'due south policies in this expanse. Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Confronting the Islamization of the W) formed in 2022 in Dresden and has since held a series of mass street demonstrations against clearing, calling for "the preservation of High german civilization" and decrying "religious fanaticism." I Pegida speaker declared that Federal republic of germany had become "a Muslim garbage dump." Opinion surveys in 2022 showed that although somewhere betwixt a third and one-half of all Germans sympathized with the movement's complaints, the cracking majority declared themselves unwilling to join in the demonstrations, correctly considering Pegida's fears of a supposed overwhelming of High german and European culture by Muslim immigrants to be grossly exaggerated.

In the by three years, Pegida has largely given way to another new political movement, Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has emerged as a conventional political party and received the 3rd well-nigh votes in national elections final fall, gaining 94 of the 598 seats in the national legislature. Also as existence anti-Islam and anti-immigrant, the AfD denies human being influence on climatic change, wants to ban aforementioned-sexual practice marriage, supports what it calls traditional family values, opposes European integration, and repudiates what information technology sees as a culture of shame and guilt over the Nazi by in favor of a new sense of national pride. In January 2017, the leader of the ultra-right faction of the party, Björn Höcke, demanded a "180-degree about-face up in the politics of retentivity," a statement that angry controversy even within the AfD. And fifty-fifty the moderate faction'south leader, Frauke Petry, who has since left the political party, showed no reluctance to apply Nazi terms that have been more or less anathemas to German politicians since 1945, such as Volk, which ways "folk," "people," or "nation" just now has strong racist overtones, attributable to its usage by the Nazis.

The AfD enjoys its strongest support in the one-time Eastward Germany. Around 20 percentage or more of voters in the five states there cast their ballots for the party terminal fall, in contrast to between seven and 12 percent in the former W German language states. This reflects the legacy of the communist government'south failure to instill an acceptable culture of remembrance in its citizens; erstwhile Due east Germans don't seem to accept the same allergy to right-wing extremism that quondam West Germans accept. In a similar way, it'south in former East German cities, such as Dresden, that Pegida has staged its most successful demonstrations. Every bit the brief rise of the National Autonomous Political party in the tardily 1960s showed, when a coalition government of the ii main parties holds power, every bit they did then and every bit they did under Chancellor Angela Merkel until the 2022 elections, the lack of any adequate political opposition encourages the rise of right-wing protest movements in Federal republic of germany.

But neither Pegida nor the AfD has managed to disturb the German consensus about the Nazi past. All the other main political parties back up Merkel'south refugee policy and are fifty-fifty more committed to the dominant High german culture of memory. The threat of correct-wing populism in Frg has proved to exist far weaker than in a number of other European countries. The days when a genuinely neo-Nazi party could win significant numbers of votes are long over, and despite some flirtation with Nazi ideas and even acts of violence on its ultra-correct fringes, right-wing populism in Germany no longer has the Nazi ties it used to take. Indeed, echoes of Nazism on the fringes of the AfD have on occasion plunged the party into crisis and take led to the resignation of some senior members. The party has said that it wants to end Germany's sense of responsibility for the High german past, just with so many solid and prominent memorials to the victims of Nazism scattered all across the land, from the Stolpersteine to the concentration army camp memorials, it is hard to see how that would happen. Such physical reminders of the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis confront Germans every day, and while a small minority may not like this, they have no choice but to put up with it. When it comes to accepting the sins of the past, there is, in the end, no alternative for Germany.

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Source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/western-europe/2017-12-12/nazism-never-again

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