Hannes Heer: Die Rückkehr der Täter. Eine Archäologie der Nazi- und der Nachkriegszeit

In the organizer's words:

Nazi Germany's bid for world power ended with total defeat and the loss of almost 40 million victims - 30 million Russians and Ukrainians, 6 million Poles, 2 million Yugoslavs, 500,000 Czechoslovaks. Among them were 5 million Jews, to which must be added 1.3 million murdered Jews from western and south-eastern Europe and 500,000 Sinti and Roma. As early as 1946, two papers were published on the question of guilt for these crimes: Karl Jaspers saw the political guilt of all Germans in having allowed "such a regime to arise in our country" in 1932/33. Hannah Arendt stated for the final period of the regime from 1940/41 onwards that the German people were in a state of "total complicity" and spoke of a "'national community' of crime". But post-war West German society negated this diagnosis and opted for a policy of amnesty and amnesia: the Federal Republic, founded in 1949, integrated the majority of Nazi elites and loyal civil servants into the new polity. At the same time, the Germans erased the crimes of the past from their collective memory: "By the mid-fifties," as historian Norbert Frei summarized, "a public consciousness had prevailed that attributed responsibility for the atrocities of the 'Third Reich' solely to Hitler and a small clique of major war criminals, while granting the Germans as a whole the status of politically seduced people who had ultimately been victimized by the war and its consequences."