This dissonant dualism of German guilt – the crimes committed against the Jews and the greater crime to have lost the war – became more, not less, entrenched in the post-war years. Despite the markedly different ideological approaches to ‘re-education’ pursued by the occupying powers, by the time the Third Reich’s three successor states had been founded in 1949 in all of them a sense of German victimhood came to overshadow any sense of shared responsibility for the suffering of Germany’s victims. Mass death, homelessness, expulsion and hunger rendered defeat and the first years of occupation
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