Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

This change in mood was driven in large measure by a wave of anti-Semitic vandalism at the end of the Fifties and by growing evidence that young Germans were utterly ignorant about the Third Reich: their parents had told them nothing and their teachers avoided the subject. Beginning in 1962, ten West German Länder announced that henceforth the history of the years 1933–1945—including the extermination of the Jews—would be a required subject in all schools. Konrad Adenauer’s initial post-war assumption was thus reversed: the health of German democracy now required that Nazism be remembered rather than forgotten. And attention was increasingly directed to genocide and ‘crimes against humanity’, rather than the ‘war crimes’ with which National Socialism had hitherto been primarily associated. A new generation was to be made aware of the nature—and the scale—of Nazi atrocities. No longer would popular magazines like Stern and Quick be able to downplay the significance of the camps, as they had done in the Fifties, or sing the praises of ‘good’ Nazis. A certain public awareness of the unacceptability, the indecency of the recent German past began to take hold.