With the “denazification” (1946–51), an unprecedented yet half-hearted attempt was made to rid German society of any remnants of National Socialist ideology and expel former Nazis from positions of power. There was always suspicion that it was largely a pro forma activity. It was seen as something superficially imposed by the Allied forces, who had a strong interest in returning Germany to “normality” as a bulwark against the communist Eastern bloc, rather than as a phase of true reeducation and acceptance of responsibility for past crimes. Older Germans commonly referred to the denazification documents as Persilscheine, making reference to a popular washing powder (Persil) famous for its exceptional “whitewashing” capacity and ability to produce superior “cleanliness” (Nowak 2012). Appalled that only 0.5 percent of all six million denazification proceedings resulted in a “guilty” or “very guilty” verdict, writer and publicist Ralph Giordano (1987, 90) denounced the widespread denials of the war generation’s support for Hitler as their “second guilt” (Zweite Schuld). As a teenager I often asked myself where the tens of thousands of people who had been involved in the deportation and murder of the Jews had gone. No one ever spoke of them. No one seemed to know anyone, let alone be related to anyone, who had taken part.
While Giordano condemns these silences and the desire to forget as an attempt to escape uncomfortable memories and confrontational questions, Connerton puts forward a more accepting view. He refers to early postwar Germany as an example of “prescriptive forgetting” (Connerton 2008, 61–62). Connerton argues that in order to restore cohesion to civil society and to rebuild the legitimacy of the new West German state, the Adenauer government needed to turn the persecution and punishment of convicted Nazis into a forgotten issue by the early 1950s.
It was the generation of the Kriegsenkel’s grandparents, a generation who had actively participated in the war and had generally supported the Hitler regime, that was affected by the sociopolitical environment of the late 1940s and 1950s, with its official lip service to the acceptance of responsibility for the war on the one hand and the strong desire to forget the past and one’s involvement on the other. Their unwillingness to confront the past later became an issue of intense conflict with the next generation. On a political level, there was the protest movement of 1968. On a familial level, there was tension between the war generation and their children. What makes this situation (and the transgenerational dynamic) even more complex is the fact that this unresolved relationship with the Nazi crimes was paired with what Connerton (2008, 67) calls “humiliated silence.” The Allied air raids of German cities had left as many as six hundred thousand civilians dead and more than eight hundred thousand wounded. More than five million German soldiers were killed before the shooting stopped, over half of them on the eastern front (Moeller 2005). Around twelve to fifteen million ethnic Germans either were expelled or had left their homes in Eastern Europe to escape the advancing Red Army in spring 1945. As many as two million are believed to have died from violence, starvation, and disease in the process (Naimark 2010). Connerton (2008, 68) expresses surprise that, for many of the postwar years, almost no one in Germany publicly talked about the bombardment and destruction of German cities and that “a colossal collective experience was followed by half a century of silence.” He sees the “economic miracle” and the quick reconstruction of the country as a covering up of the past. It concealed all visible signs of not only physical but also emotional destruction, an attempted effacement of painful and shameful memories. Such silencing, Connerton concludes, can be seen as a type of repression, but it may at the same time be an essential survival strategy.
Although public speeches in the postwar period mentioned to some extent the fate of the expellees and the prisoners of war, there was little focus on the mental and physical difficulties of the larger civilian population. Most families were left to their own devices to cope with fathers and grandfathers who had returned physically and psychologically damaged or to grieve for those who had not returned at all.1 Millions of Germans had to privately come to terms with the loss of their homes and livelihoods in the Eastern European countries in the wake of the German defeat. Victims of rape and other forms of violence had to deal with the loss of their physical and emotional health on their own. While hard to fathom from today’s standpoint, this solitary suffering was the norm at the time—across the globe. It was only at the end of the 1980s that psychological support started to be provided in the context of humanitarian aid, immediately treating populations traumatized by war and mass loss (Goltermann 2017).
From a moral standpoint, “humiliated silence” and a reluctance to publicly emphasize German wartime suffering were undoubtedly the only attitudes to appropriately show respect for the victims of the Nazis. From a psychological perspective, though, the picture looks different. Researchers and mental health practitioners have pointed to the importance of public recognition to help populations deal with the traumatic consequences of war, violence, and mass loss. French psychologist Erika Apfelbaum (quoted in Wajnryb 2001, 72) explains that individuals need to construct themselves in a way that links personal and collective memory. She highlights (in the context of the Holocaust) that public silencing is harmful for the individual as it delegitimizes personal history. Historian Catherine Merridale (1999, 1996) conducted interviews in countries of the former Soviet Union, where the communist regime had systematically suppressed public mention of the massive loss of human life during the Stalin era. Although the Russians she interviewed would share their stories of suffering and hardship with family and friends, they had no way of processing their losses in the context of society at large.
According to psychologist Yael Danieli (1998, 7), an individual’s identity involves a complex interplay of multiple spheres or systems, including the biological and intrapsychic; the interpersonal, familial, social, and communal; the ethnic and cultural; the religious and spiritual; and the political, national, and international. For a trauma to be integrated, it must be addressed in all the affected systems, including on the level of society. Danieli stresses the importance of public acknowledgment of trauma for the healing process. She speaks for Holocaust survivors and other victims of gross human rights violations rather than for the much more morally complex situation of a perpetrator country, such as Germany in World War II. On a strictly psychological level, the argument is still applicable. In the context of the Vietnam veterans (also at least partly considered “perpetrators”), for example, it was often pointed out that negative public opinion vis-à-vis the US engagement in the war and a lack of recognition hindered the soldiers’ psychological adaptation after their homecoming and contributed to their ongoing mental health issues (see for example Lifton 1973).
From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s: The Need to “Master the Past,” the Centrality of Holocaust Memory, and the Exclusion of Wartime Suffering
With a new generation coming of age in the 1960s, different accounts of the Third Reich and World War II appeared. Younger historians no longer attributed the war to a small group of Nazis acting alone but to a National Socialist ideology that had