The post-Holocaust legacy for Germany has been the central problem of the Federal Republic since its founding in 1949 and one of the central problems of the German Democratic Republic until 1990. The eighty years between the end of the war and the present have produced a continuous and substantial German engagement with the legacy of the Nazi regime that has shaped the constitutional, legal, political, educational, cultural and foreign-policy frameworks of both German states and of the unified Germany since 1990. The engagement is widely treated, in the comparative literature on national reckoning with mass atrocity, as the most substantial that any state has conducted with its own history of state crime.
The first phase: 1945 to the late 1950s
The immediate post-war engagement was conducted under Allied occupation and was substantially shaped by Allied policy. The Nuremberg trials of 1945 to 1949, the Allied de-Nazification programme that processed approximately 13 million Germans through registration questionnaires and tribunals, the prohibition of the Nazi Party and its successor organisations, and the substantial removal of Nazi officials from public office in the immediate post-war years constituted the formal legal and administrative reckoning. The deeper engagement with what had happened was substantially deferred. The historian Hermann Lübbe characterised the 1950s as a period of “communicative silence”: the events were known but not publicly discussed.
The Luxembourg Agreement of 1952, in which West Germany agreed to pay reparations to Israel and to Jewish survivors, was an important acknowledgement of responsibility but coexisted with the broader culture of silence. The first phase ended in the late 1950s. The 1959 Ulm Einsatzkommando trial, which prosecuted ten members of an Einsatzgruppe for the killings on the Lithuanian-German border in 1941, attracted substantial public attention and led to the establishment in 1958 of the Central Office for the Prosecution of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen) at Ludwigsburg, which has continued to investigate Nazi crimes to the present.
The second phase: 1960s to 1980s
The second phase was driven by the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, which brought substantial public attention to the wider Holocaust history and produced extensive German press coverage; the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963 to 1965, which prosecuted twenty-two former Auschwitz personnel and were extensively reported in West Germany; and the 1968 student movement, which substantially re-framed the post-war German political conversation around the parents’ generation’s complicity in the regime. The 1979 broadcast of the NBC television series Holocaust in West Germany, which was watched by around half the West German adult population, was the wider public moment that shifted the engagement from the academic and political into the everyday.
The Federal Republic’s institutional infrastructure for the engagement was built substantially in this period. The Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung), established 1952, expanded substantially. The state-level Landeszentralen were established. The historians’ professional engagement with the period intensified, producing the substantial post-war German Holocaust historiography (Mommsen, Broszat, Krausnick, Hilberg in his German reception). The educational reforms of the 1970s integrated the Nazi period into the school curricula at substantial depth.
The third phase: late 1980s to the present
The third phase was the period of substantial public memorialisation and of the historians’ debate (the Historikerstreit) of 1986 to 1987. The Historikerstreit, between Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber on one side and Jürgen Habermas, Hans Mommsen and others on the other, addressed the question whether the Holocaust was uniquely German and uniquely terrible or comparable to the Stalinist crimes. The debate was conducted in the major German newspapers over months and produced a clarification of the German national position on the question that has substantially held since.
The unification of 1990 brought the East German legacy into the Federal Republic’s framework. The German Democratic Republic had treated the Nazi crimes principally as crimes of capitalism rather than of the German nation; the post-1990 reckoning required substantial revision of East German historiography and educational practice. The construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (opened 2005), the establishment of multiple federal memorials to other Nazi victim groups (homosexuals 2008, Sinti and Roma 2012, T4 victims 2014), and the substantial expansion of Holocaust education in unified German schools, constitute the principal physical expressions of the third phase.
The continuing work
The German engagement with the Holocaust has continued continuously since 1945 and is in 2026 the most institutionally developed national engagement of any country with its own history of state crime. Holocaust denial is a criminal offence under the Volksverhetzung statute. Holocaust education is mandatory in all German schools. The Federal Office for Civic Education and its state counterparts produce substantial educational and public materials. The federal president addresses the Bundestag on 27 January each year. State visits by foreign leaders routinely include visits to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald memorials.
The engagement is, however, not finished and is not, on the available evidence, becoming less contested. The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) since 2013, with its substantial parliamentary representation and its leadership figures’ repeated minimising statements about the Nazi period, has produced renewed public argument about whether the eighty-year engagement has succeeded in producing a settled national consciousness or whether the substantial minority that supports the AfD’s positions reflects a continuing latent revisionism. The historians who have written most carefully on the question (Aleida and Jan Assmann, Norbert Frei, Habbo Knoch, Christoph Cornelißen) have been clear that the engagement is a continuing work rather than a completed one.
See also
- Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Berlin
- The Einsatzgruppen
- Adolf Eichmann
- People with Disabilities and the T4 Programme
- The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
- Adolf Hitler
- Heinrich Himmler
Sources
- Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, Columbia University Press, 2002
- Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, Harvard University Press, 1997
- Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, Fordham University Press, 2016
- Hermann Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewusstsein”, in Historische Zeitschrift, vol 236, 1983
- Saul Friedländer, Jürgen Habermas, Klaus Hildebrand and others, Historikerstreit, Piper, 1987 (the collected key essays of the debate)
- Eric Langenbacher and Yossi Shain (eds), Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations, Georgetown University Press, 2010
- Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, https://www.bpb.de
- Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, https://www.stiftung-evz.de