Yet we have not always approached the history of nazism in this way. Indeed, the predominantly moral perspective from which Hitler and the Germany he created are currently viewed is a relatively recent one. For a long time after the end of the war he launched in September 1939 and lost five and a half years later, Hitler was a comparatively neglected topic for historians, as were the Nazi movement and the Nazi state. Evidence was piled up for the Nuremberg trials, but the focus was very much on “war crimes”, the years before 1939 were more or less out of the visual range of the prosecutors, and the death camps at Treblinka, Auschwitz and elsewhere were not the central point of the investigation.
The trials were quickly forgotten, at least for the time being. In Germany, a kind of collective amnesia followed, undermined only by resentment at the trials themselves, the intrusive process of “denazification”, the brutal expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of the war and the mass bombing of German cities in its later stages. In the countries formerly occupied by Nazi Germany, such as France, people wanted to remember the resistance. In the Eastern bloc, communist governments celebrated (and exaggerated) the role of communist resisters but preferred to try to integrate ex-Nazis into the new society they were building rather than come to a reckoning with their crimes. In Britain, people remembered the war, the stoicism of the population during the blitz and the achievements of the British armed forces, but not much besides.
It wasn’t until the late 1960s that things began to change. For Germans, the key question was how and why the Nazis had come to power. The Federal Republic, with its capital in the Rhenish university town of Bonn, had gained legitimacy through the “economic miracle” of the 1950s, but was still not much older than Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic, had been when it had given way to Hitler’s Third Reich. People asked nervously “Is Bonn Weimar?” Political scientists and historians examined the reasons for the vulnerability of Weimar’s institutions and found, reassuringly, that the answer was “No”.
- Excerpts from The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J Evans
The trials were quickly forgotten, at least for the time being. In Germany, a kind of collective amnesia followed, undermined only by resentment at the trials themselves, the intrusive process of “denazification”, the brutal expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of the war and the mass bombing of German cities in its later stages. In the countries formerly occupied by Nazi Germany, such as France, people wanted to remember the resistance. In the Eastern bloc, communist governments celebrated (and exaggerated) the role of communist resisters but preferred to try to integrate ex-Nazis into the new society they were building rather than come to a reckoning with their crimes. In Britain, people remembered the war, the stoicism of the population during the blitz and the achievements of the British armed forces, but not much besides.
It wasn’t until the late 1960s that things began to change. For Germans, the key question was how and why the Nazis had come to power. The Federal Republic, with its capital in the Rhenish university town of Bonn, had gained legitimacy through the “economic miracle” of the 1950s, but was still not much older than Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic, had been when it had given way to Hitler’s Third Reich. People asked nervously “Is Bonn Weimar?” Political scientists and historians examined the reasons for the vulnerability of Weimar’s institutions and found, reassuringly, that the answer was “No”.
- Excerpts from The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J Evans
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