WHy did the common germans keep quite to the atrocities committed by Hitler
Answers
In Berlin, the former seat of Nazi Germany, a scandal is currently brewing that has nothing to do with modern Germany and everything to do with the nation's Nazi past. The brouhaha is over how May 8, 1945, the day Nazi Germany capitulated, should be remembered. Local officials of a wealthy Berlin district just passed a motion stating that victims of Nazi oppression are not the only ones who should be memorialized and honored. Regular German soldiers and civilians who were killed as well as women who were raped by the advancing Soviet army, too, should be remembered, they declared.
The resolution has provoked harsh criticism, especially after one lawyer and local politician said that in some matters, he can't help but agree with one of the nation's neo-Nazi parties. Critics charge that lumping all victims together, and going so far as to turn war criminals into victims, dangerously blurs the question of guilt and responsibility for the war.
The message of the debate is clear: For us Germans, whether we like it or not, the past is always present. One only has to take a look at a German bookshop these days. The shelves are overflowing with new publications on every imaginable aspect of the Nazi period. Newspapers and TV channels are running dozens of documentaries on World War II. The conflict cost about 60 million lives and obviously it still haunts us.
Every German harbors a family war story
Probably the most important reason for this ongoing presence of the Nazi past is quite personal. The former Wehrmacht soldiers who fought in the war are now almost all in their eighties. Still, almost every single German family harbors a complicated personal war history, some more bitter than others.
Part of mine, for instance, is that my Austrian grandfather committed suicide in the spring of 1945. He had been a simple tailor, churning out Nazi uniforms, but never putting one on himself or fighting. Still, he had been a Nazi party member and feared revenge from the advancing Soviet troops.
As a teenager in the late 1960s, I stumbled upon a box of family photos containing a portrait of a handsome, dark-haired young man in a black jacket with skulls on the collar, the uniform of Hitler's elite SS division. My grandmother revealed to me that the man in the photo was Willy, her beloved little brother. Willy joined the illegal Austrian branch of the Nazi party in the 1930s, and was then imprisoned. He escaped and went to Germany, where he joined the SS.
He served at the Dachau concentration camp and my grandmother remembered how he returned home for a holiday saying he had seen terrible things which he could not talk about but which made him despise National Socialism. Willy then volunteered for the eastern front and was shot in 1941, during the first week of the Russian campaign.
My father, recruited late in the war because of his young age, served as an anti-aircraft gunner in southwest Germany and was lucky not to have been on duty on the day in early 1945 when Allied bombers attacked the dam his unit was protecting. Several of his fellow soldiers died. He was 16 years old at the time.
My wife's parents tell a harrowing tale of fleeing from advancing Soviet troops in 1945. They were only children, but leaving behind their homes and everything they knew was a traumatic experience that deeply influenced their personalities and lives. Of course, we got away lightly compared to the fate of Jewish-German families, but still, the war lingers in almost every German home.