Reframing the Past: Justice, Guilt, and Consolidation in East and West Germany after Nazism

Abstract

Only a minority of Germans involved in Nazi crimes were prosecuted after the war, and the transnational history of trials is only beginning to be explored. Even less well understood are the ways in which those who were tainted by complicity reframed their personal life stories. Millions had been willing facilitators, witting beneficiaries, or passive (and perhaps unhappily helpless) witnesses of Nazi persecution; many had been actively involved in sustaining Nazi rule; perhaps a quarter of a million had personally killed Jewish civilians, and several million had direct knowledge of genocide. How did these people re-envision their own lives after Nazism? And how did they reinterpret their own former behaviors—their actions and inaction—in light of public confrontations with Nazi crimes and constructions of “perpetrators” in trials? Going beyond well-trodden debates about “overcoming the past,” this paper explores patterns of personal memory among East and West Germans after Nazism.

Forum: Theoretical Concepts of Shaping the Memory, edited by Sabina Ferhadbegović and Katerina Králová

“…58 This could, for example, denote individuals who were not actively committing war crimes but who, through their agency, participated in the daily operational running of the Nazi regime. 59 Victimhood thus suggests a moral hierarchy of implication where victims are the 'most innocent' and 'least guilty' whilst perpetrators are the 'most guilty' and 'least innocent'. This hierarchy is further supplemented by different types of crimes, where victimisation by genocide serves as the ultimate victimhood due to the perception of crimes against humanity as being of lesser severity.…”