Germany

[Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials. (photo: public domain.)]

> Overview
> Video
> Chronology
> Maps
> Additional Resources

Readings: 
  • Germany — An Overview

    Perhaps no other genocide in human history has been as well documented, analyzed and studied as the Holocaust—the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and millions of others by Hitler’s Nazi regime under the cover of a world war. How does a nation come to terms with these past atrocities? Who should be held responsible?

  • Nuremberg Trials Fact Sheet

    The international military tribunals, now commonly called the Nuremberg Trials, was a landmark event. For the first time in history, individuals were tried for "crimes against humanity" in an international court of law. This resource provides basic information regarding the trials.

  • Testimony from Nuremberg Prosecutors and Defendants

    This resource provides statements and testimonies from prosecutors and defendants in the Nuremberg trials.

  • A Critical Look at Nuremberg

    Former New York Times executive editor and columnist Max Frankel fled Nazi Germany as a child. In this reading, which quotes extensively from a column Frankel wrote in 1995 when tribunals were being created for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the writer reflects on the Nuremberg trials and their legacies.

  • Telling Right from Wrong

    The notion of forgiving another human being for horrible acts against you, your loved ones, or your community, is a complex one. This reading looks at the question of forgiveness. Can such horror truly be forgiven? How important is it for people who committed such acts to ask for forgiveness, and for the victims (or their loved ones) to forgive, so that a society might heal, rebuild, and prevent atrocities from happening again?

  • Making Good Again

    After the war, the Allies had to deal not only with questions of guilt and innocence but also with questions of restitution. What claims did the victims have on the perpetrators? On Germany itself?

  • "Putting the past behind us"

    "Collective amnesia" began to form in Europe after World War II. In this reading, Historian Tony Judt argues that "Without such collective amnesia, Europe's astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible."

  • Surrendering Freedom, Confronting the Past

    In his book, They Thought They Were Free, American journalist Milton Mayer uses interviews with ten "typical" Germans who lived under the Third Reich during the 1930s and 40s, to hypothesize on why they were not only willing members of the Nazi party, but even embraced racist values and policies. And in Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's 1967 book, The Inability to Mourn, the husband and wife psychoanalysts believed that Germany had not yet truly confronted this painful history.

  • Tearing Down the Berlin Wall: Finding Hope in Transition

    In 1961 the East German government, under the communist rule of the Soviet Union, erected a wall through Berlin that separated East Germany from West Germany. For 28 years the wall stood as both a physical barrier between East and West Germans, as well as a powerful Cold War symbol of oppressive government rule. When the wall came down in 1989, it marked a major transition in the decades-long struggle between East and West.

  • “What People Do When Words Fail Them”: Willy Brandt’s Silent Apology

    On December 7, 1970, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt traveled to Warsaw, Poland and dropped to his knees before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. Many in Poland and Germany were deeply moved by this famous gesture of repentance and apology. This reading explores some of the issues and questions around what it means to apologize.

  • Is the Past Ever the Past?

    Nobel-prize winning author Guenter Grass recently admitted that as a youth he participated in the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Hitler’s SS paramilitary force. Does this information change our perceptions of his work and his accomplishments? Should it? This reading explores these questions.

  • Proud to be German

    The 2006 World Cup provided an opportunity that many people did not consider: it gave Germany a chance to re-present itself, not only as a unified country, but as one that was proudly democratic, tolerant and multicultural. A country that was proud to be.

  • East Germany and “The Lives of Others”

    "The Lives of Others" is an Academy Award winning film about East Germany in the 1980s. The film shows how the East German secret police force, the Stasi, used spying, imprisonment and interrogation in an attempt to have control over the lives of its citizens. The movie is one of the first to publicly confront this complex and painful history.