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Search for home truths continues, 75 years on

— PHOTO: AP

(From left) German President Horst Koehler, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Harald Ringstorff, president of the German Bundesrat, during a commemoration for the victims of the Nazi era in Berlin on January 25.

Painstaking, persistent and anything but remorseless, Germany’s focus on its Nazi past never seems to slacken. As it marked the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power last week, the emphasis was on the fact that he became Chancellor with the full backing of the Constitution. This was no putsch, but the legal transfer of authority to the leader of the party that did best in a general election.

Hitler later won the support of the country’s millions of unemployed but, as the news magazine Der Spiegel pointed out, most jobless Germans voted communist in the November 1932 election. It was the middle class that put the Nazis in power, and many of its voters were Protestant Christians.

The point also struck me forcefully when I visited a recent exhibition in the towering brick aisles of the north German cathedral of Schwerin. Blown-up pictures and short life histories of a couple of dozen local vicars and parishioners were displayed on screens, with recordings of their voices and brief reminiscences by their friends. It was a modest testament to modest people, yet one of considerable importance. The men and women in this exhibition all played a special role in the Nazi period, a few as opponents, but most as Christian collaborators with Hitler’s anti-semitic discrimination and atrocities.

Germany’s record in coming to terms with its Nazi past has been remarkably good. In the years since Hitler’s defeat, the process of uncovering who did what has had impressive results, and by now is pretty much complete — or so, like most people, I used to believe. In the immediate post-war period, de-Nazification was driven by the victors. Senior Nazis were convicted by foreign judges at Nuremburg. Revanchist propaganda was banned and textbooks changed.

But most of the many lower-level officials who had loyally served the Nazis kept their jobs. The Western allies were careful not to impose on Germans the same kind of humiliation that had followed the First World War.

More monuments to the victims of the Holocaust have been built in recent years. Remembering victims is only part of the story. What about remembering the guilty? Why did the backbone of the country’s middle class accept dictatorship so readily? How did Germany’s doctors, lawyers, diplomats and civil servants behave? Why have the professions not yet opened their archives and done detailed research on how their leaders and members went along with Hitler’s repression? Above all, what happened to the conscience of the Lutherans, Germany’s largest church? So the last pages of Germany’s past have not yet been revealed. But now that the individuals themselves have all died, it ought to be easier to research the truth. That is why I found the exhibition in Schwerin so fascinating. It was the first officially sanctioned attempt by the Lutherans — as yet confined to Hamburg and Mecklenburg among the German Lander — to name names. The search for home truths is always hard, but Germany’s new generations need to keep on pushing. Don’t congratulate them too fast. The job is not yet done.

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