Remembrance of the Second World War in Germany
In Germany, no specific memorial event is associated with Second World War remembrance. Political, social and historiographic changes over the last 80 years nevertheless offer an insight into commemorative practices linked to this remembrance, accounts the general public would give of the war or the resources mobilised by the State to represent the past over time.
A military parade to celebrate the end of the war in Berlin? Soldiers marching in step, roaring tanks and demonstrations of new weapons systems on the Unter den Linden were not part of Second World War remembrance in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). And not only because this revived memory was of the defeated. Such an act of remembrance is unthinkable in Germany because the popular memory of the war is unstable. The difference between history and remembrance as the interpretation of the past is particularly visible in the changing meaning of the war in the FRG. In the pluralist society that emerged after 1945/49 in West Germany, the place of the Second World War in the popular imagination has been in a constant state of flux.
Between victim remembrance and heroic accounts
Demilitarisation, denazification and re-education: these were the objectives of the policies put in place by the Allied military governments following the surrender of the Wehrmacht on 8 May 1945 and up until the establishment of the two German States in 1949. The “main war criminals” had to answer for their crimes before the International Criminal Court in Nuremberg, in 1945-46. The press reported on the atrocities committed during the biggest military conflict of the contemporary era. For a brief period, post-war society, tired of the conflict, took a critical view of the defeat and the responsibility of the generals. Some began to establish the myth of a “clean” Wehrmacht: the regular German soldiers, they said, had nothing to do with the crimes of the SS. Meanwhile, German society regarded itself as a victim.
This rhetoric contrasted with the official heroic narrative of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), according to which the war was a consequence of fascism supported by monopolistic capitalism, from which the Germans had been liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. As if there had been a gigantic exchange of populations, there now lived in the socialist East of the country the anti-fascist Germans, who could regard themselves as being on the side of the victors, while the West Germans continued to live under the warmongering fascist yoke. The Communist Resistance constituted the nerve centre of this remembrance policy; Nazi racial policy did not play a significant role.
From the late 1950s onwards, representations and attitudes towards the war changed. The politicisation of public opinion, the rearmament of 1955-56 and the change of generation created for the Germans a radically new setting for remembrance of the war, in both form and substance.
War memorials are one example. In the 1950s, nearly all localities had a war memorial, where once a year survivors celebrated the “Day of Remembrance”, in memory of the dead of the two world wars. Meanwhile, monuments that recalled the consequences of war – captivity, exodus and expulsion – or the division of Germany, as well as the East German uprising of 17 June 1953, were erected. But since 1967, with the inauguration of the “Friedland memorial” by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, there has for the first time been a central commemorative monument to the war and its consequences.
Towards an acknowledgment of Wehrmacht responsibility
During the 1960s, many people spoke out to present the Second World War as a specifically National Socialist war, making the Wehrmacht a military instrument of the Hitler regime. The emergence of new memorials to the victims of Nazi terror and the transformation of former concentration camps into remembrance sites were, in the mid-1960s, the expression and consequence of this shift in meaning. Unlike in many countries, there was no central memorial to the soldiers killed at the front. The construction of a national memorial came up against the division of Germany and foundered. Instead, people had to be content with decentralised commemorations and war memorials. The omnipresent remembrance wording – “To the victims of war and oppression” – were deliberately ambivalent, referring as much to the Nazi dictatorship as to the regime of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the GDR.
Besides the victims of the Third Reich, more and more was heard about the criminals. They came under the spotlight in the late 1950s and early 1960s, amid high-profile court cases. Ten members of the SD (the intelligence agency of the SS), the Gestapo and the police, who had murdered over 5 500 Jews in 1941, were brought to trial in 1958. The “Ulm Einsatzkommando Trial” made the mass murder committed by the SD and Sicherheitspolizei (security police, comprising the Gestapo and Kripo, the criminal police) in Eastern Europe into a topic of discussion, popularised by the growing influence of the media. The resumption of the legal processing of the Nazi period was also marked by two new trials: that of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961-62, and those of Auschwitz, in Frankfurt, between 1963 and 1965. Both were a reminder that the war had provided the conditions for the occupation of vast areas of Europe and the mass crimes committed there. The media no longer referred to the Germans as victims, but as culprits.
View of the courtroom during screening of the documentary on the death and mistreatment of concentration-camp prisoners, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Jerusalem, 10 June 1961. © Ullstein Bild / Roger-Viollet
When the Western Allies returned the Wehrmacht archives, which had fallen into their hands, historians began to study the National Socialist regime and the role the army had played during the war. A younger generation of historians, in particular, who had served during the war as auxiliaries in the Flak (German anti-aircraft defences), used the media to raise the general public’s awareness. Instead of drawing a line under the chapter 1933-1945, they wanted to confront West Germans with their wartime past and the policy of extermination.
In the 1960s and 70s, at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (institute of contemporary history) in Munich and the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (military history research office – MGFA) in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, pioneering research was done on the policy of occupation, the war of annihilation in Eastern and Southern Europe, the indoctrination of the Wehrmacht, its collaboration with the SS and the responsibility it bears for the death of three million Soviet prisoners of war. In 1979, the MGFA published a series of ten books on the theme “The German Reich and the Second World War”. From the point of view of the experts, the criminal nature of the war waged by the Wehrmacht had been established.
Remembrance of the Holocaust inherent to remembrance of the war
These findings, however, did not lead to total public awareness within German society until at least the second half of the 1980s. But the impact of the American mini-series Holocaust, broadcast on German television in 1979, did mark the beginning of a mind shift. Never had the mass killings of European Jews during the war prompted so much discussion among the general public and within households. This new link between the war and the Holocaust, which remains immutable to this day, was reinforced in the 1980s and 90s by the mass media, on the one hand, and by the staging of victim remembrance by the State, on the other.
But across broad sectors of West German society, particularly within the military, another, untarnished image of the Wehrmacht has gone on being defended. The concept of war and the (special) role of the military in State and society was too persistent: many considered the armed forces to be a unique profession that had little to do with the State or social order. The very act of naming barracks after generals of the Wehrmacht was a symbolic form of representation that also indicated to the civilian population an outmoded conception of “tradition”, in which the Bundeswehr (the German federal armed forces) was a continuation of the Wehrmacht. Although the famous decrees on “tradition”, under defence ministers Kai-Uwe von Hassel (CDU) in 1965, and in particular Hans Apel (SPD) in 1982, sought to draw a dividing line with the army of the Nazi period, in practice they changed little.
In 1982, the MGFA launched the historic touring exhibition Aufstand des Gewissens (Revolt of the Conscience), which aimed to establish military resistance – in particular, the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944 – as the only possible cornerstone of Bundeswehr tradition in that period, thus inevitably introducing the latest research findings on the criminal war into the barracks and the public arena. But instead of taking a critical view of the role of the Wehrmacht, many active and inactive service personnel latched onto the combatants’ myth. Soldiers as persecutors long played a role in the image of the history of the federal army. On the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, President Richard von Weizsäcker interpreted 8 May 1945 as a “day of liberation”. He thus advocated an interpretation whereby the Allied victory constituted retrospectively the precondition for National Socialism to be overcome, paving the way for the advent of an effective democracy. In this, he was ahead of the game, since most people continued, even post-1985, to associate the end of the war with military defeat, and therefore saw no reason to celebrate it.
The Second World War and the Wehrmacht nevertheless became a burning issue of social self-knowledge, namely due to a touring exhibition by the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg Institute for Social Research), launched in 1995. Its title was provocative – “The crimes of the Wehrmacht between 1941 and 1944” – at a time when the myth of a “clean” Wehrmacht persisted. It had a strong resonance, particularly since it raised the highly personal question of the responsibility of people’s parents and grandparents.
From “communicative memory” to “cultural memory”
After the turn of the millennium, however, the Germans’ place as “victims” came to the forefront once more. In his 2002 bestseller, The Fire, journalist Jörg Friedrich described in minute detail the destruction of the German cities by the Allies, although he failed to provide the necessary contextualisation. The media immediately seized on the subject. Mini-series like Dresden (2006) and Hiver 1945 (2007) showed the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. One of the most expensive productions was the three-part Generation War, which came out in 2013 and was a resounding success overseas. The mini-series, which tells the story of five friends who meet in 1941 in Berlin, was screened for the 70th anniversary of the end of the war in 2015. Its melodramatic blend of historical authenticity and everyday emotions appealed to the public. This had the merit of arousing an interest in history and making people ask themselves: what would I have done?
Poster for the mini-series Generation War. © 2013 Teamworx/ZDF
Today, young people have practically no family connection with the period prior to 1945. The results of a survey by Stern magazine for the 65th anniversary of the end of the war came as something as a shock: nearly half of German citizens (45%) could not say what happened on 8 May 1945 in Germany. The uncertainty was particularly widespread among young people: more than two-thirds (68%) of 18 to 29-year-olds had no idea that the Wehrmacht had surrendered unconditionally in May. The war is no longer a subject of discussion for large sectors of the population. It has gone from the communicative memory of contemporaries to the narrative form of remembrance which Aleida and Jan Assmann have called “cultural memory”.
These changing times require us to give new forms and new content to Second World War remembrance, after the centenary of the First World War and, in 2019-20, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification dominated the remembrance landscape. Three solutions are available to us. First, a multi-perspective approach to the subject of the Second World War can re-situate our “own” victims, in contrast to the 1950s, within a more complex vision of the war that reflects above all its criminal character. Second, the memories of the victims and the perpetrators of Nazi war crimes are connected. a potentially problematic phenomenon since German people identify more with the victims and would prefer to preserve only their memory. Third, it would be judicious to internationalise and Europeanise the memory of the years 1939 to 1945. Thirty years on from the end of the Cold War, countries should no longer continue to treat the past as if it were their “own”, as if the extent of the collective memory were circumscribed by national borders. One thing is for sure: the Second World War’s place in German remembrance culture remains uncertain.
Text translated from the German