(Der Spiegel-Germany) David Crossland - Germany's Nazi past has remained a taboo subject in millions of family homes - with children and grandchildren declining to press their elders on what they did in the war. At least 20 to 25 million Germans knew about the Holocaust while it was happening, and some 10 million fought on the Eastern Front in a war of annihilation that targeted civilians from the start. That, says German historian Moritz Pfeiffer, makes the genocide and the crimes against humanity a part of family history. Time is running out. The answer to how a cultured, civilized nation stooped so low lies in the minds of the dying Third Reich generation, many of whom are ready and willing to talk at the end of their lives, says Pfeiffer, 29, a historian at a museum on the SS at Wewelsburg Castle who has just completed an unprecedented research project based on his own family. "Towards the end of one's life the distance to the events is so great that people are ready to give testimony....Now the problem is that no one is listening to that generation anymore." In My Grandfather in the War 1939-1945, Pfeiffer juxtaposed his findings with context from up-to-date historical research on the period to shed new light on the generation that unquestioningly followed Hitler, failed to own up to its guilt in the immediate aftermath of the war and, more than six decades on, remains unable to express personal remorse for the civilian casualties of Hitler's war of aggression, let alone for the Holocaust.
2012-04-12 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive