Once the evidence which proved that ordinary German people had either participated in – or silently tolerated – the horrors of the Nazi state became known, it was no longer a matter of merely a few guilty individuals – a whole nation stood accused of the atrocities of the Third Reich. Central to the question of collective guilt is the issue of Wiedergutmachung (reparations). The Allies – and the West in general – understood Wiedergutmachung in terms of justice, moral obligation, and politics. It was the democratic parties and the government of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who accepted a broad political and moral responsibility. The Wiedergutmachung Treaty (10.09.1952) was seen as a crucial measure for establishing the international political credentials of the new German state (Traverso, 1995). In contrast, as a new antifascist state, the GDR claimed a complete break with the fascist past. Moreover, according to official GDR historiography, the GDR owed its existence to the resistance against Hitler’s regime, and, with its proud antifascist record, dissociating itself from the crimes of the nation in this way made it possible for the GDR to absolve its citizens from responsibility for the fascist crimes (Buruma, 1994). Consequently, the issue of reparations was of little concern to the GDR as they sought to present the past in the manner that would serve the current political situation. It was a relatively guilt-free approach because, supposedly, the people of the GDR had struggled against – and were persecuted under – the Nazi regime. Therefore they could celebrate and commemorate their achievement in defeating it (Fulbrook, 1999). Consequently, the GDR did not seek to commemorate the victims of Nazism but rather to celebrate the heroes of the resistance (Rosenthal & Völter 1997; Traverso, 1995).

The position of the antifascist resistance does not incorporate the masses, which include a large percentage of the GDR citizens, who had played an active role in supporting Hitler and the Nazi ideology. The official position, however, played an important role in shaping the perception of the Nazi past. Kahn (1993) found that the second generation had a lack of connection between their parents’ own responsibility and the crimes of the Third Reich. Rather “...they look upon Nazi ‘fascist-capitalists’ as if these had been evil foreigners, unrelated to them...” (p. 383). The disconnection from the Nazi past is evident also in the school texts. The outline of the Nazi era, together with alarming pictures of the concentration camps, was presented to the children. These atrocities, however, do not affect them as they were not asked to atone for, or reflect on, the crimes committed by their parents or grandparents because they were, supposedly, the children of the antifascist resistance. They were taught to identify with the heroes and these crimes were not part of their identity (Buruma, 1994).

The reunification of West and East Germany provided yet another occasion for the Nazi past to be the focus of much national and international attention. It was considered to have brought together two opposing ideological political systems (democracy in the former West Germany, and communism in the former East Germany) which generated different political identities and historical images of its citizens. Given this situation, the people from the former East Germany may be expected to have a different relationship to this historical event from those of the former West Germany.

The total sample for the 1995 study comprised 232 university students from the former East and West Germany. The West group consisted of 94 participants, 61 women and 33 men. Their average age was 24.6 (SD = 4.59, range = 18-36). The East German group originally consisted of 138 participants, but 2 who did not specify their sex were omitted, leaving 98 women and 38 men. Their average age was 22.3 (SD = 3.08, range = 18-32). In the 2000 study, there were 129 participants from the former East Germany, 107 women and 22 men, with an average age of 22.5 (SD = 3.08, range = 18-36). All the East German participants of both studies were from the same university in former East Germany. It is vital to stress that this was not a longitudinal study that repeatedly measured the same sample over a period of time. Given the objectives of the study, a matched sample was considered more appropriate as all of the participants would have experienced the social and political changes brought about by reunification. More importantly, they would all have been exposed to the West Germans’ education system – that is, West Germans’ treatment of the Nazi past through the textbooks and teaching.

For all of the subsequent measures to be described, item responses were made on 5- point Likert scales, and scale items were reversed where appropriate so that the higher the score, the higher the concept in question.

Collective Self-Esteem The issues surrounding the Holocaust continue to act as a threat to national self-esteem. A collective self-esteem scale of 12 items was adapted from the 16 items developed by Luhtanen and Crocker (1992). The scale consisted of three categories, in which each category assessed different aspects of collective self-esteem. The items were phrased in terms of German identity. The public subscale items assessed the individual’s perception of others’ evaluation of one’s social group, for example, “The Germans are unpopular in the world”. The private subscale items assessed the individual’s self-evaluation of one’s social group as a whole, for example, “I have good feelings about Germany”. The identity concept subscale items assessed the self-evaluation of the relationship of one’s social group membership to one’s self-concept, for example, “Being German is an important reflection of who I am”. The membership subscale items, for example, “I feel I don’t have much to offer to the social group”, and “I am a cooperative participant in the social groups to which I belong” were omitted as they were not relevant to the present study. Reliability analysis indicated that the scale was internally consistent with the overall reliability coefficient alpha for the scale = .87.

Willingness To Accept Responsibility For The Nazi Past Over the years there have been numerous debates on Germany’s political responsibility for the Holocaust. These types of questions have been surveyed repeatedly by research institutes such as the Allensbach Institute (Allensbacher Jahrbuch der Demoskopie, 1997). This measurement is relevant for the purposes of this study, as it reveals the willingness of the third generation to see the continuing consequences of the Holocaust, and to accept responsibility for this part of their history. This scale consisted of 6 Likert-type items generated from previous national surveys conducted by the Allensbach Institute (1997). For example, “It is still Germany’s moral duty to pay for the compensation of living survivors of the Nazi terror”. Reliability analysis indicated that the scale was internally consistent, with a reliability coefficient of 0.77.

The data were collected as part of a larger project on German identity. The questionnaires (“Deutsch-Sein, Wie ist das?”) were administered in a class setting. Foreign and Jewish-German students as well as students who are outside the age range answered the questionnaire, but had to be excluded, because the study was concerned exclusively with the perspective of non-Jewish Germans of the third generation. Excluding them right from the beginning was considered to be too disturbing for the German participants in the class, and too disruptive for the procedure.

The respondents were instructed that the research was about German identity and that participation was voluntary – also that the replies would be anonymous and only grouped statistical data would be used. Respondents were informed that there were no right or wrong answers, and that the researcher was interested only in their honest and spontaneous reactions. The self-administered questionnaire took approximately 25 minutes.

To examine the relationship between different historical treatments and attribution of responsibility for the Holocaust, five groups of responses were collapsed down into two broad categories:

1. The Nazi system which consisted of the Nazi leaders, the Nazi party, and large industrial companies (n = 125, 54.1%).

2. 2.  The general population (n = 105, 45.9%).

The data indicated that there was a strong tendency for the East group to attribute the responsibility for the Holocaust to the Nazi system, while the West group attributed the responsibility to the general population χ²(1, N = 231) = 12.87, p < .001. Thus the hypothesized relationship (Hypothesis 1) was supported.

The Nazi system group (M = 2.57, SD = .60) expressed a slightly higher level of collective self-esteem than did the general population group (M = 2.45, SD = .51) but this did not reach statistical significance t(224) = 1.167, p > .05. As expected, the group which attributed responsibility to the general population (M = 4.1, SD = .49) expressed a higher level of willingness to accept responsibility for the Nazi past than did the group that attributed responsibility to the Nazi system (M = 3.8, SD = .53), t(224) = 4.38, p < .001. Hypothesis 2 was partially supported.

To examine the relationship between different historical treatments of the Holocaust and perceptions of grandparents’ involvement during the Holocaust, nine groups were collapsed down into four broad categories;

1. Those who perceived their grandparents to be active Nazis, members of the Nazi party, who belonged to organizations such as the SS, and the supporters of the Nazis’ ideology are grouped together as grandparents perceived as the regime supporters.

2. Those who perceived their grandparents to be political opponents of the Reich, Germans in prisons or concentration camps, and those who fled Germany during the Third Reich are grouped together as grandparents perceived as the regime opponents.

3. The bystanders included German society at large; these bystanders are characterized by partial knowledge of the crimes committed, and by more or less sustained indifference and passivity.

4. The participants who had no knowledge of their grandparents’ involvement during the Third Reich.

Following the 1995 pattern, there was a high level of acceptance of responsibility for the Nazi past (M = 3.9, SD = .60) and a moderate level of collective self-esteem (M = 2.6, SD = .59) in the 2000 sample.

The results indicating that the higher proportion of the sample attributed responsibility to the general population as compared to the Nazi system should not go unnoticed (see Table 3).

Social identity theorists have claimed that people may have a particular relationship to a historical event that contributes positively to their personal and social identity (Gaskell & Wright, 1997). Actual historical events, however, may not always fulfill such a positive image. Members of groups may be tempted to forget, to reconstruct, to reelaborate, and to reinvent themselves to maintain a positive self-concept. As innovative collective recollections generate a new past and new area of consensus, they can also generate new forms of conflict within a culture which result from the newly formed collective memory (Straub, 1993). The results from the 1995 sample indicated that the East German group’s perception of responsibility for the Holocaust was directed mainly at the Nazi system, while the West German group attributed responsibility to the general population. This supported the notion that individuals may, at times, disagree radically about their past (Davis & Starn, 1989). In this case, they cannot reach a consensus which would acknowledge their common past, as there is no common ground upon which to create a compatible construct of reality.

The findings in part 2 indicated a significant shift in the attribution of responsibility for the Holocaust 10 years after reunification. First, this illustrates how one group’s attempt to reconstruct the past may conflict with the attempts of other groups to enforce a different view, and how power relations influence people’s judgments. Secondly, the data supported the notion that collective memory is a reconstruction of the past in the broader contexts of community, politics and social dynamics of the present (Halbwachs, 1992; Radley, 1990; Thelen, 1989). Thus, what people choose to remember can reveal a complex relationship between their past and their present (Middleton & Edwards, 1990; Passerini, 1987; Tetlock, Peterson, McGuire, Chang, & Feld, 1992).

Overall, the differences between the participants who perceived their grandparents as having been victims and/or opponents, and those who perceived their grandparents as having been regime supporters, were far fewer than anticipated. However, it is interesting that there was a tendency for the participants to perceive their grandparents more in the role of victims and opponents, rather than as perpetrators. It is difficult to obtain exact figures to support the notion that the Nazis enjoyed widespread popularity. However, there are various discussions in the literature to indicate that this was the case. Noakes and Pridham (1974) stated that “a crucial element in popular consent to the regime was the fact that Nazism embodied, albeit in an extreme form, many of the basic attitudes of a very large section of the German people” (p. 574). Meier (1993) maintained that a large proportion of the population served the Nazi cause – whether they were directly, or indirectly, partakers in the crimes of the Third Reich.

The data of this study supported the notion that communications about recent German history are disturbed. In the former FRG it was primarily through the subtle mechanisms of psychological avoidance – whilst in the former GDR, it was through the more direct mechanism of disconnection (Brendler, 1991; Hübner- Funk, 1990; Rosenthal, 1992; Rosenthal & Völter, 1997). In neither of the former states did the young Germans receive accurate information about family members’ involvement in the Holocaust. The third generation views the Holocaust as an historical failure of the first generation of the Third Reich – but without accurate information about family members, this results in their inability to recognize that their grandparents were contributing to the overall criminal system (Brendler, 1991).

The element of distortion in the grandparents’ roles during the Holocaust could be interpreted within the framework of social identity theory. Tajfel and Turner (1979) asserted that people strive to maintain a positive social identity. One’s national identity may be shaped by historical experiences and these actual events may not always fulfill a positive image. Thus it is necessary to revise either the factual details or the meaning of events in order to fit them into the current set of beliefs. Hence, when the group analyzes some of the actions of its ancestors in the context of its effects on a new generation, it may selectively distort the memory of those events (Baumeister & Hastings, 1997). Perceiving grandparents in the role of the victims and/or opponents, rather than as perpetrators, creates a positive, or simply an acceptable, social identity. Essentially, the participants attributed responsibility for the Holocaust to those members of the population who were alive during that period, but they tended to view their own grandparents as victims or opponents of the regime, and, in this way, to absolve them from responsibility. This suits their view that their family and they themselves are innocent, and provides them with a positive identity. Furthermore, the present data are consistent with the findings of Brusten and Winkelmann in 1992. This indicates that there is powerful contradiction in need of further exploration to unpack the dynamics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) for the third generation after the Holocaust.

On the basis of the research, the concept of collective memory is extremely important in understanding German identity. German national identity is not only a set of characteristics but it is also a set of processes in which a nation develops from historical experiences in which its collective past, collective memory and collective recollection act as sources of orientation in identity and self-image.

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