politics of memory: Holocaust and legitimacy in post-Nazi Germany

In the immediate post-World War II years, Germans' reaction to their defeat was characterised by evasion of responsibility, calculated amnesia, and downright lies. German judges called upon to try former Nazis were themselves corrupt. Even though only 350 of Germany's 90,000 medical doctors actively participated in Nazi crimes, their colleagues' silence both during the war and later amounted to complicity. The widespread suppression of their knowledge of and participation in the Holocaust constitutes the "destructive culmination of German history."