Outside my hotel, the no. 6 bus takes you the short distance from Goethe Square to the Buchenwald concentration camp. You don’t need to go far in Germany to be confronted by its terrible history. In Munich, it takes just over half an hour to travel from the S-Bahn no. 2’s central station to its end stop, Dachau. In Berlin, it’s a little more complicated to reach Sachsenhausen by public transport, but the trip north of the city can be done in just over an hour.

For the past half-century Germany has engaged in an act of atonement that has dominated all aspects of life, with everything referenced back to the Nazi era. Germans’ high state of moral alert, even after all these years, still dictates much of what they do. The historian Fritz Stern talks of ‘the Germans’ wish to believe’ in Hitler, ‘in their voluntary choice of Nazism’.¹ Stern spent his long career seeking to answer the question ‘Why and how did the universal human potential for evil become an actuality in Germany?’² Or, as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor contended, writing in the closing months of the war: ‘The history of the Germans is a history of extremes. It contains everything except moderation, and in the course of a thousand years the Germans have experienced everything except normality.’³

An entire phraseology has been built up around the need to remember: Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with history); Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (processing history); Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance); and most controversially, Kollektivschuld (collective guilt).

German history, even pre-twentieth century, is seen through this lens. Unlike France or Britain or many other countries around the world, there are no grand national day ceremonies, although the recently inaugurated Day of German Unity (on 3 October) is now tentatively being marked. Those who died in military service to their country rarely receive public commemorations. The only parades are local folkloric or cultural ones. There is little pageantry – which could account for Germans’ obsession with royalty and celebrity elsewhere.

Which other country would build a monument to its own shame – and right next to its two most famous landmarks? The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe sits close to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag in the heart of Berlin. Containing 2,711 rectangular concrete slabs, each resembling a coffin, it was inaugurated in 2005. School groups descend on it from all parts of the country, children warned to be quiet at all times. To watch their faces as they leave is instructive. Some historians and architects have criticized it as too abstract, cold even. I see it as chilling and in the appropriate sense. This is now the most famous site of remembrance to the Holocaust within modern Germany and the territory of the former Third Reich, but it is only one of many.

In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig came up with an idea. Three decades on, there are more than 70,000 Stolpersteine in 20 languages in 120 towns and cities in 24 countries across Europe. These are small symmetrical stones, literally stumbling stones, 10 centimetres by 10, with brass plaques bearing the names of people exterminated in the concentration camps and other victims of National Socialism. They are located outside the last known home of the victims, mainly but not exclusively Jews. Some are Roma, others are homosexuals or disabled. The inscription on each stone begins ‘Here lived’, followed by the victim’s name, date of birth and fate: internment, suicide, exile or, in the vast majority of cases, deportation and murder. Most are located in Germany.⁴

These acts of remembrance did not come easily, and they did not come quickly. Indeed, it took the best part of two decades after the war for Germans to really confront the unvarnished truth of the Holocaust and other horrors. From the mid-1940s, the prevailing mood was of shocked humiliation. The Allies’ tactic of breaking civilian morale by firebombing cities into oblivion may have brought forward the end of the war. It also allowed a sense of victimhood to take root, usually silently; in the views of some, there was a sense of moral equivalence between Nazi crimes and Allied excesses.

Initially, the process of rebuilding took only physical form. The image of the Trümmerfrauen, the rubble women, is writ large on the German psyche. Immediately on the Nazis’ surrender, the Allies enlisted all able-bodied women aged between fifteen and fifty to clear buildings brick by brick, using sledgehammers and picks. The streets were cleared of rubble. Many of these women were traumatized from war. But they were deemed capable of manual work, nine hours per day for a few coins and a ration card. Many men were crippled or in prisoner-of-war camps. Eight million people had been killed or were missing, more than 10 per cent of the population. Around 150 towns and cities lay in ruins. Nearly half the roads, railways, gas, electricity and water supplies were destroyed. George Orwell described what he found in Cologne in March 1945: ‘The master race are all around you, threading their way on their bicycles between the piles of rubble or rushing off with jugs and buckets to meet the water cart.’⁵ His caustic fury was typical of its time.

As Neil MacGregor writes, ‘The pathos of the handcart is powerful and real.’⁶ An already impoverished country was required to house and feed twelve million people driven out from the eastern lands by the Russian advance, increasing the population by a fifth at a time when there was barely any food to go round. This was possibly the biggest forced population movement in history. Many people had nowhere to go, nowhere warm to shelter, pushing a few ragged belongings with them. The winter of 1946–47 was particularly harsh. Money was worthless. Barter was the currency of choice. The most sought-after commodities were cigarettes and chocolate. Food rationing prescribed a mere 1,000–1,500 calories per day. American food supplies – a sixth of Germany’s total food production at the time – saved tens of thousands from starvation.

To this day, few families do not have someone, or know of someone, who was scarred by the post-war collapse. This was for a long time an under-commemorated and under-studied aspect of German history. Is this, MacGregor wonders, ‘because Germans consider these events as just retribution for evil deeds? When a state has done so much wrong, how are we to respond to the suffering its citizens endure as a result? If we assert a communal guilt, can we nonetheless plead for individual compassion?’⁷

In a book published in 2008 called The Cold Homeland, the historian Andreas Kossert examines the treatment of these destitute people from the east. They were not welcomed with open arms by their countrymen – something that has always been, and remains, an awkward subject that requires sensitive handling. ‘Seventy years after the end of the war, almost every family in Germany is affected by it,’ writes Kossert. ‘But it is only gradually becoming a topic of collective memory in Germany, because until very recently the issue was associated with a right-wing, revisionist position. [. . .] In many families there was a total silence and not a word about the loss, the mourning of parents or grandparents.’⁸

Occupying forces promoted the idea that through denazification, demilitarization and reconstruction, Germany could reset the clock. It began to be used in everyday parlance. Roberto Rossellini’s film Germany, Year Zero, which was shot on location in 1947 and screened in German and English the following year, may have helped spread the use of the term. Zero, rubbing everything out, was convenient. Most Germans in that period chose to see themselves as either victims or unwitting participants. A truly honest debate about the nature of participation and guilt would take two decades to materialize. As the war reporter Martha Gellhorn wrote mockingly during her travels across the defeated lands: ‘No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village . . . there weren’t many Jews in this neighbourhood . . . we have nothing against the Jews; we always got on well with them.’ She added: ‘It should be set to music.’⁹

For the Allies, the situation required pragmatism. With the Soviet threat increasing, they desperately needed Germany back on its feet. They needed it stable. The first sign of a shift away from punishment came during a visit by US secretary of state James Byrnes in September 1946. He visited a number of destroyed cities, giving a speech in Stuttgart which he entitled a ‘Restatement of Policy’; it was anything but. Two processes were set in motion: economic assistance and a decision to focus more on the dangers of communism than the crimes of fascism. ‘The American government has supported and will continue to support the necessary measures to denazify and demilitarize Germany, but it does not follow that large armies of foreign soldiers or alien bureaucrats, however well motivated and disciplined, are in the long run the most reliable guardians of another country’s democracy,’ Byrnes said. ‘The United States cannot relieve Germany from the hardships inflicted upon her by the war her leaders started. But the United States has no desire to increase those hardships or to deny the German people an opportunity to work their way out of those hardships so long as they respect human freedom and cling to the paths of peace.’¹⁰

President Harry Truman concluded that without a massive injection, Europe would not get back on its feet. As his secretary of state George Marshall (who had succeeded Byrnes), put it: ‘It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health to the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.’¹¹ The European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, provided $12 billion to eighteen European nations (the equivalent of more than $100 billion in today’s prices). Britain and France received the most, followed by Germany. The USSR refused money for itself and for the new Eastern European bloc that had come under its wing.

Many middle- and even some higher-ranking Nazis were restored to their positions. Denazification certifications – dubbed Persilscheine, ‘Persil notes’ – were easy to obtain. Suspicions of Nazi complicity could be washed away with some historical detergent. Suspected Nazi offenders could be exonerated by statements of good reputation. People talked about being washed clean or walking in with a brown shirt and coming out with a white one. A few years later, the new Bundestag passed Article 131, formalizing the process. This allowed public servants, including politicians, judges, military officers, teachers and doctors, to be automatically reinstated if they had passed denazification tests. Retirement benefits were restored. A number of business leaders were able to take up their posts at the helm of companies that had been complicit.

The memory of war guilt has not receded with time. I am struck by how many Germans, particularly the young to middle-aged, bring it up unprompted. They do so less to dwell on the past, important though that is, but to check that the lessons have been learnt. In these times of increasing authoritarianism, nationalism and incivility in Europe and around the world, they are talking about the crimes of the Third Reich more than they have ever done. In Munich, I meet Matthias Mühling, director of the Lenbachhaus, one of Munich’s most important galleries. As we look out from the museum onto the neoclassical splendour of Königsplatz, the square that was at the heart of Nazi power, he points out to me the Central Institute for Art History. Soon after the war, the Americans set up a team there to investigate the thousands of looted works of art. The episode featured in a 2014 Hollywood hit, The Monuments Men, starring George Clooney. As Mühling tells the story, he becomes ever more impassioned. The ease with which many ex-Nazis returned to prominent positions in culture, and other parts of society, rankles with him. He talks of ‘everyone’s grandfathers and possibly fathers being Nazis – and still getting away with it’. He points out that the Lenbachhaus, unlike pretty much all its rivals, did not become a cheerleader for Hitler. Many museum directors who had enthusiastically complied with instructions to rid themselves of ‘degenerate Jewish’ art were co-opted by the US forces to help find missing works. ‘I suppose that was obvious,’ Mühling says. ‘They knew where it had gone.’ What matters more? The fact that many senior people got away with it? Or the fact that many of the present generation in public life are still angry that they did?

In the mid to late 1940s, apart from the most egregious war criminals, there was little interest in pursuing smaller fry. Only twenty-four top Nazis were put on trial at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. Twelve were sentenced to death, and ten of them were hanged on the same day, 16 October 1946, in the building’s gymnasium. It was a public manifestation of guilt, but at the same time it was part of a narrative that the war chapter had been closed. Institutions were forced to recant. One of the first was the Protestant Church, which acknowledged its collaboration with the Nazis in what was called the Stuttgart Confession in October 1945. ‘Through us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries,’ it declared. ‘That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole Church: we did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the National Socialist regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.’¹² Even this half-apology, half-non-apology was regarded as too much by many at the time.

All the attention of Germany’s first governments was on the economic task at hand. Theodor Heuss, West Germany’s first post-war president, declared: ‘We have practically only one chance – and that is work.’ Two politicians were instrumental in Germany’s rapid recovery, for laying the foundations of the Wirtschaftswunder, the Economic Miracle. In 1948, as director of economics under the American and British Bizone, Ludwig Erhard abolished the existing currency overnight. Ten Reichsmarks would be exchanged for one new Deutschmark. Some 90 per cent of public debt was instantly wiped away (as were any private savings in Reichsmarks). Even more daringly, with...