I've not read this thread for a couple of days for I wanted to read it at full length in a single 'session' and I have read now for about one hour. Sorry if I do not respond to all questions for I then would have to write a book as alanabit remarked. I'd rather respond to other themes in new threads (Ron, yes there is still a big East-West split; Dr. Norman Winstanley, I'd say that today there are more wrong prejudices against Roma in Germany than against Jews but I don't know about that specific case)

Ebbie, yes, all German soldiers wanted to surrender to the Western Allies and if my father wouldn't have led his unit against Allied orders (German units, only surrender to that army you have fought against) across the Elbe during the night and pretend having fought on the Western front I wouldn't exist.

Ebbie (once more) and Bill, my comparison of the GDR with Austria was a bit clumsy but both countries did steal away from responsibility. As McGrath has said, most Germans of that generation have been supporters of the Nazis and the three countries all had their share of murderers, supporters, and those who did not like what they saw but looked away. As Mick, Ernest (and someone else; Ron?) have said I have repeated communist propaganda mockingly.

M.Ted, you have used a very appropriate word: 'disturbing'. So let me use this word as a start for another shorter tale.
When I grew older (from 16 onwards, perhaps) I always found it 'disturbing' to live in this country. It took me a long time to find out why. It was the contrast between the murderous and bloody past and the happy and (at the first glance) innocent present. A clean country with nice people who are (mostly) friendly to foreigners. That perception just did not fit into the truth of the films about the Nazi time of which I have see each I could.

Those nice elderly people (which are now in their 80s or 90s) must have at least tolerated the violence against fellow Germans and other countries. I look into the mellow old faces and think "have you whipped a Jew to make him run faster", "have you reported a homosexual hoping to get his flat", "have you looked the other way when a train with doomed to die people begging for water came by". These are minor crimes in comparison to industrialised genocidal killing and burning. But whereas only a fairly small minority of Germans was involved in those grand scale crimes, the majority of them must have been involved in at least one of those "minor" crimes and this way have supported the muderous regime so it could last 12 years. Why didn't they withdraw the support to the Nazis at least after the Kristallnacht (a Nazi euphemism) which we now call in German with its real name: Pogromnacht.

I always found these contrasts disturbing. I now can accept that as something to live with and I can better live with it when the past is not swept under the rug. I go to my local supermarket and I see the small plaque telling the passer-bys that on this place in 1941 (exact date given) some three hundred Jews were rounded up to be deported to Theresienstadt and that after the war, only 17 of them were still alive. There are always fresh flowers on that spot.

I cycle to work and pass a medieval tower and when I stop I can read a plaque telling that the Gestapo has tortured prisoners in that tower. I think the present has to be permanently disturbed with reminders of this past lest we forget.

A German artist (Gunter Demnig) has started to place 'stumbling stones' in the towns. Not in a verbatim sense stumbling stones but little plaques in the pavement in front of the houses simply telling what has happened to the inhabitants of this house:

Picture of such a stumbling stone. It reads: Here lived Horst Lothar Koppel, born in 1924, deported in 1943 with the 29th transport to the East.

If you walk through a street with these plaques you will be surprised about the number of them. And then one can get a start of an understanding of the scale of the genocide.

The contrast between the past and the present still disturbs me but I accept it now as unavoidable and even helpful.

Wolfgang