German honesty regarding its past is a modern phenomenon, if not outright propaganda. During the Cold War they were a lot less honest; the Nazi regime was often

German honesty regarding its past is a modern phenomenon, if not outright propaganda. During the Cold War they were a lot less honest; the Nazi regime was often used as propaganda against the other side. e.g. West Germany would downplay Germany's capitalist class's role in Hitler's rise to power and emphasize the racial nature of the Holocaust. East Germany[0] would do the opposite, emphasizing capitalism and de-emphasizing antisemitism[1]. These different spins on the same events were intended to downplay their side's role in the Nazi regime, shifting all the blame to the other. This is especially true in the West. Large swaths of the German capitalist class actively backed Hitler and the Nazi party, and got away with it. How they got away with it is particularly appalling. One of the most common defenses at Nuremburg was "I was just following orders", an excuse that was usually rejected. But there was one very specific kind of order that would reliably keep Nazis (Hugo Boss, IG Farben, etc) out of the noose: shareholder duties. In the name of anticommunism, there was an active campaign in the First World[2] to downplay the war crimes of German capitalists after WWII. The AfD is not a result of Germany being tired of remembering. They're a result of Germany's denazification being incomplete - and politically influenced by the exact same economic forces[3] that put Hitler in the chancellor's seat in the first place. States create liberal democracies with free markets, businesses figure out how to exploit those markets, they get unfathomably rich before someone can stop them, they coopt or overthrow democracy, and then replace liberalism with tyranny. Overthrow is possible because society has vulnerabilities that can be exploited through propaganda and outrage porn. You socially engineer the public into abolishing their own liberty to hurt the other that they hate. In America, that vulnerability was African Americans. In Nazi Germany's case, it was deeply rooted antisemitism. In today's Germany, it's immigration[4]. [0] The Stazi wants to know about your dancing skill and computer memory speed [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Uni... [2] As in, "aligned with American capitalism" world [3] America's business elite were not that far behind Germany's in terms of planning to overthrow democracy. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot [4] German immigration policy - and, to a larger extent, most EU external immigration policy - is built entirely for rich, self-motivated knowledge workers who can navigate bureaucracy and do all the integration work themselves. As a result, it has lots of poorly integrated immigrant populations with lots of scary right-wingers that the German right can use to scare German liberals into, themselves, becoming scary right-wingers. Fnord fnord fnord.