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explanation for the delay inside Germany in facing up to its past has been constructed by A. Dirk Moses, a historian at the University of Sydney (though he has also worked in Freiburg), who gives a “generational account.” His study, published in 2007, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 41 but, essentially, Moses—whose references are admirably copious—says that the generation known in Germany as “Forty-fivers,” people who were born in the late 1920s, who received their socialization in the Third Reich in the 1930s, and were on the edge of adulthood in 1945, had no other sociopolitical experience than National Socialism to go by, did not feel personally responsible for the atrocities (because they weren’t yet old enough), but afterward withdrew into the “private spheres” of family life and work, their psychological rivalries with their fathers remaining unresolved; “emotionally bound” to Hitler, they threw themselves into rebuilding the country, and remained largely silent about what had gone on in Nazi times—lest that disrupt the task of reconstruction. This meant, he said, that the nation in the 1960s was largely the same one as had existed in the final years of National Socialism, that the hierarchical and authoritarian cast of mind continued and this “silent majority” “remembered the sufferings of its own rather than those of its victims.” Furthermore, he said, many of the younger generation felt that the educated middle class incarnated these pathologies “in a particularly virulent way.” All this accorded well, he said, with the picture painted in 1967 by two psychoanalysts, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, in their book The Inability to Mourn , who had argued that, even at that late date, Germany was gripped by a “psychic immobilism,” unable to admit its culpability in the crimes of National Socialism, because that would involve the admission of shame and guilt on such a scale that “the self-esteem needed for continued living” would be unattainable.
    The “psychological” explanations are plausible. At the same time, the studies carried out at the Potsdam Institute for Military Research into “Germany and the Second World War,” the ninth volume of which was published in 2008, provide two new lights on this aspect of affairs. In the first place, this meticulous project (volume nine is 1,074 pages long) removes any lingering doubt that “almost every German” in the Third Reich knew what was happening to the Jews. The evidence is now too overwhelming, from the public auctions in Hamburg, where the property of 30,000 Jewish families was sold to 100,000 successful bidders, to the prisoners in Bremen who worked in full sight of the population, especially to clear bomb damage, and were known as “zebras” on account of their striped uniforms, to the ship moored in the Rhine at Cologne, filled with Jews held ready to clear the bomb damage as soon as the air raids were over, to Düsseldorf, where the mayor wanted the captive Jews worked harder. The historians concluded that, after the war, there was a “collective silence” in Germany, protecting former Nazis who had taken part in the Third Reich’s crimes, “because everyone had, before 1945, benefited from the Nazi regime in one way or another.” At the same time, and as Max Hastings concluded in a review of the book, this study is a “notable tribute” to a new generation of Germans, most born long after the war, who are ready at last to compile a totally objective picture of the Third Reich, in so doing passing judgment on their parents’ generation in a way few other countries have managed. 52
    G ERMANY’S “W RONG T URN”
     
    There is one final sense in which the Holocaust exerts its influence on the writing of history and therefore on our understanding of the past. The Nazis in general, and the Holocaust in particular, were so extreme, and so unique (notwithstanding what Professors Nolte,