Talk:Vergangenheitsbewältigung

message: "a denazification driven at first under Allied Occupation and then by the Christian Democratic Union government of Konrad Adenauer" - I find this misleading. Formally, it is, of course, true, that the denazification programme that was begun by the Allies was continued under Konrad Adenauer and his CDU-government. But I believe it would be better to simply state that the denazification was continued in the first years of the Federal Republic by the German government. In my opinion mentioning Konrad Adenauer and the CDU in this context gives the wrong impression that denazification was on Adenauer's and the CDU's political agenda more than on that of other parties. Which would be blatantly wrong. It is fair to assume that a government made up of social democrats and possible communists would have cleansed the institutions and society in general much more eagerly and effectively than what was done under the rule of the Christian Democrats. It happened under Adenauer, after all, that most of the war and other criminals that had been tried in Nuremberg were pardoned, most life-long prison terms reduced to just a couple of years etc. At the same time tens of thousands of former Nazi-officials regained their old positions or came into new influential ones. Just like the Western allies found nothing wrong with making use of the German experts who had been involved in Nazi crimes, as long as they seemed useful or even indispensable in the beginning confrontation with the Soviet Union, the CDU-Federal government (even more so the Länder-governments) included countless former members of the NSDAP and did not shun away from employing former SS-members and the like especially in the police forces and the secret services (Verfassungsschutz, Bundesnachrichtendienst). Hardly any of the Nazi jurists were punished, most of them continued their careers as attorneys, judges and in the administrative institutions and universities. The willingness to declare all matters that had to do with the Nazi period as past and over evolved unbelievably early, even before 1950, and this broad movement found political support mainly in the CDU. So this is why I would hate to see Konrad Adenauer and his CDU depicted as protagonists of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", provided that term is not understood as meaning denying, belittling, hushing up and effectively forgetting what had happened between 1933 and 1945.141.91.129.5 (talk) 15:45, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: an encylopadic entry is not about what you like to see, or what you beleive could have happen with Kurt Schumacher as chancelor. 16:50, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Konrad Adenauer and CDU 

message: in the after denazification part: "Having replaced the institutions and power structures of National Socialism, the aim of liberal Germans was to deal with the guilt of recent history." That is very euphemistic. The institutions were replaced, but not at all the people controlling the instituions. Look for example at Kurt Georg Kiesinger.
in the Poland part: "...that of the Communist regimes which possessed them for more than four decades." Sounds like they were grabbing the memorials in Auschwitz & Theresienstadt from someone, not creating them in the first place.
-- ExpImptalkcon 21:32, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see why "Having replaced the institutions and power structures of National Socialism, the aim of liberal Germans was to deal with the guilt of recent history" should be qualified as "very euphemistic", and the case of Kurt Georg Kiesinger doesn't disprove the statement. "The institutions were replaced, but not at all the people controlling the institutions" - this is also true. But you obviously disregard that the first statement is limited to "liberal Germans". Kiesinger wasn't one of them, neither before nor after 1945. He was one of the leading politicians of the Christian Democratic Union, a conservative party that, although led by Konrad Adenauer, who had belonged to the conservative, catholic opposition against the Nazis, had very little qualms receiving "former" Nazis into its ranks. The sentence that refers to the liberal Germans could be criticized as to the fact that certainly the German left (social democrats and communists) who, after all, belonged to the group of people that had suffered most under the totalitarian régime was even more interested in "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", including identifying and punishing the perpetrators of Nazi crimes. Most notable critics of German post-war politics, when under the auspices of the Cold War the western allies lost their interest in denazification and the conservative governments of the Federal Republic was even less inclined to perform a real "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", belonged to the German left, and they were more often then not denigrated by the conservatives as unpatriotic mudrakers. While the sentence quoted above is not inclusive enough on the one hand (because it focuses only on the liberals), it is unwittingly over-inclusive on the other. For the relatively small political party that was programmatically affiliated with liberalism, the FDP (Freie Demokratische Party = liberal democratic party)was a very strange mix: on the one hand it consisted of old liberals of the Weimar Republic and, of course, of young liberal democrats, on the other hand there was a very strong tendency to absorb "old" Nazis, and in fact in some regions it seems that such old Nazis used their membership in the liberal party as a camouflage of their true political ambitions, which were not as far removed from that of the NSDAP as one would have wished.141.91.129.4 (talk) 14:39, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV