[awinder]

I don’t see a lot of current generation German spirit-busting going on. The 90s saw the myth of the clean wehrmacht finally addressed, this abhorrent stuff is being investigated by younger-gen German academics while the surviving vestiges of people who were empowered around the end of nazism and the power vacuum following try to fight back.

It’s also kinda difficult to separate the self-loathing from being part of a dark system, from the direct affects of reparations, from becoming ground 0 at the Cold War, from knock-on effects of any of the above. But one thing is for sure, prevention of fascism was definitely not a highest good, or at least for long. We released the war criminals and rearmed them the second that an ascendant Socialist power needed to be addressed, with 0 pushback on the demands.

[boppo1]

>released the war criminals and rearmed them the second that an ascendant Socialist power needed to be addressed

Who/when? War criminals released in West Germany to combat East Germany? Did they somehow not commit war crimes this time?

> the myth of the clean wehrmacht finally addressed

Can you explain this a little more? I had a grandfather I never met who was in the wehrmacht. As an American youth I understood it as wehrmacht == nazi, without any distinction. I dismissed what my grandmother said about him hating Hitler as revisionism because A. I disliked her for other reasons and B. obviously a nazi would try to prove their innocence. Being part German felt dirty as a kid and I wanted to be distanced from it.

It was not until adulthood and digging through old family records that I realized there was a potential distinction between party members and the wehrmacht, or that they were drafting all able bodied men at the end. Though my grandparents clearly weren't heroes of any sort, I realized I had perhaps been too brutal in my assessment. But perhaps not! I just don't really know.

One day I'll get around to requesting his military record from the German government, though I don't know the integrity of those records, given the post-war political situation.

[awinder]

This is a pretty good jumping off point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht

Yeah West Germany successfully pushed for western-held war criminals to be released in the early 1950s. Rearmament and relaxing of the terms of reparations happened very rapidly, within a year individual pieces are being rolled back. There’s kinda a general history of rapidly needing the Germans after WW2 and a lot of people got second chances (also see Operation Paperclip). West Germany used these opportunity to try to rewrite history, gain more government independence, dramatically lessening whatever “spirit-busting” was a part of WW2 reparations.