"In this way" according to the German historian Konrad H. Jarausch , "the personal accounts that were made public created the illusion of a harmless population that somehow seemed to have been absent during the atrocities of the Third Reich, while in conversations at night with alcohol as the inevitable guest of confidences, they revealed the true and terrible experiences".
Personal accounts made public created the illusion of a harmless population
In short, a curtain of oblivion and repression of memory fell that affected practically all Germans, willing to leave behind the horrors of defeat and silently swallow the accounts that each one had with the previous regime, and both in the East as in the West, the old Nazi sympathies ended up being purged at the beginning of the 50s. In East Germany, publicly accepting the mistakes made was enough to join the SED -the Unified Socialist Party of the GDR-, especially if one of the 'converts' volunteered to instruct another of the collaborators and win him over to the cause. In the West, the process included the collective pardon of numerous collaborators, under the argument of putting an end to the humiliation of
the denacification and occupation. Right-wing parties such as the BHE and the FDP pressed for the reintegration into the bureaucracy of many of the former Nazi collaborators who had been temporarily suspended from their former posts.
Justice in Germany and the painful exercise of historical memory were made to wait, then, until 1958, when during the Ulm trials, ten of the members of one of the Nazi execution commandos were sentenced to several years in prison for the murder of Jews on the German-Lithuanian border. Despite the reluctance of the chancellor of the FRG, Konrad Adenauer, who was serving his third term and was in favor of turning the page, in order to build a new country, he admitted the creation of a body to investigate those crimes, such as the one in Ulm , that the Nazis had committed against civilians, at least outside of Germany and that, evidently, they had not been judged by the victors. The Central Bureau of Investigation of Nazi Crimes emerged and is still in operation.