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-

T

ry as so many Germans
do to put the memory of
the Holocaust behind
them, it remains a powerful
component of the German
psyche, provoking intense de-
bate whenever events bring it
to the fore.
The great majority of Ger-
mans would like to be able to
forget the Nazi years. Most of
them would agree with Chan-
cellor Helmut Kohl that the
German people had been de-
ceived and misled by Adolf Hit-
ler into passive acquiescence in
the commission of a crime of
horrendous proportions, that
the postwar generation of
Germans had acknowledged
the guilt of their parents, had
made retribution to the Jewish
people and while they should
never forget the crimes com-
mitted in the name of the Ger-
man people, they should not
have to bear a continued collec-
tive guilt.
In Chancellor Kohl's view,
the Holocaust was the work of
a relative few who imposed
their will on a nation most of
whom were uaware of the
crimes being committed, and,
in any case, were helpless to
resist. In planning for
museums of German history
now in process of being estab-
lished, Kohl is said to favor the
revisionist school of historians
who argue that the Holocaust
was an aberration of history
such as has happened often in
the past and in many lands.

A small number, almost
entirely neo-Nazis, still influ-
enced by the Nazi racial
theories, deny the salient facts
of the Holocaust and the mur-
der of six million Jews. The re-
visionist school of historians
whom the chancellor seems to
favor, who would minimize the
Holocaust by categorizing it as
but one of a long series of mon-
strous crimes against human-
ity at all periods in the world's
history, as the Stalinist exter-
mination of the kulaks in the
Soviet Union, appears to be
gaining wide audiences.

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44

Friday, January 9, 1987

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

Books and articles expound-
ing this view of history in-
creased in number over the
past year and engendered
heated debate between those
who go back to Attila the Hun
to make their point that mass
murder and genocide is com-
monplace in the history of man
and that the Holocaust was not
a unique crime but one in an
inevitable historical series.
This view is rejected by West
Germany's President Richard
von Weizsacker, a German
nobleman and son of a con-
victed war criminal, who has
emerged as the moral con-
science of the German people.
Von Weizsacker rejects the
concept of collective guilt but
faults Germans for shunning
their responsibility by looking
away and keeping quiet when

President Chaim Herzog.

the Nazis pursued the exter-
mination of the Jews.
The Germans of today can-
not be blamed for the sins of
their fathers, he declares, but
they must accept the past be-
cause anyone who refused to
remember its inhumanity, is
prone to risks of new infection.
The German leader stressed
the theme of remembrance
again in a message to the dedi-
cation in December of an in-
ternational youth center in
Oswiecim, Poland, within a
mile of the former Auschwitz
concentration camp. The cen-
ter was built with German
funds at the initiative of the
German Protestant group, Ac-
tion for a Symbol of Atone-
ment.
The Von Weizsacker posi-
tion is strongly supported by
those who have led the fight to
make the study of contempor-
ary history an academic disci-
pline in West Germany. Today,
nearly every German univer-
sity has a chair in contempor-
ary German history and histo-
rians are zealously conducting
research into every aspect of
the Nazi regime.
There is, without any doubt,
a continuing preoccupation
with the German-Jewish rela-
tionship all through German
history, in the Nazi era and to-
day. It is evidenced in the
amount of space given in the
media to questions concerning
Jews, to the quick and heated
reaction to the theses advanced
by the revisionists and in the
special concern with which
Jewish issues are generally
treated.
The effort to bring wider
understanding of the
German-Jewish relationship
through the centuries was
demonstrated in Berlin when
Mayor Eberhard Diepgen
dedicated the famed Martin
Gropius Building as the home
of the Jewish department of
the Berlin Museum 48 years
after the Nazis looted and pil-
laged the Jewish Museum in
Berlin and closed it down. The
purpose of the Jewish exhibit,
the mayor said, was to make
the Jewish contribution to the
history of Berlin "visible and
clear."

