# How does Germany view D-Day in modern times? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 6, 2019, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-germany-view-d-day-in-modern-times/835118 "2019-06-06T13:38:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![EdelweissPirate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8491ac/32.png) [@EdelweissPirate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdelweissPirate)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2019, 7:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-germany-view-d-day-in-modern-times/835118/21 "2019-06-10T07:33:54Z")
I think when Mops said that German higher ed has no “noticeable liberal education component,” the “liberal” wasn’t meant in the political sense but rather in the context of what used to be called a “liberal education,” or one that provided a solid grounding in the seven liberal arts. “Liberal education” can also be used to distinguish the classic(al) liberal arts college experience from trade school or professional school. But maybe you knew that already. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2019, 12:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-germany-view-d-day-in-modern-times/835118/22 "2019-06-10T12:51:38Z")
[This seems like a good summary](https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-germany-d-day-liberation-20190606-story.html) of how German views on the war and Nazism have evolved over the decades. > [@](#): > > As the generation that elected Adolf Hitler and fought his genocidal war dies away, most Germans today see World War II through the prism of guilt, responsibility and atonement. And almost all agree that the defeat of the Nazis was a good thing. > That hasn’t always been the case. > > Many Germans who survived World War II had supported Hitler and the Nazi race ideology that led to the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe — and they were devastated by the downfall of the Third Reich. > … > > After the country was back on its economic feet, younger Germans started to question their elders, culminating in the “1968 movement” in which students confronted their parents with the atrocities committed during the Third Reich. It does seem odd that the Nazis have come to be seen as an alien conquering force imposed on a freedom-loving people, rather than as an indigenous popular movement driven by real people in real conditions. It’s not easy to accept that ordinary people can be so susceptible to going along with hatred, as long as they think they’re benefiting from it, and that Germans of the 1930’s were not fundamentally different from people anywhere else. It can happen anywhere and at any time, and it often has. ---
**Author:** ![EmbarrassingDad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/embarrassingdad/32/5441_2.png) [@EmbarrassingDad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EmbarrassingDad)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2019, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-germany-view-d-day-in-modern-times/835118/23 "2019-06-10T14:59:02Z")
I’m sorry, but while this is a good question, it doesn’t feel to me like a “General Question” with a factual answer, and more like IMHO, or a Great Debate. ---
**Author:** ![Corry\_El](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Corry\_El](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Corry_El)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2019, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-germany-view-d-day-in-modern-times/835118/24 "2019-06-10T16:05:05Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > [This seems like a good summary](https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-germany-d-day-liberation-20190606-story.html) of how German views on the war and Nazism have evolved over the decades. > > It does seem odd that the Nazis have come to be seen as an alien conquering force imposed on a freedom-loving people, rather than as an indigenous popular movement driven by real people in real conditions. It’s not easy to accept that ordinary people can be so susceptible to going along with hatred, as long as they think they’re benefiting from it, and that Germans of the 1930’s were not fundamentally different from people anywhere else. It can happen anywhere and at any time, and it often has. I don’t know about odd, maybe natural, but this seems to me is a significant complication to the typical German explanation (I assume some of the posters who gave it here are Germans) of the country’s attitude: that everyone learns and believes the Nazi’s were bad and the war their fault and it’s as simple as that…but it really isn’t. From direct person experience and that of one of my kids who lived in Germany and speaks remarkable German (from all I’ve heard) it’s not quite that simple. The part about the German people mainly enthusiastically supporting the war, when it was going well, tends to be de-emphasized in favor of ‘the criminal regime’. And there’s some corresponding conflation of Nazi atrocities not directly related to the war (though not necessarily opposed by the general population either) with the war. Plus IME plenty of sympathy for the German position and even Hitler among the war time generation which is now mainly gone. ‘He did terrible things, but he was trying help his country’. Not so simple, and like you say painting it as just about ‘criminal regimes’ (though the Nazi’s were) distracts from the true source of this danger going forward, human societies not only ‘criminal regimes’. Whereas again the place of the Normandy invasion in the post war German mind is much simpler: it doesn’t stand out remotely as much in German memory as in American, in the military history and mythos of the European war. It doesn’t even stand out as much to Brits who have more other major victories and ‘glorious defeats’ of WWII in Europe to commemorate (such as the Battle of Britain and the Dunkirk evacuation respectively). ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2019, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-germany-view-d-day-in-modern-times/835118/25 "2019-06-10T16:33:53Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > [This seems like a good summary](https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-germany-d-day-liberation-20190606-story.html) of how German views on the war and Nazism have evolved over the decades. > > It does seem odd that the Nazis have come to be seen as an alien conquering force imposed on a freedom-loving people, rather than as an indigenous popular movement driven by real people in real conditions. It’s not easy to accept that ordinary people can be so susceptible to going along with hatred, as long as they think they’re benefiting from it, and that Germans of the 1930’s were not fundamentally different from people anywhere else. It can happen anywhere and at any time, and it often has. I once wrote a long post that tackled that very subject in a similar thread, I have to see if I can find it again… [Ah, here it is:](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=809441) > [@Why didn't the South/racists get their day of reckoning like postwar Germans did?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-the-south-racists-get-their-day-of-reckoning-like-postwar-germans-did/770571/37): > > That is a ridiculously simplistic statement about a very complex, decades-lasting and still lingering subject. You could write multi-volumed books about it (and I’m sure someone has). Hint: it didn’t went like this: the REAL bad guys got judged at Nuremberg (heck, a slimy clever handsome scum like Albert Speer got away with 20 years), the lower ranks got swiftly [denazificated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification), everybody knelt down and swore “I’ll be a good boy by now and an upright commie-hater” and everything was wine and roses. Except for those many nazi war criminals who escaped, many via the [rat lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(World_War_II_aftermath)) with aid by catholic cleric and US intelligence, there remained millions of bureaucrats, officials, clerks, policemen, judges etc etc. who had been good functioning and loyal executives during the nazi era who just couldn’t get rid of without a break down of civil order. Those, well, were “denazificated”, but many stuck to their former convictions and their influence remained, most atrociously in the field of justice: the early Federal Republic of Germany was very reluctant to judge nazi criminals because of that influence, and the ball only really got rolling by the braveness of one prosecutor, [Fritz Bauer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Bauer), with the [Auschwitz trials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Auschwitz_trials) in 1963. The outcome of these trials were IMHO not ideal, to say the least, and the following history of the prosecution of nazi criminals by German justice was often embarrassing, up to today. > > There’s, for instance, the famous case of chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s important secretary [Hans Globke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Globke). When Adenauer (who himself had been a staunch anti-nazi, his personal reputation is undoubted in that regard) was confronted with Globke’s nazi past, he famously quipped: > > > [@Konrad Adenauer](#): > > > > Man schüttet kein schmutziges Wasser weg, solange man kein sauberes hat. > > > > One does not throw out dirty water so long as one does not have any clean water. > > And this exactly was the common attitude in the early years of the federal republic. This radically changed with the student revolt in the mid-sixties, when the new generation dared to ask their parents and grandparents the uncomfortable, nagging question “What did YOU do between 1933 and 1945?”. In a longer process, the view on those shameful years changed in the following years also in the mainstream, and from about 1970 on a real confrontation with our own past could happen on every social level, and the [Warschauer Kniefall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warschauer_Kniefall)became possible (and Willy Brandt got much flak from the right for his gesture). Of course, a fringe of that student revolt turned terrorists, [the RAF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction), which bit us in the ass during most of the seventies, and was a cruel joke of history: the opposition against historical crimes of contempt for mankind turned into an outbreak of inhuman crimes, but it shows how our nazi past haunted us still. > > I’ll cut it now, though I could go on and show how this is an important subject till today, but I hope you get my gist so far. And we haven’t even handled the denazification process and handling of old nazi cadres in East Germany yet… > > tl;dr;: “denazification” is a complex subject. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-germany-view-d-day-in-modern-times/835118.md?page=1)