All my life, the Germans have been a counterexample to other nations, where the order of the day was to officially forget the sins that stained the land. "Least said, soonest mended," was the Canadian and American approach to the genocide of First Nations people and the theft of their land. It was, famously, how America, especially the American south, dealt with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

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Silence begets forgetting, which begets revisionism. The founding crimes of our nations receded into the mists of time and acquired a gauzy, romantic veneer. Plantations - slave labor camps where work was obtained through torture, maiming and murder - were recast as the tragiromantic settings of *Gone With the Wind*. The deliberate extinction of indigenous peoples was revised as the "taming of the New World."

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The American #CivilWar was retold as "#TheLostCause," fought over states' rights, not over the right of the ultra-wealthy to terrorize kidnapped Africans and their descendants into working to death.

This wasn't how they did it in Germany. Nazi symbols and historical revisionism were banned (even the Berlin production of "The Producers" had to be performed without swastikas). The criminals were tried and executed. Every student learned what had been done.

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Cash reparations were paid - to Jews, and to the people whom the Nazis had conquered and brutalized. Having given in to ghastly barbarism on an terrifyingly industrial scale, the Germans had remade themselves with characteristic efficiency, rooting out the fascist rot and ensuring that it never took hold again.

But Germany's storied reformation was always oversold.

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As neo-Nazi movements sprang up and organized political parties - like the far-right #AlternativeFürDeutschland - fielded fascist candidates, they also took to the streets in violent mobs. Worse, top German security officials turned out to be allied with #AfD:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/04/germ-a04.html

Neofascists in Germany had fat bankrolls, thanks to generous, secret donations from some of the country's wealthiest billionaires:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/billionaire-backing-may-have-helped-launch-afd-a-1241029.html

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Speccher is at pains to remind us that Germany's truth and reconciliation proceeded in fits and starts, and involved compromises that were seldom discussed, even though they left some of the Reich's most vicious criminals untouched by any accountability for their crimes, and denied some victims any justice - or even an apology.

You may know that many queer people who were sent to Nazi concentration camps were immediately re-imprisoned after the camps were liberated.

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Both Nazi Germany and post-Nazi Germany made homosexuality a crime:

https://time.com/5953047/lgbtq-holocaust-stories/

But while there's been some recent historical grappling with this jaw-dropping injustice, there's been far less attention given to the plight of the communists, labor organizers, social democrats and other leftists whom the Nazis imprisoned and murdered. These political prisoners (and their survivors) struggled mightily to get the reparations they were due.

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Not only was the process punitively complex, but it was administered by bureaucrats who had served in the Reich - the people who had sent them to the camps were in charge of deciding whether they were due compensation.

This is part of a wider pattern. The business-leaders who abetted the Reich through their firms - Siemens, BMW, Hugo Boss, IG Farben, Volkswagon - were largely spared any punishment for their role in the the Holocaust.

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Many got to keep the riches they acquired through their part on an act of genocide.

Meanwhile, historians grappling with the war through the "#Historikerstreit" drew invidious comparisons between communism and fascism, equating the two ideologies and tacitly excusing the torture and killing of political prisoners (this tale is still told today - in America! My kid's AP history course made this exact point last year).

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The refusal to consider that extreme wealth, inequality, and the lust for profits - not blood - provided the Nazis with the budget, materiel and backing they needed to seize control in Germany is of a piece with the decision not to hold Germany's Nazi-enabling plutocrats to account.

The impunity for business leaders who collaborated with the Nazis on exploiting slave labor is hard to believe.

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