Germany and its Nazi past: forever seeking closure The change in the public mood is a shift from previous decades in which the memory of the Holocaust played a central role in German identity. Immediately after the Second World War, Germany was not alone in being largely silent about the Holocaust. That changed following the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s, in which lower-level officials within the death camp apparatus were put on trial, amid widespread publicity in Germany. In the decades that followed, senior German politicians undertook public acts of contrition; Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before the memorial to the Warsaw ghetto, and German president Richard von Weizsäcker gave a landmark speech in which he spoke of Germany's 1945 defeat as an act of liberation. Perhaps as important as any of these high-level political acts, the US TV mini-series Holocaust attracted a vast audience when it was shown on West German television in 1979. East Germany was different. Here, there was a denial of the Nazi past, with the Communist authorities declaring that theirs was an anti-fascist state that had no link to the actions of previous generations. "To be fair," Kundnani says, "there was more of a break, more of a thorough-going purge of Nazis in the education system." Repentance for Nazi genocide as a driving force behind the policies of the German state reached its high-water mark under foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who used it in 1999 to justify Germany's involvement in Kosovo, the country's first deployment abroad since the war. "Up to that point, the guiding principle of West German foreign policy was Nie wieder Krieg - no more war," Kundnani says. Fischer said: 'I didn't just learn: never again war. I also learnt: never again Auschwitz."" But even as Germany's foreign intervention was being justified on the basis of special responsibility for the Holocaust, a countervailing call for closure was being made. In 1998, the writer Martin Walser called for the drawing of a Schlußstrich - a final line - under the Nazi past. That has not stopped Germany's leaders from carrying out public repentance. Since he took office in March last year, President Gauck has mapped a painful route through the devastation the Third Reich inflicted on its European neighbours, with visits to the Czech village of Lidice last October and the Italian hamlet of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in March this year. Both places, like Oradour-sur-Glane, were the sites of Nazi massacres. Last month, Angela Merkel became the first German chancellor to visit Dachau, the concentration camp that opened close to Munich in 1933. At an election rally held in a beer tent in the nearby town that gave the camp its name, she berated her audience in a manner that, onlookers said, left party functionaries "open mouthed." The concentration camp had been "in our midst," Mrs Merkel told her audience. Those who wished to could see and hear [it]. That was why it was so important "that we never look the other way again, and refuse to listen." A newspaper account described an atmosphere of utter silence in the beer tent, with not a mug being lifted or a fork being clinked on a plate. Earlier this year, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the US-based Jewish human rights organisation that funds Operation Last Chance, called for the closure of a magazine called Der Landser - the title is an old-fashioned German word akin to "squaddie" - which relates stories of the German army's Second World War exploits, typically from the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers. Similar magazines are popular the world over, but Germany has no ordinary military past. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Israel office, has expressed disappointment at the pace of prosecutions in the decades since the war ended. Germany is very keen to focus on dialogue and tolerance education, far less on the issue of finding the last perpetrators and making them pay for their crimes. Most countries prefer not to focus on their own criminality. Justice over the years in Germany has been partial at best. There was a legal rather than political trigger for the latest attempt to prosecute alleged Nazi war criminals. The case of the late John Demjanjuk, who was convicted in 2011 by a German court for war crimes committed at the Nazi extermination camp near Sobibór, in occupied Poland, established a precedent that lower-level camp functionaries could be brought to justice if they had played an overseer role, which paved the way for fresh prosecutions. But it came at a particularly troubling time for German politicians attempting to find a vocabulary to deal with the burden of the past - and to communicate this to the next generation. The German historian Hannes Heer, best known for a 1990s exhibition that confronted the German public with the crimes of the Wehrmacht, says: "For young people in Germany today, there is a fascination with Hitler, with the black uniforms - and they also have a sense that this is something uncomfortable for their parents." It is vital to understand, Heer says, that at the time Nazism had a powerful appeal to ordinary Germans. For the older generation, there was always an element of hope about this period [the Third Reich], because it came after the Weimar Republic, the terrible unemployment, the discord between the parties in parliament, the reparations that followed Versailles. It wasn't just bloodlust. This hope led many young people to join the Hitler Youth, for example, and you have to take that seriously. The German education system continues to be rigorous in educating its children about the Nazi past. To help young Germans to understand their relationship with the Holocaust, Mr Heer argues, it is essential to say that: "While you have no guilt, you must have a view. You must know what happened, and you have a responsibility to make sure this doesn't happen again.