future generations to acknowledge when a broader still reconciliation can be achieved by the nations who fought each other.

Since the series was broadcast, newspapers and online forums have been full of comments by descendants of the German wartime generation, with many saying that their parents rarely, if ever, spoke of their experiences.

Producer Nico Hofmann has said that one of his goals was to encourage a national debate among the generations “to speak for the first time about the experience” of the war and he said that when screened, the third and final episodes attracted a 20.5 percent share of viewers aged 14-59 years old.

The series had on average 7.6m viewers per night and suddenly the few remaining survivors of Germany’s wartime generation, grandfathers and grandmothers, who for yearsto heap blame for the war on the German people and the Nazis, as if an entire nation was suddenly gripped by a mass psychosis, which drove them alone to commit diabolically atrocious acts of genocidal aggression, the historical evidence when objectively assessed, indicates that the German people and the Nazis were not solely responsible for the outbreak of war and were not the only ones to commit atrocities against civilians and captured enemy combatants.

Where ‘Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter’ breaks new ground, is that it is a major German TV series, broadcast internationally to widespread acclaim, which depicts the plight of the German people sympathetically, not attempting to ‘whitewash’ the German war record, but merely presenting a balanced and objective view in which the German people are not