Hanako’s Reviews > Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich > Status Update

Most Germans showed no interest in or sympathy for the immeasurable suffering they had inflicted on the territories they had conquered and occupied
One comes to realise that busyness has become their chief defense against reality

It seemed to him they had nothing to complain about except the unfortunate situation in which they found themselves. They don’t see why they of all people have to suffer so much

Most Germans had not in fact rediscovered their consciences. On the contrary few of them wanted to hear about the horrors of nazism

Everyone helped the persecuted “at great risk to my own life”, the majority of these posthumous good samaritans add with proud modesty. Attestations of good character are the order of the hour.

“No one is a nazi”
“No one ever was… we stand around looking blank and contemptuous and listen to this story without friendliness and certainty without respect. To see a whole nation passing the buck is not an enlightening spectacle.”

They agreed that the donitz government would argue that neither the German Wehrmacht nor the German people had knowledge of these things and distanced themselves from them in every form

"We didn't know!" became the catchphrase of German denialism. Life correspondent heard these words with such "monotones frequency" in the spring of 1945 that they sounded in her ears "like a kind of national chant for Germany"

But very few Germans were prepared to confront such monstrous facts and their own complicity in them. On the contrary, most reacted with emotional frigidity and a well-practiced reflexive look away.

Germans were unable to muster the strength to free themselves, so Germany's liberation would have to come from the outside

The West is free, but the East is still in bondage to the treacherous tyranny of the Japanese