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Mangled Memory: Remembrance of the Nazi Regime in the German Democratic Republic

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Cover photo: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Berlin, Palast der Republik — um 1990 — 2” / CC BY-SA 4.0

By Aviva Gomes-Bhatt

From 1949 until 1990, Germany was divided into the Western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR). Ideologically separated by the proverbial Iron Curtain, each state had to grapple with reconstruction and usher itself into a new era. In addition to addressing the legacy of the war and the atrocities of Germany’s Nazi past, the GDR’s leaders were also tasked with the development of an entirely new socialist state. Consequently, one of the main goals of the GDR’s leadership was to create a sense of solidarity and unity among East Germans. The need to achieve this, however, resulted in a state-sanctioned view of the Nazi regime that often minimized or excluded the Holocaust, and the primacy of German Jews as victims of Nazi persecution. This paper will analyze the driving forces behind why the East German government chose to implement the narratives they did and the effects these decisions had on East German society.

Following the end of the Second World War, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, each overseen by one of the Allied Powers: Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. As efforts got underway to begin the reconstruction—both physical and ideological—of the country, tensions grew between the East and West, creating a divide between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union that eventually culminated in the official division of Germany in 1949.[1] Upon division, it was immediately evident that the Western world recognized the FRG as the legitimate successor to the preceding German regimes, leaving the GDR with the task of proving itself both domestically and internationally.[2] The Soviet Occupation Zone had borne far more long-lasting physical traces of the war than its Western counterparts, which left the Eastern state lagging behind industrially.[3] The need for the GDR to legitimize itself would become a critical component in how it framed the history of the Nazi regime.

The most paramount part of East German ideology, and what would later become its founding myth, was antifascism.[4] Even before the official establishment of the GDR, the press in the Soviet Occupied Zone focused heavily on publishing antifascist survivor narratives, to start building up this new identity from the beginning.[5] During this time, a few newspapers in the Soviet Zone began analysis on the specific persecution and murder of Jews under the Nazis. These papers were aided by information disseminated through a range of pamphlets, even though paper was not easy to come by. The 1946 Nuremberg trials, for instance, served as a significant source of official documentation on the crimes of the Nazi regime.[6] Two of the most influential of these texts on Jewish persecution were published in 1948 by the Dietz Verlag publishing house. Stefan Heyman and Siegbert Kahn were both young Jewish communists who had been imprisoned in, and survived, Nazi camps. Through their writings, they attempted to promote an intellectual way of coming to terms with the antisemitism that was so prominent in the country. They wanted to show how the nation-wide spread of antisemitism was a steppingstone that allowed the Nazis to justify racism on a much larger scale.[7] While Heyman and Kahn’s publications did not have a massive impact in shaping the narrative of the war in the Soviet Zone, their writings were later used as the basis for further research into the persecution of Jews by numerous historians and scholars in the GDR.[8]

In 1946, the Soviet occupation administration oversaw the creation of the Socialist Unity Party (SED)—a merger between the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).[9] The SED leadership was comprised primarily of a communist “elite,” most of whom had partaken in antifascist activity during the Nazi regime.[10] Often, this occurred by way of fleeing the country as émigrés during the war years and participating in resistance through their writings. Upon returning to Germany, many of these émigrés felt a level of resentment towards Germans who remained in the country and “colluded” with the Nazis by default.[11] However, this tension could not be allowed to brew, as the SED leadership was facing the much more daunting task of legitimizing their rule and their newly founded state. One of the primary ways this took shape was through crafting a war narrative that would absolve regular East German citizens of guilt from either passivity or participation in the Nazi regime, allowing them to move on and participate in the building of a united socialist state. As early as 1946, public denunciation of East German citizens was already being suppressed, and in its place, the SED was crafting a new narrative that saw the German people themselves as victims of the Nazi regime.[12]

As historian Jon Berndt Olsen explains, “political leaders in East Germany still saw great value in influencing the vernacular memory culture and hoped in the immediate postwar era that this would aid them in their quest for legitimacy.”[13] While the SED’s rule was initially backed by the Red Army, it would not be enough to secure leadership in the state long term.[14] One of the most important distinctions that the SED made was to delineate a connection between fascism and capitalism, and similarly, one between anti-fascism and communism.[15] The Dimitrov Thesis—coined by Bulgarian Communist Party leader Georgi Mikhailov Dimitrov—defined the Nazi regime as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capitalism.”[16] This view of the Nazi regime, as first and foremost a capitalist one, had several repercussions for the GDR. For one, it allowed the GDR to position itself as the morally superior German state, while the capitalist FRG was supposedly returning to a fascist legacy.[17] Walter Ulbricht, the First Secretary of the SED, asserted that the blame of the war should rest primarily on the shoulders of the “300 leaders” of the Nazi military-industrial complex, and the German people’s only real “tragedy” was in failing to resist.[18] The official doctrine of the GDR claimed that Nazism was defeated by the Soviets and communism, and East Germans were “liberated” by the Soviets, rather than being conquered by the invading Red Army.[19] While this perspective on the war allowed for East Germans to unify under the SED, it also meant that the Holocaust, as well as antisemitism enacted by regular citizens, was severely overlooked.

East German soldiers on guard at the border between East and West Germany. Photo is in the public domain.

While the crimes and atrocities committed against Jews were not necessarily ignored or covered up, official SED narratives tended to ignore the specifically ethnic element that the targeting of Jewish people by the Nazis entailed. In part, this was because public acknowledgement of the racism and antisemitism that led to the Holocaust would take away from the image of regular Germans as victims, by implying that in some cases of violence towards Jews, they were perpetrators as well, whether through direct action or passive compliance. Since the main goal of the SED was to build national unity, Jewish suffering was not paramount to the administration.[20] Admitting racial motivations to be the forefront of Nazi policy would have deeply contrasted with the view that Nazism was truly about class conflict, and therefore socialism was needed to serve as a moral antidote.[21] As Pól Ó Dochartaigh explains, “since the GDR derived its legitimacy from the war against Nazism, it could not allow any cause to dilute or overshadow its core legitimacy.”[22] One of the few occasions when the nature of the Holocaust was substantially explored in the GDR was when the SED exploited it for political purposes against the FRG.[23] For example, the late 1950s saw controversy in the FRG over a number of destroyed synagogues and former Nazis ascending to positions of political power. The GDR used these examples to publicly berate the West and claim the higher moral ground. Books such as Witch Hunt on the Jews and Globke and the Extermination of Jews were published to attack the West.[24] During the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, the East German press made efforts to report extensively on the murder of Jews by the Nazis, while continuing to assert that the FRG was a continuation of that legacy.[25] It is important to note that these actions were highly insincere, given the GDR’s own stance towards the Holocaust and its own Jewish population.[26] The SED’s emphasis on antifascism and eschewing of the Holocaust permeated several aspects of life in order to ensure that their messaging was all-encompassing.

The arts, including literature and film, played a major role in shaping public memory, and was therefore highly controlled by the SED. This was evident especially when analyzing how effective these mediums were in disseminating Nazi beliefs during the 1930s and 1940s.[27] While the GDR’s Constitution explicitly forbade censorship, a censor’s office did exist, and exercised some literary control over publications. Most members of the censor’s office, however, were mainly low-status workers, and as such, had not undergone very rigorous denazification procedures—that is to say, the Soviet-promulgated initiative for ridding German society of Nazi ideology.[28] What was emphasized through the censor’s office though, was the need for regularity and unity, particularly in the immediate postwar period. War narratives that were published had to fit the mold the SED laid out, which resulted in gaps in the understanding of the war itself.[29] This was especially true because many of these narratives were written by émigrés who had fled Germany when the Nazis came to power and were writing from an outsider perspective. Since these writers had not experienced the war firsthand in Germany, they also considered themselves distant from those who remained behind and “colluded” with the Nazis.[30] Because of this, it was a select elite few whose memories were disseminated throughout the GDR to represent the entire population.[31] 

To further the narrative of German victimhood, official state propaganda also drew connections between the suffering people endured during the war and the brutality of the Western Allied powers. For example, the ruin of the Fruauenkirche, a Lutheran church in Dresden, was a physical sign of the losses caused by the Allies. Of particular note in this example is that the Soviets were not involved with this attack, thereby coinciding with the negative view of the capitalistic West that the SED was trying to implement. It also succeeded in once again situating Germans as the victims in this war.[32] SED propaganda regularly emphasized important German communist figures and events from the past, such as the activities of communist revolutionaries Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, in order to further gain support and loyalty of East Germans.[33]

In addition, the East German school curriculum concentrated heavily on the rise and triumph of Nazism, but only immediately before and during the Second World War. Missing from this curriculum was the period of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 1930s wherein the Nazis were able to garner public support in the first place.[34] Only one school text was approved by the Ministry of Education per subject every year. These texts did feature some information on Jewish persecution under the Nazis. Year 7 students, for example, studied F.C. Weiskopf’s book Die Geschwister von Ravensbrück, wherein a group of Jewish orphans escape their would-be murderers. In Year 9, students learned about some of the anti-Jewish measures that occurred under the Nazis. Despite this, however, schools failed to position German Jews in their historical context and did not provide information on their origins in Germany, religion, or daily lives in society—including their work, education, or recreational habits. The result was that the actions of the Nazis were deemed to be isolated incidents by a bad group of people, and the antisemitism that was widespread throughout Germany and much of Europe for centuries was disregarded.[35]

Film was another medium through which ideology was disseminated in order to reshape. As the SED assumed power over the newly formed GDR, filmmakers were not exempt from helping to cement the view of the GDR as the socialist antidote to fascism and were therefore subjected to a great deal of creative control.[36] The Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) was the GDR’s state-controlled film studio and was responsible for outlining the parametres in which filmmakers could create. DEFA mandates fell in line with the Soviet Union’s denazification and political education program for East Germany. The primary aim was to foster the development of a new generation of filmmakers who would be ideologically committed to antifascist cinema.[37] Konrad Wolf’s 1968 film, Ich war neunzehn, is an excellent example of this. By the late 1960s, there was a generation of East Germans for whom Nazism and the war were abstract histories that held no visceral meaning. This resulted in a level of skepticism about the GDR’s “heroic master narratives of antifascism.”[38] Wolf’s film was especially significant because it depicted very complex notions of victimhood. Told through multiple perspectives, the film exhibits the threat of death as faced by German Jews, German communists, and Soviet soldiers as they all faced the Nazis in different ways.[39] Film therefore became an easily digestible ideological weapon – through its appeal, it was able to reach audiences in a subtle, yet effective manner.

Although the SED’s official narrative did not focus too much on the specificity of Jewish suffering, DEFA still produced several films on this topic. Kurt Maetzig’s 1947 film, Ehe im Schatten, was one of the first to deal with this topic. The film follows a German man, Hans Wieland, and his Jewish wife Elizabeth, as the Nazis ban her from performing on stage as she had done in the past. The film ends with Hans poisoning Elizabeth, before drinking from the same cup. Although Jewish persecution is a central theme in this film, its overly aesthetic nature distracts from the subject matter at hand, and the emotional pathos stifles the historical reasoning for Elizabeth being targeted.[40] The 1963 film Nackt unter Wölfen served as the first DEFA film set in the specific context of a concentration camp. In the film, a Jewish boy interned at Buchenwald concentration camp survives after the camp is liberated by communist inmates themselves. This is a gross misrepresentation of history, as the camp was not in fact liberated by communist inmates, and instead epitomizes the way in which the GDR “[instrumentalized] Jewish issues in the service of an altogether different political agenda.”[41] The 1975 film, Jakob der Lügner, depicts the attempts of a man named Jakob to offer ghetto inhabitants a distraction from their inevitable fate. This film, unlike the previous two, refuses to sensationalize its subject matter, and by the end, as Jakob and a number of Jews from the ghetto are loaded onto a train, it is clear that there is no hope for them.[42] Through the progression of films on the subject of Jewish persecution under the Nazis, it is evident that over the years, filmmakers—although still bound by DEFA restrictions—were able to explore more in-depth narratives that depicted Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.

The historiography of the Nazi regime coming out of the GDR is also highly indicative of how the state dealt with the Nazi past. Many young historians in the GDR followed cues outlined by the Soviets. The 1953 East German edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, for example, included a 150-page outline on Germany history, yet made no mention about Jewish persecution in the 12 pages dedicated to the “Hitler dictatorship.”[43] The text instead made the broader claim that “part of the population in [Eastern Europe], first and foremost Slavs, was bestially exterminated.”[44] While the Encyclopedia entry was not written by German historians, it serves as an example of the direction East German historians took themselves and highlights how Jews were minimized or excluded from historical narratives in order to emphasize the socialist fight against fascism. In another instance, in 1966, an eight volume History of the German Workers’ Movement was published, of which only a few pages touched upon the Nazi persecution of Jews.[45] This information was supplemented with the argument that the working class attempted to offer aid to the targeted Jewish people, and most Germans were simply passive and non-resistant at worst.[46] Similarly, teaching manuals published in the late 1960s and early 1970s emphasized that ordinary German citizens had been intimidated and coerced by the Nazis into aiding and abetting the persecution of Jews. There was no mention of Nazi state-sponsored indoctrination leading to antisemitism and racism which encouraged Germans to act this way, as it would lay fault on them.[47] 

Despite official prescribed parametres for establishing historiography, GDR scholars did manage to delve into the history of the Holocaust on their own terms. Heyman and Kahn’s 1948 publications served as an important basis for students in higher education who sought alternatives to the idealist state-mandated teaching they received in school.[48] In 1966, a volume of photographs and texts detailing the persecution and genocide of European Jewry was published, spearheaded by historian Helmut Eschwege, and 12 years later, a general history of the persecution of Jews was published. Both publications received a generally muted response, domestically and internationally. This exemplifies the success of the SED’s quest to unify the country behind their war narrative.[49] As historian Kurt Pätzold explains, “omissions in research and publishing […] had a serious effect on popular education in the broadest sense.”[50] Because publishing was so limited and strictly controlled in the GDR’s formative years, it was much more difficult to introduce new information to the population decades later.

East Germans install a sign. Photo is in the public domain.

In addition to literary and cinematic methods, the SED was able to cement its view of the Nazi regime through official state memorial sites, the most significant being former concentration camps. Three national memorials were established at the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück camps in the 1950s as part of the SED’s attempt to create national memory projects.[51] At the site of the Sachsenhausen labour camp, the Museum of the Resistance Struggle and the Suffering of Jewish People was created. It was the only museum in the GDR to focus on antisemitism as a primary factor. The emphasis on the interned Jews was muted, however, as the museum attributed rebellions by these Jewish prisoners to having been instigated by communists. This connection was meant to emphasize communist solidarity with the Jews, once again putting antifascism at the forefront of the narrative.[52]  It is worth noting that this museum was largely created to satisfy the demands of the Israeli Union of Anti-Nazi Resistance Fighters. The organization had demanded a memorial section dedicated to Jewish suffering and had proposed being permitted to set up their own exhibit. By implementing the Museum of the Resistance Struggle and the Suffering of Jewish People, the SED was able to satisfy the request for a Jewish-focused memorial, while maintaining their own messaging and preventing Israel from setting up their own. In this way, the SED was able to keep a tight control on the narrative being put forth through memorials.[53]

Perhaps the most significant of these memorials was the one at the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1958, the site was officially renamed the National Site of Warning and Commemoration. At the memorial’s opening, Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl claimed that the monument should serve as a symbolic representation of the GDR’s greatest heroes. He attested that:

“[It] should not just be a day of memory for the time of our great fighters, but this day should also provide us with a renewed warning and bind us not to surrender our fight against every form of inhumanity too soon, until we have removed every form of fascism in every country and for all time.” [54]

The site’s permanent exhibition placed a significant spotlight on the exploits of the German Communist Party (KPD) in the years after the First World War, emphasizing their continual role in combating fascism and capitalism. 

Unlike at Sachsenhausen, the Buchenwald memorial did not have any sort of monument dedicated solely to Jewish victims. The SED claimed Jewish victims were commemorated as part of ethnic groups that were recognized, including Polish, Russian, Hungarian, and Roma victims. This also allowed the SED to avoid having to group Jewish victims under an Israeli banner. The SED claimed that this manner of organization returned to Jewish victims a nationality that the Nazis stole from them. Regardless of this sentiment, though, the fact remains that “Jews suffered because they were Jews or regarded as such, not because they were nationals of particular countries.”[55] The SED’s claim served as nothing more than an excuse to avoid drawing any attention away from their antifascist narrative. The Buchenwald site did display a stone slab near the crematorium memorializing the Jews who had been incarcerated, but that was the extent of specifically Jewish commemoration. The “Jewish Camp” area where thousands of Jews had been interned and died was disregarded in its entirety.[56] The major recurring theme of the Buchenwald exhibitions was to superimpose “both the triumphant narrative of antifascist resistance, and the anti-Western narrative according to which all suffering was the result of capitalist greed.”[57] This served to universalize all suffering endured under the Nazis, which on the one hand aided in unifying the East German people, but on the other, greatly diminished the specificity of Jewish suffering. The Buchenwald memorial garnered a great deal of attention from both the press and the public, proving how significant it was in ascribing the Party ideology with the new state.[58]

In addition to the major national memory projects established by the SED, there were also several smaller, local monuments set up to honour the “victims of fascism” across the country.[59] In Dresden, for example, a menorah-shaped stele was erected near the site of a destroyed synagogue. The monument featured six arms instead of the usual eight to represent the six million murdered Jews in the Holocaust. Although this monument was created to specifically honour Jewish victims, the inscription on the memorial reads: “In Eternal Memory: To the Victims of Fascism.”[60] This generalized dedication renders the monument much more universal than it was supposed to be, thereby partly diminishing its significance. An SED-sponsored museum exhibit on the “Other Germany” was curated by former camp victims with the intention of influencing the popular memory of life in the Third Reich. The ideological purpose of this museum was to emphasize the role German communists played in resisting the Nazis.[62] Additionally, there were a number of organizations independent from the SED that attempted to construct their own memorials and exhibitions, including the Committee of Antifascist Resistance Fighters, the Museum for German History, and the Marx/Engels Institute.[63] Some of these groups attempted to set up monuments at the Buchenwald site, but were met with only limited success.[64]

The SED’s party line about the Nazi regime and Holocaust also directly affected the lives of Jewish survivors living in the GDR following the war. Although not as extreme as under the Nazi regime, antisemitism was prominent in the Soviet Union. This sentiment carried over into the Soviet Occupation Zone, and while it may not have been explicitly acted upon at the time, it did mean that anti-Jewish attitudes were not quelled as thoroughly as they should have been during the reconstruction process.[65] Jewish communities in the GDR were not exceedingly numerous, but many of them did attempt to commemorate the Holocaust independent of state sanction.[66] Jewish survivors were attributed the title of “victims of fascism,” instead of the lauded “fighter against fascism” that was bestowed upon German communists who had actively defied the Nazi regime, whether through active resistance in Germany or by emigrating to an Allied nation after the Nazis gained control of the state.[67] This distinction was important as it placed Jews in the same societal category as ordinary Germans who failed to resist the Nazis and engaged in passivity or compliance instead. There was no room in the SED’s strict binary of “fascism versus antifascism” to afford special attention to the unique nature of Jewish suffering.[68] 

Because of this label, Jews in the GDR were not only relegated to the same societal rank as ordinary Germans, in many cases they continued to be at a disadvantage because of it. For example, in 1953 the Union of those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime was replaced by the Committee of Antifascist Resistance Fighters in the GDR. The new organization did not extend membership to any Jewish individuals because of their lowly status of “victim of fascism,” thereby denying them the right to participate in a support organization.[69] As the Cold War progressed, growing tensions between the Soviet Union and Israel also led to repercussions for Jews in the GDR. While there was no explicit persecution, East German authorities were more than willing to not only treat Jews in the state with suspicion of being spies, they also implemented anti-Israeli propaganda that was outright antisemitic.[70] Additionally, many Jewish survivors identified themselves first and foremost as German, hiding their Jewish heritage in an attempt to blend in, as overt religious practices were viewed as a social barrier.[71] Even Jewish communists who wholeheartedly supported the socialist system were liable to being targeted by purges that took place within the Party, at least one of which was distinctly antisemitic.[72] These examples juxtapose the public claims made by the SED that stated antisemitism did not exist in the GDR. While it may not have existed as it did during the Nazi regime, discrimination against Jewish Holocaust survivors and Jewish GDR citizens did occur.

German historian Dorothy Wierling explains that the term “collective memory” is not always an accurate one when referring to nations, as the so-called “collective” is often comprised of various collectives, and not a homogenous memory.[73] She explains the relationship between individual and public memory can be starkly different.[74] The GDR serves as an excellent example of this complex way of analyzing history and memory. Most popular interpretations of how the Nazi regime and the Holocaust were addressed in the GDR draw on the SED’s policies to speak for the entire country.[75] However, memories of the war were often curated in family spheres as well, and differed based on regional, social, and political factors across the country, in addition to one’s own personal experiences during the war.[76] Unfortunately, these accounts often went undocumented, or remained fairly inconspicuous as state-driven narratives took precedence. 

The SED’s approach to memory and remembrance was driven greatly by their urgent need to unify the GDR under their leadership. To achieve this, and to validate their position as a socialist administration in one of two competing German states, the SED first equated the fascism of the Nazi regime with capitalism, situating communism as the morally superior ideology. It was then crucial to absolve East German citizens of guilt through passivity or compliance during the Holocaust. This was achieved through the perspective that Germans were victimized by the Nazis and forced into compliance and were thus not to blame for any atrocities committed under the Nazi administration. While the SED’s efforts proved effective as they permeated all sectors of public life, it must be noted that in pursuing this course of action, Holocaust survivors and Jewish citizens were greatly marginalized. While it cannot be said that Holocaust remembrance was entirely ignored in state-driven initiatives, the moral superiority the SED claimed to exude was tainted by this lacuna.

Footnotes:

  1. Mary Fulbrook, The Two Germanies, 1945-1990: Problems of Interpretation (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1992), 13.
  2. Lorn Hillaker, “Representing a “Better Germany”: Competing Images of State and Society in the Early Cultural Diplomacy of the FRG and GDR.” Central European History 53, no. 2 (2020): 373.
  3. Dorothy Wierling, “The War in Postwar Society: The Role of the Second World War in Public and Private Spheres in the Soviet Occupation Zone and Early GDR,” in Experience and Memory: the Second World War in Europe, ed. Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 216.
  4.  Ibid, 219-220.
  5.  Elizabeth Wenger, “Speak, Memory? War Narratives and Censorship in the GDR,” Modern Humanities Research Association 96, no. 4 (2018): 642.
  6. Kurt Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust: A Provisional Review of GDR Historiography,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 40, no. 1 (1995): 293-294.
  7. Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 295.
  8. Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 296.
  9. 2. Stephen Brockmann, “Resurrected from the Ruins: The Emergence of GDR Culture,” in Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR, ed. Karen Leeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 40.
  10. Wierling, “The War in Postwar Society,” 218.
  11.  Wenger, “Speak, Memory?,” 644.
  12.  Wenger, “Speak, Memory?,” 647.
  13. Jon Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945-1990. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 18.
  14. Wierling, “The War in Postwar Society,” 218.
  15.  Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 21.
  16. Brockmann, “Resurrected from the Ruins,” 38.
  17. Hillaker, “Representing a “Better Germany,” 379.
  18. Wenger, “Speak, Memory?,” 647.
  19. Pól Ó. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016),63.
  20. Wenger, “Speak, Memory?,” 647.
  21. Bill Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” in Memorialization in Germany since 1945, ed. Bill Niven and Chloe Paver (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 205.
  22. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 64.
  23. Hillaker, “Representing a “Better Germany,” 379.
  24. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 65.
  25. 3.3 Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 206.
  26. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 65-66.
  27. Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 298.
  28. Wenger, “Speak, Memory?,” 643.
  29. Wenger, “Speak, Memory?,” 644.
  30. Wenger, “Speak, Memory?,” 644.
  31. Wenger, “Speak, Memory?,” 656.
  32. Wierling, “The War in Postwar Society,” 221.
  33. Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth 21.
  34. Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 292.
  35. Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 301-302.
  36. 3. Seán Allan, “DEFA’s Antifascist Myths and the Construction of National Identity in East German Cinema,” in Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR, ed. Karen Leeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 54.
  37. 3. Seán Allan, “DEFA’s Antifascist Myths and the Construction of National Identity,” 52.
  38. 3. Seán Allan, “DEFA’s Antifascist Myths and the Construction of National Identity,” 62.
  39. 3. Seán Allan, “DEFA’s Antifascist Myths and the Construction of National Identity,” 65.
  40. 3. Seán Allan, “DEFA’s Antifascist Myths and the Construction of National Identity,” 52.
  41. 3. Seán Allan, “DEFA’s Antifascist Myths and the Construction of National Identity,” 66.
  42. 3. Seán Allan, “DEFA’s Antifascist Myths and the Construction of National Identity,” 66.
  43. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 64.
  44. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 64.
  45. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 64.
  46. Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 299.
  47. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 64.
  48.  Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 295.
  49.  Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 292-293.
  50.  Pätzold, “Persecution and the Holocaust,” 302.
  51. Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 52.
  52. Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 206.
  53. Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 206.
  54. Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 54.
  55. Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 208.
  56. Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 208.
  57. Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 209.
  58.  Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 54.
  59.  Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 52.
  60.  Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 210.
  61.  Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 19.
  62.  Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 19.
  63. Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 206.
  64. Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 54-55.
  65. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 56.
  66. Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 34.
  67. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 61.
  68. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 61.
  69. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 61.
  70. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 62.
  71. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 36.
  72. Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, 55.
  73. Wierling, “The War in Postwar Society,” 214.
  74. Wierling, “The War in Postwar Society,” 214.
  75. Niven, “Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR,” 207.
  76.  Wierling, “The War in Postwar Society,” 214.

References:

Allan, Seán. “DEFA’s Antifascist Myths and the Construction of National Identity in East German Cinema.” In Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR, edited by Karen Leeder, 52-69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Brockmann, Stephen. “Resurrected from the Ruins: The Emergence of GDR Culture.” In Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR, edited by Karen Leeder, 35-51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Dochartaigh, Pól Ó. Germans and Jews since the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Fulbrook, Mary. The Two Germanies, 1945-1990: Problems of Interpretation. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992.

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