War Stories

Robert G. Moeller powerfully conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the recent past after the Second World War. He rejects earlier characterizations of a postwar West Germany dominated by attitudes of "forgetting" or silence about the Nazi past. He instead demonstrates the "selective remembering" that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans, crimes that--according to some contemporary accounts--were comparable to the crimes of Germans against Jews. Moeller draws on a wide range of U.S. and German government documents, political debates, film archives, letters, oral histories, and newspaper accounts.