Nazi crimes and identity in West Germany: Collective memories of the Dachau concentration camp, 1945-1990.

The National-Socialist concentration camps are one of the most powerful symbols of barbaric repression in the post-World War II Western world. A case study of the post-war history of the Dachau camp provides the basis for an analysis of the construction of collective memories as determinants of group identity and moral consciousness. The physical, visual and oral representations of the Dachau camp after 1945 are reconstructed under the aspect of how the camp, as a historical symbol, was understood and utilized by various groups during the four periods of its post-war history: as an internment camp by the US Army (1945-48); as a refugee settlement by the state of Bavaria (1948-64); as a memorial site by former inmates (1956-68); and as a didactic facility by younger generations of West Germans (1970s-). The group images (collective memories) of Dachau for each of the four groups are traced since 1945. In contrast to the Allied experience of the camps at liberation as festering products of German barbarity, most Germans remembered them as penal institutions for criminals and dangerous regime opponents. Whereas the Allied/international image of the camps has changed little since 1945, the camps first disappeared from West German collective memory in the late 1940s, then the attempt was made to eradicate their remaining traces in the early 50s. Various groups of former concentration camp inmates, in contrast, used memories of the camps to buttress group cohesion, and to influence West German political culture. In response to the Allied and former-prisoner images, older West Germans developed what I term the myths of ignorance, victimization, and resistance. Some Germans, primarily of younger generations, have responded since the late 1960s by recovering the historical experience of the Nazi era and assimilating it into their own memories. The basic categories of dealing with Dachau as a historical experience are interpreted in relation to broader developments in West German and Western political culture. Links between varying perceptions of the past and political behavior suggest that the core values reflected (and constructed) by historical consciousness are closely related to qualitative changes in ethical discourses within the political process.Ph.D.European historyModern historySocial SciencesSocial structureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129016/2/9308392.pd