Abstract
In the late 1980s, some leading West German academics engaged in a well-publicized dispute about whether one might compare atrocities committed by the Nazis with acts committed by the Soviet Union, particularly the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. This dispute helped reintroduce into academic and public discourse the consideration of Germans as wartime victims. For conservative politicians and scholars this was part of an effort to ‘normalize’ German history and not just to stress the uniqueness of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The collapse of East Germany, the unification of the two German states and the end of the Cold War opened the door to new considerations of the Germans as victims. Scholars and politicians on the Right and Left encouraged the study of all kinds of victims: Jews, forced labourers, soldiers, expellees, women raped by Soviet soldiers, citizens of East Germany persecuted by their Communist government and civilian victims of wartime bombing. Gilad Margalit’s Guilt, Suffering, and Memory, Michael Prince’s War and German Memory, and the chapters in Germans as Victims, edited by Bill Niven, all provide extensive coverage of the evolving treatment of this wide-ranging subject.
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