Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)
I couldn’t read the whole thing, but as a Jew whose relatives and culture was murdered by the Germans, I found it did not adequately address the reality that many Germans knew about the camps (to say nothing of the progroms and humiliations that preceded them) and that the people who perpetrated the Holocaust were in large part incorporated unreformed into German society after the war.<p>The speech reads<p>&gt; Yet with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: the 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-Socialist regime.<p>Maybe this rang true to many Germans of 1985, I can’t know. But the historical fact is (just to take an example) the post war German government was staffed with individuals who served at high positions in the Nazi regime and surely believed in, or at least we’re comfortable with, the Nazi cause. I’m sure in the private sector there were even more unreformed Nazis.<p>It also seems to suggest that the German people couldn’t know what atrocities were being committed, which it was well known what was going on. Both the camps and the progroms and public humiliations visited upon Jews and others.
EDIT: I take the criticism of some of the commenters below that not all Germans knew the full extent of the mass murder.<p>So the whole speech rings hollow to me, and it’s purpose mostly seems to be to assuage the guilt of an entire population responsible for truly horrific acts. Which, yeah, the Germans would need that in order to be able to move forward, but the comments here are definitely not understanding the speech in that critical light.