How does Heimkehrerdenkmal elucidate its Controversy?
The Heimkehrerdenkmal has generated controversy for failing to address Germany's culpability in causing the suffering of its own citizens and the deaths of fifty million people worldwide during the Second World War.  The ethnographer Peter van der Veer describes hearing such criticisms from visitors at the monument, and he observes “this is a view one encounters more often in conversations with people from the former DDR, that in the DDR they at least had the moral decency to understand these facts in terms of German guilt instead of in terms of victimhood.”
Second World War