Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army 60 years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945. Over 1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed in gas chambers in that small Polish town during four years, about 1,000 per day. At the same time, across Europe the Nazis gassed, shot, starved and worked to death millions of Jews, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and handicapped men, women and children.

Since the moment that Russian soldiers laid eyes on the few thousand haggard survivors, surrounded by piles of rotting corpses, German responsibility for this unparalleled crime has been known across the world.

There are loud voices here in Germany demanding that now, 60 years later, it is time at last to forget the horrible past, and just look forward. These same voices have complained about every public effort to deal honestly with this past. But these past weeks, Germans have been doing precisely the opposite.

On television, in newspapers and magazines and in public forums, Germans are solemnly remembering, reliving and regretting the crimes committed in the name of the German nation. The perpetrators are dead or dying, even their children have retired. There is nobody left to take personal responsibility for what other Germans did. Yet with admirable determination, Germans publicly affirm their responsibility to understand their past and accept its consequences.

Across Berlin, the center of Nazi planning of their Final Solution, public ceremonies were performed in churches, government buildings and museums.

We attended one ceremony in a city hall in a district where about 16,000 Jews lived in 1933. Some very active residents have been working for years to point public memory back to these Jewish neighbors, to their persecution by the Nazis, and to their eventual fate. The ceremony included short speeches by a surviving former resident who talked about her mother and by the director of the German-Israeli Society, who named the Jews who had lived in his own apartment building. A local teacher described a multi-year project in her school in which children have been putting names of former Jewish residents of the district onto stones in an expanding wall. Then an exhibit was opened. It contained biographical books prepared about 92 Jews from the area who were killed, fled or went underground.

There are dozens of memorials to the victims of German state policy in every part of the city, plus many more plaques on houses remembering former residents. Since 1992 hundreds of small paving stones with names of Jewish victims have been placed in front of the houses where they lived, not just here in Berlin, but in many German cities.

The largest memorial to Jewish victims outside of Israel is being completed in the center of Berlin, just steps from the Brandenburg Gate. Across an entire city block, 2,700 large concrete blocks ranging in height from a few inches to 15 feet create a disorienting maze of silence, which will open to the public in May. The German government has supported this project with millions of euros, not to mention one of the most valuable pieces of public land.

The Holocaust itself has become a nearly sacred object here. The day of the liberation of Auschwitz was declared a national day of remembrance in 1996.

Claiming that the Holocaust never happened or that there were no gas chambers, as Holocaust deniers do, is illegal here, as is the display of Nazi symbols like the swastika. The recent use by a neo-Nazi state legislator of the word “Holocaust” to refer to the fire-bombing of Dresden by American and British planes near the end of the war stirred up outrage among politicians of all parties.

None of this should be taken for granted. Governments do not wish to remember the misdeeds of earlier generations; the more murderous those misdeeds, the less likely they are to be memorialized. In the U.S., the lack of official commemoration of the slaughter of Native Americans and the acrimonious discussions about reparations for slavery are more typical across the world. Germans were forced by military defeat and years of international pressure to recognize the truth about their behavior.

But honesty has its rewards.

The slogan about those who do not remember history being condemned to repeat it is banal, but it has this grain of truth. Openly recognizing governmental crimes against humanity, publicly acknowledging and regretting the evil acts of the past, can make it more difficult for governments to once again perpetrate horrors. The discussion of Nazi crimes has made Germans much more aware of violations of human rights. At the end of 2004, a policeman was convicted of threatening to torture a man who had been arrested for kidnapping, in order to make him reveal the child’s whereabouts. Even in this extreme situation, the verbal threat of physical torture was considered beyond acceptable limits. Knowledge of the brutality of long-dead Nazis makes Germans extremely sensitive about their contemporary behavior.

In today’s brutal world, I find that sensitivity welcome.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He is temporarily teaching in Germany and can be reached at shochsta@bates.edu.

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