>>12436217Despite years of /pol/soning related damage to my brain I try to give a somewhat unbiased answer.
After the war was lost, the first reflex was to carry on as before under whatever new ideology the vivtors demanded.
The mindset of the average people may be compared to how japan handles its past today.
Hitler was seen as being somewhat too extreme and unchristian, not much apology given for the war, it had been in germanies interest after all and commies/capitalists on the other side of the wall were mean.
People either claimed they had not known of the atrocities and were deceived by an otherwise benevolent regime, they claimed to have been forced to compliance under the atmosphere of state terror, or that they supported and joined the NS state to soften it from within to a more desirable not-holocausting moderate national socialism.
The last position was a claim hold by our chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger who reigned from 1966–1969 and was a confirmed nsdap member and early supporter of Hitlers state btw just to show how prevalent this mindset was that we had a german Shinzo Abe on crack in the west.
In the east everything had been capitalism fault all along. the german was a victim of the bourgeosie that could redeem itself by building socialism. This might seem like a cheap explanation but it works in authoritarian one party states with an obsession on controlling "truth" in the most bluntest way possible.
There was a liberal revolution in the west carried by the babyboomers that only swept over fully to the east in the early 2000s.
This revolution questioned the three narratives as explained above and vilified the older generation, pushing them out of power.
