I didn’t know this story, great article in the @guardian today by Pankaj Mishra about the shipwrecking German culture of memory :
“Such mentalities were partly manifest in German treatment of the Jewish displaced persons. They were still languishing in West Germany in 1952, when the Bavarian customs police launched a raid on a displaced persons camp.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jan/30/israel-and-the-delusions-of-germanys-memory-culture
“Germany’s postwar quest for normalisation – whether through philosemitism and west-philia, or Staatsräson and proud and ostentatious self-reproach – has reached a dead end. It always seemed implausible that a collective moral education could produce a stable, homogeneous attitude across the generations. There are too many other factors determining what is remembered and what is forgotten, and the German national subconscious is burdened by a century of secrecy, crimes and cover-ups.”