Post War Rationalisations

Each country, each national group, each political party fashioned its own version of the war and , as time went on, burnished remembrance and amnesia into self-serving myth. For some peoples, such as Serbs and Jews, a narrative of victimhood was a potion that came to serve as justification for resurgent nationalism. For the British, the lone struggle of 1940-1, the heroism of the few in the Battle of Britain and the many in the Blitz, reinvigorated national self-consciousness. For the French, the petty day-to-day accommodations that most had made with the occupier were overshadowed by the legend of resistance, that the Vichy regime had been made in France and supported, at least, initially, by the great majority of the French people.

For Germans the chief components of wartime memory were the agonies of the eastern front, the terror of Allied carpet-bombing of German cities, and the flight of civilian population from the path of the Russian army in East Prussia and elsewhere in the east…. From 1947 onwards the Cold War rendered the earlier struggle of the German army against Bolshevism somehow respectable. Military service on the eastern fron became a virtual badge of honour with all responsibility for the attendant atrocities against prisoners of war and civilians shunted onto the shoulders of the disbanded police state apparatus….For many Germans the terrible losses from Allied bombings of German cities somehow canceled out the crimes committed by the Nazis.

From Barbarism & Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time by Bernard Wasserstein