While the first history textbooks in postwar Germany were light on the subject of the Nazis, by the early 1960s, less than two decades after the fall of the Third Reich, things changed. In textbooks that were used at different levels comparable to middle and high school in the United States, authors began confronting the real history of recent past. They “engaged the most contentious issues of the recent past: Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, German support for the Nazi Party, concentration camps, and the extermination of the Jews. For most of them, the traumas suffered by Germans were part of a larger story of suffering and sacrifice brought about by National Socialism and the war,” as an article by Brian Puaca, a scholar of German education history, put it. While at first, textbooks portrayed the German people as victims, as the 1960s progressed, the position changed to one of culpability, too, in the atrocities committed.
