The Hidden History of Germany

WHAT THEY DIDN’T PUT IN THE TEXTBOOKS.Germany’s official history is among the most thoroughly documented on earth. Trials, memorials, museums, school curricula, decades of public acknowledgment. The country has done more to confront its past than almost any other nation.And yet there are still chapters that get skipped.The financial backers who helped bring Hitler to power and were never held to account. The corporations that used slave labor and quietly rebuilt their reputations in the postwar years. The scientists and intelligence operatives who walked straight from Nazi service into new careers, protected by Cold War calculations. The ordinary citizens who knew far more than the history books later claimed.The denazification process that convicted thousands but let many more slip through. The silence that settled over West Germany as a matter of deliberate policy. The Allied decisions that consistently prioritized strategic value over justice.This book goes past the official reckoning. It looks at what the trials left out, what the postwar settlements buried, and what historians have only begun to excavate in the decades since the archives opened.Germany confronted its past more honestly than most countries ever have. But even the most honest reckoning has limits. This is what lies past those limits.