The change in German views of the Nazi era after I lived in Germany was made brutally clear to me by an experience 21 years later, in 1982. In that year my wife Marie and I spent a vacation in Germany. As we were driving along the autobahn and approaching Munich, an autobahn exit sign pointed to a suburb called Dachau, the site of a former Nazi concentration camp (German acronym for Konzentrationslager: KZ) that Germans had converted into a museum. Neither of us had previously visited a KZ site. But we didn't anticipate that a "mere" museum exhibit would affect us, after all that we already knew of KZs through the stories of Marie's parents (KZ survivors) and the newsreels of my childhood. Least of all did we expect to be affected by how Germans themselves explained (or explained away) their own camps.

In fact, our visit to Dachau was a shattering experience — at least as powerful as our subsequent visit to the much larger and more notorious Auschwitz, which is also an exhibit but not a German exhibit because it lies within Poland. Photographs and texts in German vividly depicted and explained Dachau KZ and its background: the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the Nazi persecution of Jews and of non-Nazi Germans during the 1930s, Hitler's steps towards war, the operation of Dachau KZ itself, and the operation of the rest of the Nazi camp system. Far from shirking German responsibility, the exhibit exemplified Fritz Bauer's motto, "Germans holding judgment upon themselves." What my wife and I saw then at Dachau is part of what all German children have seen from the 1970s onwards. They are taught at length in school about Nazi atrocities, and many of them are taken on school outings to former KZs that, like Dachau, have been turned into exhibits. Such national facing-up to past crimes isn't to be taken for granted. In fact, I know of no country that takes that responsibility remotely as seriously as Germany does. Indonesian school children still are taught nothing about the mass killings of 1965; young Japanese whom I have known tell me that they were taught nothing about Japan's war crimes; it is not the ational policy in the U.S. for American schoolchildren to be taught in grim detail about American crimes in Vietnam, and against Native Americans, and gainst African slaves.