Collateral Damage of History Education: National Socialism and the Holocaust in German Family Memory

The article discusses the processes involved in handing down memories of the Nazi Holocaust from one generation to the next. The article analyses the memories of German families in order to understand the nature of historical consciousness. It examines personal interviews, letters, and family symbols in order to illustrate the attitudes, experiences, and behaviors of parents and grandparents as they passed information on to their offspring. The research concludes that family members pass down idealized portraits of themselves to their family in order to exculpate the family name from involvement in Holocaust crimes.