Time: What West Germany Got Wrong About the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

In the summer of 1982, while he was still opposition leader in Bonn, future German chancellor Helmut Kohl expressed his concerns about the plans for a national Holocaust museum in the United States. Peter Petersen, a CDU member of the Bundestag, recorded what Kohl had said to a group of Bundestag parliamentarians about the museum, which “the Jews,” as Petersen put it, were building in Washington. In the early 1980s, he summarized Kohl’s statement: “What would a young German visiting the United States think when he passed the Holocaust Museum on the Mall? . . . What would he feel when he saw his country’s entire history reduced to these twelve terrible years? Was this the way in which the United States was going to treat its most valued European ally?”

Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, a network of mostly conservative West German officials and their associates in private organizations and foundations, with Kohl located at its center, perceived themselves as the victims of the afterlife of the Holocaust in America. They were concerned that public manifestations of Holocaust memory—for example museums, monuments, and movies—could severely damage the Federal Republic’s reputation in the United States. [...]

Through a series of behind-the-scenes interventions, a network of official and unofficial German emissaries attempted to integrate the history of German anti-Nazi resistance and of postwar West Germany into the exhibition concept. They aimed to show that not all Germans had been Nazis and that the Federal Republic had learned its lessons. For instance, they considered the country’s coping with the Nazi past, its model democracy and the alliance with Israel a success story, which should be told in the museum. For more than a decade, German intermediaries tried to convince the museum planners to design the exhibition accordingly, arguing that the museum would be incomplete without references to the “good Germans” that lived and suffered through the Third Reich as well as postwar West Germany’s accomplishments. As claimed in interviews and oral history transcripts with former museum representatives Michael Berenbaum, Miles Lerman, and William Lowenberg, they also offered a very large donation—up to $50 million—to make an even more convincing case in Washington.

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