German history lessons

Remembering the textbooks of 1964

Sir, – I like reading Derek Scally’s articles. As a German, I find it interesting to see an Irishman’s view on German matters.

In his article of April 10th Scally mentions Wieland Giebel watching how his homeland “began, gingerly, to approach the Holocaust” in the 1970s (“Hitler is a taboo here”, World News).

This surprised me, as I left school in Hamburg in 1964 and remember clearly that we had Eugen Kogon’s famous book Der SS-Staat as a textbook in our history lessons. I still have that thick paperback volume at home. It must have been in 1962 that our class was taken to a cinema to watch a film about the concentration camps.

The Nazi crimes were certainly dealt with at length well before the 1970s. – Yours, etc,

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JUTTA PLATH,

Frankenthal,

Germany.