Holocaust, the 1978 TV series that helped Germany break the silence about its past

As the world remembers the Holocaust, some Germans see a period ahead that echoes the widespread amnesia in the postwar period

Publicity poster for Holocaust, starring James Woods and Meryl Streep
Publicity poster for Holocaust, starring James Woods and Meryl Streep

Elon Musk, the great disrupter, has done it again. In a live-stream to a rally of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Saturday, he said “German children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents”.

His assertion attracted cheers from supporters present and, no doubt, quiet nods of approval in some livingrooms across the country.

With it, Musk has tossed a grenade into decades of German engagement with its wartime past, a process so thorough it has its own term: Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Its key argument, distorted either wilfully or ignorantly by Musk, is that German history is not a pick and mix: if you want Bach and Beethoven, you get Hitler, Himmler and Höss, too.

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Almost no one alive today has any personal guilt for the crimes of the Nazi era, but the foundation of postwar Germany is shared moral responsibility to preserve the memory of the Nazi horrors: its perpetrators, victims and survivors.

As the world remembers the Holocaust on Monday, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, some see a period ahead that echoes the widespread amnesia in the postwar period.

Many credit the 1978 miniseries Holocaust with breaking the silence. Produced by NBC and starring a young Meryl Streep and James Woods, the miniseries was watched in the US 120 million viewers and centred on fictional Weiss family, humiliated, ground down and murdered by the Nazi regime.

The massive reaction in the US, home to a large Jewish population including many survivors, was nothing compared with the emotional earthquake it triggered in Germany, land of the perpetrators.

When it aired in January 1979, up to 40 per cent of all adults in the country tuned in, roughly 20 million people, as well as 15 per cent of children under 18.

Decades of shame, silence, mourning and complicity were exposed in a very public way. The term Holocaust, used in the Nazi context, entered the German language.

“It has never left me,” said one friend who watched it back then. “It shaped my understanding of evil.”

Tovah Feldshuh was 'angry' but dry-eyed during the filming of the mini-series Holocaust. Photograph: Tony Cenicola/New York Times
Tovah Feldshuh was 'angry' but dry-eyed during the filming of the mini-series Holocaust. Photograph: Tony Cenicola/New York Times

With a clever, elegant script by writer Gerald Green and directed by Marvin Chomsky, brother of Noam, the series was a massive, ambitious endeavour. Among the 150 cast members, US Jewish actor Tovah Feldshuh remembers she was “angry” but dry-eyed during filming.

“The Christians in the cast were the ones who wept, it was their first exposure to this battering of horrendous, genodical fascism,” she told The Irish Times. “The survivor generations were completely shut down, mothers didn’t tell their children.”

It was only two years after shooting in Vienna that Feldshuh learned how two distant cousins from the Austrian capital had been deported to Belarus and shot.

The press reaction to Holocaust in Germany was mixed. One newspaper dismissed it as soap opera, another said the characters were “miles away from reality”. No one asked why German television had yet to dare anything so ambitious. Or why German public television’s programme board only agreed to buy and broadcast the series in a narrow, 5-4 vote.

Feldshuh remembers excited late-night calls from producers about the after-effects in Germany. Schoolbooks were changed and the public demanded books and documentaries on what was, until then, a dimly-remembered period. Seven months after broadcast, the Bundestag abolished the statute of limitations on murder.

But it wasn’t until 2011 that things really changed. In the trial of former camp guard John Demjanjuk, German courts finally accepted a lower standard of proof for Nazi convictions. Simply being present, or participating in the Nazi death machine, judges accepted, was now enough to be guilty. A series of prosecutions followed of nonagenarians who worked as camp guards, secretaries and accountants.

German historian Götz Aly estimates that, had today’s legal standard been applied back when Holocaust was first broadcast in 1979, some 300,000 men and woman still alive at the time could have been prosecuted for participating in the Nazi exterminations.

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“But millions of German family members – German society as a whole – would not have been able to handle that,” he said.

For political scientist Samuel Salzborn, the belief that most Germans have addressed – and accepted – their past is “the greatest living lie of the modern federal republic”.

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Those who engaged with historical materials on the period, or investigated their family’s past, were always a minority, he argues. Most Germans reject collective guilt or responsibility for the past in favour of “collective innocence”. The mentality that this is someone else’s story – Hitler was a Nazi, but not grandad – is what Musk and the AfD are tapping into.

The miniseries Holocaust, half a century on and available for free on YouTube, has just gained a new urgency.

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