BOB FAW: Here, where thousands of prisoners were greeted by the sadistic sign "Work Shall Make You Free," only to be put to death later by Hitler's SS, here on a lovely Sunday afternoon, mechanic Hans Peter Otto is bringing his wife and three small children not to a soccer game or picnic but to Sachsenhausen, a Nazi concentration camp outside Berlin.
HANS PETER OTTO (Mechanic) (Through Translator): It's very important to keep places like that as a place of remembrance, so things like that will never happen again.
FAW: Even old German soldiers like Holst Starosske, 78, can only look on now in disbelief.
HOLST STAROSSKE (War Veteran) (Through Translator): I repeatedly come here to look at all the crime that was committed here, because during the war we didn't notice any of it. And only after the war we found out, through places like this.FAW: In the Holocaust, Hitler's diabolical scheme to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, 6 million died. But Inge Deutschkron, now 83, survived. While Jews all around her were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps, she was given a job and refuge in this shop, now a museum, where German businessman Otto Weidt produced brushes.
INGE DEUTSCHKRON (Museum Blindenwerkstatt): He was not Jewish. He risked his head, there's no question about it.
FAW: Deutschkron left Germany, returned, and now teaches children here what Hitler did to Jews and how non-Jews like Otto Weidt tried to help. But for years in Germany there was mostly silence about atrocities of the Hitler era. That's changed. That history is taught now in all German schools. And all over the country, Holocaust victims are remembered -- here at the Jewish cemetery of Berlin, one of Europe's largest.
(Voice of Translator, Reading Inscription on Gravestone): Both died in a concentration camp of Auschwitz. Only God knows why.FAW: Remembered, too, at this memorial -- a train depot, now abandoned, in Berlin.
(Voice of Translator, Reading Plaque at Train Depot): In memory of tens of thousands deported to the death camps and killed by the Nazi henchmen.
FAW: All this is part of the country's ongoing campaign to confront the evils of its past. The latest, Berlin's Holocaust memorial, which honors the 6 million Jews killed during the war. Completed this spring at a cost of $160 million, it consists of nearly 3,000 slabs of concrete designed, said its architect, to resemble tombs on an open sea.
(To Ms.Deutschkron): Today do you find Germany is honestly trying to confront its past?
Ms. DEUTSCHKRON: No doubt about it. No doubt about it.
FAW: Today the government spends millions of dollars to build monuments and to maintain concentration camps as museums; spends billions more, even now, as reparations to Israel. So much public admission of guilt, there is now in Germany a backlash -- a feeling, 60 years later: enough is enough.Many Germans applaud that Holocaust memorial and agree all those public acts of contrition are the least the country can do.
BRIGIT: It should never be forgotten what the Germans have done to the Jewish people, so I think we must pay money.
FAW: But a growing number of Germans -- it is impossible to determine exactly how many -- argue that after six decades, Germany has finally atoned: that it no longer needs to keep apologizing, much less spending money on memorials.MITA: The money would be better on other projects, so I don't think it's very good.
ZEEMONA MUELER: I think there should be a stop by now.
(Voice of Translator SYLKE SCHUMANN): Why is that?
Professor LARS RENSMANN (Potsdam University): Roughly 20 percent of Germans share anti-Semitic perceptions of Jews. The difference now is that due to the discourse on memory, on Holocaust memory, in recent years we finally see a rise of anti-Semitic attitudes.
Ms. KAHANE: Oh, she was on the street, and there was a man who's always sitting in the restaurant. And when she passed he said, "Jewish pig."
Mr. VOIGT (Through Translator): We are more than ready to forget about it. No other country does what Germany does at the moment. That we are again and again and again reminding everyone, including ourselves, of what Germans committed 60 years ago.
Ms. DEUTSCHKRON: I don't understand it either. How can one understand that there is -- that there are human beings who would think about and decide also how to kill, how to murder more cleanly or more rationally or more whatever. That is very difficult to understand.
