I think about this work a lot:

[they] "would insist that the nation own up to its deep shame. The actions that followed were called Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which translates to 'working off the past.' " https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/21405900/germany-holocaust-atonement-america-slavery-reparations

"The process was so widespread in the 1980s and 1990s that some don’t remember the entrenched, miserable resentment that preceded it."

- [the article linked above gives a good account of the 'miserable resentment']

[in 1960] " 'It means nothing as it is,' a survivor told the journalist. Dachau had been disguised, said another critic, 'like a witch who wants to appear harmless.' ”

[in the run-up to German reunification in 1990]

"Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (reckoning with the past) came to be seen as a moral imperative."

"Determined to see a more honest reflection of the horrors perpetrated at Dachau, a group of survivors and historians issued a series of recommendations to redo the memorials there."

"In German, there are a few words for what we in America would call a monument or memorial."

“For monuments to horror that are large — a concentration camp — Gedenkstätte is the appropriate term.... The root word is denken (to think), + it signals the enormous amount of thought devoted to the question: What do we remember in matter, and how?”

"The question is one that the U.S. has begun to probe, with white Americans jolted awake this summer to the realization that perhaps streets should not be named for slave owners and domestic terrorists or crowned with statues exalting the traitors who declared a rebel govt."

"It is a reckoning that Germans undertook decades ago."

"With no equivalent international pressure to concede the defeat of its so-called Lost Cause, America has resisted such reconstruction."

"Alexandra Senfft ...has written books about the impact of her grandfather’s Nazi ties on his children and grandchildren, and other descendants of Nazi perpetrators struggling with their tainted inheritance."

"For her effort, her mother’s relatives have distanced themselves from her, minimizing contact after decades of closeness."