[...] the government's need to legitimize its own educational dictates coincided completely with the citizens' need for exoneration from historical responsibility. Add to this a kind of "Hiroshima effect." The genocidal bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had transformed the Japanese into victims, and they no longer wanted to hear about their own complicity in starting the war. Similarly, East Germans were transformed into victims by the Soviet occupation. Whatever role they may have palyed during the Nazi years was atoned for by their sufferings under Stalinism. Unlike in West Germany, the perpetrators had become the victims, and that's how they saw themselves. [...]