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Deutsche Welle (16 November 2020)

Germany is marking the 75th anniversary of the first Nuremberg trial. Initially, the trials, military tribunals by occupying powers, were barely respected in a country that wanted to forget. But that attitude changed.

"Guilt is always something personal," says 81-year-old Niklas Frank. It's a thought that touches Germany's fundamental problem after the war: How can a nation's trauma be worked through in individual's people's heads? How do you take your parents' guilt personally? 

Though many Germans treated it as an abstract problem that could be suppressed in silence, the question cut into Niklas Frank's life like a knife. He was the son of Hans Frank, the governor-general of the occupied Polish territories during World War II, who directly oversaw four Nazi extermination camps.

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