From The Age (Australia)

According to a University of Bielefeld survey, Germans are sick of the "harping on" about Nazi crimes against the Jews, a university study shows.

1. survey seems to confirm a shift in the German consciousness about victimhood.

2. now trendy for Germans to consider themselves as victims of the Nazi regime, rather than its enablers. Books about German suffering in Allied air raids, particularly on Dresden, and the expulsion of millions of civilians at the hands of the Red Army have emboldened Germans to think of themselves as worthy of sympathy instead of merely bearing the shame of a hideous regime.

3. half of respondents believed that Israel was pursuing a genocidal policy against the Palestinians, and that there was "little difference" between Nazi treatment of Jews and Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

4. the study revealed that 62 per cent of Germans were "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews".

5. attitudes appear to be changing. More than 60 per cent of Germans who once shamefully accepted their nation's role in the genocide are now positively "irritated" at being still held responsible.

6. the shift in sentiment has coincided with the re-emergence of the far right in German mainstream politics. Most now wish to consign their Nazi past to the history books.

7. once considered taboo to talk about their own suffering out of respect for the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, the theme has now spawned its own industry known as the "victim culture". There is now a steady stream of books and documentaries devoted to the issue.

Since details of the study were released, politicians have made emotional appeals for Germans to remember their responsibility to keep the flame of remembrance burning.

'Anti-Semitism does not just represent a threat for the Jews, but also for ourselves,' warned Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the country's most popular politician.

But political observers say the shift in attitudes is the result of a longer process in which many Germans believe they have atoned sufficiently for their grandparents' crimes and now have the right to bury the past.

'This trend began with revisionist historians telling the Germans that they were really the victims of the war rather than its perpetrators,' said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, a Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.

'It's appalling,' said Lord Janner, a spokesman for British survivors of Auschwitz. It really raises fears that the current generation are not ready to pass on the history and lessons learnt from those events to their children.'

That's precisely the point... and the problem. Communism and Marxism WANT to revise history. How can we learn from history if history is rewritten?