Three Differences Between Germany and the US Regarding Historical Atrocities
Takeaways as the US grapples with its slave-owning roots
There wasn’t a memorial at the Dachau Nazi concentration camp until 1965. That was 20 years after the Allies liberated the Holocaust site.
That’s one of the eye-opening facts from this excellent Atlantic piece about German Holocaust remembrance.
Here’s another one: Less than half of one percent of Germany’s population is Jewish. Germany, with a population of 83 million has fewer than 120 thousand Jews. More Jews live in Boston, than all of Germany.
Compare that to the United States and the number of blacks and descendants of slaves.
Blacks make up more than 14 percent of the US population. The US population is more than 330 million. That alone demonstrates the difficulty for the US to arrive at a collective reckoning about its slave-holding past.
In Germany, people can go for days, perhaps their whole lives without meeting a Jew. That is not the case with African Americans in the United States.
The chances that a white person will run into someone black are infinitely higher.
