It would be decades before younger Germans emerged from the national solipsism of their parents and recognised the suffering wreaked by German fascism on other peoples. When they did so, not least through moral repugnance at the creation of the West German army and through the appearance of active ‘atonement’ movements, the way opened to wider empathies. ‘By the 1990s, German responsibility for the Holocaust had become a civil religion that defined national identity.’