It is my understanding that the Nazi concentration camps were not quite public knowledge, so how did the German public react to having been basically complicit in acts of mass torture and genocide once the full extent of the Third Reich's implementation of "the Final Solution" came to light? Do articles from the late 1940s reflect a sense of public guilt? Was there (in at least some circles) a culture of what would now be called "Holocaust denial"? Were there residual pockets of Nazi or other miscellaneous far-right activity after the end of the war? How did the citizenry reaccommodate themselves to moderate politics after the war?
The phrase "We didn't know" is used until today when you ask people who were alive during World War II. While that may be correct individually, it certainly isn't when you look at the german society of the time. Especially in the last months of the war people were directly confronted by death marches, by hundreds of corpses of Jews lying besides railroad tracks because the bodys were just thrown out of the wagons. And there are several sources of trains with everyday people passing Auschwitz (on their way to Krakow and so on) who stood up from their seats to watch the chimneys of Auschwitz-Birkenau with a feeling of anxious sensation.
After the war, as part of the denazification program, many Germans were forced to visit concentration camps or watch documentary films the Allies hat shot in the camps. There's this iconic image of captured soldiers in a cinema: http://i.imgur.com/KWBQB.jpg
Many, if not most, were shocked. In my interpretation, all of them were shocked because of the drastic imagery, some of what had happened and most because they now fully understood what had happened while they had done what they could to look away from it. Most Germans have in one way or the other made a profit of the persection of the Jews, by buying a company for a far too low price, by moving to this new, bigger apartment that was suddenly empty, by having one less competitor and so on. Not everyone of those who made a profit is guilty in a moral sense, but they all sure could have felt guilt.
The years after the war, however, were hard enough for Germans to survive because of hunger, cold and displacement. There wasn't much time to think about the Holocaust, there weren't definitive numbers of victims published. Many thought that the Allies exaggerated the atrocities to justify vile behaviour towards Germans and the occupation. Popular legends spread, such as the one that piles of dead bodies in the aforementioned movies weren't from Auschwitz, but from Dresden, which the Allies had bombed. This isn't strict Holocaust denial, but it is a root of it.
The twelve years of Goebbels' antisemitic propaganda hadn't just disappeared. Many people, wether they liked it or not, were deeply antisemitic. My mothers great-aunt once told her about being invited at a friend's friend's family in the early 1950s, having a nice dinner, having a lot of laughter and, when they said goodbye, discovering that those people she had dined with were Jews. Even though she liked them, she threw up as soon as she was out of the house.
There are some surveys, done by OMGUS, on german attitudes towards National Socialism. In August 1947, 55% said that National Socialism was a good idea that hadn't been executed well. 35% said it was a bad idea. Even in 1952, 37% of all western Germans said it would be better for Germany if there were no Jews in the country.
Many people tried to cope with that kind of guilt by just doing what they had done prior to 1945: looking away, agreeing to some kind of non-genocidal antisemitism, claiming amnesia or ignorance.
