I know this might sound a bit radical, but over the years I have been reading around on the subject of war crimes, collaboration with occupiers, etc.. and how the offenders and victims have been dealing with it.
What I've seen, so far, is that most countries do not, or poorly, admit what they have done and/or don't put a lot of effort in trying to keep their citizens informed, so that the past doesn't repeat.
I have not seen many accounts of this, other than the wave of guild that spread through a lot of post-WWII generation germans, even though... well, a lot of other countries have done a lot of crimes in a lot of places and occasions. For example, Austria collaborated quite happily with Nazi Germany, but was there any public regrets? I remember seeing a documentary saying that racism was still quite high. Another example would be France with the Collaborators, that was mostly ignored (there were a few trials for the Vichy leaders, I think, but nothing big) or how they mostly ignored what happened in Algeria, too. Or Japan with their ambiguous way of admitting but not really the horrors they did in China and the other occupied countries. Et caetera, et caetera.
My question is, is there any other country that has really done their "devoir de mémoire" (duty of remembrance? it's a french expression, I don't think it's been translated properly).
PS : I have gone through the FAQ and most upvoted posts in the sub, as well as a quick unsuccessful search. If the questions has been answered already, feel free to send me the link. Thanks in advance!
edit : word
I would debate the premise of the question - that Germany has "properly" come to grips with their Nazi past. Certainly most historians would dispute that the West Germans were even remotely effective at "De-Nazification". East Germany was only marginally more effective at it, but then they were replacing one radical ideology with another ...
It's certainly true that certain sectors of German society have attempted to honestly come to grips with the Holocaust, but there was a WHOLE LOT of cover-ups after the war. Yes, there were trials, but if you read the history of the trials (Rebecca Wittman has a great book on the Auschwitz trial), you'd also see that lots and lots of perpetrators, especially mid- and higher-ranking perpetrators got away with everything while low level, sometimes even foreign, guards are being prosecuted to this very day. Part of the problem is that the judicial system was left almost entirely intact, which meant that Nazi judges were often judging other Nazis for crimes they committed as Nazis. You can imagine that it was not the most effective system. The Soviets and the GDR attempted to get around this by basically creating a new justice system by scratch, but that did not work out very well (turns out trained lawyers and judges do serve a purpose - who'd've thunk it?). You can read about that experiment in Inga Markowitz's book Justice in Luritz. This was not only contained to the judiciary, either. The immediate post-war society, through at least the 1970s, was run, primarily, by men who had worked for, if were not themselves ardent Nazis. While it's true that some German leaders, like Adenauer and Brandt, were anti-Nazi activists during the war, others were party members, such as Kiesinger.
A couple of very good books that discuss this include a collection of essays edited by Rita Chin, et. al, entitled After the Nazi Racial State and Dirk Moses's German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past I highly recommend both.