You may or may not have been taught about "Denazification", the process in which the allies whitewashed Germany & Austria of all Nazi culture & ideology. Though this process was implemented to varying degrees in each of the four occupation zones (UK, USA, USSR & France) with the American zone implementing it fully whereas the French not so much.

As you can see from this image of the American Denazification effort, Germans were forced (in some cases) to tour the concentration camps & the dead bodies that lay there. You can read more about Denazification as a whole in my attempt at an answer

A lot of Germans in former occupied territories were given a "taste of it's own medicine" so to speak as those that had been oppressed by them where basically seeking their revenge. BBC 2's 1945: The Savage Peace (2015) is a really good documentary that tells this story. Other documentaries you may like include BBC's Everyman: An eye for an eye (1990) about the Jews that became "nazi hunters" after the war such as Simon Wiesenthal. There's also BBC's Germany after the war: 1945-49 (2005) about Post-WW2 Germany.

In my other answer that I've linked I've included sources that might be of interest to you. I'm going to tag /u/angelsil, /u/marisacoulter, /u/Kugelfang52 *et al who should be able to give a better answer than I.

One important realm of public discourse about WWII and the horrors that came with it was cinema, in part because the German film industry had been closely tied to German national identity and the German government since its creation. Life as a German citizen following WWII was a time of extreme political tension and pressure, as they had to deal with the fracturing of Germany into East/West, threats of domestic terrorism, and reforming German identity after a great loss.

Because of the sheer number of people involved in the Nazi bureaucracy, there were a huge number of people in positions of power who were active during Nazi rule. Because you want experienced judges and experienced filmmakers making judgement calls and good films, a significant number of bureaucrats and people of power who were Nazis retained their jobs after the war (the actual legal and political processes thru which this happened are very important and interesting but I don't know them).

German cinema after WWII wasn't immediately changed. It remained mostly the same, because the same directors and producers were making films (and the German subsidy system supported established filmmakers), and tried to fulfill the German Cinema's traditional role of defining German identity and a source of national pride. They did not address the experience of claustrophobia, whiplash, and disillusionment being felt at a national level. In fact, these films rarely addressed the War or Nazi atrocities, completely ignoring or skirting around the issues.

Many young German filmmakers were upset at this, and in 1962 a group of 26 young men at the Oberhausen film festival declared in a statement to the press that

The collapse of conventional German film has finally removed the economic basis for a mentality that we reject. This gives the new kind of film the chance to come to life.
German short films by young filmmakers, directors and producers have in recent years received a large number of prizes at international festivals and gained the recognition of international critics. These works and their successes show that the future of German film lies with those who have proven that they speak a new film language.
[...]
The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.

The Oberhausen Manifesto was the call for the establishment of the New German Cinema, and the directors who emerged from it include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders (who are, in my unrelated opinion, some of the best filmmakers to ever live). The New German Cinema struggled mightily with financing and industry the first years of its existence, but several filmmakers made it big on the domestic and international stage. And the films that eventually emerged from it -- Yesterday Girl by Alexander Kluge, Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, Germany in Autumn by the group of them, and eventually The Lost Honor of Katharina Bloom -- explore problems of collective amnesia, the psychological effects of the wall, Nazis remaining in power, media control and prevailing sexism.

Sources:
New German Cinema: A History by Thomas Elsaesser (1989)

Deterrorializing the New German Cinema by John E. Davidson

And also I read a bit from From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film by Siegfried Kracauer.

I played a bit fast and loose with what I could remember from these sources, I could refine my post if requested.

One. The orientation of understanding

To the extent that it can be simplified as a contiguous process, Germany’s attempt at coming to terms with the Holocaust has followed a tortuous road. Facing the past has required Germany to ask difficult questions of itself, not all of which were welcome or wholly answerable. Even when Germans have mustered the conviction necessary to confront an odious national legacy, the methods by which the majority have undertaken the task have not been universally acceptable or satisfactory. For all the rhetoric that holds the nation-state out as an indivisible unit that can act, think, and feel as if it were but one body, the fact is that Germany is like all other nations in that it is made up of a diverse and sometimes fractious polity. Consequently, the fundamental problem with the idea of coming to terms with the Holocaust is that the phrasing supposes an end which may not exist.

In itself the Holocaust was simply an event of such enormity that it defies normal comprehension, and whatever methods one might typically employ in order to grasp the world, they all wither when weighed against the naked brutality of the murder of so many millions. As the survivor and memoirist Elie Wiesel wrote, "traditional ideas and acquired values, philosophical systems and social theories -- all must be revised in the shadow of Birkenau." Besides the human toll which it exacted, the Holocaust "did enormous harm to ethics by showing how ethical teachings could be overridden, rendered dysfunctional, or even subverted to serve the interests of genocide." Any attempt at coming to terms with its horror must therefore involve the reconstitution of those same ideas, values, philosophical systems and social theories which normally serve as the anchors by which we orient our understanding of the world, but which were left broken in the wake of genocide.

However, as societies change, these same assumptions which underlay the way we perceive the world are apt to change as well. Coming to terms with the Holocaust therefore depends upon far more than a practical understanding of the forces which conspired to produce it. It also requires that we consider how those forces might interact with our own societies now or in the future. That which stands as a satisfactory conclusion for a particular person or group at a particular time could prove entirely inadequate for others. In her reflections on the intractability of memory, the survivor Ruth Klüger likened our mental spaces to dusty museums, wherein the furniture and exhibits that constitute our understanding of the world must be periodically rearranged so as to maintain perspective when new information or attitudes are introduced. This is as true for Germany as a nation as it is for the individual.

The trouble, therefore, is not that the Holocaust is intrinsically unrepresentable or otherwise impossible to comprehend. Instead, the difficulty with coming to terms with it lies with the ambiguity of how to judge whether that goal has been satisfied. If it is true that understanding and reconciliation are not finite processes with definite ends, then the Holocaust will never be ‘solved.’ While individuals will continue to approach the Holocaust with the interest of coming to terms with it, the answers that they produce cannot be expected to hold true for all cases at all times. Unlike scientific experiments, history is not a replicable experience, and that which is ‘true’ about the past is as much a product of the questions which we ask of the evidence as of the evidence itself.

Even as regards science, Henri Poincaré notes that “somewhere in his writings” Leo Tolstoy had once explained that “science for science’s sake is an absurd conception [because] we cannot know all the facts, since they are practically infinite in number.” That our understanding of the world might be “determined by caprice or immediate necessity” was hugely unsatisfying to Mr. Poincaré. Consequently, he argued that the point of science was not to know everything, but rather to make a judicious selection of those facts which are most interesting; those which “can be used several times, those which have a chance of recurring.” The same is true for history. Of the many events that have transpired in the past why do we choose to remember some moments over others, and why are so many forgotten? Which are the facts that are important to our world, and how can we discern them?

To approach these questions one must remember that history, like memory, is more than bare chronology. While there are some touchstone events, the basic existence and general shape of which all historians will agree on, those alone inform us of very little. History is formed instead in the far more ambiguous and disputed expanse which details the relationships between events and the journey from one point to the next. An example would be the story of Anne Frank who hid in Amsterdam for years with her family, and whose diaries have made her an icon of strength in the face of oppression. To us the facts as well as the meaning of her story are well known and well accepted. But why do we remember her before the millions of other victims of war and genocide? With what strangeness would an alien race, unaware of our common past, look upon the idolization of this single girl over so many other victims?

The answer is akin to Henri Poincaré’s suggestion. Although there is always a degree of arbitrary selection in the way in which we view the world, in the case of the stories that we tell ourselves about our past we make selections of fact so as to construct, reinforce, or retrieve those “traditional ideas and acquired values, philosophical systems and social theories” which Elie Wiesel lamented to have been broken by the Holocaust. We do this because history is not merely a recitation of fact. It is an act of narrative, and it is the process by which facts are explained which makes it.

The weakness though, is that no narrative is sacrosanct. As Perry Anderson argues in his essay on the emplotment of tragedy during the Holocaust, narratives “are never plenipotentiaries over the past.” Drawing from The Content of the Form, Anderson notes that “narrativity always involves moralization -- historical emplotments invariably embodying ethical judgments.” This is undoubtedly true, and it speaks to the difficulty of coming to terms with the Holocaust. For the Germans who are descendants of the perpetrators of this enormous crime, the task can appear to require not only accepting the past as true, but condemning it as well. And, if one were to condemn the past does that extend to a condemnation of all Germans who stood by or participated in even small ways in the Holocaust? Is it a condemnation of an entire nation, of one's own ancestors? Is it, by extension, a condemnation of oneself as bearing an immutable responsibility which has been handed down by generations?

Written in broad strokes these are the sorts of questions which have driven continued German engagement with the Holocaust as it relates to their national identity. However, while there is near universal agreement that Germany must react in some way to their nation’s historical role as perpetrator, controversy arises when attempting to define the boundaries of responsibility, as well as the obligations which responsibility imparts. Although Germans agree that something must be done to memorialize Germany’s historic role as perpetrators, they have differed quite sharply on what, how, and why.

Insofar as it is possible to describe such a contentious and evolving discussion in singular terms, these questions have been present in Germany’s national discourse from the ending of the war on up to the present day. Along the way the conversation has passed through a number of distinct stages, being marked at first by a general silence about the war and its consequences before breaking open during the period of the Eichmann trial as a new generation of Germans began to criticize the nation into which they were born. This trend, coupled with new sociological and historical research, also expanded the domain within which individuals might be considered responsible for the crimes of war. Consequently, new investigations into and prosecutions of Germans for war crimes forced Germany to reconsider whether it had or ever could move beyond its historic guilt.

Since then, many new memorials, museums, and monuments have opened across Germany in order to commemorate the victims of the Nazi period. These efforts are born of a determination among successive German governments to stare unflinchingly at the past, but they are not themselves without controversy. The presentation and description as well as the very motive for memorialization have been widely questioned. What’s more, many of these projects were begun or envisioned during and shortly after the abrupt reunification of the German nation. Because East and West Germany had very different historiographical approaches to the Holocaust, very few of the current stock of national symbols can be said to represent the German nation without qualification.

For the sake of my sanity, I can hope to tackle only a selection of the issues which coming to terms with the Holocaust raises, and even then only from the perspective of West Germany. My responses will deal with, in turn, the state of German society during the period immediately after the war, the imposition and impact of Allied governance along with the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial and the revitalization of interest in the war and its significance, problems of memory and the occasional insufficiency of memorialization, and contemporary reflections upon the continuing task of enfolding the Holocaust into ourselves as an event, a tragedy, and a moral lesson.