The GDR's approach to the problem of the Nazi past mirrored that of the FRG, but also departed from it in several important dimensions. Evasion of the immediate past was common in both Germanys, despite the widespread assumption that the FRG in particular owned up to its past misdeeds during the Cold War. But the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the ruling SED party and the unique context of the Cold War meant that the war was presented and memorialized in a very particular form. The result was a memory culture in the GDR which presented the Second World War as both immediate and quite distant past for the wider population.

Like the Western zones, the Soviet military government (SVAG) expected to run a thorough denazification program that would winnow out the many functionaries of the Third Reich and replace them with ideologically compatible replacements. Although SVAG's denazification efforts did not reach the same systematic level as the Americans' five-tier denazification, but the Soviet zone's effort ran across many of the same obstacles. The burden of proof for denazification tribunals often landed on these Germans themselves, and naturally they portrayed their own actions as politically neutral. In theory, the tribunals were supposed to investigate these claims to political innocence, but in practice, the denazification tribunals were woefully understaffed and overworked in all the occupation zones. Nor were the tribunals run evenly, some districts could be more lax than other, and naturally most Germans flocked to the lenient tribunals to gain their Persilschein. there was also an urgent need to retain skilled workers and managers in the Soviet zone, leading to a very rushed denazification that was as slipshod and imprecise as its Western counterparts.

The generally poor denazification efforts throughout Germany conditioned a good deal of the efforts of the postwar years to come to terms with the past. The population of both Germanys had a sizable number of former members of the regime and this inhibited any efforts to go poking around in the nation's past.

This is not to say that denazification did not have some victories. The Eastern zone's Neue Lehrer policy brought in a generation of new instructors with anitfascist credentials at the primary school level and these new teachers later became one of the bedrocks of the SED's corps of functionaries. Some Germans also found it hard to completely erase evidence of their malfeasance and the did sort of familiarize postwar Germans into what was to be acceptable ideological behavior in the postwar period. However, the efficacy of the program as a whole was undercut by from both the wider German public's resistance and the military government's own hypocrisies which often gave sanction to assigning lower levels of responsibility to individuals whose professional skills were needed for reconstruction. By the standards the denazification program set up for itself in its rhetoric, the program was largely a collective failure in all zones as it failed to sift out various Nazi officials and inculcated patterns of alibi-making and blame-shifting among the wartime generation that proved to be quite durable.

This soft denazification meant that the FRG often saw many former officials of the former Third Reich take up new positions of authority. The Bundeswehr, for example, was staffed by many Wehrmacht veterans and most famously, Adenauer's Chief of Staff was Hans Globke, who was one of the co-authors of the Nuremberg Laws. The presence of so many former Nazis in positions of power in the FRG gave the SED a propaganda tool to slam its rival for hypocrisy (it also provided an excuse not to conduct their own investigations for Nazi criminals). In this the SED had an advantage since most of its senior executive leadership was drawn from prewar emigres from the KPD, it did not need to place former Nazis in positions of power. As a party dictatorship, the SED did not need as many functionaries as Bonn did, and the smaller East German territory also meant it was much easier to staff the government with existing or new cadres. Although there were a fair number of ex-Nazis as the mid-level positions, they seldom rose to the prominence of people like Globke.

The GDR's superpower patron also discouraged former officials from regaining power. Like the Bundeswehr, the GDR's military was initially staffed by Wehrmacht veterans, but unlike its counterpart, the SED retired these officers as soon as that had trained their own SED officer cadres in the 1960s. Unlike the FRG, former Wehrmacht officers did not become part of the establishment. Nonetheless, many former Nazis managed to find a career inside the GDR, particularly if their expertise was in demand, which was especially true of both the sciences and medicine. While the GDR maintained an extensive network of surveillance of its population, it was seldom concerned with rooting out ex-Nazis unless they posed a security risk; or, as one MfS employee said in a post-89 interview, "we'll decide who's a Nazi ."

But the presence of people like Globke or Adolf Heusinger in positions of power was a propaganda coup for the SED and increasingly featured in the shrill agitprop of the SED that behind the glitz of the FRG's Wirtschaftswunder were the same officials responsible for fascism. One of the common tropes of GDR spy fiction was that a brave MfS agent went under cover in the West to discover cabals of Nazi war criminals escaping justice amidst the millionaires of the West. Depictions of the Second World War in fiction and memorials stressed that although the Soviets won the war in the name of the free peoples, but that many of the enablers of Nazism were still active and quite powerful. The war, in this sense, was not over.

This notion of an unfinished war gelled well with existing Marxist-Leninist precepts that explained both fascism and the rise of Hitler in class terms. The general narrative of fascism was that monopoly capital, fearful of the growing power of communism and the working classes, backed fascism as a means to stave off revolution. In various histories and documentaries produced in the GDR, Hitler proved unruly to control and unleashed the worst impulses of monopoly capital, leading to an attack on the USSR, but he did not fundamentally alter the material conditions of German class relations. The workers' and peasants' of the GDR was both an explicit rejection of fascism, but also a sign of the inevitable march of progress towards the inevitable creation of communism.

This framework allowed the SED to place itself as the central heroes within the narrative of the Second World War and cast most Germans as the victims of fascism. This politicization of history was fairly obvious inside the educational system of the GDR where the SED popularized a script of Fascist depravity in which the German toiling classes were among the victims. Like the USSR and other Eastern bloc states, the state-sanctioned line was that the primary targets of fascism were Marxists and all other victims were ancillary to the fundamentally anti-communist goals of Hitler. This led to a sidelining and subordination of any non-communist suffering and martyrdom. The state typically enfolded the Holocaust into other crimes of Hitlerite depravity in which the specifically racial and antisemitic nature of the Holocaust lost much of its weight. Popular histories in the GDR often emphasized the heroic nature of communist resistance to fascist crimes, often to the detriment of even acknowledging other groups' suffering. Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen became important state pilgrimage sites for the state youth group, Freie Deutsche Jugend, but these sites' emphasized KPD suffering and heroism rather than guilt and contemplation. The Sachsenhausen obelisk features the red triangle and its attending statue features a pieta of Soviet soldiers helping cloth the emaciated KPD prisoners. The SED poster announcing the commemoration featured the flags of Hitler's victims, including Israel, but they are dwarfed and subordinate to the red triangle.

The history curriculum in the GDR often presented its students with often quite graphic and voluminous details of German crimes, but the imperative to not privilege any one group, whether ethnic or ideological, above the wartime KPD and the Soviets meant that the victims of the Third Reich were an undifferentiated polyglot mass. For example, one 1952 GDR textbook described the evolution of the death camps thus:

Since 1939, camps became extermination camps in extraordinary numbers. Tens of thousands of human beings who were hated by the Nazis ended in those camps: professors, engineers, priests, politicians, workers, Jews, Frenchmen, Czech citizens, Soviet soldiers and officers.