I want to be careful how I phrase this question, so please know that I mean to cause no offence. I'm curious to know how Germany- probably West more than East as they were not dealing with the problem of Soviet occupation to the same extent, but I may be wrong- dealt with the preceding years of The Third Reich and The Holocaust. I cannot begin to imagine how the German people were affected by the second world war. And yet it could be argued that they are the leading country in the world right now, and seems to be a stable, progressive country that has been able to address its still-relatively-recent past. Were there any academics, for example, who led the way in how the following generations were educated about what had occurred? Are there any books about this subject? How does modern Germany address this topic when it is necessary, and what is the general consensus of what they have learned about preventing such a thing happening again, and how it happened? Apologies again if any of what I have said has come across as insensitive. I am intrigued to learn more, especially if there are any prominent individuals involved in this process that I could learn more about.
For a deeper look at the situation after German unification and in addition to the info provided by /u/BeondTheGrave I suggest you check out my post here:
A great source to start out with on this topic would be Jefferey Herf's Divided Memory which discusses Nazism and the Holocaust in the context of rebuilding both East and West Germany. Another good book is Catherine Epstein's The Last Revolutionaries, which touches on the role of Nazism in creating and sustaining the East German state. And there are a lot of differences between the two, as Ill touch on.
Basically, the major question in Germany following the war was 'What happened' and 'how do we move forward.' Germans generally understood the magnitude of their defeat, and lived daily in the destruction and devastation brought about by the war and Nazism. For many, they simply didnt even have the time or the energy to wonder about the legacy of Nazism. They had more immediate concerns, such as food, housing, and the money to buy basic items. For men, returning from the front or PoW camps, they found homes and communities who had grown without them. They saw the damage their actions and their defeat caused, and many saw them as agents, willing and unwilling, of Germany's humiliation. Women too struggled, many of whom struggled to put their lives back together after the war. Both sides had to make a lot of compromises and sacrifices just to put their lives back together.
You see these struggles play out in West Germany during their early political struggles. The Christian Democratic Union, under Conrad Adenauer, emphasized the role of Germany as victims of Nazism. They argued that the Nazis had coerced the Germans into supporting them, fighting the war, and perpetrating the Holocaust. Rather than a spontaneous and popular event, they argued that the Holocaust was the result of a conspiracy of a few hardcore Nazis, assisted by a multitude of unwilling and unaware Germans. They didnt reject the Holocaust or the criminal action of many Germans, but rather emphasized normality. They were opposed by the Social Democratic Party, led by Kurt Schumacher. Schumacher had been personally imprisoned at Dachau, where he had lost one of his arms. Schumacher was, understandably, staunchly anti-Nazi and argued that Germans had to come to grips with Nazism and the Holocaust. He thought that people needed to accept their own personal roles in the crimes. Unlike the Adenauer approach, which favored a quiet recognition of the Holocaust, Schumacher proposed a loud, public, and pervasive conversation.
These two threads, the CDU line and the SPD line, have tended to alternate in German (specifically West German) politics and their memory of Nazism. While Adenauer was in power in the 1940s and 1950s, the emphasis was on normalizing former soldiers, victims, and Nazis. But in the 1960s, a new series of SPD governments pushed the Holocaust into the forefront. It was carried forward by the generation of 1968, who asked their parents the feared question: 'What did you do during World War Two?' This generation criticized their parents and the Adenauer years for seemingly sweeping Nazism under the rug and ignoring the Nazi past of many West Germans. This would last until the 1980s, when people slowly pivoted away from that direct, often ugly, confrontation with Nazi crimes.
In East Germany, Nazism and the Holocaust were viewed through the lens of the 'Anti-Fascist Struggle.' This was largely a result of the strict, homogeneous, and ideological nature of Communism. Unlike in West Germany, where there was often public debate on the issue, East German Communists like Walter Ulbricht came into power with a firm understanding of Nazism. The Ulbricht faction which would quickly take control of the Socialist Party of Unity entered exile in the Soviet Union, and had front row seats to both Stalin's Purges and the German invasion of the USSR. These two events convinced Ulbricht of two things: 1) that ideological deviation was potentially fatal, and 2) that the Germans had committed unspeakable crimes to the Communist World. And it was through this Communist lens that the East Germans viewed Nazism. They considered an outgrowth of Capitalism, one which targeted Soviets and Communists for persecution and extermination. East Germany emphasized the persecution, imprisonment, and death of Communists, some of whom had rejoined the party in 1945. For them, the Holocaust and Nazism was the ultimate class struggle. As a result, however, they rejected the idea that individual groups were targeted more. Specifically, the racial and religious aspects of the Holocausts were deemphasized. Rather, Jews were either incidental targets, or were persecuted for the connection to leftism.
This narrative remained very stable throughout the Cold War. It served the German-Soviet relationship, as it placed a huge emphasis on the crimes that Germans committed to the Russian people. It naturally supported the place of the Russians as the primary victims of Nazism, as well as its primary foe. Further, the Communist narrative skirted the issue of normalization. Nazis and their fellow travelers were exiled, imprisoned, or excommunicated from the SPD. Unlike in West Germany, Nazism was soundly rejected in the East, while their opponents, men like Ulbricht and the veteran communists who lived through the Nazi period, were glorified as heroes of the antifascist struggle. In time, East Germans would reject the privileged place of the veteran communists, but as you might expect of a Stalnist-style state, these challenges were infrequent and underdeveloped. Dissent, even from the antifascist narrative, could carry steep penalties. It was, ironically, only the veteran communists themselves who carried the clout and the credibility to make those fundamental criticisms.