There's a couple of different ways to answer your question and I'll defer to those who are more familiar with Germany post-Word War II to speak to more specifics but I can speak to some general moves made by the German education system, especially post-unification.

Before that, though, it's helpful to expand our thinking about "propaganda education." The most generous definition of propaganda is "information used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view." In effect, the fact American schoolchildren say the pledge in the morning is propaganda. This becomes even clearer in the context of the addition of "under God" in the 1950s. (I get into that a bit here.) While we can frame the decision to ask virtually all of America's children to perform a daily ritual in which they recite words in the direction of the flag as patriotism or building civic duty, it's propaganda. That it's a part of virtually every public school in America puts it under your umbrella of "propaganda education." Holding this tension - that propaganda education isn't just something that happened in Axis countries - can help us be a bit clearer about how complicated and common propaganda is in schools.

So, back to Europe. The education center at Auschwitz-Birkenau was founded in 1947 and from the beginning, the head of the Department of Museums and Monuments in the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art, Ludwik Rajewski, who steered the project into existence focused on the ideas of "moral autonomy" and maintaining humanity. This second idea referred to both the humanity of those held prison inside its walls and put to death, but also the humanity of the guards and those who made the decisions that led to the Holocaust. This wasn't necessarily about offering grace or forgiveness, but rather to make it plain they were people who made choices. And those choices led to the rise of the Nazi Party, to the Holocaust, to the death of millions.

In a retrospective on Holocaust education in 2000, Krystyna Oleksy described two questions that shaped the thinking moving forward in Poland about educating children regarding the events of World War II^1:

First, how was it possible for Auschwitz to happen in the middle of the twentieth century? Second, who planned, built and ran the camp, who were the victims, and why were they sent to Auschwitz? In both cases, it is necessary that the search for answers be based on concrete people whose names are known.

Germany took a similar approach around the two ideas of moral autonomy and humanity. Although there are some regional differences, Germany has a fairly national approach to education. This means that post-unification, how teachers approached the events of World War II was fairly standardized across the country. From an older response of mine comparing Holocaust education in Germany to the (lack of) systematic education about chattle slavery in the United States.

[World War II] wasn't softened for young children but it wasn't graphic - the content was presented in a straightforward manner. It was and is "more than just dealing with the victims of the Holocaust: it includes an examination of the ideological basis of National Socialism, social conditions that were the foundation of the Third Reich and the planning and course of the Second World War."1 Teachers received training in how to talk about an individual's role in the war, how to design field trips to camps, and the rationale behind the curriculum. As a result, there's been a national conversation about the war for several generations, which means there's a general willingness to address the scars. Parents learned of it in school and accept the responsibility to talk to their children about the war.

One thing I was struck by while reading about the decisions in the 1950s by German educators was their personal conflict about the events of the war, especially in West Germany. East German teachers leaned into the history of communism defeating facism but West German teachers didn't always have that history as an escape. This meant that individual teachers often had to reconcile their personal and family actions during the war but I think the important thing to stress is that they wrestled.

To your question as it how well it went, education historians have differing takes on the success of the re-education of the German population went after the war, especially with regards to American involvement. For every strongly-worded essay I found where the historian declared it a success, there was one calling it a failure. We can look to the rise of neo-Nazi groups as a sign of failure but we can also look to the continued conversation in German schools about the Holocaust, the role of personal responsibility towards those with less power, and moral autonomy as a sign of success.

---

1.Teaching the Holocaust : Educational Dimensions, Principles and Practice, edited by Ian Davies, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2000.