The recent death of Hans Filbinger has sparked another controversy in Germany about the Nazi past. Hans Filbinger, born in 1913, was a judge in the legal service of the German navy during the war. He later went into politics and served from1966 to 1978 as the minister president (essentially governor) of Baden-Württemberg, one of West Germany's largest and most prosperous states, as a prominent member of the Christian Democrats, the conservative party. He was brought down in 1978 by two scandals. His role during the Nazi period had been in the public discussion since 1972. Then, in 1977, several members of the Red Army Faction imprisonsed in Stammheim died in their cells, in the hospital, or were injured. Then, in 1978, his role as a judge for the Nazi regime was revealed. He had had a hand in numerous death penalty cases, including the executions of deserters shortly before the war ended, as well as in disciplinary cases among prisoners of war after the end of hostilities. (Read an obituary in English at The Indepdendent).

His death has caused a stir at the national and local levels here in Germany. At his funeral, the current minister president of Baden-Württemberg, Günther Oettinger (also Christian Democrat) referred to him in his eulogy as an opponent of the Nazi regime, information he purportedly got from http://www.hans-filbinger.de/, Filbinger's official webpage. When the storm of protest broke out - including accusations from the Social Democrats that he was "fishing on the far right" and calls for his resignation by the Zentralrat der Juden, the main Jewish reprisentation in Germany, Oettinger stood by his claims and apologized only for having hurt anybody's feelings. Last night the news featured his total retraction of his statements in a forest of microphones. As the commentators noted, he has been politically damaged from the left by his statement and on the right by buckling to the media storm.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Heribert Prantl puts Oettinger's remarks in the context of the longstanding politiization of German postwar history. He follows German historians in dividing German memory of the Nazi period into four phases:

1) 1945-1949: denazification by the occupying powers
2) 1949-1963: denial, ignoring and making light of the past
3) 1963-1985: This phase is bounded by the Auschwitz trials of the 1960s and the famous speech by federal president Weizäcker on the 40th anniversary of the capitulation. It is a 20-year period of confronting the history of the Holocaust. One highpoint of this period, I might add, was the Shoah miniseries in the late 1970s.
4) Prantl calls phase 4 "maintaining the past" as being These kinds of falsifications of history have brought several politicians to their fall since the 1970s.

The whole scandal has revolved around the label "opponent" (Gegner) from Oettingers eulogy. It continued to simmer in the back pages of the newspaper for several weeks as letters to the editor and follow-ups about Filbinger and Oettinger continued to be published.