“So we drove to Göttingen at the beginning of May 1961, not without reservations, although we had no concrete fears. We knew about the desecration of Jewish cemeteries that had taken place in 1959. We also knew that people who held important positions in the Nazi regime, such as Hans Globke, who had commented on the Nuremberg Laws, and Theodor Oberländer, who was suspected of being partly responsible for the mass murder of Jews, held high positions in the Federal Republic revenue. Globke was Adenauer’s State Secretary from 1953 to 1963, and Oberland Minister in Adenauer’s cabinet. On the other hand, we viewed Adenauer as a democrat who had been deposed as Lord Mayor of Cologne in 1933 and who had enforced the reparation laws in parliament in the 1950s. In many ways we were naive. I was particularly convinced that the vast majority of the German population only followed Hitler under the pressure of terrorism and did not approve of the crimes of the Nazis, insofar as they knew about them. Nevertheless, whenever we saw people of the corresponding age on the street or on the bus, we were always tormented by the question of who had been involved in which crimes.
Our first impressions of Göttingen were positive and we received a very friendly welcome. When we arrived in Göttingen, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem had just started. We were excited to see how Germany would react to the process. Every evening there was extensive television coverage of the Jerusalem trial. We feared that some Germans would draw the wrong conclusions from the process, that they would only blame a small group of leading Nazi personalities such as Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann as well as the SS for the mass murder, and that the German population as a whole would see it as innocent. On the other hand, the excellent thirteen-part television series “A Nation Is On Trial”, which examined the historical background of the extermination of European Jews, had an impact.”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 144f (translation)