From the perspective of the turn of the twenty-first century it seems strange how little was spoken about the Nazi past at that time. We knew something about people like Wittram, Heimpel and Schramm, but not exactly what role they played under National Socialism. Only when the archives in the former GDR were opened in the nineties did one learn more. One also did not ask many questions. Suddenly all were democrats and had opposed the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis. Gerhard Ritter and Hans Rothfels who remained very nationalistic, after 1945, asserted that the German historians with few exceptions had remained loyal to the principles of scholarship and had kept their distance from National Socialism, which with many had not been the case. I had not been aware of how close the majority of German historians had been to National Socialism. Through Wittram we came to know his assistant Rudolf von Thadden and his wife Wiebke, who are still among our best friends. At that time von Thadden was not yet thirty. He and Ernst Schulin, who had just received his doctorate in Göttingen, were among the few historians we knew at that time who were seriously concerned about the German past. Von Thadden at the age of thirteen in 1945 had been forced to leave his parents Pomeranian estate. He came from a conservative Protestant family that had suffered under the Nazis. His father was involved in the oppositional Confessional Church and had spent some time in prison, and his fathers sister was executed. After 1945, his father was elected first president of the Lutheran Church Council. Von Thadden attended a lycée in Geneva, where he learned fluent French, which served him in good stead in his lifelong work promoting German-French understanding. Our friendship with both von Thaddens contributed much to our feeling at home in Germany.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 96