At the end of the most destructive war in historical memory, Germans were confronted with the near-impossible demand that they look at the now visible enormity of material and moral devastation and accept collective responsibility. Collectively they had become ‘the German question', as the photo-journal LIFE announced on the title page of the issue that published the first images of the opening of the camps. In the pre-television period, these images had enormous power, and they made ordinary Americans ask how the German people could have committed such acts of unspeakable, unbelievable cruelty. The assumption of collective guilt and demand for collective remorse was to endure for over half a century, creating the politically potent notion of a uniquely German ‘unmastered’ or ‘uncompleted’ past. At the end of the war German civilians, at that time women, children and old men, were taken to the camps to view the atrocities committed in their name. This was documented in a large number of photos taken by US Army Signal Corps photographers whose task was to show the viewers’ criminal culpability and lack of remorse; and their notoriously ‘stony’ faces do indeed show horror and repulsion rather than sadness. Obviously, they did not know how to react to what they saw and they did not understand what was asked of them. They were ordinary women who had just barely survived a total war of hitherto unknown dimensions, with most of the men either killed or prisoners of war, and when the victors asked the notorious question, ‘How could you have done it?’ they would answer ‘We did not know anything about it’, which confirmed the victors’ certainty that they ‘must all have known’. Whether they did or did not know is politically still a ‘live’ but ultimately moot question, because from the beginning it failed to address the different ways of knowing and of remembering. Instead it imposed an enduring sameness of guilt – they all knew everything and did not do anything – and of memory: they will now all remember, and in the same way, that they did know and did not act.