Nazi Germany's total defeat in May 1945 marked the end of almost six years of appalling violence, bitter fighting and genocide. An incalculable number of people, both soldiers and civilians, had been killed in the Second World War, including almost six million European Jews, brutally murdered in the Nazi regime's schemes of racial cleansing. Germany emerged from the war a devastated and shattered country. Its major cities had been reduced to rubble, the transport system was badly damaged and its ruling structures had been discredited. The ruins of the Third Reich, though, gave way remarkably quickly to two new German states in the East and in the West. Less than fifteen years after the destruction of the Nazi dictatorship, West Germany was flourishing. By the late 1950s, it had managed to return to the international fold, its economy was booming and its citizens enjoyed a comprehensive social security system, pensions and paid holidays. This process of economic, social and political reconstruction, however, had required very little focus on the victims of Nazism. Instead, narratives of the war tended to focus on the German soldiers killed in the fighting or on the German civilians who had lost their lives under Allied bombardment.

Although the victims of Nazi genocide rarely intruded into West German remembrance activity, the Jewish soldiers killed in the First World War proved to be an exception. Alongside the other German soldiers of the Great War, they found themselves included in the Federal Republic's nascent memory culture.