The prosecutor argued for a 13-year prison sentence, which the court denied. Even if the prosecutor's argument had prevailed, it is unclear that Goetzfried's situation would have ended up much differently. After sentencing him to ten years, the court then released Goetzfried on the grounds that he had previously spent 13 postwar years imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. Goetzfried's prosecutors stated that this trial might be the last of Germany's Nazi-era war-crimes trials. For just as Holocaust survivors are aging and dying, the same is true of war-crimes suspects and the witnesses who could testify against them.

The murderous legacy of Nazism has cast a long and foreboding shadow over the German nation. Questions of collective guilt and responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism permeate the fabric of German society. Although more than 50 years separate the present day from the end of World War II, Germany still struggles to come to terms with its past.

Until the 1960s, discussions of National Socialism were virtually absent from German textbooks. Although questions about culpability for the Holocaust are now cautiously broached in Germany, every effort to memorialize the Holocaust ignites a national debate.

On an individual level, German intellectuals have wrestled endlessly about German guilt. Whereas the German philosopher Karl Jaspers rejected the thesis of collective guilt, German theologian Martin Niemöller openly acknowledged it.

In his confession "I Am Guilty," Niemöller wrote: "We are most certainly not without guilt; and I ask myself over and over again what would have happened if 14,000 evangelical ministers all over Germany had defended the truth with their very lives in the year 1933 or 1934....I can imagine that we should have saved 30 to 40 million lives."'