Has Germany truly come to terms with its Nazi past?

Germany is often lauded for the way it confronts its own past. The Holocaust, the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children, has a central place in collective memory as well as in the memorial landscape of the capital Berlin, where a 200,000 sq ft site is dedicated to it. But campaigners and historians have long argued that the Nazis’ murder of an estimated 275,000 people suffering from mental illness and disabilities has received far less public attention. Now one of the last physical traces of this crime is to be destroyed, causing a new row over how modern Germany should deal with its past.

At the centre of the debate is a hospital in the Bavarian city of Erlangen where around 1000 people suffering from mental illness and psychiatric disorders were murdered by the Nazi regime through deliberate starvation and neglect. The 160m-long sandstone building had subterranean ‘hunger wards’.