The nazi Germany – consistently with its racist ideology – pursued a totally different type of war in the East than in the West. According to the author, this difference was not reflected in the western european image of the war, which attempted to create a collective, national experience of the sufferings that in reality was the share of only some segments of the society, most importantly of Jewish citizens. In this way, common national remembrance is necessarily illusory: the fragmented and disrupted experience of World War II can only leave behind a fragmented and disrupted remembrance in Western Europe.