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Anti-Semitism is a worldwide phenomenon whose continuity in Germany cannot be understood without analyzing the aftermaths of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. This is one of the central findings of a qualitative and psychoanalytically oriented study of the psychical aftermaths in non-Jewish Germans as a result of the National Socialist extermination of the Jews. The background of the research project was the 1941 deportation of Jews from a German city to the ghetto of Minsk (Belarus), where about 135,000 Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1943. In a group discussion, non-Jewish Germans who had witnessed this deportation as schoolboys in 1941 were asked to speak about their memories of the deportation. This discussion was followed by interviews with most of the participants and some of their children. The interpretation of the qualitative material is discussed in relation to psychoanalytic concepts on the defenses of guilt and shame and their intergenerational transmission.