GERMAN television viewers are used to frequent programmes exploring the Nazi era and the second world war. But rarely has such a programme triggered as much debate and interest as the screening in mid-March of a three-part drama, “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” (Our Mothers, Our Fathers), which tracks the lives of five young German friends from 1941 to 1945.

The fictional drama, based on scrupulous research, had on average 7.6m viewers per night. Suddenly the few survivors of Germany’s wartime generation are being sought out as never before by talk shows and newspapers. Grandfathers and grandmothers, who for years kept silent, or were never asked, are facing questions about how it could happen, what it was like and whether they saw atrocities. Some more painful questions about who committed what atrocity are resurfacing, too.

Nearly 70 years after the end of the Third Reich, Germans feel compelled to keep their country’s Nazi history alive. “It’s not about guilt any more, but it is about collective responsibility,” says Arnd Bauerkämper, professor of history and cultural studies at the Free University in Berlin. The suspicion, however irrational, says Der Spiegel, a weekly, is that the German people are a special case, a historical outlier, who are unsure of themselves and must time and again seek reassurance. “It’s never over,” read a headline for an interview with Nico Hofmann, producer of the series, and a bunch of young Germans in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a daily.

Films such as “Schindler’s List”, “Holocaust”, an American television series, and the German-made “Downfall”, which tracks Hitler’s final days, all caused passing sensations in Germany. Yet they did not prompt the same intergenerational questioning. “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” has reminded the public that this is their last chance to talk to survivors.

It seems the actual atrocities were committed by others, not those who are prepared to speak today. Ninety-year-olds now talk of “seeing villages burned” or of how they escaped firing-squad duty. What comes across strongly from these accounts is that after 1943 most intelligent Germans accepted that the war was lost. If they fought on it was out of desperation or camaraderie. Dieter Wellershoff, a writer, interviewed on a popular talk show, said he volunteered for the Hermann Göring tank regiment in 1943 aged 18, after the German defeats in Stalingrad and north Africa, knowing that he was joining a losing war.

All five characters in Mr Hofmann’s film reach that conclusion early on. They are swept along like corks in an ocean. The atrocities two of them commit as soldiers—one executes a Soviet commissar, the other a Jewish girl—seem to come from their circumstances: obey or die. The real war criminals are the others who exult in killing or intellectualise it. That has prompted some critics to suggest that putting five sympathetic young protagonists into a harrowing story just offers the war generation a fresh bunch of excuses. It’s never over.