The story of the denazification of Germany after 1945 comes in two versions. The one we know best allows us to congratulate ourselves on a job well done. We turned the most powerful and frightening dictatorship in Europe into a stable, peaceable and functioning democracy for the first time in its history. This is the story we grew up with during the cold war, one that justified the partition and occupation of the country over many decades. And the invasion of Iraq in 2003 made it seem relevant in an entirely new way. It stood as a salutary contrast with the sheer superficiality and short-sightedness of the Bush administration’s approach to military occupation.

But there is also a much less self-­congratulatory version of denazification. It dwells on the darker side by exposing once taboo subjects like the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe and the apparently countless rapes carried out by the Red Army. This is a story of Allied acquiescence and even culpability in evil. Delicate subjects like the Allied treatment of German P.O.W.’s in 1945 — in camps whose mortality rates were for a time extremely high — were scarcely mentioned in polite company for much of the cold war.

In two earlier works, Frederick Taylor honed an effective and fast-paced approach to the telling of modern German history. One of these, “Dresden,” on the Allied bombing in 1945, was a persuasive exercise in historical reassessment, arguing strongly that contrary to general impression, there was indeed a military rationale for the operation. The other, “The Berlin Wall,” also neatly separated myth from reality by looking behind the symbolism of the wall to the way it served both American and Soviet geopolitical interests. “Exorcising Hitler” has all the same ingredients — colorful anecdotes and harrowing recollections, an omnivorous intelligence and wide reading in the scholarly literature — but Taylor hasn’t decided which version of the story of Germany’s occupation he wants to tell, and the result is a little confusing.

That may be partly because Germany in 1945 was a confusing place. Hitler’s influence lingered in unexpected ways. When an American intelligence officer interviewed a Social Democratic politician in one newly liberated town, he was shocked when his presumably anti-Nazi interlocutor started raising his arm in salute and then began ranting about the need to purge the country of its tainted blood — by which he meant pro-Nazi blood.