ABSTRACT
Fifty years after the outbreak of the war, self-justifying history is still thriving; when you examine works written in Britain, in West Germany, in the German Democratic Republic, in France, in the Soviet Union, and even in the United States, you realize that the time is not yet ripe for a definitive diagnosis of the history of the Second World War. Furthermore, only the textbook published in Spain, a country that remained neutral during that period, openly refers to the divergences that separate the historians of different nations. This comparative exercise, however, is not without its interest, for it permits us to reveal more clearly the focal points of this history. Some of them are identified below: they concern the sense of guilt arising from massacres, whether organized or not; the problem of responsibility for the outbreak of war; and the problem of its conduct and the secret intentions of the belligerents.
