With all the press coverage this week surrounding Thursday's 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, German papers on Thursday are divided as to how much more attention the event really needs. A number of papers completely avoid the topic on their front pages, preferring instead to lead with the imminent introduction of university tuition in the country. Most, however, devote a number of pages to articles, opinion and photos from the Third Reich's most infamous concentration and death camp. And, as this is likely one of the last chances to carry first-hand accounts of survivors, many publications choose to tell very private stories of horror and suffering.

The center-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung devotes two full pages to coverage of the Holocaust with a long portrait of a Sinti (gypsy) Holocaust survivor named Else Baker gracing page three. As an eight-year-old, she was taken from her home in April 1944 by Nazi officials and sent to Auschwitz. Her adoptive father, however, made it his business to get her back and spent months writing letters to Nazi officials pleading for his daughter. He even joined the Nazis, a party he hated, because he thought it might help. It did. In September 1944, he was allowed to pick her up from the Ravensbrueck Concentration Camp where she had been transferred. "Papa," she said upon being asked what happened in the camps, "there were people burned in there."

The paper's culture page addresses, with the help of witnesses, one of the most difficult questions facing present-day Germany: "What did the Germans know about the annihilation of the Jews?" One of the vignettes presented is of an acquaintance of the Benda family in Berlin. The young man came back on leave from the Eastern Front in 1942 and rang at their doorbell. He had something he needed to get off his chest. He then told the story of watching as unarmed Jews were massacred by Nazi gunmen. The harsh conclusion of the article: "In the countryside it might have been possible not to have heard anything about what was happening to the Jews. In the cities (such ignorance) was impossible."

The weekly news magazine Stern devotes its cover story to Auschwitz and headlines with the provocative question "Should we still feel guilty?" Its cover story offers large photos taken at the camp, including those of children being led to the gas chambers by their mothers. In one scenario, a woman asks Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the camp, "How can you find the will to murder all of these darling little children?" Hoess, who was hanged as a war criminal in 1947, kept a careful diary. In one entry, he declared his love for camp life. "I could never complain of being bored at Auschwitz," he wrote. "Every one of my wife's wishes was filled. She had there a paradise of flowers." The couple's garden stood 100 meters from a gas chamber. The cover story also includes photos taken after the camp liberation, maps of the camp layout and photos of visitors today. In all, the story presents a portrait of the place and of the Nazi killing machine that drove it. It also includes interviews with survivors as well as German school children. On the magazine's front page, the editor-in-chief, Thomas Osterkorn writes, "If the memorializing of Auschwitz is to have a goal, it has to be to warn us about the dangers of totalitarianism. It is good that now there is a monument to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The victims don't need it -- we do."

A second Stern piece asks 12 prominent Germans, Israelis and Holocaust scholars -- including Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Paul Spiegel, the head of the Jewish community -- if Germans should still feel guilty about the Holocaust. The highlights: Shimon Peres says, "Germans have to look to the future, but they must always remember and must never be allowed to forget their past." Gerhard Schroeder: "Auschwitz is a synonym for the greatest human catastrophe in human history....remembering the crimes of National Socialism is our ongoing responsibility." Harvard historian and author of the controversial book "Hitler's Willing Executioners," Daniel Goldhagen: "Germans who did not persecute Jews or actively aid the other sinister Nazi objectives during the Holocaust years, should not feel guilty because they are not guilty. That naturally goes for all those born after the war, too."

Die Zeit the leading intellectual weekly, looks at the history of remembering Auschwitz, noting that with every 10-year anniversary the effect memories have on society lessens slightly. This, says the paper, was a particular phenomenon from 1995 until 2005. It points out that since 1995, Auschwitz has also been less frequently used as a political tool by German politicians. The last case, it points out, occurred in 1998, when the ruling coalition government cited Auschwitz as a reason to intercede in Kosovo. Overall, the paper sees three major dangers for the future of Holocaust studies and memories. The first is a "folklorization of National Socialism that has developed as far as England's Prince Harry." In other words, it fears the Nazis will become more the stuff of myth than fact. The second is that the "flood of images" that so often inundate television, films and the media, "threaten to make the Holocaust banal" simply by over-exposure. Another danger, it says, is that constant exposure has the unfortunate side effect of transforming Nazi criminals into "dear old friends who we recognize from television." Thirdly, the paper says, upcoming generations will be threatened by the ability to rationalize the Holocaust objectively, rather than hear survivors' tales directly. It concludes simply, saying "In dealing with Auschwitz, there is only one rule: when you are not disturbed in the deepest part of your soul every time you hear about it, every time slightly differently, then something is wrong."