Germany’s democratic postwar governments have made great efforts to make the country again acceptable in the civilized world. There are increasing signs, however, of shifts in German attitudes toward rewriting its past under the Hitler regime. The indicators are many and diverse. At a recent visit to Bergen-Belsen, several Germans told me that the work they do to commemorate what has happened at the concentration camp is disapproved of by many.

Several members of Germany’s elite are trying to clean up their country’s history. Their message is that many others have supposedly conducted themselves comparably in the past, or are behaving so now.

The German historian Jorg Friedrich, the author of two best-selling books, depicts the wartime Germans as victims. He called Winston Churchill the greatest child-killer of all time, claiming that he slaughtered 76,000 children. Mr. Friedrich did not mention the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by his countrymen.

The leading German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in a 2002 interview with the Austrian journal Profil, named America and Israel as the only two countries today that struck him as being “rogue states.”

Another even more effective approach to distorting the past by trying to degrade others to Germany’s level is to accuse Israel of acting similarly to the Nazis’ immense crimes. So, for instance, in 2002, Norbert Blum, a former Christian Democrat minister repeatedly referred to Israel’s “Vernichtungskrieg” against the Palestinians. This is the Nazi expression for a war of extermination.

The Christian Democrat Party expelled parliamentarian Martin Hohmann many months after he called Israelis, in 2003, a nation of criminals, using the expression “Taetervolk,” commonly reserved for Nazi Germany. He was praised inter alia by German General Reinhard Gunzel, who was thereupon pensioned off.

One recent incident is telling because nobody took responsibility for it. In May 2005, the German Open tennis championships for women were held in Berlin under sponsorship of the Qatar Tennis Federation. An article in the tournament program explained that the organizing club, LTTC Rot Weiss, had blossomed after it expelled all Jews in 1936. The publication included a picture of Hermann Goring, a leading Nazi, visiting the club. When this became known, the club’s chairman apologized profoundly.

Compared to these examples, “the locust affair” seems of less importance. In April 2005, Franz Muntefering, the chairman of the German Socialist party, or SPD, undertook a major assault on capitalists. He said that “certain financial investors do not care about the people whose jobs they destroy. They remain anonymous, have no face, and fall like locusts over companies. These they graze bare and then move on.” Oskar Lafontaine, a former chairman of the party, who left it a few weeks ago, agreed, adding that Messrs. Schroder and Muntefering were also “locusts” because they had demolished the German welfare state.

The weekly Stern obtained a background paper of the SPD parliamentary faction, which contained the names of the “locust firms.” Several of the seven listed were recognizably Jewish by their names, i.e., Goldman Sachs and Haim Saban Capital.

The German metalworkers trade union, IG Metall, published a cartoon on the cover of its monthly Metall comparing American investors to (bloodsucking) mosquitoes. The often controversial German Jewish historian, Michael Wolffsohn, pointed to the similarities between the semantics of the current attacks on capitalism and those on the Jews under Hitler. He mentioned that in the Nazi past, Jews had been compared to rats and pigs, while the locust was now the metaphor for the targets.

Several prominent socialists felt they should come to the aid of their leader. The chairman of the parliamentary economic committee, Rainer Wend (SPD), said this about Mr. Wolffsohn: “The man is not fully normal.” Other left-wing politicians tried to turn Mr. Wolffsohn into the accused. Rather than disassociating themselves from the locusts metaphor, they became indirect associates of it.

Mr. Wolffsohn’s Web site now includes a number of quotes from extreme anti-Semites very similar to the words Mr. Muntefering had used. One comes from the rabid 1940 anti-Semitic propaganda movie “Jud Suess,” directed by Veit Harlan. Another originated in Julius Streicher’s Der Stuermer, the prime Nazi journal.

The locust affair would hardly have been worthwhile analyzing had Mr. Muntefering not been an important political personality in the governing party, had he not been supported by so many of his political colleagues, and had there not been many other indicators of similar and worse phenomena in German society.

This was confirmed by a 2004 study on German anti-Semitism by the University of Bielefeld. It found that the sanitizing history approach has deeply permeated German society. Fifty-one percent of those polled were inclined to agree that “what Israel is doing with the Palestinians is, in principle, no different than what the Nazis in the Third Reich did with the Jews.” The survey’s results confirm those of earlier polls on German anti-Semitism.

There are also many other indicators that there are profound negative processes under way in Germany that must be watched carefully. They involve both anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, this time disguised as anti-Israelism. What is most worrisome is that these attitudes seem to have made major inroads among members of the younger generation.

Dr. Gerstenfeld is chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.