Interest in post-crisis education and concomitantly in education for democracy and citizenship, manifest in a large number of recent initiatives and publications, provides an opportunity to revisit the period of occupation in Germany after the Second World War, when there was concern--at least in the Western Zones--to create an awareness of the citizen's duty to participate in the democratic processes on which a future state could be built and to oversee educational development in such a way as to encourage those processes. That interest has been reinforced through consideration of the consequences of military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. The necessity to plan for what needed to be done--in education as well as in other fields--in the post-conflict conditions in those countries was clearly not given the attention it deserved by the eventual victors, and any lessons of history, it seems, were barely considered. Occupied Germany provides an instructive example. This paper examines aspects of education for democracy in occupied Germany, 1945-1949, with a focus on efforts made in the British Zone of Occupation to encourage active participation in democratic processes in schools and universities.