Fulbrook Deed Restrictions: Fill & Download for Free

Germany's defeat and the aftermathThe first German defeat in Europe came at Stalingrad in February 1943. Later, in 1945, Germany was invaded from both the east and west.Germany was now occupied and divided into four military zones, each controlled by one of the four allied powers: USSR, USA, Britain and France. Its capital Berlin was similarly divided amongst the occupiers.Each Allied army brought with them a mixed set of expectations, and an ambiguous and ultimately limited collection of plans for how to proceed after defeat. Many questions had been left out entirely, other policies were vague or contradictory. Manuals instructed troops to be strict in their dealings with the Germans, and were reinforced by images from the liberated concentration camps and other gruelling discoveries, confirming the extent of German barbarity. But these sentiments combined with war fatigue, a realization of the scope of destruction in Germany, and a budding sense of sympathy with the defeated, to form an incongruous and unpredictable mix. In the first months and years of their existence the military governments in all four zones operated in openly contradictory terms: officers in some departments set out to deindustrialize, demilitarize, and denazify, just as their colleagues in others tried to reconstruct, motivate, and re-educate, or at least provide the bare necessities of life.The British were fairly concerned with rebuilding their own country at the time, so they put a limited amount of resources into managing Germany and its denazification. They realized that, at certain levels, former Nazi sympathizers were so integrated into society that it wasn’t realistic to suddenly remove them all, provided they had not committed any war crimes themselves. They began to install trade unions and tried to let businesses thrive as long as they weren’t run by hard-core Nazis.The French were wary about German leadership, and actively tried to keep the German people from taking hold of their own government again. They did not seem to see the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler as the root of the problem — instead, they placed blame on the German people as a whole. They were a leading force that sought to demilitarize the Germans as a whole, for fear that they would once again rise up and threaten the world at large.The Americans decided to take on the enormous, bureaucratic task of categorizing and registering every German in their zone. Depending on the nature and severity of their affiliation with the Nazi party, the could have been set free, or they could have been sentenced to death — or a number of possibilities in between. Anyone with any substantial connection to the Nazi party was not allowed to run for office, as was anyone who was not yet documented. However, this whole convoluted process proved incredibly difficult, as rooting out ideologies by stacks and stacks of paper often is, and has been considered a failure by many. Still, their priority was to try to get the Germans on board with their same western democracy.Censorship was an main part of the efforts to expel the Nazi ideology from German culture, though talk of censorship, even in extreme circumstances such as these, always bring up controversy, even by those who vehemently disagree with the ideology being censored. This meant changing newspapers, radio stations, movie theaters — the works. The Allied powers attempted to confiscate every bit of Nazi propaganda or material, though again, how this was interpreted and carried out depends on the zone and who controlled it.The Soviet Union was very concerned with class, and essentially flipped the existing class system on its head. They put the pressure on wealthy land owners, tried to instate Communism in every echelon of German government. Often times, the upperclassmen were automatically assumed to have been affiliated with the Nazi party, and were “redistributed” regardless. What was Soviet controlled Germany would eventually become East Germany.Regardless of the location, it became increasingly clear that it is difficult to separate a sense of blame toward an entire people from the desire to rebuild and start anew. These were the five classifications of Germans:Group I: Major offenders, who were subject to arrest, trial, and a possible sentence of death or long imprisonment. Their public trials, like those held in Nuremburg, were meant to discredit them, publicize their atrocities, and justify Allied justice to the German people.Group II: Offenders — activists, militants, and profiteers. They would be sentenced to imprisonment.Group III: Lesser Offenders who weren’t imprisoned but placed on probation, with restricted rights, for up to three years.Group IV: Followers, who were prohibited from holding public office, fined, and limited to performing manual labor. Young adults in this category were barred from university admission.The remainder were classified as “Exonerated.” By 1949 more than 6 million Germans were scrutinized in this way. The denazification authorities passed judgment in some 1.2 million cases - more than a million persons were classified as followers. This figure compared with just under 2000 major offenders and some 25,000 offenders.Despite the five classifications aimed at clearly defining the levels of involvement with the Nazis, the “us versus them” mentality did make things difficult, as was mentioned before with the French. For example, the British received criticism for running an interrogation camp in Bad Nenndorf, where there were reports of torture and deliberate starvation on suspected Nazis; the Soviets ran “NKVD special camps” while denying their existence, and those interned there may not even have been Nazis — some just rebelled against Stalinism. Approximately 43,000 people died in these Soviet camps, out of the total 158,000 imprisoned there.Denazification in West GermanyThe extent of denazification was criticized in view of the multitude of cases of people who were "rehabilitated" in spite of their Nazi past. Among them were many who were active in the war against the Jews in a variety of ways, e.g., professors P.H. Seraphim (active in the "Final Solution"), H.F.K. Guenther (the outstanding racial scholar of the Nazi period), who published antisemitic literature, and Dr. Hans Globke, co-author of the leading commentary on the Nuremberg Laws.By 1949 priorities had changed radically, and most of these contradictions had disappeared, or been pushed aside. The western zones had become a bulwark against communism, while the Soviet Union had deepened its control in the east. In this mobilization both sides discarded their more restrictive and punitive policies and replaced them with new objectives. In January 1945, the Nazi Party had some 8.5 million members – that is, significantly more than 10% of the entire population.After the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, many of them claimed that they had been only nominal members. When Post journalist Ernest O. Hauser visited Moosburg in 1947, [“I Visit Some Nazis in Cages,” Oct. 11, 1947] his first request was to interview captured Gestapo officers. The two he met assured him they’d done nothing wrong. They’d been police men who were ordered into the Gestapo. Since then, they had “merely protected the state against her enemies.”Hauser also interviewed Heinrich Hoffer, Hitler’s photographer and the man who introduced him to Eva Braun. Hoffer’s defense was he’d only joined the Nazi party because an American editor had offered him a thousand dollars to photograph Hitler, and he had to be a party member to get close to the Fuhrer.After several more interviews with suspected Nazis, Hauser wrote, “I’m glad to report that they are the world’s most innocent and harmless people — they told me so themselves.”Inmates who hoped to be classified as a Category III or IV had to provide evidence they were one of the “good” Nazis. The best approach, Hauser wrote, was to claim they had secretly helped Jews. “In hearing the prisoners talk about the kindly interest they always took in their Jewish compatriots,” he wrote, “one might easily think that the Nazi Party was a society for the care and protection of Judaism.”Hauser noted the thousands of “intellectuals” in the camp — highly intelligent, well educated professionals who considered themselves, as did other Germans, as the best people in Germany. These academics and professionals were responsible for the highly efficient Nazi government. Now they demanded release, claiming to be the only hope against communism. “The Bolsheviks are coming!” they cried, according to Hauser “Let us out! We are the saviors of Europe.”Such attempts to get off scot-free did not work for the Nazi luminaries tried at Nuremberg, but it certainly did work for many lower-level Nazis involved in countless crimes. And with the advent of the Cold War, even people outside of Germany were willing to look past these offenses.Denazification, the Allies’ attempt to purge German society, culture and politics, as well as the press, economy and judiciary, of Nazism, petered out quickly and was officially abandoned in 1951. As a result, many Nazis were absorbed into an emerging new society that officially committed itself to democracy and human rights.Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor, said in 1952 that it was time “to finish with this sniffing out of Nazis.” He did not say this lightheartedly; after all, he had been an opponent of the Nazis. To him, this “communicative silencing” of the Nazi past – a term coined by the German philosopher Hermann Lübbe – was necessary during these early years to integrate former Nazis into the democratic state.Where one was going, advocates of this approach argued, was more important than where one had been. Adenauer focused on rehabilitation of Nazi party members in government administration and FRG society. In this way, members of his government were in no way Nazi sympathisers, and thousands of the most high-ranking Nazi war criminals faced imprisonment for their actions.Nevertheless, Adenauer did introduce some controversial policies, believing that the survival of the FRG was of more importance. In May 1951, Adenauer's government passed the first amnesty law, which allowed 150,000 German officials who had been removed from their positions due to the allied denazification programme to return to government administration. Even more controversially, in 1954, his government passed the second amnesty law that annulled the British process of denazification. This law led to some 400,000 Germans being granted amnesty after previously being declared Nazi criminals, thereby having important implications in weakening the legal focus on the investigation and prosecution of Nazi criminals in the FRG. There was also political gain for Adenauer, as these policies allowed him to gain the support of more right wing Germans. This point is significant as Adenauer was reliant in the Bundestag on coalitions with right wing parties which controversially, justified right wing politics in the 1920s and 1930s as a reaction against communism and the possible breakup of the German nation. In 1952, for example, Adenauer told the Bundestag that 66% of foreign office diplomatics in high positions were former Nazis. Perhaps most controversially, former members of the Reich main security office and SS department aimed at fighting all enemies of the Reich were able to take up these positions again in the police and security forces. So much so, the British High commissioner from 1951 to 1953, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, once wrote, ‘whenever I travelled, I ran into ghosts of Hitler's Reich, men who had occupied positions in administration, in industry, or the society of the day. They were either living in retirement or were taking jobs in banks, commerce or industry.’ As a result, Adenauer’s approach meant that the FRG was built on a morally questionable basis that undermined its supposed democratic values. In fact, by the mid 1950s, the focus on denazification had come to an end. It was only in the 1960s that a cultural revolution led by young West German citizens challenged the policiesStill, despite the criticism, in the aftermath of the collapse of a totalitarian regime, occupying powers or successor governments look for ways to preserve the social, economic, cultural, and governmental structures of the given society while condemning the deeds and actors of a previous regime, and denazification is looked upon as an inviting precedent. It just could be that a fig leaf of procedural decontamination, however inadequate, is needed for a society to be rebuilt.Denazification in the East GermanyAfter World War II, the East German regime tried to shun its historical responsibility by declaring widespread racism had been overcome, by an incomplete program of denazification, by introducing a new socioeconomic system and by portraying West Germany as the sole inheritor of the Nazi legacy.Those state policies had the effect of making the Nazi past a taboo, while putting all blame and responsibility on the "class enemy" in the West. That led to what historian Mary Fulbrook has called 'collective amnesia' and perpetuated the concept of an ethnically homogenous state, as well as the subliminal yet persistent existence of National Socialist and reactionary thinking in eastern Germany.Although the initial denazification efforts in the Soviet Zone of Occupation were more far-reaching than in the Western zones - purging an alleged 520,000 former Nazi party members from the army, state bureaucracy and economy - the Communist authorities decided, abruptly, in 1948, that further systematic denazification was an obstacle to economic and political reconstruction.Walter Ulbricht, the ruling party's first general secretary, remarked that "we cannot allow ourselves to be set back by ancient history" and ended the policy by declaring its "success."The regime thus turned a blind eye to the persistence of xenophobic and reactionary ideas. That informal "pragmatic pact of silence" between the regime and the German people constituted a truce between the Socialist Unity Party and former Nazis, who were to be rehabilitated in return for their acquiescence to the establishment of a new dictatorship.Suppressing responsibility for Nazi atrocities was helped by the Marxist-Leninist conception of fascism. Communist doctrine considered fascism to be the most extreme form of capitalism. By changing the socioeconomic structures of the state, communists would, it was argued, be able to rid society of fascist and anti-Semitic elements. In contrast, the West still harbored the virus of fascism as it did not break with capitalism - the wellspring of the horrors of the Nazi regime.The communist GDR drew its legitimacy from the myth that it was an anti-fascist state and that its whole population participated in the progressive forces leading the resistance against Nazism. Socialism was a justification for the exoneration of the working class and the early abdication of any "collective guilt."The country’s past was effectively whitewashed, and there was a veil of silence around the persisting Nazi legacy and continuities with the Third Reich. In 1953, Bertolt Brecht criticised the GDR’s lack of engagement with the Nazi past when he argued that, "We have turned our backs much too soon on the immediate past in our eagerness to face the future. The future will depend, however, on our settlement with the past."The East German lack of a pluralistic political system and of a critical, free and independent media contributed to the development of that collective amnesia around the Nazi past. The absence of other powers within the state which could have scrutinized the regime surely accounts for the fact that 12 former Nazi Party members could become part of the ruling party's Central Committee by 1965. The explicit danger of persisting racism and the taboo surrounding the Nazi past became apparent in the early 1950s, when a wave of state-directed anti-Semitism, which had swept across the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1953, also arrived in the GDR.Cold war hysteria, deteriorating relations with Israel and resultant attempts to entice Arab countries into the Soviet orbit, as well as Stalin’s personal anti-Semitism, blended into a campaign which targeted the allegedly disloyal, "cosmopolitan" Jewish population.1953, members of East German Jewish communities were accused of being 'Zionist spies: there were interrogations, Jewish organizations were dissolved, and many Jews lost their jobs. This openly anti-Semitic campaign resulted in a mass flight of Jew>ish citizens to West Germany and also illustrates how the regime endeavored to turn the GDR into an ethnically and ideologically homogenous state.Moreover, the regime sidelined the "Jewish question." As the communist struggle against Nazism constituted the founding myth of the GDR, acknowledging Jewish suffering was feared to undermine the regime’s legitimacy. The ruling party’s emphasis on communist suffering hence verged on Holocaust denial.The 1953 East German edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia does not mention Jews at all in its 12-page section on the "Hitler dictatorship." It claims that during World War II, "part of the population in these [Eastern European] countries, first and foremost Slavs, was bestially exterminated."Senior party members such as Paul Merker, not Jewish himself, who who opposed this approach to dealing with the Nazi past, was sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish state and demanded restitution of Jewish property, were violently silenced.In a crudely anti-Semitic party resolution after Merker's arrest, Merker was portrayed as the head of a conspiratorial group which sought the “transformation [of the country] into a vassal state of American monopolies” whose role model was Hitler's Germany. Merker was accused of having worked together with Zionist groups – or "Jewish-nationalist" capitalist interests as well as of "U.S. imperialism," who used the accusation of anti-Semitism to discredit "vigilant, progressive comrades."The GDR’s attempt to build a nationally, culturally and ideologically homogeneous state, its anxiety about difference and attempts to expel "foreign" elements, is a legacy that today's German far right is enthusiastically exploiting