Exorcising Hitler (58 page)

Even the FDP, in favour of free markets and socially liberal, nevertheless contained a strong intermix of old-fashioned nationalism. As for the DP (German Party), it was a strange combination of a regional ultra-conservative pressure group and a collection point for Nazi remnants (it had originally been re-founded in 1946 as a direct successor to the so-called ‘German-Hanoverian Party’, which between 1866 and 1933 had campaigned for the restoration of the Hanoverian monarchy that had been dispossessed by Bismarck).
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Given the tight parliamentary situation, even the extreme national-conservative DKP/DRP (
Deutsche Konservative Partei/Deutsche Reichspartei
), with only five seats, had to be taken into account.

Under these circumstances, the Chancellor’s position, and the position of this new democratic experiment in Germany, still felt precarious. Adenauer needed a broad consensus and this kind of talk ensured he got it.

Perhaps it was just that, in the end, many of the (mostly) men who had suffered at the hands of the denazifiers were, like Adenauer, middle-class university graduates, usually in law, who continued to see themselves, whatever political choices they had made on the way, as disinterested servants of the people. Unless there was direct evidence of terrible offences against humanity, the Chancellor just could not bring himself to see them as criminals, and, given his own conservative values, he wanted these men to return to the country’s service as soon as possible, just as he had.

Kurt Schumacher, in his reply to Adenauer’s big speech, attacked the Chancellor’s apparent complacency about the Nazi regime’s crimes and doubted whether its victims, especially the Jews, would ever be properly compensated. The barbaric Hitler regime, he said, ‘had dishonoured the German people by its extinction of six million Jews’. Oddly, though, Noel Annan records:

I remember being surprised that in a ten-page memorandum which Kurt Schumacher wrote in May 1946 setting out what his party wanted the British to do there was, except for one request to move a particular police chief, no reference to denazification.
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The American military official Walter Dorn observed the same of Schumacher’s lack of real interest in denazification.
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Annan admired Schumacher greatly for his moral stature, whereas he respected Adenauer for his practical political abilities. But there is something subtle here about why denazification did not work, even for those Germans who hated the Nazis. And there is also something about the way that occupiers, especially English-speaking occupiers during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, do not understand what unites the people of the countries they occupy, no matter how violently, often lethally, those people disagree among themselves. The history of ‘de-Ba’athification’ in Iraq tells its own, echoing story, too.

So it was that in May 1951 the CDU and SPD combined to pass the
Entnazifizierungsschlussgesetz
(law to end denazification), which allowed all but categories I and II of Nazi miscreants, i.e. major war criminals and incriminated individuals – in the event, a tiny proportion of those punished by denazification panels – to return to their jobs in the country’s civil service.

Even before this, many convicted Nazis had been restored to their old jobs by German-run administrations. According to an American report, in Hesse in 1949, 85 per cent of civil servants originally removed by the denazifiers were back at their jobs. In May 1949, at the time the West German state and constitution were coming into being, between 30 and 60 per cent of officials of the Bavarian
Land
government were ex-Nazis.
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After the passing at federal level of the
Entnazifizierungsschlussgesetz
, the way was also free for ex-Nazis in the central government civil service. In August 1950, a quarter of all departmental heads in the Bonn ministries were ex-Nazis. Three years later, the proportion had reached 60 per cent. In the Foreign Ministry in 1952 the proportion was two-thirds.
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It must be mentioned that, despite the torrent of accusatory East German propaganda on this issue, by the middle of the 1950s in many regions of that communist state up to 15 per cent of SED members were former Nazis.
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The outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950 was another turning point in the history of post-war Germany. Germany, like Korea (and Vietnam), was divided between communist and capitalist regimes and therefore also at risk. In Washington, opinion switched away from post-war moral niceties and towards getting as many ‘useful’ Germans on the Western team as possible. Freedom needed German industry and German manpower.

Alfried Krupp and other leading industrialists were released from their prisons during 1951, on the initiative of the American High Commissioner to Germany, John McCloy. Soon most had had at least some property returned to them. Krupp suffered losses from the breaking up of his giant company, but with a fortune of more than a billion dollars (estimated in 1960, the equivalent in today’s money of between seven and eight billion) he remained the richest man in Germany, and probably in Europe, until his death in 1967.
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IG Farben was also broken up.
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However, almost all of the IG executives put on trial in 1947–8 enjoyed profitable and respected post-release careers. Again, High Commissioner John McCloy played a part in their early release, though he claimed that he had decided this on purely legal grounds. Fritz Ter Meer, who had been closely involved in planning IG’s Auschwitz satellite camp, was released in February 1951 from Landsberg prison in Bavaria. Landsberg was the same not especially rigorous institution in which Hitler had served time after his attempted Munich coup in 1923. Ter Meer may have been a war criminal, but he was no fool. He said very little to the reporters gathered outside the prison gates, but did find time to observe: ‘Now that the Americans have Korea on their hands, they are a lot more friendly.’
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The Korean War unleashed a huge rearmament programme on the part of the US and its allies. Armies that had been allowed to run down were reinforced, budgets massively increased. Washington’s armed forces budget near enough quintupled from $17.5 billion in 1950 to $70 billion at the end of 1951. Defence expenditure as a share of the American gross national product went up from 4.9 per cent in 1949 to 17.8 per cent in 1952–3.
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The British also raised their defence budget. The Labour government, narrowly re-elected in 1950, was divided over the new taxes and charges raised to cover the increased military spending, and was soon out of office.

The Federal Republic, aka West Germany, was rapidly developing into one of the bulwarks of the European resistance to Stalin. There was talk in government circles as early as 1950 of a new West German army (in East Germany there already existed a paramilitary police force – the so-called ‘People’s Police in Barracks’).
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It no longer mattered nearly so much that an official or a businessman had been a Nazi. All hands were needed to rebuild Germany. The danger from the East was all too clear.

It certainly did not matter at all if that same official or businessman had been in the Wehrmacht. The cult of a ‘pure’ Wehrmacht that had been led astray by Hitler, but whose soldiers had nevertheless done their duty, flourished from the late 1940s onwards, even though it did not wholly accord with the facts about the Second World War. It was, however, undoubtedly true that, just as not all Allied forces that fought in that just war did so in a just fashion, so, in the case of the Wehrmacht, by no means all of those who fought in the Führer’s criminal war were war criminals.

However, by the early 1950s in West Germany there were many who sought to deny that there had been war crimes at all. The Free Democrats, who had set out to target former Wehrmacht soldiers and POW returnees as potential supporters, fell in with a group of former Nazis, including a circle based around Werner Naumann, former State Secretary at Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, who had been agitating in favour of a general amnesty for ‘so-called war criminals’. Another pillar of Adenauer’s power, the GB/BHE,
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which entered the parliament (and the government) in 1953, represented many expellees. It also flirted with the far right (several of its leaders were former Nazis). Along with the much larger, supposedly apolitical refugee organisation, the BdV (
Bund der Vertiebenen
, Federation of Expellees), the GB/BHE represented a powerful pressure group in Germany right through to the 1970s, blocking any roads that might have led to a post-war settlement of the ‘German Question’ through recognition of the post-war territorial losses to Poland and Russia. The GB/BHE even opposed diplomatic relations with Poland and Czechoslovakia until the ‘stolen’ territories were returned.
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A campaign for total amnesty rumbled on, but by now such a thing would have undermined Adenauer’s fence-mending foreign policy, and releases and pardons were at best piecemeal. A push before the 1953 elections in West Germany achieved much, but not enough for the Chancellor’s nationalist opponents, and in the elections Adenauer’s party gained an extra 10 per cent of the vote, greatly strengthening his position. Many real war criminals remained in prison until the late 1950s, but eventually all were released from Allied jails. The last four – SD killing-squad leaders who had been condemned to death at Nuremberg but then had their sentences commuted – left prison in 1958.
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One of this final quartet of the pardoned, Dr Martin Sandberger, had personally commanded the killing squad that rendered Estonia ‘Jew-free’ in the winter of 1941–2, and been SD commander and head of the security police there. As it happened, he had studied law, back in the early 1930s, at Tübingen University with the social democratic politician Carlo Schmid. Schmid remembered him well and with a degree of affection. Some years before Sandberger’s release, Schmid was among those who submitted statements in support of his repeated pleas for clemency. The impeccably democratically minded Schmid’s portrait of the mass murderer Sandberger as a middle-class, educated German led astray could have stood for many thousands of others:

He was a hard-working, intelligent and gifted lawyer, who on the one hand had succumbed to the intellectual nihilism of the time, and on the other clung firmly to the formal world of middle class behaviour conditioned by his family tradition. Had it not been for the irruption of national socialist rule, Sandberger would have been a decent, conscientious, hardworking official like so many others . . .
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Sandberger, Schmid pleaded, should be ‘given the chance to prove himself in life anew’. And in the end, he was – ‘like so many others’.

The 1950s in West Germany were a time for what might be kindly called ‘reintegration’ but could also have been called, as it was by some left-wing commentators, ‘restoration’
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– not so much of Nazism, but of the old authoritarian, conservative Germany out of which Nazism had grown. Just as the Bourbons, when they were restored in France after Napoleon’s overthrow in 1814–15, ended up pardoning and employing some of Napoleon’s most talented soldiers and officials, so Adenauer’s Germany was prepared to let Nazis in on the power structure of the Bonn Republic – so long as they behaved themselves and acted as if they were prepared to become democrats. Which most of them, given the chance for a ‘second career’ after such uncertain times, did.

The benign differences that became apparent in the formally democratic West Germany of the 1950s – contrasting with the equivalent period after the First World War, the 1920s – were threefold.

First, after a shaky start amidst an economy still recovering from the post-war breakdown, with shortages still widespread and industry only slowly picking up capacity, within a couple of years of its foundation the Federal Republic was booming. Its democratic predecessor, the Weimar Republic, had never quite achieved sustained economic growth – not even in the mid-1920s, when it came as close to economic and, as a result, political stability as it ever would. West Germany’s long boom continued from 1950 to 1965, as Germans, chastened by war and determined never to go hungry again, worked as never before, and correspondingly benefited more than any other country (with the possible exception of Japan) from the enormous resurgence of the world economy following the Second World War. The period of uninterrupted German growth and prosperity lasted, in fact, a little longer than the entire Weimar Republic and a lot longer than the ‘Thousand-Year’ Third Reich. Even the relatively mild recession of the mid-1960s, though it caused dismay at the time, was a mere pause in a road to national riches that continues, with some indigestion as a result of the absorption of East Germany after 1989, to this day.

Second, the birth of the second German democracy happened in the shadow of the Cold War. The collapse of the wartime capitalist/communist alliance and the subsequent nuclear stand-off with Russia made West Germany a valued partner for the US and its allies. Fear of communism also stampeded all but the far left and the very far right of the German political spectrum into supporting the form of government that the Americans supported: democracy. That was, in effect, the deal. Even those West Germans who still harboured doubts about the ultimate efficacy of democracy – the polls taken around the time of the Federal Republic’s foundation indicate there were at that point quite a few – nonetheless realised that rebuilding it in their country was the price of membership of the American-led anti-communist club that guaranteed the safety of their increasingly prosperous society. The wave of rape and violence that had followed the Soviet invasion of eastern Germany – horrific first-hand accounts of which were brought west by masses of refugees – had served to propel millions of Germans in the Western zones towards their new American, British and French masters, no matter how unimpressed by them they might have otherwise been. The rapid imposition east of the Elbe River of a communist puppet state, complete with the full apparatus of police repression and economic semi-serfdom, further reminded the Westerners that, whatever the imperfections of their own post-war state, it was better than the only other alternative currently on offer.