By Ralf Beste, Georg Bönisch, Thomas Darnstaedt, Jan Friedmann,
Michael Fröhlingsdorf and Klaus Wiegrefe
Translated
from the German by Christopher Sultan
——
Spiegel Online, March 6, 2012
After World War II, West Germany rapidly made the transition from murderous
dictatorship to model democracy. Or did it? New documents reveal just how many
officials from the Nazi regime found new jobs in Bonn. A surprising number were
chosen for senior government positions.
Ten
days before Christmas, the German Interior Ministry acquitted itself of an
embarrassing duty. It published a list of all former members of the German
government with a Nazi past.
The
Left Party’s parliamentary group had forced the government to come clean about
Germany’s past by submitting a parliamentary inquiry. Bundestag document
17/8134 officially announced, for the first time, something which had been
treated as a taboo in the halls of government for decades: A total of 25
cabinet ministers, one president and one chancellor of the Federal Republic of
Germany — as postwar Germany is officially known — had been members of Nazi
organizations.
The
document revealed that Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a member of the
conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who governed Germany from 1966 to
1969, had been a member of the Nazi Party ever since Adolf Hitler seized power.
According to the Interior Ministry list, German President Walter Scheel, a
member of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) who was in office
from 1974 to 1979, had been a Nazi Party member “from 1941 or 1942.”
The
list names ministers of all political stripes and from a wide range of social
backgrounds. Some, like leftist Social Democratic Party (SPD) mastermind Erhard
Eppler (Minister of Economic Cooperation), did not become Nazi Party members
until the end (at 17, in Eppler’s case). Others, like conservative Christian
Social Union (CSU) agitator Richard Jaeger (Minister of Justice), had been part
of Hitler’s paramilitary organization, the SA (since 1933, in Jaeger’s case).
Even FDP luminary Hans-Dietrich Genscher (first interior minister and later
foreign minister), who denies to this day that he knowingly joined the Nazi
Party, is listed as a Nazi Party member.
According
to the government list, former SPD Finance Minister Karl Schiller was in the
SA, while his fellow cabinet minister Horst Ehmke was a Nazi Party member, as
were (“presumably,” the list notes) former SPD Labor Minister Herbert Ehrenberg
and Hans Leussink, a former education minister with no party affiliation. On
the conservative side, the report names several former Nazi Party members,
including former CDU Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder and former CDU Minister
for Displaced Persons Theodor Oberländer, as well as former CSU Post and
Communication Minister Richard Stücklen and former CSU Interior Minister
Friedrich Zimmermann.
Germany’s Dark Past
None
of this information is new. It isn’t just since the 1968 student revolts that
critical citizens, intellectuals and the media have broadcast new details on
the contemporary relevance of Germany’s dark past. For years, the notion that
partisans of the Nazi regimes were able to manipulate their way into the top
levels of government in the young federal republic, and that former Nazi Party
members set the tone in a country governed by the postwar constitution in the
1950s and 60s has been a subject for historians.
But
six decades after the Nuremberg Trials against the leaders of the Nazi regime,
a new attempt — the first official one, at that — to come to terms with postwar
Germany’s Nazi past is now underway. Now everything has to come out. Throughout
the former West Germany, investigations are digging deep, extending all the way
down to the foundations, seeking to answer a fundamental question: Just how
brown — the color most associated with the Nazis — were the first years of
postwar West Germany?
The
government’s 85-page response to the Left Party’s inquiry about old Nazis in
the halls of power is nothing more than an interim summary of research being
undertaken in the archives of many ministries and federal agencies. As part of
the effort, historians are reviewing enormous stacks of personnel files on
behalf of the government.
No
one has ever dug this deeply. The highly controversial study on Nazi
involvement at the Foreign Ministry, marketed last year as a bestseller, was
only the beginning. Historians are now studying old files at the Finance
Ministry, in the judiciary and the Economics Ministry and, in particular, in
the police and intelligence services. How many Nazis took part in the
rebuilding of the government after World War II? How much influence did the
surviving supporters of the Nazi dictatorship have on the establishment and
operation of Germany’s first functioning democracy?
Officials
at the Interior Ministry, the source of the most recent government document,
have issued an EU-wide call for assistance in addressing Germany’s Nazi past.
Historians from the western city of Bochum are now poring over old files from
the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) which stretch
for about 500 meters (1,640 feet) to determine how many of the Nazi
dictatorship’s helpers hid under the coattails of the domestic intelligence
service in the early years of the Federal Republic — and how this could have
happened.
An Enormous Confession
Was
the protection of the young, optimistic constitution in the hands of former
National Socialists? It is as if the government were determined to finally shed
all of its oppressive secrets.
It’s
an enormous confession. The discussion revolves around an entire generation of
civil servants, all “public employees,” according to the German government’s
most recent report to the Left Party, “who were at least 17 at the time of the
collapse of the Nazi dictatorship, and no more than 70 at the time of
constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.” The people in question would
have been born between 1879 and 1928.
Whether
it will ever be possible to separate the good from the bad seems questionable
at the very least. About a million people from the generation in question
worked for the government in the early years of the republic. But according to
the report, only about 200,000 personnel files from this period still exist.
Nevertheless,
Berlin historian Michael Wildt expects “substantial new information” to emerge
from the file rooms of government agencies. Wildt is convinced that it will
become clear that all government institutions, provided they existed at the
time, were involved “in the mass crimes of the Nazis.” And the institutions
that were newly formed under the postwar constitution, namely the police and
the intelligence services, were largely staffed with civil servants from the
old, criminal organizations. Ministries and government agencies have “covered
up, denied and repressed” their dark history, says Wildt.
Covered
up, denied and repressed. It’s a charge that doesn’t just apply to politicians
and public servants, at least not in the early years of the republic. Senior
members of the media, including at SPIEGEL, proved to be unwilling or incapable
of sounding the alarm. This isn’t surprising, given the numbers of ex-Nazis who
had forced their way into editorial offices.
Blood on Their Hands
The
new wave of revelations from Germany’s past doesn’t just provide additional
gruesome details about the generation of perpetrators. In the middle of the
flourishing democracy of reunified Germany, people are turning their attention
to the roles of those who actively helped the Nazis, or at least looked the
other way, when politicians, civil servants and lawyers with blood on their
hands claimed important positions once again.
The
willingness to let bygones be bygones, either because of a guilty conscience or
for the sake of a new beginning, was disastrous. It is this attitude that has
prompted historians to accuse the founding generation of having jeopardized the
new, hopeful Germany, where human dignity was treated as the most important
constitutional value.
Germany
in the 1950s was “a precarious nation,” a country on the brink, says historian
Wildt. Even though the 50s were seen as Germany’s “golden years,” the period
was also haunted by the demons of the past, whose machinations, as we are
learning today, could easily have brought Germany to what Wildt calls a tipping
point. For many historians and constitutional experts, the fact that this did
not happen — once again — was a stroke of luck, and a miracle of the Bonn
republic.
Biologically
speaking, Germany has largely lost its connection to the generation of
perpetrators. Even those who sought to cover up the Nazi past are mostly
retired nowadays. The opportunity is favorable. Now it is up to the
grandchildren to address the miracle, which must seem like a timeless lesson to
some, a lesson on the difficulties of building a democracy from the ruins of a
brutal dictatorship.
The Grandchildren Want to Know
And
the grandchildren want to know. A specialized history book like “Das Amt” (“The
Department”) hasn’t had this much success as a bestseller in a long time. The
publisher, Blessing Verlag, has already sold more than 75,000 copies of the
€34.95 thriller about the Nazi foreign ministry.
In
2005, then Foreign Minister and Green Party member Joschka Fischer deployed a
commission of historians to trace the new activities of old Nazis in his
ministry back to their roots. In a dispute over obituaries for deceased
diplomats, which are customarily couched in reverential terms, it had become
apparent that the spirit of yesterday still hovered above the Foreign Ministry,
especially when it came to diplomats with a Nazi past.
It
was only the work of the historians deployed by Fischer that finally debunked
the legend that the diplomats had been part of a secret resistance cell in the
Third Reich. The story first emerged in the years after the war when, following
the Nuremberg Trials, officials from Hitler’s foreign ministry were also put on
trial. At the time, Ernst von Weizsäcker, the former secretary of state in
Hitler’s foreign ministry, defended himself against the accusation that he had
been a willing helper to the dictatorship. One of the supporters of his cause
was his son Richard, who later became the German president.
This
old theory was still quasi-official in 1979, when Hans-Dietrich Genscher (FDP)
was the foreign minister. “The Foreign Ministry put up a fierce and sustained
resistance to the plans of the Nazi leaders, and yet was unable to prevent the
worst from happening,” a brochure titled “Foreign Policy Today” declared.
In
truth, it wasn’t just a few implanted Nazis who participated in the Holocaust
through the so-called Judenreferat(Jewish Department). In fact, the
entire ministry implemented the political dictates of the rogue regime with the
practiced effectiveness of a functioning government agency. The Foreign
Ministry was “part of this monstrous dictatorship, and it performed its
duties,” says Norbert Frei, a historian from the eastern German city of Jena
and one of the authors of the study.
‘Maintaining the Continuity of Berlin Tradition’
After
the war, the restoration of former officials to positions in the Foreign
Ministry occurred at an astonishing rate. The political division alone soon
counted 13 former Nazi Party members among its top officials, while 11 of the
17 senior members of the legal department were former Nazis. “There is no other
federal ministry,” then SPD parliamentarian Fritz Erler concluded, “that is
maintaining the continuity of Berlin tradition in this manner than the Foreign
Ministry.”
The
restoration of the old elites also had consequences for foreign policy, which
veteran diplomats still deny to this day. Old Nazis were usually sent to posts
in South America and Arab countries, where they shaped the image of the
supposedly new republic. The diplomats repeatedly took steps to protect Nazis
hiding abroad and accused war criminals from persecution.
In
the 1950s, the German embassy in Buenos Aires unquestioningly issued travel
documents to the family of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organizers of the
Holocaust, for a trip to Germany. No one bothered to draw any conclusions about
Eichmann’s whereabouts.
As
SPIEGEL revealed in 1968, the main legal protection office at the Foreign
Ministry even developed into a “warning service” for old Nazis. With the help
of the Red Cross, the diplomats informed about 800 Germans and Austrians that
they should avoid traveling to France, because they had been convicted of war
crimes there and could run into “difficulties.”
The
case of the Finance Ministry, in particular, highlights the dangerous
pragmatism adopted by West Germany’s founders in their personnel policies.
Shortly after the new constitution had come into effect, Konrad Adenauer,
postwar West Germany’s first chancellor and anything but a Nazi sympathizer,
demanded an “end to this sniffing out of Nazis.”
“You
can’t build a Finance Ministry if you don’t have at least a few people in
senior positions who understand something about earlier history,” Adenauer told
the parliament, seeking to justify his support of staffing continuity.
An Abominable Lawyer
The
chancellor, for his part, entrusted himself and his chancellery to Hans Globke,
a former official in Hitler’s interior ministry and one of the authors of the
Nuremberg race laws. The man Adenauer once called “my dear Herr Globke” was the
most powerful government official in Germany for a time, even though anyone who
wanted to know could easily consult the abominable lawyer’s anti-Semitic
concoctions. He was responsible for the mandatory assignment of the first names
Israel and Sara to Jews in Nazi Germany. The ability to quickly identify
someone as a Jew was one of the preconditions of the Holocaust.
Globke
was the most capable civil servant that the new country believed it had at its
disposal. Part of his competence had to do with the precision with which he
once distinguished among different classifications of Jews: “The three-eighths
Jew, who has one fully Jewish and one half-Jewish grandparent, is considered a
crossbreed with one fully Jewish grandparent, while the five-eighths Jews with
two fully Jewish grandparents and one half-Jewish grandparent is considered a
crossbreed with two fully Jewish grandparents.” With the same Prussian
bureaucrat’s sense of perfection, Globke also developed Adenauer’s center of
power, the Federal Chancellery at Schaumburg Palace. Globke was adept at
pleasing everyone. During the Nuremberg war crimes trials, he even appeared as
both a witness for the defense and a witness for the prosecution.
Only
once did the past catch up with Adenauer’s senior state secretary. When it was
revealed that Globke, as an assistant department head in the Nazi interior
ministry, had announced that “the independent state of Luxembourg was
dissolved” as a result of the Nazi occupation, Luxembourg demanded that Globke
return the Grand Cross of the Order of the Oak Crown, which the small country
had conferred on him after the war, in 1957.
This
didn’t seem to trouble Adenauer, who said: “I don’t know of anyone who could
replace Globke.” The “Globke System,” which SPIEGEL ridiculed at the time,
wasn’t just a system of spinning thread that all came together at the
Chancellery. It was also a system that was holding together the young Federal
Republic. Globke was a defining force in West Germany. The country needed men
like him, people who were flexible and experienced — and who didn’t look back.
Institutions
that, unlike the Finance Ministry, were newly established in the spirit and on
the foundation of the new constitution, also employed people formerly
affiliated with the Nazis. As the new study shows, former SS members with
Gestapo experience were employed at the BfV as wiretapping and postal
surveillance experts — initially as free agents, “because, after all, they did
have to respect the fact that these people were tainted,” then BfV President
Hubert Schrübbers once noted. Schrübbers himself was later removed from office
over allegations of his own Nazi past. But nothing against Hitler’s Gestapo.
“These people were experts,” a former senior BfV official said in 1965.
There
was no looking back when the Globke system dominated the entire security
apparatus. Even contemporaries suspected that Nazi-era experts were given jobs
in the intelligence services of the new republic and at the Federal Office of
Criminal Investigation (BKA).
The
British press openly scoffed at the “Gestapo Boys” working for the organization
headed by Reinhard Gehlen, the precursor of the Federal Intelligence Service
(BND). The networks of old Nazis were also an issue in Bonn. SPD opposition
leader Kurt Schumacher took Adenauer to task, claiming that the intelligence
service was “infiltrated” with men from the vicious SD — the intelligence
service of the SS.
Today,
experts estimate that about one in 10 of Gehlen’s employees came from the
empire of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, bringing the total to a few hundred men.
They do not include those who may have been involved in murder campaigns while
wearing the gray uniform of the Nazi armed forces, the Wehrmacht, or as Nazi
officials.
The
situation was even worse at the BKA. At times, former members of the SS’s Totenkopf division
held more than two-thirds of all senior positions. When the agency began
looking into the past of its employees in 1960, about 100 officials, or a
quarter of the entire workforce, were investigated.
The
payrolls of the BKA, BND and BfV include men like former SS Oberführer Wilhelm
Krichbaum, who, as head of the Geheime Feldpolizei(Secret Military
Police), tortured and killed tens of thousands of “suspected partisans” on the
Eastern Front. Krichbaum joined the Gehlen Organization in 1948 and was soon
put in charge of its district office in the Bavarian town of Bad Reichenhall.
‘Staunchly True to His World View’
Theo
Saevecke embarked on a career in law enforcement at the BKA. He had joined the
Nazi Party in 1929, when it was still very small, and eventually reached the
rank of Hauptsturmführer in the SS. While with the SS,
Saevecke organized forced labor operations involving Tunisian Jews and ran the
Milan office of the security police, where he was responsible for hundreds of
executions.
After
the war, the senior official openly described himself as a “former old National
Socialist.” He remained staunchly true to his worldview. As a CIA contact
noted, Saevecke would “literally stop at nothing to suppress the communist
movement, against which he has felt an elementary hatred since the 1920s.”
While with the BKA, Saevecke was in charge of the police effort surrounding the
1962 SPIEGEL scandal, before going into retirement.
Because
it was to be expected that the expertise of former Nazis would be in demand
once again, the Allies had initially obtained an express power of veto from the
BfV. The Berlin Document Center routinely investigated job applicants — albeit
not with sufficient thoroughness — for evidence of former Nazi Party and SS
membership. BND founder Gehlen also shunned the men from Himmler’s organization
at first.
Until
the fall of the Third Reich, Gehlen, a general in the German army during World
War II, had maintained a department at Wehrmacht headquarters that wrote
analyses about the Red Army. In 1946, the Americans recruited him to continue
his old activities, but this time for the US Army. Washington also feared that
secret agents with a Nazi past could be blackmailed by the Soviets or the
intelligence agencies of other countries.
‘If He Can Help Us, We’ll Use Him’
But
the Americans did not insist that Gehlen provide them with access to the
personnel files of his employees. When a critical member of the US Congress
questioned then President Harry S. Truman about cooperation with Gehlen, Truman
grumbled: “This guy Gehlen, I don’t care if he screws flies. If he can help us,
we’ll use him.”
A
panel of historians has also now been appointed to investigate the question of
why the BND recruited former Nazi thugs. Why did the agency use someone like
Konrad Fiebig, a former member of an SS paramilitary death squad known as an Einsatzgruppe who
was later charged with the murders of 11,000 Jews in Belarus, as a courier? And
what exactly did his superiors know about the crimes?
Of
course, former Nazis helped each other out. For example, one former SS member
said that Krichbaum expressly asked him to “report former SD people who no
longer have a profession, because they could become active again.”
An
especially large number of tainted agents were associated with an organization
known as Dienststelle 114, with offices in the back courtyard of a
building on Gerwigstrasse in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe. Officially,
the office housed a company called Zimmerle & Co., a maker of roller
shutters. The original purpose of the organization was to find out, on behalf
of the Americans, what Moscow’s agents were up to in the American occupation
zone. But conservative nationalist Gehlen used the counterespionage mission to
develop a system of informants against pacifists and communists. The word was
soon out among former Nazis that there was good money to be made in Gehlen’s
organization.
The
ex-Nazis were no longer committing murders at the BND. However, experts suspect
that the former SS officials, who had once held the ranks of Sturmbannführer,
Obersturmführer and Oberführer, introduced the crusader
mentality into the BND that gave the agency the reputation of being a
stronghold of people living in the past. Anyone who occasionally traveled to
East Germany, made left-leaning political statements or even struck a neighbor
with connections to the BND as suspicious ran the risk of being placed under
surveillance, having his mail opened or his telephone conversations wiretapped
by the BND.
‘Willing Servants of the Regime’
Even
top politicians were placed under surveillance, including the later head of the
SPD parliamentary group, Herbert Wehner (“an extremely dangerous enemy of the
state”) and the later President Gustav Heinemann, who was observed after being
classified as a suspicious “element.”
Hardly
anyone in law enforcement was not tainted with a Nazi past. Most, says current
BKA President Jörg Ziercke, were “supporters and willing servants of the
regime.”
This
tradition continued on the inside of the agency, even if the personnel at the
BKA adjusted to the new conditions. The officers devoted special attention to
people known as “country travellers,” who were still referred to as “gypsies”
during the Third Reich.
A
1967 manual reads: “The penchant for an unattached vagrant lifestyle and a
pronounced aversion to work are among the special attributes of a gypsy.” As
much as a decade after the end of the war, the BKA included the prisoner number
tattooed on the arm of a presumed delinquent in its search profile.
Dieter
Schenk, the former head of the criminal division at the BKA, is sharply
critical of the agency, saying that for years it was dominated by “toadyism,
wagon wall behavior and an authoritarian style of leadership.” These are the
secondary bad habits of a bureaucracy that has something to hide, and in which
yesterday’s and today’s officials cannot look each other directly in the eye.
No
ministry in West Germany was spared the army of surviving accomplices, helpers
and accessories. “This continued activity of the old National Socialists is a
fundamental affliction of the inner constitution of the Federal Republic,” Karl
Jaspers, the philosopher of West Germany’s formative years, said in 1966.
When
the old affliction was no longer painful, parts of the government that were
seemingly above suspicion began recalling their own problems. In 2007, the
Federal Ministry of Transportation issued a thin report on its own past. It
turned out that thousands of outwardly virtuous railroad workers were willing
accessories to the genocide of the Jews.
Responsible for the Nazis’ Starvation Policy
Meanwhile,
a historian had compiled a list of 62 people with Nazi pasts for a study on the
precursor agency to the Federal Consumer Protection Ministry. During World War
II, employees of the Reich Agriculture Ministry were responsible for the Nazis’
starvation policy in eastern Poland, Lithuania and Belarus.
In
2009, then Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück (SPD) established a seven-member panel
of historians whose results were to be released to the public. Their job was to
examine “how the Reich Finance Ministry contributed to the plundering of the
Jews and the financing of the arms buildup and the war.” The Federal Ministry
of the Economy commissioned a similar study in the following year.
It
has already been revealed that half of all state secretaries, section heads and
subsection heads in the 1950s were former members of the Nazi Party.
According
to research by Norbert Frei, a historian in the eastern city of Jena, about a
third of the people working in the federal government’s ministerial bureaucracy
in 1953 had been fired by the Allies directly after the war. They were
considered no longer usable at the time. The fact that most of them returned,
and that some even went to court to get their old jobs back, is tantamount to a
coup d’état.
The
former Nazis who had been deprived of their power took advantage of a provision
of the new constitution to secure power, influence and a good pension until the
end of their lives. During the debate over the constitution in the
Parliamentary Council, the public servant lobby was the only group in society
that managed to file legal and financial claims for compensation. This isn’t
exactly surprising, given that public servants held the majority of votes
within the council.
In
this manner, German civil servants had managed to quickly and painlessly sweep
aside their pasts. The German judges didn’t even need a new law to help them
along.
The Judiciary That Sentenced 50,000 People to Death
The
self-righteousness of the German postwar judiciary stands in sharp contrast to
the calamity that the profession inflicted on Germany. Indeed, its crimes are
at the very top of the list of disgraceful deeds. Between 1933 and 1945, German
judges, both civilian and military, handed down an estimated 50,000 death
sentences, most of which were carried out. “The dagger of the assassin was
concealed beneath the robe of the jurist,” said Telford Taylor, the US chief
prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
Roughly
80 percent of the judges and prosecutors who had served Hitler’s regime of
terror until May 8 were soon dispensing justice once again — but this time in
the young Federal Republic. “Perhaps there is truly evidence,” wrote Nazi
expert Jörg Friedrich, “that a constitutional state can stand on a judicial
mass grave.”
In
the misery of the postwar era, lawyers were urgently needed. Although the crime
rate skyrocketed in the era of black markets and refugees, there was a shortage
of judges to hear cases. To make up for the deficiencies, the occupiers of the
western zones appointed judges who had retired before 1933, or they hired
lawyers untainted with Nazi connections. Starting in October 1945, the British
practiced the so-called “piggyback procedure” in the recently established
judicial administration: For each judge without a Nazi past, one judge with
former Nazi connections could be appointed. But, by the summer of 1946, even this
restriction had been dropped.
Now
the halls of justice were even staffed with judges who had once served on the
Nazis’ People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), which was set up in 1934 to
handle “political offenses” and became notorious for the frequency, arbitrariness
and severity of its punishments. Nevertheless, the civilian courts handling the
de-Nazification process merely classified them as “hangers-on.” In 1953, at
least 72 percent of judges on the Federal Supreme Court, Germany’s highest
court for criminal and civil law, had former Nazi connections. The number
increased to 79 percent by 1956 and, in the criminal division, it was at 80
percent by 1962.
Suppressing Opposition to the Regime
It
wasn’t until after 1964, when Nazi-affiliated judges still made up 70 percent
of the court, that one could begin “to observe a decline,” says Hubert
Rottleuthner, a sociologist of law. He also points out that this statistic does
not include the judges and prosecutors who worked exclusively in the military
justice system. Their trail of blood is significantly wider than that of even
the “special courts” (Sondergerichte), established to suppress
opposition to the regime, and the People’s Court.
Between
1939 and 1945, wartime judges sentenced an estimated 30,000 soldiers to death,
often for minor offences and, as some said, “as a deterrent.” Up to 90 percent
of these sentences were carried out by firing squads or executioners.
Despite
their horrific pasts, the expertise of these judges was soon in demand at the
Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJ). The specialists at the new ministry secretly
worked on relevant regulations aimed at establishing new versions of the
notorious wartime courts. For example, a special criminal court for the new
armed forces, the Bundeswehr, included emergency rules that would have largely
deprived German citizens in uniform of their rights.
Among
the promoters of a new system of military justice were Josef Schafheutle, who went
from working in the Reich Justice Ministry to being head of the BMJ’s criminal
law division, and his department head, Eduard Dreher. During the war, Dreher
had served as the senior public prosecutor at the special court (Sondergericht)
in Innsbruck, Austria. In one case, he called for the death penalty “although
even the special court supported a reprieve,” according to journalist Ernst
Klee.
The Death Penalty?
To
have the secretly written “preliminary” consultant drafts reviewed by outside
experts, the Bonn ministry installed a “Military Criminal Law Commission,”
whose members — including a former air force judge and a former army senior
field judge — repeatedly cited the extremely harsh provisions of the war era
during their discussions behind closed doors. And at least three commission
members favored reintroducing the long-abolished death penalty.
Another
member explained when the “ultimate penalty” was necessary in his opinion,
namely when the “capacity of the military” was in jeopardy and, with it, the
“security of the nation” and the “maintenance of discipline.”
A
number of soldiers had been executed during the war for the “violation of
discipline.” Now the ugly word was back in use in the postwar justice ministry.
Although nothing ever came of the law, the malignant spirit of its authors did
not disappear as quickly. To this day, every German attorney and judge is
familiar with the experienced Nazi jurist Dreher, who also wrote the leading
opinion on the German Criminal Code.
The
jurists acquitted themselves because they were able to argue on their own
behalf. With the exception of two chairman of a military court martial, whose
actions could no longer be treated as the actions of judges, not a single judge
in the Federal Republic has ever been convicted of perversion of justice.
In
the new Germany, victims in the administration, the courts and parliament often
encountered judges, bureaucrats and doctors who had once served in Hitler’s
Third Reich.
For
example, someone who had walked into the Department of Reparations in the villa
once owned by the industrialist Rudolf ten Hompel — the headquarters of the Ordnungspolizei (the
regular police force of Nazi Germany) in the western city of Münster — in the
winter of 1953/54 would have stood a good chance of running into a former Nazi
there. Three of the seven employees were former party members.
Abandoning the Cleansing Plan
Werner
Villinger, a doctor who was involved in the mass murder of the disabled prior
to 1945, served on the Reparations Committee of the Bundestag, a position in
which he was partly responsible for a decision to deny compensation to roughly
400,000 people who had been forcibly sterilized in the Nazi period. One of his
fellow committee members was Hans Nachtsheim, who should have been serving a
prison sentence instead of in the parliament. According to the research of
journalist Ernst Klee, Nachtsheim conducted medical experiments with epileptic
children in 1943.
The
murderers of yesterday were afforded public support. Even church leaders put in
a good word for Nazis who had been convicted by the Allied courts as principal
perpetrators. For example, Protestant Bishop Otto Dibelius and World Council of
Churches President Martin Niemöller, a victim of Nazi persecution himself,
asked the Allies for “mercy for those who, branded with the stigma of war
crime, are being held in captivity.”
The
religious leaders interceded on behalf of men like Martin Sandberger, who was
held at the Landsberg Prison in Bavaria until 1958. As the leader of Special Commando
1a, Sandberger had made Estonia “free of Jews” and had admitted to the killings
of “about 350″ communists. But even the prominent SPD politician Carlo Schmid
spoke out on behalf of his former legal intern at the University of Tübingen:
“Without the onset of National Socialism, Sandberger would have become a
reputable, hard-working and ambitious public servant.”
The
distinction between perpetrators and victims disappeared in a haze of pity and
sympathy.
When,
in January 1951, there was a rumor in Bonn that the Americans were planning to
execute Nazi mass murderers who were imprisoned in Landsberg and had already
been sentenced to death, Landsberg Mayor Ludwig Thoma had no trouble convincing
members of the Bundestag and the state parliament to attend a protest event
“against barbarity.”
Not Prepared to Accept a Fourth Reich
The
historian Jens-Christian Wagner has reconstructed the event. A Landsberg
electrical business provided a vehicle equipped with loudspeakers free of
charge, and the local radio station called upon residents to participate in the
protest event. One in three residents showed up. When several hundred Holocaust
survivors tried to interrupt the rally, the mob shouted: “Jews out!”
But
the Allies were not to be swayed, and a few months later the sentences against
some of the prisoners were carried out. One of the men executed was Otto
Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which had murdered tens of
thousands of children, women and men.
Until
1951, the Western Allies executed close to 500 Nazi war criminals, including
politicians (like former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop), military
officers (like Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the Supreme Command of the
Wehrmacht) and SS officials (like police chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner). The fact
that major figures from the Third Reich were hanged over a period of several
years brought it home to the Germans that the Allies were not prepared to
accept a Fourth Reich.
The
Nazi Party was banned, other right-wing extremist parties were not allowed in
the first place, and Nazis were denied the right to vote. “Just imagine that
the occupying power were no longer here,” Thomas Dehler, the then chairman of
the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in the Parliamentary Council, told his
colleagues. “What would this democracy look like, and how wretched and weak
would it be!”
When
the British wiretapped a group of former Nazis surrounding Werner Naumann, the
former deputy of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, they gained the
impression that the ex-Nazis were infiltrating the FDP in North
Rhine-Westphalia. On the night of Jan. 14, 1953, British military police
officers surrounded the houses in the western and northern cities of Solingen,
Düsseldorf and Hamburg where the Nazi conspirators were staying and arrested
them. The next morning, the occupying power informed an astonished public that
the Nazis had been pursuing “plans to regain power in West Germany.”
‘No Nazi Renaissance’
In
retrospect, the threat was probably not as great as the British portrayed it,
and the case against Naumann and his associates was dropped. But the episode
illustrates how seriously the occupiers took the situation. And everyone
understood the message, says Berlin historian Michael Wildt, namely that “there
would no Nazi Renaissance.”
But
even the Allies were unable to thoroughly cleanse Nazi-contaminated Germany.
The plan to “de-Nazify” the conquered country, the Allies’ aim of “removing
National Socialists from offices and positions of responsibility,” failed as a
result of delays stemming from the resistance of those affected by this policy.
In the US zone alone, some 13.4 million people over the age of 18 had to
complete a questionnaire with 131 questions, and a total of 3.7 million cases were
reviewed in all of the Western zones combined. But the lion’s share of the
investigations ended without indictments. Only 25,000 Germans from an army of
millions of yesterday’s collaborators were sentenced by the so-called Spruchkammer (the
civilian courts handling denazification). They were fined or banned from their
professions, but they were rarely sent to prison.
In
the end the Americans, as ardent as they had been as first, abandoned their
ambitious cleansing plan. The Germans — all Germans — were needed as the Cold
War intensified. “If the nominal party members had not been given back their
civil rights and the possibility of leading a normal life,” the US military
governor Lucius D. Clay concluded at the time, “a serious source of political
unrest would have developed sooner or later.”
The
victors’ assumptions proved to be correct. “The almost complete social
reintegration of the former leading National Socialists was morally
questionable, and in some cases scandalous; from a functional standpoint, however,
it proved to be highly effective,” writes historian Edgar Wolfrum. “Integration
into the new democratic nation, as well as personal successes and new careers,
offered the guarantee that the democracy would not be immediately questioned or
challenged.”
Opposed to All Concepts of Morality
But
what price did the nation of the constitution have to pay for this small
compromise with the past? “The fact that, in light of the millions of victims
of Nazi policy, the majority of perpetrators in West Germany were to get off
virtually scot-free was a process so fundamentally opposed to all concepts of
morality that it could not possibly have remained without consequences for this
society,” writes Freiburg historian Ulrich Herbert.
On
Nov. 7, 1968, a woman climbed onto the podium at the CDU party convention in
Berlin, pushed her way to Chairman and Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, slapped
him and shouted “Nazi, Nazi.” Beate Klarsfeld was sentenced to a one-year
prison term that very same day — proof of how quickly German judges could react
when determined to bring about justice.
The
anti-Fascist activist, honored in many places (just not in Germany) with medals
and awards for her worldwide pursuit of Nazi criminals who had gone into
hiding, made a splash with her highly telegenic slap. It went down in German
history as an event just as momentous as the establishment of the Federal
Republic in 1949: a turning point in the way Germans dealt with the past. It
was only the 1968 generation, the generation of Joschka Fischer, who would
later become foreign minister, that revolted against the comforting sleep of
the republic, the depraved system of chumminess, opportunism and cover-up.
It
was a rebellion. The demand to know the whole truth went down in the history of
the Federal Republic as a “moral act,” says the constitutional lawyer and
author Bernhard Schlink, whose novel “The Reader,” about a young man born after
the war falling in love with a former concentration camp guard, became a global
success.
But
the days of slaps and revelations are gone. Poet-lawyer Schlink believes that
the hour of truth, which is now being celebrated with panels of historians and
addresses by cabinet ministers, has the bitter aftertaste of
self-righteousness. “This approach to dealing with the past no longer costs us
anything,” says Schlink. He calls it “part of a new culture of denunciation.”
Historian
Wildt is no less critical about the new rush to expose old Nazis. He sees the
thirst for the truth about one’s own history as a form of obsessive political
self-purification: “They want to clean themselves. Then they’ll have put it
behind them.”
A
“relaxed civil society,” says Wildt, would handle the past differently. It
would not involve procurement offices and vetted panels with strictly limited
access to records, but an opening of the files based on the model of the agency
that manages the Stasi records. “All government agencies should place their old
files into the archive, so that every citizen can see for himself.”
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