As History is one of our favorite
educational tool, we will present the history of denazification during Post
World War II. This is another example of how good can overcome evil.
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Denazification
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.helen-fry.com/books/denazification/]
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
Denazification (German: Entnazifizierung) was an Allied initiative
to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and
politics of any remnants of the National Socialist (Nazi) ideology. It was
carried out specifically by removing those involved from positions of influence
and by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with it.
The program of denazification was launched after the end of the Second World
War and was solidified by the Potsdam Agreement.
The term denazification was
first coined as a legal term in 1943 in the Pentagon, intended to be applied in
a narrow sense with reference to the post-war German legal system. Soon
afterward, it took on the more general meaning.
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A
headline in the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes announcing
Hitler's death.
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Workers removing the signage from a former
"Adolf Hitler Street"
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Overview
Denazification in Germany was
attempted through a series of directives issued by the Allied Control Council,
seated in Berlin, beginning in January 1946. "Denazification
directives" identified specific people and groups and outlined judicial
procedures and guidelines for handling them. Though all the occupying forces
had agreed on the initiative, the methods used for denazification and the
intensity with which they were applied differed between the occupation zones.
Denazification also refers to the
removal of the physical symbols of the Nazi regime. For example, in 1957 the
West German government re-issued World War II Iron Cross medals, among other
decorations, without the swastika in the center.
About 8.5 million Germans, or 10% of
the population, had been members of the Nazi Party. Nazi-related organizations
also had huge memberships, such as the German Labour Front (25 million), the
National Socialists People's Welfare organization (17 million), the League of
German Women, Hitler Youth, the Doctors' League, and others. It was through the
Party and these organizations that the Nazi state was run, involving as many as
45 million Germans in total. In addition, Nazism found significant support
among industrialists, who produced weapons or used slave labour, and large
landowners, especially the Junkers in Prussia. Denazification after the
surrender of Germany was thus an enormous undertaking, fraught with many
difficulties.
The first difficulty was the enormous
number of Germans who might have to be first investigated, then penalized if
found to have supported the Nazi state to an unacceptable degree. In the early
months of denazification there was a great will, especially among the
Americans, to be utterly thorough, to investigate everyone and hold every
supporter of Nazism to account; however, it turned out that the numbers simply
made that goal impractical. It soon became evident, too, that pursuing
denazification too scrupulously would make it impossible to create a functioning,
democratic society in Germany, one that would be able to support itself
economically and not become a burden on the victorious nations. Enforcing the
strictest sanctions against lesser offenders would prevent too many talented
people from participating in the reconstruction process. The Morgenthau
Plan had recommended that the Allies create a post-war Germany with all its
industrial capacity destroyed, reduced to a level of subsistence farming;
however, that plan was soon abandoned as unrealistic and too likely, because of
its punitiveness, to give rise to another round of German anger and
aggressiveness. As time went on, another consideration that moderated the denazification
effort in the West was the concern to keep enough good will of the German
population to prevent the growth of communism.
The denazification process was often
completely disregarded by both the Soviets and the Western powers for German
rocket scientists and other technical experts, who were taken out of Germany to
work on projects in the victor's own country or simply seized in order to
prevent the other side from taking them. The U.S. sent 785 scientists and
engineers from Germany to America, some of whom formed the backbone of the U.S.
space program.
In the case
of the top-ranking Nazis, such as Göring, Hess, von Ribbentrop,
Streicher, and Speer,
the initial plan was to simply arrest them and shoot them, but that course of
action was replaced by putting them on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg
Trials in order to publicize their crimes while demonstrating that
the trials and the sentences were just, especially to the German people.
However, the legal foundations of the trials were sometimes questioned, and the
German people were not entirely convinced that the trials were anything more
than "victors' justice".
Many
refugees from Nazism were Germans and Austrians, and some had fought for
Britain in the Second World War. Some were transferred into the Intelligence
Corps and sent back to Germany and Austria in British uniform. However,
German-speakers were small in number in the British zone, which was hampered by
the language deficit. The Americans were able to bring a larger number of
German-speakers to the task of working in the Allied Military Government,
although many were poorly trained. They were assigned to all aspects of
military administration, the interrogation of POWs, collecting evidence for the
War Crimes Investigation Unit and the search for war criminals.
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A swastika at the Nazi party rally grounds being demolished
with explosives, as part of the denazification initiative.
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Application
American zone
The Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 directed US
Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower's policy of
denazification. A report of the Institute on Re-education of the Axis Countries
in June 1945 recommended: "Only an inflexible long-term occupation
authority will be able to lead the Germans to a fundamental revision of their
recent political philosophy." The United States military pursued
denazification in a zealous, albeit bureaucratic, fashion, especially during
the first months of the occupation. It had been agreed among the Allies that
denazification would begin by requiring Germans to fill out a questionnaire (German:
Fragebogen)
about their activities and memberships during the Third Reich. Five categories
were established: Major Offenders, Offenders, Lesser Offenders,
Followers, and Exonerated Persons. The Americans, unlike the
British, French, and Soviets, interpreted this to apply to every German over
the age of eighteen in their zone. Eisenhower initially estimated that the
denazification process would take 50 years.
When the nearly complete list of Nazi
Party memberships was turned over to the Allies (by a German anti-Nazi who had
rescued them from destruction in April 1945 as American troops advanced on
Munich), it became possible to verify claims about participation or
non-participation in the Party. The 1.5 million Germans who had joined before
Hitler came to power were deemed to be hard-core Nazis.
Progress was slowed by the
overwhelming numbers of Germans to be processed, but also by difficulties such
as incompatible power systems and power outages, with the Hollerith IBM data machine that held the
American vetting list in Paris. As many as 40,000 forms could arrive in a
single day to await processing. By December 1945, even though a full 500,000
forms had been processed, there remained a backlog of 4,000,000 forms from POWs
and a potential case load of 7,000,000. The Fragebogen were, of course,
filled out in German. The number of Americans working on denazification was
inadequate to handle the workload, partly as a result of the demand in the U.S.
by families to have soldiers returned home. Replacements were mostly unskilled
and poorly trained. In addition, there was too much work to be done to complete
the process of denazification by 1947, the year American troops were expected
to be completely withdrawn from Europe.
Pressure also came from the need to
find Germans to run their own country. In January 1946 a directive came from
the Control Council entitled "Removal from Office and from Positions of
Responsibility of Nazis and Persons Hostile to Allied Purposes." One of
the punishments for Nazi involvement was to be barred from public office and/or
restricted to manual labour or "simple work". At the end of 1945 3.5
million former Nazis awaited classification, many of them barred from work in
the meantime. By the end of the winter of 1945–6 42% of public officials had
been dismissed. Malnutrition was widespread, and the economy needed leaders and
workers to help clear away debris, rebuild infrastructure, and get foreign
exchange to buy food and other essential resources.
Another concern leading to the
Americans relinquishing responsibility for denazification and handing it over
to the Germans arose from the fact that many of the American denazifiers were
German Jews, former refugees returning to administer justice against the tormentors
of their relatives. It was felt, both among Germans and top American officials,
that their objectivity might be contaminated by a desire for revenge.
As a result of these various
pressures, and following a 15 January 1946 a report of the Military Government
decrying the efficiency of denazification, saying, "The present procedure
fails in practice to reach a substantial number of persons who supported or
assisted the Nazis," it was decided to involve Germans in the process. In
March 1946 The Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism
(German: Befreiungsgesetz) came into effect, turning over
responsibility for denazification to the Germans. Each zone had a Minister of
Denazification. On 1 April 1946, a special law established 545 civilian
tribunals under German administration (German: Spruchkammern), with a staff of 22,000
of mostly lay judges, enough, perhaps, to start to work but too many for all
the staff themselves to be thoroughly investigated and cleared. They had a case
load of 900,000. Several new regulations came into effect in the setting up of
the German-run tribunals, including the idea that the aim of denazification was
now rehabilitation rather than merely punishment, and that someone whose guilt
might meet the formal criteria could also have their specific actions taken
into consideration for mitigation.
Efficiency thus improved, while rigor declined.
Many people had to fill in a new
background form, called a Meldebogen (replacing the widely disliked Fragebogen),
and were given over to justice under a Spruchkammer, which assigned them
to one of five categories.
- V. Persons Exonerated (German: Entlastete). No sanctions.
- IV. Followers (German: Mitläufer). Possible restrictions on travel, employment, political rights, plus fines.
- III. Lesser Offenders (German: Minderbelastete). Placed on probation for 2–3 years with a list of restrictions. No internment.
- II. Offenders: Activists, Militants, and Profiteers, or Incriminated Persons (German: Belastete). Subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment up to ten years performing reparation or reconstruction work plus a list of other restrictions.
- I. Major Offenders (German: Hauptschuldige). Subject to immediate arrest, death, imprisonment with or without hard labour, plus a list of lesser sanctions.
Again
because the caseload was impossibly large, the German tribunals began to look
for ways to speed up the process. Unless their crimes were serious, members of
the Nazi Party born after 1919 were exempted on the grounds that they had been
brainwashed. Disabled veterans were also exempted. To avoid the necessity of a
slow trial in open court, which was required for those belonging to the most
serious categories, more than 90% of cases were judged not to belong to the
serious categories and therefore were dealt with more quickly. More
"efficiencies" followed. The tribunals accepted statements from other
people regarding the accused's involvement in National Socialism. These statements
earned the nickname of Persilscheine, after advertisements for the
laundry and whitening detergent Persil. There was corruption in the system,
with Nazis buying and selling denazification certificates on the black market.
Nazis who were found guilty were often punished with fines assessed in deutsche
marks, which had become nearly worthless. In Bavaria the Denazification
Minister, Anton Pfeiffer, bridled under the "victor's justice", and
presided over a system that reinstated 75% of officials the Americans had
dismissed and reclassified 60% of senior Nazis. The denazification process lost
a great deal of credibility, and there was often local hostility against
Germans who helped administer the tribunals.
By early
1947, the Allies held 90,000 Nazis in detention; another 1,900,000 were
forbidden to work as anything but manual labourers.
By 1948,
the Cold War was clearly in progress and the US began to worry more about a
threat from the Eastern Bloc rather than the latent Nazism
within occupied Germany. The remaining cases were tried through summary
proceedings that left insufficient time to thoroughly investigate the accused,
so that many of the judgments of this period have questionable judicial value.
For example, by 1952 members of the SS like Otto Skorzeny
could be declared formally denazified (German:
entnazifiziert) in absentia
by a German government arbitration board and without any proof that this was
true.
The
delicate task of distinguishing those truly complicit in or responsible for
Nazi activities from mere "followers" made the work of the courts yet
more difficult. US President Harry S. Truman alluded to this problem:
"though all Germans might not be guilty for the war, it would be too
difficult to try to single out for better treatment those who had nothing to do
with the Nazi regime and its crimes." Denazification was from then on
supervised by special German ministers, like the Social Democrat Gottlob Kamm
in Baden-Württemberg, with the support of the US occupation forces.
Contemporary
American critics of Denazification denounced it as a "counterproductive
witch hunt" and a failure; in 1951 the provisional West German government
granted amnesties to lesser offenders and ended the program.
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Eagle above the rear main entry to the
Robert-Piloty building, department of Computer Science, Technical University of
Darmstadt. Note the effaced Swastika under the eagle.
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Censorship
While
judicial efforts were handed over to German authorities, the US Army continued
its efforts to denazify Germany through control of German media. The
Information Control Division of the US Army had by July 1946 taken control of
37 German newspapers, six radio stations, 314 theaters, 642 cinemas, 101
magazines, 237 book publishers, and 7,384 book dealers and printers. Its main
mission was democratization but part of the agenda was also the prohibition of
any criticism of the Allied occupation forces. In addition, on May 13, 1946 the
Allied Control Council issued a directive for the confiscation of all media
that could contribute to Nazism or militarism. As a consequence a list was
drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which
were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and
destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense.
All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed.
The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order was in
principle no different from the Nazi book burnings.
The
censorship in the U.S. zone was regulated by the occupation directive JCS 1067
(valid until July 1947) and in the May 1946 order valid for all zones
(rescinded in 1950), Allied Control Authority Order No. 4, "No. 4 –
Confiscation of Literature and Material of a Nazi and Militarist Nature".
All confiscated literature was reduced to pulp instead of burning. It was also
directed by Directive No. 30, "Liquidation of German Military and Nazi
Memorials and Museums." An exception was made for tombstones "erected
at the places where members of regular formations died on the field of
battle."
Artworks
were under the same censorship as other media;
"all collections of works of art related or dedicated to the perpetuation of German militarism or Nazism will be closed permanently and taken into custody.".
The
directives were very broadly interpreted, leading to the destruction of
thousands of paintings and thousands more were shipped to deposits in the U.S.
Those confiscated paintings still surviving in U.S. custody include for example
a painting "depicting a couple of middle aged women talking in a sunlit
street in a small town". Artists were also restricted in which new art
they were allowed to create; "OMGUS was setting explicit political limits on art and
representation".
The
publication Der Ruf (The Call) was a popular literary magazine first published in 1945 by Alfred Andersch and edited by Hans Werner Richter. Der Ruf, also called Independent
Pages of the New Generation, claimed to have the aim of educating the
German people about democracy. In 1947 its publication was blocked by the
American forces for being overly critical of occupational government. Richter
attempted to print many of the controversial pieces in a volume entitled Der
Skorpion (The Scorpion). The occupational government blocked
publication of Der Skorpion before it began, saying that the volume was
too "nihilistic".
Publication
of Der Ruf resumed in 1948 under a new publisher, but Der Skorpion
was blocked and not widely distributed. Unable to publish his works, Richter
founded Group 47.
The Allied
costs for occupation were charged to the German people. A newspaper which
revealed the charges included, among other things, thirty thousand bras was banned by the occupation authorities for
revealing this information.
Soviet zone
From the beginning, denazification in
the Soviet zone took on the political tone of class warfare. As they moved into
Prussia, amid the invasion, the Soviets killed, arrested, or put in internment
camps the Junkers
and other large landowners, not only for their reputation of being supporters
of militarism and Nazism but also in order to seize their lands and
redistribute it to small farmers. Many industries were expropriated, with
entire factories carted off to Russia, or nationalized.
In July 1945, the Soviets were the
first of the Allies to install state (Länder) governments and the first
to allow political parties.
The Soviet secret service, NKVD, set up a number of infamous "special camps" where – among others –
alleged Nazis were interned. However, people were sometimes arrested completely
arbitrarily and did not receive a fair trial, with some not even receiving any
trial at all. At least 43,000 died in the camps. Doing special tasks for the
Soviet government could protect Nazi members from prosecution, enabling them to
continue working. Having special connections with the occupiers in order to
have someone vouch for you could also shield you from the denazification laws.
The abandonment of stringent
denazification in the West became a major theme of East German government
propaganda, which often claimed that the West German government was nothing but
an extension of the old Nazi regime. Such allegations appeared frequently in
the official Socialist Unity Party of Germany newspaper, the Neues Deutschland.
The 1953 June 17 riots in Berlin were officially blamed on Nazi agents
provocateurs from West Berlin, who the Neues Deutschland alleged
were then working in collaboration with the Western government.
The Berlin Wall was officially called
the Anti-Fascist Security Wall (German: Antifaschistischer
Schutzwall)
by the East German government, and was ostensibly built to protect East German
society from the activities of Nazis in West Berlin.
British zone
The British prepared a plan from 1942
onwards, assigning a number of quite junior civil servants to head the
administration of liberated territory in the rear of the Armies, with draconian
powers to remove from their post, in both public and private domains, anyone
suspected, usually on behavioural grounds, of harbouring Nazi sympathies. For
the British government, the rebuilding of German economic power was more
important than the imprisonment of Nazi criminals. Economically hard pressed at
home after the war, they did not want the burden of feeding and otherwise
administering Germany.
In October 1945, in order to
constitute a working legal system, and given that 90% of German lawyers had
been members of the Nazi Party, the British decided that 50% of the German
Legal Civil Service could be staffed by "nominal" Nazis. Similar
pressures caused them to relax the restriction even further in April 1946. In
industry, especially in the economically crucial Ruhr area, the British began
by being lenient about who owned or operated businesses, turning stricter by
autumn of 1945. In order to reduce the power of industrialists, the British
expanded the role of trade unions, giving them some decision-making powers.
They were, however, especially zealous
during the early months of occupation in bringing to justice anyone, soldiers
or civilians, who committed war crimes against POWs or captured Allied aircrew.
In June 1945 an interrogation centre at Bad Nenndorf
was opened, where ex-Nazis and suspected communist agents were tortured with
beatings, whippings, thumb-screws, cold, starvation, etc.. A public scandal
ensued but only one person was found guilty of neglect.
The British to some extent avoided
being overwhelmed by the potential numbers of denazification investigations by
requiring that no one need fill out the Fragebogen unless they were
applying for an official or responsible position. This difference between
American and British policy was decried by the Americans and caused some Nazis
to seek shelter in the British zone.
In January 1946, the British handed
over their denazification panels to the Germans.
French zone
The French were less vigorous, for a
number of reasons, than the Americans, not even using the term
"denazification," instead calling it "épuration"
(purification). They did not view it as critical to distinguish Nazis from
non-Nazis, since in their eyes all Germans were to blame. At the same time,
some French occupational commanders had served in the collaborationist Vichy
regime during the war where they had formed friendly relationships with
Germans. As a result, in the French zone mere membership in the Nazi party was
much less important than in the other zones.
Because teachers had been strongly
Nazified, the French began by removing three-quarters of all teachers from
their jobs. However, finding that the schools could not be run without them,
they were soon rehired, although subject to easy dismissal. A similar process
governed technical experts. The French were the first to turn over the vetting
process to Germans, while maintaining, of course, French power to reverse any
German decision. Overall, the business of denazification in the French zone was
considered a "golden mean between an excessive degree of severity and an
inadequate standard of leniency," laying the groundwork for an enduring
reconciliation between France and Germany. In the French zone only thirteen
Germans were categorized as "major offenders."
Brown book
In 1965, the National Front of the
German Democratic Republic published what became known as the Brown Book:
War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany: State,Economy, Administration, Army,
Justice, Science. The book, among other things, mentioned 1,800 names of
former Nazis who held positions of authority in West Germany. These included 15
ministers and deputy ministers, 100 generals and admirals of the armed forces,
828 senior judges and prosecutors, 245 leading members of the Foreign Ministry,
embassies and consulates officials, and 297 senior police officers and Federal
Office for the Protection of the Constitution officials. As revealed by BKA
official Dieter Senk in 1989, "today we know that [the] Brown Book didn't
contain even approximately all the relevant names.... For example it mentions
only 3 names from the BKA...." The book had a controversial impact in West
Germany. Reflecting this, a judge ordered the seizure of the volume from the
Frankfurt Book Fair in 1967.
Implications
For future
German states
The culture of denazification strongly
influenced the parliamentary council charged with drawing up a constitution for
those occupation zones that would become West Germany.
This Constitution (German: Grundgesetz, Basic Law), was completed
on May 8, 1949, ratified on May 23, and came into effect the next day. This
date effectively marks the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany.
For the
future of Europe
The end of denazification saw the ad
hoc creation initially of the Western Union (not to be confused with the
commercial operation of that name) which would be institutionalised as the
Western European Union in 1947 and 1955, with a broad socio-economic remit actually
implemented in the strict domain of arms control.
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"A German girl is overcome as she walks
past the exhumed bodies of some of the 800 slave workers murdered by SS guards
near Namering, Germany, and laid here so that townspeople may view the work of
their Nazi leaders., 05/17/1945" Cpl. Edward Belfer. May 17, 1945. Nara
#111-SC-264895.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, German
civilians were sometimes forced to tour concentration camps and in some cases
to exhume mass graves of Nazi victims.
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Responsibility
and collective guilt
The ideas of collective
guilt and collective punishment originated not with the
US and British people, but on higher policy levels. Not until late in the war
did the U.S. public assign collective responsibility to the German people. The
most notable policy document containing elements of collective guilt and
collective punishment is JCS 1067 from early 1945. Eventually horrific footage from
the concentration camps would serve to harden public opinion and bring it more
in line with that of policymakers.
Already in 1944, prominent U.S.
opinion makers had initiated a domestic propaganda campaign (which was to
continue until 1948) arguing for a harsh peace for Germany, with a particular
aim to end the apparent habit in the U.S. of viewing the Nazis and the German
people as separate entities.
Statements made by the British and
U.S. governments, both before and immediately after Germany's surrender, indicate that the German nation as
a whole was to be held responsible for the actions of the Nazi
regime, often using the terms "collective guilt" and "collective responsibility".
To that end, as the Allies began their
post-war denazification efforts, the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD)
of Supreme Headquarters
Allied Expeditionary Force undertook a psychological propaganda campaign for the purpose of developing a German
sense of collective responsibility.
The Public Relations and Information
Services Control Group of the British Element
(CCG/BE) of the Allied Control Commission for Germany began in
1945 to issue directives to officers in charge of producing newspapers and
radio broadcasts for the German population to emphasize "the moral
responsibility of all Germans for Nazi crimes." Similarly, among U.S.
authorities, such a sense of collective guilt was "considered a
prerequisite to any long-term education of the German people."
Using the German press, which was
under Allied control, as well as posters and pamphlets, a program was conducted
to acquaint ordinary Germans with what had taken place in the concentration
camps. For example using posters with images of concentration camp victims
coupled to text such as "YOU ARE GUILTY OF THIS!" or "These
atrocities: Your Guilt!!"[Notes 2]
A number of films showing the
concentration camps were made and screened to the German public, such as Die
Todesmühlen, released in the U.S. zone in January 1946, and Welt im Film No. 5 in June 1945. A film that
was never finished due partly to delays and the existence of the other films
was Memory of the Camps.
According to Sidney Bernstein, chief of PWD, the object of the film was to:
... shake and humiliate the Germans and prove to them beyond any possible challenge that these German crimes against humanity were committed and that the German people – and not just the Nazis and SS – bore responsibility.
English writer James Stern recounted
an example in a German town soon after the German surrender.
[a] crowd is gathered around a series of photographs which though initially seeming to depict garbage instead reveal dead human bodies. Each photograph has a heading 'WHO IS GUILTY?'. The spectators are silent, appearing hypnotised and eventually retreat one by one. The placards are later replaced with clearer photographs and placards proclaiming 'THIS TOWN IS GUILTY! YOU ARE GUILTY!'
Immediately upon the liberation of the
concentration camps, many German civilians were forced to see the conditions in
the camps, bury rotting corpses and exhume mass graves. In some instances,
civilians were also made to provide items for former concentration camp
inmates.
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Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld! ("These
atrocities: Your Fault!") One of the posters distributed by U.S.
occupation authorities in the summer of 1945.
"Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld!"
(These atrocities: Your fault!") Propaganda poster used in occupied
Germany after World War II.
This poster and other posters like it were
distributed in occupied Germany in the summer of 1945, immediately after World
War II. As a publication of the US Government -- OMGUS was under
the War Department -- it's public domain by law both under current law and
under the law as it stood at the time. There was an Allied directive to Allied
press agencies stating that the goal of these demonstrations was to convince
the German population of their collective guilt. See Assmann and Frevert,
"Geschichtvergessenheit-Geschichversessenheit". Text of the poster:
Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld! In zwölf Jahren haben die Nazi-Verbrecher
Millionen Europäer gefoltert, verschleppt und ermordet. Männer, Frauen und
Kinder wurden von Hitlers vertierten Henkersknechten gehetzt und zu Tode
gequält, nur weil sie Juden, Tschechen, Russen, Polen oder Franzosen waren. Ihr
habt ruhig zugesehen und es stillschweigend geduldet. Im Kampf erhärtete
Soldaten der Alliierten haben ihren Ekel und ihre Empörung angesichts der vergasten,
verkohlten und ausgemergelten Leichen der Opfer in den K.Z. nicht verbergen
können. In Buchenwald wurden nach deutschen Lagerberichten 50 000 Menschen
verbrannt, erschossen, aufgehängt. In Dachau fanden amerikanische Soldaten
allein 50 Güterwagen mit verwesenden Leichen. Seit Beginn dieses Jahres erlagen
dort 10 000 Menschen ihren Foltern. In Belsen fanden britische Truppen
Folterkammern, Verbrennungsöfen, Galgen und Auspeitschungspfähle. 30 000
Menschen sind dort umgekommen. In Gardelegen, Nordhausen, Ohrdruf, Erla,
Mauthausen, Vaihingen fielen unzählige Zwangsverschleppte und politische
Gefangene einem Inferno, wie es die Weltgeschichte noch nie gesehen hat, zum
Opfer! Ihr habt untätig zugesehen. Warum habt Ihr mit keinem Wort des
Protestes, mit keinem Schrei der Empörung das deutsche Gewissen wachgerüttelt?
Das ist Eure grosse Schuld - Ihr seid mitverantwortlich für diese grausamen
Verbrechen! 1) Güterwagen vollgeladen mit Leichen wurden in Dachau von den
amerikanischen Truppen entdeckt. - 2) Wie Brennholz aufeinandergeschichtete
Leichen wurden im Dachauer Konzentrationslager von den amerikanischen Truppen
gefunden. Das Blut floss über den Boden, als die Soldaten ankamen. - 3) Dieser
Insasse des Dachauer Schandlagers wurde hohläugig und abgemagert vor Hunger von
den amerikanischen Soldaten aufgefunden. - 4) Ein Teil der in einer Grube
gefundenen 1000 Leichen, die von britischen und amerikanischen Soldaten bei der
Befreiung eines Lagers vorgefunden wurden. - 5) Amerikanische Soldaten
besichtigen ein Greuellager, wo die verbrannten Leichen der Nazi-Opfer
aufgestapelt liegen. - 6) Verkohlte Leichname der politischen Gefangenen, die
von SS-Truppen im Dachauer Lager in den Tod gehetzt wurden. –
7) Ein Insasse des Dachauer Lagers betrachtet
die Leichen seiner Kameraden, die Opfer vertierter SS-Truppen wurden. Die Nazis
gossen Benzin über die Leichen und verbrannten sie.
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In the crematorium courtyard, U.S. soldiers
confront the citizens of Weimar with the corpses found there. This was the first
photo of Buchenwald to be published; it appeared in the London Times on April
18, 1945.
|
Surveys
The U.S. conducted opinion surveys in
occupied Germany [clarification needed Western Zone or just
American Zone?]. Tony Judt in his book Postwar: a History of
Europe since 1945 extracted and used some of them.
- A majority in the years 1945–49 stated National Socialism to have been a good idea but badly applied.
- In 1946, 6% of Germans said the Nuremberg trials had been unfair.
- In 1946, 37% in the US occupation zone said about the Holocaust that "the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans."
- In 1946, 1 in 3 in the US occupation zone said that Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race.
- In 1950, 1 in 3 said the Nuremberg trials had been unfair.
- In 1952, 37% said Germany was better off without the Jews.
- In 1952, 25% had a good opinion of Hitler.
However, in
Hitler, Germans, and the 'Jewish Question', Sarah Ann Gordon notes the
difficulty of drawing conclusions from the surveys. For example, respondents
were given three alternatives from which to choose, as in question 1:
Statement
|
Percentage
agreeing
|
Hitler
was right in his treatment of the Jews:
|
0%
|
Hitler
went too far in his treatment of the Jews, but something had to be done to
keep them in bounds:
|
19%
|
The
actions against the Jews were in no way justified:
|
77%
|
To the
question of whether an Aryan who marries a Jew should be condemned, 91%
responded "No". To the question of whether "All those who
ordered the murder of civilians or participated in the murdering should be made
to stand trial," 94% responded "Yes".
Gordon
singles out the question "Extermination of the Jews and Poles and other
non-Aryans was not necessary for the security of the Germans", which
included an implicit double negative to which the response was either yes or
no. She concludes that this question was confusingly phrased (given that in the
German language the affirmative answer to a question containing a negative
statement is "no"):
Some
interviewees may have responded "no" they did not agree with the
statement, when they actually did agree that the extermination was not
necessary.
She
further highlights the discrepancy between the antisemitic implications of the
survey results (such as those later identified by Judt) with the 77% percent of
interviewees who responded that actions against Jews were in no way justified.
Gordon
states that if the 77 percent result is to be believed then an "overwhelming
majority" of Germans disapproved of extermination, and if the 37 percent
result is believed to be correct then over one third of Germans were willing to
exterminate Poles and Jews and others for German security. She concludes that
the phrasing of the question on German security lowers the confidence in the
later interpretation.
Gordon
follows this with another survey where interviewees were asked if Nazism was
good or bad (53% chose bad) and reasons for their answer. Among the nine
possible choices on why it was bad, 21% chose the effects on the German people
before the war, while 3–4 percent chose the answer "race policy,
atrocities, pogroms" However, Gordon highlights the issue that it is
difficult to pin-down at which point in time respondents became aware of the
exterminations, before or after they were interviewed: questionnaire reports
indicate that a significant minority had no knowledge until the Nuremberg
trials.
She also
notes that when confronted with the exterminations there was an element of denial,
disbelief, and confusion. Asked about concentration camps, very few Germans
associated them with the Jews, leading to the conclusion that they did not
understand how they had been used against the Jews during the war and instead
continued to think of them as they were before the war, the place where
political opponents to the Nazis were kept. "This naivete is only
understandable if large numbers of Germans were truly ignorant of the existence
of these camps". A British study on the same attitudes concluded that
Those who said National Socialism was a good idea pointed to social welfare plans, the lack of unemployment, the great construction plans of the Nazis ... Nearly all those who thought it a good idea nevertheless rejected Nazi racial theories and disagreed with the inhumanity of the concentration camps and the 'SS'.
Sarah
Gordon writes that a majority of Germans appeared to approve of nonviolent
removal of Jews from civil service and professions and German life. The German
public also accepted the Nuremberg laws because they thought they would act as
stabilizers and end violence against Jews. The German public had as a result of
the Nazi antisemitic propaganda hardened their attitudes between 1935 and 1938
from the originally favorable stance. By 1938, the propaganda had taken effect
and antisemitic policies were accepted, provided no violence was involved. Kristallnacht caused
German opposition to antisemitism to peak, with the vast majority of Germans
rejecting the violence and destruction, and many Germans aiding the Jews.
The Nazis
responded by intimidation in order to discourage opposition, those aiding Jews
being victims of large-scale arrests and intimidation. With the start of the
war the anti-Semitic minority that approved of restrictions on Jewish domestic
activities was growing, but there is no evidence that the general public had
any acceptance for labor camps or extermination. As the number of antisemites
grew, so too did the number of Germans opposed to racial persecution, and rumors
of deportations and shootings in the east led to snowballing criticism of the
Nazis. Gordon states that "one can probably conclude that labor camps,
concentration camps, and extermination were opposed by a majority of
Germans."
Gordon
concludes in her analysis on German public opinion based German SD-reports
during the war and the Allied questionnaires during the occupation:
it would
appear that a majority of Germans supported elimination of Jews from the civil
service; quotas on Jews in professions, academic institutions, and commercial
fields; restrictions on intermarriage; and voluntary emigration of Jews.
However, the rabid antisemites' demands for violent boycotts, illegal
expropriation, destruction of Jewish property, pogroms, deportation, and extermination
were probably rejected by a majority of Germans. They apparently wanted to
restrict Jewish rights substantially, but not to annihilate Jews.
 |
|
A sergeant from British Field Security Police
interrogates Clara Lackman, a typist at the Gestapo Headquarters in Lubeck.
|
 |
| Suspected Nazis fill in a questionnaire about their political activities in a detention centre near Hamburg run by the British Army. |
End
The West German political system, as
it emerged from the occupation, was increasingly opposed to the Allied
denazification policy. As denazification was deemed ineffective and
counterproductive by the Americans, they did not oppose the plans of the German
chancellor Konrad Adenauer to end the denazification efforts. Adenauer's
intention was to switch government policy to reparations and compensation for
the victims of NS rule (Wiedergutmachung), stating that the main
culprits had been persecuted. In 1951 several laws were passed, ending the
denazification. Officials were allowed to retake jobs in the civil service,
with the exception of people assigned to Group I (Major Offenders) and II
(Offenders) during the denazification review process.
Several amnesty laws were also passed
which affected about 792,176 people. Those pardoned included people with six-month
sentences, 35,000 people with sentences of up to one year and include more than
3,000 functionaries of the SA, the SS, and the Nazi Party who participated in
dragging victims to jails and camps; 20,000 other Nazis sentenced for
"deeds against life" (presumably murder); 30,000 sentenced for
causing bodily injury, and 5,200 who committed "crimes and misdemeanors in
office." As a result, several people with a former NS past ended up again
in the political apparatus of Western Germany.
 |
|
Abolish
Human Abortion
|
Criticism
by the Red Army Faction
Because the Cold War had
curtailed the process of denazification in the West, certain radical leftist
groups such as the Red Army Faction justified their use of violence
against the West German government based on the argument that the
West German establishment had benefited from the Nazi period, and that, while
having officially renounced the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes, it was still largely
fascist in outlook in all other aspects. They pointed out that many former
Nazis held government posts, while the German Communist Party was illegal. They
argued that "What did you do in the war, daddy?" was not a question
that many of the leaders of the generation who fought World War II and
prospered in the postwar "Wirtschaftswunder"
(German Economic Miracle) encouraged their children to ask.
One of the major justifications that
the Red Army Faction gave in 1977 for killing Hanns-Martin Schleyer, President of the Confederation of German
Employers' Associations (BDA) and perceived as one of the most powerful industrialists
in West Germany, was that as a former member of the
SS he was part of an informal network of ex-Nazis who
still had great economic power and political influence in West Germany.
Hiding
one's Nazi past
Even today, membership in Nazi
organisations is still not an open topic of discussion among most Germans. It
was not until 2006 that famous German writer Günter
Grass, often viewed as a spokesman of 'the nation's moral conscience',
spoke publicly about the fact that he had been a member of the Waffen SS
(even though his involvement appears to have been less than criminal; he was
conscripted into the Waffen SS while barely seventeen years old). Joseph
Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), on the other hand, has been
open about his membership at the age of fourteen in Hitler
Youth. Statistically it is likely that there are many more Germans of
Grass's generation (also called the "Flakhelfer-Generation")
with biographies similar to his.
In other
countries
In practice, denazification was not
limited to Germany and Austria; in every European country with a vigorous Nazi
or Fascist party measures of denazification were carried out. In France the
process was called épuration légale (English: legal cleansing). Prisoners of
war held in detention in Allied countries were also subject to denazification
qualifications before their repatriation.
Denazification was also practised in
many countries which came under German occupation, including Belgium, Norway,
Greece and Yugoslavia, because satellite regimes had been established in these
countries with the support of local collaborators.
In Greece, for instance, Special
Courts of Collaborators were created after 1945 to try former collaborators.
The three Greek 'quisling' prime ministers were convicted and sentenced to
death or life imprisonment. Other Greek collaborators after German withdrawal
underwent repression and public humiliation, besides being tried (mostly on
treason charges). In the context of the emerging Greek
Civil War however, most wartime figures from the civil service, the Greek
Gendarmerie and the notorious Security Battalions were quickly integrated
into the strongly anti-Communist postwar establishment.
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