After the Reich (69 page)

The interview brought Winifred Wagner new fame. More reporters pitched up at her house in the Fichtelgebirge. Some wanted to know if she had slept with Hitler. She said no. She told them that Hitler had been misled by Bormann. She clearly possessed a ‘stuff and nonsense’ charm, and had seen enough of the Third Reich and its puffed-up officials to know how to deal with a few army interrogators. With time she won the conquerors round. One reason was her command of English, which made her an important source of information for the occupying forces.
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Meanwhile Thomas Mann had weighed in from his exile in America, publishing his reasons for not returning to Germany. He attacked those who had continued to pursue an artistic life under Hitler. One who felt that he was being indicted was Emil Preetorius, who had designed some of the most famous sets for Bayreuth, and whose anti-Nazi views and friendship with Jews had not only been well known but had put him in danger. Mann gave no credence to the idea of ‘inner emigration’ as expounded by Preetorius and others. Preetorius’s message to Mann was ‘My dear friend, you have no idea of the sorcery of terror.’ It was an argument forcefully put forward by Furtwängler when he asked Mann why he felt that Germans should have been deprived of the solace of Beethoven during the years of the Third Reich.
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Furtwängler’s humiliation began on 11 December 1946 in the Spruchkammer in the Schlüterstrasse in Berlin. This was run by the British major Kaye Sely as head of the Information Services Control Intelligence Section. His attitude to denazification was generally more indulgent than that of most gentiles, but it was not going to help Furtwängler much. The first session of the Spruchkammer lasted for five hours before it was adjourned so that more witnesses could be called. Heinz Tietjen, who had abandoned his lover Winifred Wagner to her fate, once again played a questionable role. Now he attempted to cover up for his intrigues at the Lindenoper. He had had enough of the vain Furtwängler and sought to promote the equally vain but considerably more ambitious Karajan. He became Goebbels’s stooge in his campaign to discredit the older conductor.
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Furtwängler meanwhile expressed his astonishment at his treatment considering that he was the only member of the musical establishment to have actively opposed Hitler.
^cx

In words reminiscent of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Furtwängler said, ‘You have to work with the regime in order to work against it . . . Emigration would have been a more comfortable solution in any case.’ The Western Allies had plenty of dirt to throw at the conductor. Much of it centred on the critic Edwin von der Nüll, who had made unflattering comparisons between Furtwängler and Karajan, and whom the former had contrived to have sent to the front, where he perished. Nüll had been a pawn of Goebbels. Furtwängler’s defence had been limp, and the conclusion of the day was to direct the case to the Allied Kommandatura. Those who had hoped to be able to hear the conductor perform the
Eroica
the next day were to be disappointed.
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Behind the scenes there was the constant clamour of the émigrés who were determined to see the conductor as a cultural figurehead for the Nazis. Chief among them was Erika Mann. His old rival Toscanini also played a prominent role. Furtwängler had sealed his fate with many Jewish Americans when in 1936 he had been offered the position of principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic but chose to direct the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera instead. Once again he had been a victim of Nazi intrigue. News had been leaked to the press in order to compromise him with the New Yorkers.
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The Americans led the way with denazification, trying 169,282 cases. The Russians and the French weighed in at around 10 per cent of that figure at 18,328 and 17,353 respectively.
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The British seemed to show very little interest in the matter within their zone, handling a little over 1 per cent of the American cases, at 2,296. Clay had full belief in the process and thought the Allies were doing well. On 5 July 1945 he reported that denazification in the early ‘liberated’ cities of Aachen and Cologne was virtually complete. In Bavaria and Württemberg, however, it was going very slowly. In March 1948, the Russians made a point of releasing 35,000 minor Nazis from their camps.
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Clay had bagged 75,000 Nazis to date. Certain organisations were particularly thick with them. He estimated that the police administration was 100 per cent Nazi; the ‘Kripos’ or criminal police 60 per cent; the others 40 per cent.
^cy
In the banking world of Frankfurt half those employed were Nazis; that meant 326 people. On the other hand the docility of the post-war Germans struck Clay as it did everyone else: the ‘German masses seem totally apolitical, apathetic and primarily concerned with [the] everyday problems of food, clothing and shelter’. They did not quite behave as he expected them to: ‘no general feeling of war guilt or repugnance for Nazi doctrine and regime has manifested itself. Germans blame Nazis for losing war, protest ignorance of regime’s crimes and shrug off their own support as incidental and unavoidable.’
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Clay continued bagging Nazis. In autumn 1945 he had 80,000 in the bag plus the same number of Waffen-SS and ‘Schupos’ - members of the Security Police who were interned with the POWs. On top of these he had around 75,000 Germans sacked because of their Nazi past, and 9,500 from financial institutions.
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On 8 December the number of imprisoned Nazis in the American Zone had risen to 90,000, and was to reach 100,000 by the end of the year. Another 25,000 members of paramilitary organisations were lodged with the POWs.
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It is not clear whether or not most of the SS men had been released. Certainly, most of the Nazis had been released by the summer of 1948. Clay admitted to holding 5,000 prisoners at that time, with some 25,000 more awaiting trial outside the camps. They were all hard-core cases. In September 1947 he turned his mind to the German scientists who had been taken to the US in Operation Paperclip, to work on the atom bomb and the rocket programme. In his opinion they should not have been exempt from trial.
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On 13 May 1946 Control Council Order Four was passed. All literature of a Nazi or militarist nature was to be confiscated. Clay was not impressed. He had, by his own admission, been banning and confiscating such books since the arrival of the Americans in Germany. He was particularly keen to replace school textbooks from the era of the Third Reich. It was an understandable measure, but taken to extremes it could only lead to absurd situations and scenes reminiscent of the Nazi book burnings when over-zealous local councils decided to expurgate their library collections.
^cz
It also furthered the confusion - which reigned at the heart of the Control Council - that Nazism and ‘Prussianism’ were intimately related.
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Clay played the game while he was at the helm. In 1948 the Cold War was coming and JCS 1067 was replaced by the less stringent JCS 1779, which advocated economic unity and self-government. Clay was replaced by his deputy, John McCloy. Times had changed and the former banker was more interested in building a bridge to the Germans. His wife Ellen came in useful in all this: she was German, and a distant cousin of Adenauer’s second wife.
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McCloy himself went to Canossa: he paid a call on Frings and promised the prelate that he would review the sentences passed on German war criminals. The Americans began to release them in droves in 1949 in the interests of good relations with Adenauer’s government.
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Seen as an exercise in punishing criminals, denazification was a farce. A number of insignificant Pgs were treated with the utmost cruelty while the big fish went free. Most of the minor cases were not ideologically committed anyway. Some of the worst killers, those who sent thousands to their deaths, who carried out the executions in the east as members of police units, or who operated the trains which took Jews to the death camps in the General Gouvernement, were not punished at all; they retired from the police or the railways without anyone having called them to account, and died in their beds.

Nazis in the Austrian Woodwork

In Berlin, the Viennese George Clare was keeping an eye on Herbert von Karajan. He was well aware of the conductor’s Nazi past. The impresario Walter Legge came to see them in the Schlüterstrasse to enquire about his status, as he wanted to know if he was permitted to give concerts in Britain. He had been denazified in Vienna, but as Sely told him, ‘we always discount Austrian denazification’. Sely later sent Clare off to investigate, giving him the address of the British theatre and music officer Peter Joseph Schnabel - otherwise known as ‘MacSchnabel’ from his dandified ways and the fact that he had once performed the role of teaching the Cameron Highlanders to ski.

Clare found a room in the Park Hotel in Hietzing, a stone’s throw from British Army HQ in Schönbrunn, where his murdered parents had spent their honeymoon. He met Schnabel at Demel’s coffee house by the Hofburg. The Austrian Jew was doing a tour of the tables, kissing the hands of the local ladies. It soon dawned on Clare that Allied culture boffins were even more firmly wedded to the local terrain in Vienna than were those in Berlin: there was Schnabel and ‘George’ the Frenchman, whose Danubian accent gave him away. Also ‘one of us’ was the US captain Ernst Häussermann, who was deputising for another - Ernst Lothar. Finally the Russian representative dashed into the meeting late, and bearing a parcel. She had a ‘sweet’ excuse in her hand: it was a
Sachertorte
. Her name was Lily Wichmann, another Viennese.

Denazification was not a big issue for any of them. For a start Austria had had its own government from the beginning - a privilege granted to the ‘first victim’. The armies of occupation were there to enjoy themselves, and that meant music. It would have been a shame, according to Clare, to lock up decent musicians. He looked up a former corporal in the Pioneer Corps who had risen to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. The colonel invited him to the British Officers’ Club in the Palais Kinsky. Clare was shocked to see how much the Austrians had buried the past. Pure German
Hochdeutsch
was now out of fashion: everyone did their best to speak in a sing-song Austrian dialect, and men donned Styrian hats and suits, and women dirndls, to assert the cultural differences that occurred once you crossed the little River Inn.
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Yet there was still the problem of what to do with the Nazis who so openly contradicted Austria’s pose. The Figl government drew up a National Socialist Law which was passed by the federal parliament on 24 July 1946 in the belief that it was in keeping with Allied demands for denazification. It was not: the Russians in particular found it too lenient and the Americans wanted automatic prosecution at the level of Untersturmführer - that is, a second lieutenant in the SS. The Allies made around 200 changes. The American minister, Erhardt, went so far as to suggest the creation of ‘concentration camps’ for Nazis.
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These already existed in the British Zone.
^da
It was finally adopted on 7 February 1947. Under this law Nazis were divided into two groups according to the power they yielded during the Third Reich. For war criminals there was a special jurisdiction. The categories were similar to those employed in the American Zone in Germany: ‘incriminated’, ‘slightly incriminated’, ‘not incriminated’. Of the more than half a million Austrian Nazis, a little under 10 per cent fell into the first class. It was assumed that the 470,000 in the second class would be amnestied and returned to the suffrage for the next elections.
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Special ‘People’s Courts’
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-
nomen est omen -
were established to try Nazis. There was no appeal. The first case came up on 14 August 1945 when four SA men were accused of the massacre of 102 Jews in Engerau. There were seven death sentences passed by the end of the year. It was a modest tally. Where possible the blame was laid at the feet of the Germans. On 30 August William Donovan, head of the OSS, received a report that 63,000 of Vienna’s 67,000 Nazis had been tagged. A large number of them were claiming they had been forced to join the Party and wanted their names dropped from the register. Some 5,800 of the city’s ‘dangerous Nazis’ had been gaoled, but another 10,000 were still at large.
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When the tally was concluded there was a total of 536,000 names on the register; and 100,000 of these had been so keen they had joined before 1938, when it was still an illegal organisation. Denazification went off at half cock in Austria. From the beginning it was left in the hands of the Austrian government to pursue Nazis, albeit under the gaze of the Allied Bureau. The Americans prided themselves in being the ‘most drastic’, although the evidence does not necessarily point to that. In October they came under strong criticism when it was reported that the former Gauleiter Scheel had been seen walking about the streets of Salzburg. They were also keen to weed out the ‘Austro-fascist’ Dollfussites from the ÖVP. The British they castigated as the ‘mildest’. Again this is misleading.
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