Exorcising Hitler (47 page)

The plans for German self-denazification ran parallel with these political developments. Democratisation and denazification were intimately connected imperatives. One legitimised the other – certainly as far as the outside world was concerned, and hopefully, the occupiers thought, so far as the average German in the American Zone was concerned, too.

The permanence and legitimacy of these developing institutions had now to be clearly established. When the Germanised version of the ‘Law for the Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism’ – drafted by the AMG’s lawyers under consultation with German colleagues – was approved by the
Land
premiers on 5 March 1946, the signature ceremony was symbolically located in the metropolis that had been the birthplace of Nazism and Hitler’s favourite city: Munich. Each of the three state governments now acquired a Minister for Denazification. Under him extended a network of 545 denazification tribunals (
Spruchkammern
), organised at
Kreis
level, and with a total German staff for the entire system of around 22,000. Each of these thousands of officials was implausibly supposed to have been thoroughly vetted by the US Army Special Branch.

The highly unpopular
Fragebogen
(literally: question sheet) was now renamed a
Meldebogen
(report sheet). The tribunals could classify their subjects as major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, fellow travellers – or as exonerated of all involvement. Oversight would still be exercised by Military Government officers at a regional level, but the local Germans were indeed allowed a lot of freedom – more than in any other zone.

There were also some concessions on principle. It was now assumed that only around a quarter of Germans in the zone counted as contaminated.
⁵
The possibility was also conceded, for the first time in the post-war period, that denazification should be about rehabilitation, not just punishment. While any German who had ‘contributed to the development or support of National Socialism or militarism’ would be ‘called to account’, he would also be given the opportunity to vindicate himself on the basis of a ‘just consideration of his individual responsibility and his actual conduct, taken as a whole’.
⁶
This was either a masterstroke of sensitive humanitarianism or a licence to acquit. Only time, and the tendencies of individual tribunals, would tell which.

Things were made easier for the tribunals, as the year went on, by the exemption of Party members born after 1919 (unless they had committed serious crimes), who were considered to have been subjected to brainwashing, and to disabled veterans. A reasonable and humane exemption, preserving many genuinely devastated lives from further misery, this nevertheless represented a useful loophole for the truly guilty.

So the new-model denazification took off, a little slowly at first. There were all kinds of problems. These included shortages of office space, of office furniture and equipment and, significantly, of professional qualified and educated staff. Many otherwise suitable candidates were tainted by Party membership and could not join the tribunal system until they had themselves been cleared. Since each tribunal had, according to the law, to be headed by a qualified judge, the Americans immediately ran into exactly the same problem as the British – the difficulty, given sky-high rates of Nazi Party membership among lawyers, of finding ‘untainted’ law officers.

The tribunal process was not technically a legal proceeding, though it involved a prosecutor, an accused, a defender and a jury (the tribunal, or
Spruchkammer
, itself) and could take place in public with all the adversarial trappings of a ‘trial’. The difference was that tribunals technically decided ‘responsibility’, not guilt – a concession to the Germans who objected to
ex post facto
laws being applied.
⁷
However, by no means all cases got so far. The flood of business would simply have overwhelmed the system, which even as things stood was stretched up to and beyond its limits. It was generally only when the prosecutor decided to charge a former Nazi in one of the serious categories that a hearing was necessary. This could be held in public, if based on oral evidence, or in private if based on written evidence. The tribunals decided in secret by a majority vote. In fact, in the first five months after they were set up, of 583,985 cases that came before the tribunals, 530,907 were dealt with without the necessity of a trial. So less than 10 per cent
went to public hearings.
⁸

Perhaps it was inevitable that Germanised denazification would run into so many problems right from the start, and grow worse as the process rolled out. In the early months of the occupation, the opponents of Nazism had been able to expect that, if they could gain the support of local American military officials – particularly public safety officers – they could bring about some changes in their communities and make sure that at least some of the guilty were punished for what they had inflicted on their fellow citizens and the wider world between 1933 and 1945.

In Bavaria, there was a period even after the ‘Germanisation’ of the process where the appointment of a communist, Heinrich Schmitt, as minister promised to turn denazification into a genuinely radical process. But Schmitt, though efficient and incorruptible, operated in an openly political way, which disturbed many both among the populace and within the Military Government. He was also openly radical in his goals, an unabashed social engineer. Schmitt believed strongly that it would only improve society if former Nazi big shots were forced to slide down to unskilled labourer level – the result of being found guilty of activism and banned from government service and the professions. This would act as a warning to others, a case of elementary social justice, and give an opportunity for decent, untainted Germans with hitherto limited life chances to climb the post-war social ladder.

Schmitt did not last long in his post. American intelligence investigated his department and found he was stuffing it with fellow communists. With elections now taking place, Bavaria’s post-war conservative party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) – founded from a collection of old Catholic Centre Party members, veterans of the pre-war Bavarian People’s Party and former Nazis – was gathering a dominant political momentum, and also flexing its muscle. In May, Schmitt’s ministry was purged. In June, Schmitt himself was forced out, despite the personal respect in which he was held by Major Walter Louis Dorn, the American history professor who had spent the war years with the CIA’s predecessor, OSS, and was adviser on denazification first to Eisenhower and then to Clay. Schmitt, Dorn admitted, was simply too controversial and was seen as a barrier to wider public acceptance of the programme.
⁹

The new minister, Anton Pfeiffer, was a pre-war Catholic politician of the familiar anti-Nazi but strongly nationalistic and socially conservative type. A member of the CSU, ‘untainted’ Pfeiffer may have been, but like the CSU itself he disliked the denazification law they had been forced to accept, seeing it as little more than victors’ justice, and did his best to render it all but ineffective. He insisted to his American overseers that only 30,000 Nazis in Bavaria belonged to categories I and II, and snubbed tribunals run by leftists.

While Pfeiffer was minister (until December 1946), the tribunals reclassified at least 60 per cent of senior Nazis, often only fining them, and reinstated more than 75 per cent
of the officials formerly dismissed by the Americans. It got so bad, from the Americans’ point of view, that in October Premier Hoegner had to be warned to report improper behaviour by the tribunals to the US authorities.

The fact was, Germanised denazification rapidly descended into a farce, and not just in Bavaria, as Clay himself was forced to admit. Nazis, often comfortably situated and able to hire clever lawyers to represent them at the hearings, ran rings around the untrained and often relatively uneducated members of the tribunals. A torrent of denazification certificates – popularly known as
Persilscheine
(‘Persil certificates’ – after the well-known detergent produced by Henkel & Co., which naturally washed white) – descended on the guilty in Bavaria and elsewhere in the American Zone. The tribunals, hated as they were in many circles, in fact proved so forgiving that they were known satirically as ‘follower factories’, producing from once-rabid Nazis hundreds of thousands of mere political passengers of convenience or compulsion who were deemed worthy of the mildest punishments.

There was evidence, as American intelligence realised from censoring letters sent abroad from the zone, as well as listening in on phone calls, that the tribunals were in many cases not only incompetent and politically lax, but corrupt. CIC Region IV Munich reported in August 1946: ‘Censored letters make clear the existence of a black market in securing statements of innocence for former Nazis; dozens of intercepted communications seem to indicate that Nazis trade endorsements of their guiltlessness and mutually certify to their anti-Nazi attitude and anti-Nazi activities in the past.’
¹⁰
The report continued damningly, in a snapshot of the bleak situation in the tribunals and a Bavarian government machine that was rapidly becoming a tool of the conservative-nationalist CSU:

Letters from smaller communities seem to indicate that the CSU very commonly gives aid and comfort to former [Nazi] party members. In several letters the CSU is called the C
N
SU, i.e. the Christian National Socialist Union. Many communications complain that former Nazis still occupy leading positions in Bavaria. Letters from returned Prisoners of War, who have participated in re-education courses as, e.g. Ft Mead in the United States, express disappointment with the Bavarian political situation and a feeling of hopelessness that PW’s returning from America, indoctrinated in American democracy, are not utilised or employed by Military Government.
¹¹

Within months of the end of the war, denazification, initially quite popular among the disillusioned and angry German masses, had lost a lot of public support. In the early days, almost everyone rejoiced at the humiliation of former Nazi big shots, known as ‘golden pheasants’ for their ornate uniforms and lavish lifestyles. Now, leftists thought the purge didn’t go far enough, Nazis hated it for understandable reasons and non-Nazi conservatives came to see it as just another otherwise pointless ruse by the control-mad occupiers to ‘keep Germany down’.

Half-starved, largely unemployed, seemingly with few prospects and looked down upon by the foreign bringers of ‘freedom’, ordinary Germans soon began to see themselves as victims and to reject the notion of indiscriminate ‘collective guilt’ that they saw as lying at the heart of denazification.

It was this problem – the awareness that if one has ‘collective guilt’ then there is for the individual often no guilt – that led the Austrian-born liberal journalist Hans Habe, who had returned from exile as a GI in 1945 and almost immediately became the editor of the American-licensed German-language newspaper in Munich, to observe that ‘in fact, if the Germans were collectively guilty, we should have concealed it from them’. Habe was sceptical about the effectiveness of denazification in the form it took. The defensive reaction that it gave rise to would not produce genuine reflection and readiness for re-education on the part of the German people.
¹²
The writer and political scientist Eugen Kogon, a devout Catholic who had spent six years in Buchenwald for his opposition to the Nazis, observed that the Allied mission to cleanse and re-educate the Germans was starting to have the opposite effect:

Because of the awful clamour around it and because of its own blindness, they [the German people] wanted to hear nothing of self-examination. The voice of their conscience did not awaken.

American polling in their zone saw approval of denazification slip from 54 per cent in early 1946 to 32 per cent in 1947. It would reach its lowest level in 1949 at 17 per cent.
¹³

Denazification was especially unloved in conservative, inward-looking rural communities, in essence for quite primitive, unpolitical reasons. There respected and trusted local figures were often among the accused, and community solidarity often – in fact usually – trumped the demands of a political justice that few locals, whether Nazi supporters or not, recognised. The doctor, the teacher, the policeman or the agricultural merchant may have been Nazis, but they were the people villagers relied on. To have them removed from such crucial positions in the community by a bunch of opportunists and/or unpatriotic German troublemakers – as rural folk often viewed the denazification tribunals – caused deep resentment.

In many parts of the American Zone, those who served the denazification tribunal were treated as social lepers. It was therefore hardly surprising – especially given the shortage of lawyers and officials untainted by Nazi pasts – that there were serious shortages of qualified personnel; in fact, of any personnel at all. An American Special Branch report from October 1946 on the
Spruchkammer
at Steinach, a small town about an hour’s drive west of Nuremberg, summed up one particular tragicomic case: