Exorcising Hitler (54 page)

The elections in the Soviet Zone in October 1946 – the last more or less free choice for its citizens until after the fall of the Berlin Wall – gave the SED a strong vote, but not the majority the Soviets had anticipated. In Greater Berlin, where the Soviet writ did not run as completely as elsewhere, and the SPD continued to put up its own candidates, the SED failed spectacularly, gaining fewer than 20 per cent of the vote, with the SPD managing 48 per cent.

Aware that it could not win a free vote – elections in Hungary and Austria had also ended in the defeat of communist ‘united front’ movements – the Soviet-installed regime began to tighten the political screws. Ulrich Frodien and his friends, realising the dangers they were running, gradually dropped out of political activity. Most of them went to the West in the end, including Ulrich in February 1948, escaping at great risk from a sanatorium near the border with the British Zone, where he was undergoing treatment for bronchial problems arising from a war wound to his lung.
²⁵

That denazification was a tool for economic transformation and an instrument of political control for the Soviets and their German communist allies could not now be denied. It was also a means of changing German society, making a clean sweep through the two areas of public life where until now the right had been especially firmly entrenched: the legal and educational systems.

Since the nineteenth century, Germany’s courts, and its schools and universities, had been strongholds of the nationalist, authoritarian right. As in the West, a strong majority of teachers and legal officials were known to have been Nazis. The French made a brief, early attempt at a comprehensive purge, but then changed their minds when they saw that there would be no teachers in the zone’s schools when they reopened. The Russians and the German communists were less timid, perhaps because for them there was more at stake. To the totalitarian mind, it was clear that the education and legal systems were essential for their future control in the zone – the first, key to their control of young people’s minds; the second, key to their control of the whole people’s liberties.

There was some justification for a radical transformation in both areas. In the Weimar Republic, the courts had often been a centre of hard-line resistance to democracy, as had the schools. In both cases, professionals in these areas had flocked to the Nazi Party. In fact, in the area of the Soviet Zone, 70 per cent of teachers had been Party members, as opposed to 55 per cent on a nationwide basis. In Mecklenburg-Pomerania and Thuringia, membership had touched 85 per cent. But how to purge these areas in the required radical fashion without bringing teaching in the zone to a halt? Teachers and judges were, after all, highly trained and qualified people, as were doctors. Except that in the case of doctors – also a strongly Nazified group – the results for their patients of dismissing so many qualified people would be, quite literally, fatal. So the medical profession remained more or less untouched.

In late summer 1945, the Soviet Zone authorities hastily trained thousands of ‘reliable’ candidates – usually socialist or communist activists – in three-week courses covering the basic teaching skills. They called them
Neulehrer
(new teachers). Joachim Trenkner remembers most of his former teachers just disappearing. They were replaced by
Neulehrer
, whom he described more than sixty years later as ‘bizarre’. And they were not all politically reliable, either:

I remember one thing. Russian language classes started . . . and it was hard to get Russian teachers in the Thuringian provinces. And so we got most of them from Lithuania. Refugees, most of them came from the Baltic states. I remember our very first refugee teacher was an old man, white hair, thick glasses, and he started the first lesson with words I shall never forget: ‘Children, I have to teach you the language of our common enemy!’ I don’t know how long
he
lasted there . . . [laughter]
²⁶

By the same token, established judges or prosecutors – around 80 per cent of whom had been Nazis in each case – were replaced with
Volksrichter
(people’s judges), again proletarian candidates selected by the SED, who began their work with as little as six months’ legal training. Unlike in the Western zones, in the East the rule was that
any
judge or state prosecutor who had been a Nazi must be dismissed, and this stipulation was overwhelmingly kept to.
²⁷

All these changes could be presented as a necessary radical social transformation, which arguably they were. However, they also, through the appointment of committed loyalists wholly dependent on the administration’s favour – an Eastern-trained ‘new teacher’ or ‘socialist’ judge would not find employment in the West – gave the new powers in the land direct control over vital levers of the post-war social machine.

In the universities, the remaining teaching staff were also ruthlessly purged. Many had already headed west. By the beginning of 1946, three-quarters of professors in the Soviet Zone’s six major universities had either been purged or had fled.
²⁸
The politicisation of higher education was soon impossible to ignore. The quality of teaching declined drastically. Affirmative action quotas were introduced, systematically favouring working-class over ‘bourgeois’ applicants.

Universities and colleges were used as social portals through which only those socially or politically acceptable to the new communist rulers would be allowed to pass. Unlike in the Western zones, where the post-1919 generation was presumed to be the product of Nazi brainwashing and therefore less than fully responsible for its own political crimes and errors, in the East a close watch was kept on the past politics of applicants for university places.

Lothar Löwe, considering applying for the prestigious Humboldt University in East Berlin, was warned by a friend, who had himself narrowly escaped arrest, that the authorities there were not just refusing any would-be students who had risen to the rank of Pennant Leader (
Fähnleinführer
) or above in the Hitler Youth – as Löwe had – but were also liable to take them into custody. Since the foundation of the Free University of West Berlin still lay in the future, Löwe accordingly abandoned plans for university study and went straight into journalism with one of the newspapers recently licensed by the Americans in West Berlin. It was the beginning of a distinguished career.
²⁹

Although historians concede that the Soviet purge was probably the most thorough, as in all the zones the ‘normal’ procedure for denazification varied from lax to harsh. When the Soviets wanted people – the case of the rocket scientists and other specialists is typical – then they got them, Nazis or not. In that, they were no different from the other powers. More than half a million Nazis out of a population of eighteen million were banned from all but menial employments between 1945 and 1948 – at least temporarily.
³⁰

The thing about the communists, however, was that, like the Church, they allowed for the possibility of redemption. After all, given the attitude of the communists towards Nazism as the final, desperate phase of capitalism, there was always a kind of moral opening for those who admitted their mistake – who repented. So (usually minor or so-called ‘fellow traveller’) Nazis who, after a year or two, were willing to turn to the true church of the SED, stood a chance of being rehabilitated. Especially if the new regime decided it could use their services. Goering had once quipped, ‘I decide who is a Jew’; Ulbricht and co. might equally have joked, had their sense of humour been more obliquely developed, ‘I decide who is a Nazi’. Think of the rocket scientists and, on a more localised, personal level, the efficient – but once Nazi – chemist Dr Bergander in his Dresden distillery.

As early as the winter of 1945–6, when the leaders of the German Communist Party visited their masters in Moscow, Stalin had suggested, on the above lines, that there should be a political bolthole for ex-Nazis to go to in the Soviet Zone; a special party organisation that would permit repentant ex-Nazis to contribute to the new world that was opening up in post-war Germany.

Stalin’s suggestion was too cynical even for Ulbricht and his comrades. They were, of course, busily attacking the Western Allies for alleged laxity towards former Nazis in their zones, and did not want to undermine their own propaganda.
³¹
However, a little over two years later, as relations between East and West deteriorated further, and the SED’s control had reached a level where it could manipulate public opinion much as it wished, the unthinkable happened. The NDPD (National Democratic Party of Germany) was added to the ‘block’ of parties (all ultimately controlled by the SED, of course) that made up the pseudo-democratic political landscape in the Soviet Zone. In the NDPD, ex-Nazis whose past crimes were demonstrably not too terrible, and who were prepared to swear allegiance to the communist regime, were permitted to participate in the new society. And the transfer from allegiance to totalitarianism of the right to totalitarianism of the left often proved, perhaps understandably, not so hard as the pre-1945 world might have imagined.

During the previous two years, even before their existence was officially recognised, and even while they still lived in fear of the denazification courts, this group had been quietly courted. ‘Minor’ Nazis had been encouraged, for instance, to vote the right way in the Saxon plebiscite of June 1946 about ‘land reform’ by timely concessions from the Soviet Zone authorities regarding the security of their own property. The implication was: if you, the small Nazis, vote for the big Nazis to be expropriated, then you will receive fair treatment. There is every indication from the plebiscite results that this strategy worked.
³²

The Soviets, like the other occupying powers, were torn between the dream of denazification and the necessity, in the developing struggle for power in post-war Europe, for which control of Germany would be crucial, of stabilising ‘their’ Germany and drawing ‘their’ Germans together.

In the final analysis, like the Western powers they criticised so savagely – and sometimes rightly – the communists were prepared to cut deals and compromise. By the late 1940s, Germany was no longer just a defeated nation to be disposed of as the victors willed, but the cockpit of the Cold War.

*
Exact value equivalents are difficult to estimate. The French franc had been steadily sliding in value since 1936 and would continue to do so until the ‘new Franc’ was introduced in 1960 and its worth stabilised. The exchange rate was around 120 to the American dollar in 1945 and by 1949 had slid to some 350 to the dollar. Choosing a mean value of around 250 to the dollar, this sum might represent $200 million, i.e. some $2–3 billion at current prices.

13

Hope

In May 1946, General Clay cabled Chief of Staff Eisenhower a memorandum, in which he attempted to sum up the situation of Germany one year after Victory in Europe. It was a far from optimistic communication. Clay wrote:

After one year of occupation, zones represent airtight territories with almost no free exchange of commodities, persons and ideas. Germany now consists of four small economic units which can deal with each other only through treaties in spite of the fact that no one unit can be regarded as self-supporting, although British and Russian zones could become self-supporting. Economic unity can be obtained only through free trade in Germany and a common policy for foreign trade designed to serve Germany as a whole. A common financial policy is equally essential. Runaway inflation accompanied by economic paralysis may develop at any moment. Drastic fiscal forms to reduce currency and monetary claims and to deal with debt structure are essential at earliest possible date. These cannot be obtained by independent action of the several zones. Common policies and nationwide implementation are equally essential for transportation, communications, food and agriculture, industry and foreign trade, if economic recovery is to be made possible.
¹

In practice, he said, the only possibility of economic integration was with the British Zone. ‘In theory’ the Russians should find it acceptable ‘though in detail many difficulties will arise with the Russian representatives’. The proposals would be unacceptable to the French, who were still insisting that the Rhineland and the Ruhr be detached from Germany, a suggestion Clay dismissed without reservation. It posed the prospect not just of a German crisis but of ‘a world disaster’. Clay’s cable makes it clear that, in reality, the French were seen as more of a problem than the Russians. The Russians might be obstructive on detail, but not at this point on basic principle. The French, however, refused point-blank to accept either a unified administration in Germany or a unified economy. It could be argued with hindsight that the Soviets let the French do a lot of their ‘dirty work’ for them, but that was not apparent to contemporaries.

Clay continued: