Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  By the time that I moved from Britain to West Germany, West Germany felt more prosperous and contented than was Britain. Note the irony, often noted bitterly by my British friends: Germany had lost World War Two and Britain had won it, but it was West Germany rather than Britain that then created the economic miracle. Politically, by 1955 West Germany had regained sovereignty, and Allied military occupation ended. After the Allies had fought two world wars in order to defeat and disarm Germany, West Germany began to rearm and to rebuild an army—not at its own initiative, but (incredibly!!) at Western urging and against a vote of the West German parliament itself, so that West Germany would have to share with the Allies the burden of defending Western Europe. From a 1945 perspective, that represented the most astonishing change in American, British, and French policy towards Germany.

  The West German economy has been characterized by relatively good labor relations, infrequent strikes, and flexible conditions of employment. Employees and employers tacitly agree that employees won’t strike, so that businesses can prosper, and that employers will share the resulting business prosperity with their workers. German industry developed an apprentice system that it still has today, in which young people become apprenticed to companies that pay them while they are learning their trade. At the end of the apprenticeship they then have jobs with that company. Today, Germany has Europe’s largest economy.

  At the end of World War Two, the Allies prosecuted the 24 top surviving Nazi leaders at Nuremberg for war crimes. Ten were condemned to death, of whom the highest ranking were the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring. (The latter succeeded in committing suicide by poison during the night before his scheduled execution.) Seven others were sentenced to long or lifelong prison terms. The Nuremberg court also tried and sentenced numerous lower-level Nazis to shorter prison terms. The Allies subjected much larger numbers of Germans to “denazification” proceedings, consisting of examining their Nazi past and re-educating them.

  But the Nuremberg trials and denazification proceedings didn’t solve the legacies of Naziism for Germans. Millions of lower-level Germans who had either been convinced Nazis or had followed Nazi orders were not prosecuted. Because the trials were conducted by the Allies rather than by Germans themselves, the prosecutions did not involve Germans taking responsibility for German actions. In Germany the trials became dismissed as “Siegerjustiz”: mere revenge taken by the victors upon the vanquished. West Germany’s own court system also carried out its own prosecutions, but their scope was initially limited.

  A practical problem for both the Allies and the Germans themselves in developing a functioning post-war government in Germany was that any government requires officials with experience. But as of 1945, the vast majority of Germans who had acquired experience in government acquired it under the Nazi government, which meant that all potential post-war German government officers (including judges) had either been convinced Nazis or at the very least had cooperated with the Nazis. The sole exceptions were Germans who had either gone into exile or had been sent by the Nazis to concentration camps, where they couldn’t acquire experience in governing. For example, West Germany’s first chancellor after the war was Konrad Adenauer, a non-Nazi whom the Nazis had driven out of his office as mayor of Cologne. Adenauer’s policy upon becoming chancellor was described as “amnesty and integration,” which was a euphemism for not asking individual Germans about what they had been doing during the Nazi era. Instead, the government’s focus was overwhelmingly on the urgent tasks of feeding and housing tens of millions of underfed and homeless Germans, rebuilding Germany’s bombed cities and ruined economy, and re-establishing democratic government after 12 years of Nazi rule.

  As a result, most Germans came to adopt the view that Nazi crimes were the fault of just a tiny clique of evil individual leaders, that the vast majority of Germans were innocent, that ordinary German soldiers who had fought heroically against the Soviets were guiltless, and that (by around the mid-1950’s) there were no further important investigations of Nazi crimes left to be carried out. Further contributing to that failure of the West German government to prosecute Nazis was the widespread presence of former Nazis among post-war government prosecutors themselves: for instance, it turned out that 33 out of 47 officials in the West German federal criminal bureau (Bundeskriminalamt), and many members of the West German intelligence service, had been leaders of the Nazi fanatical SS organization. During my 1961 stay in Germany I occasionally heard defenses of the Nazi era by older Germans who had been in their 30’s or 40’s during that time, whom I had gotten to know well, and who were talking to me in private. For example, the husband of a woman musician with whom I played cello-and-piano sonatas eventually explained to me that the purported extermination of millions of Jews was mathematically impossible and the biggest lie ever told. Another older German friend eventually played for me a recorded speech by Hitler, to which she listened with a mixture of pleasure and amusement.

  In 1958 the justice ministers of all West German states finally set up a central office to pool their efforts to prosecute Nazi crimes committed anywhere inside and even outside West German territory. The leading figure in those prosecutions was a German Jewish lawyer named Fritz Bauer, who had been a member of the anti-Nazi Social Democratic Party and had been compelled to flee Germany to Denmark in 1935. He began prosecuting cases as soon as he returned to Germany in the year 1949. From 1956 until his death in 1969 he served as chief prosecutor for the German state of Hessen. The central principle of Fritz Bauer’s career was that Germans should hold judgment upon themselves. That meant prosecuting ordinary Germans, not just the leaders whom the Allies had prosecuted.

  Bauer first became famous for what were known in Germany as the Auschwitz trials, in which he prosecuted low-level Germans who had been active at Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps. The Auschwitz personnel whom he prosecuted consisted of very minor officials, such as clothes room managers, pharmacists, and doctors. He then went on to prosecute low-level Nazi police; German judges who had ruled against Jews or against German resistance leaders or had issued death sentences; Nazis who had persecuted Jewish business people; those involved in Nazi euthanasia, including doctors, judges, and euthanasia personnel; officials in the German foreign office; and, what was most disturbing to German people, German soldiers guilty of atrocities particularly on the eastern front—disturbing because of the widespread German belief that atrocities had been committed by fanatical groups such as the SS but not by ordinary German soldiers.

  In addition to those prosecutions, Bauer tried to track down the most important and most evil Nazis who had disappeared after the war: Hitler’s assistant Martin Bormann; the Auschwitz concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele, who had carried out medical experiments on prisoners; and Adolf Eichmann, who had organized the round-up of Jews. Bauer did not succeed in tracking down Mengele, who eventually died in Brazil in 1979, or Bormann, who it later turned out had committed suicide in 1945 around the same time as did Hitler.

  But Bauer did receive information about the location of Eichmann, who had fled to Argentina. Bauer concluded that he couldn’t safely pass that information to the German Secret Service for them to capture and punish Eichmann, because he feared that they would just tip off Eichmann and allow him to escape. Instead, he relayed the news of Eichmann’s whereabouts to the Israeli Secret Service, which eventually succeeded in kidnapping Eichmann in Argentina, secretly flying him to Israel in an El Al jet, putting him on public trial, and eventually hanging him after a trial that drew worldwide attention not just to Eichmann but to the whole subject of individual responsibility for Nazi crimes.

  Bauer’s prosecutions attracted wide attention within Germany. More than anything else, they revealed to Germans of the 1960’s what Germans of the 1930’s and 1940’s had been doing during the Nazi era. The Nazi defendants being prosecuted by Bauer all tended to offer the same set of excuses: I was merely
following orders; I was conforming to the standards and laws of my society at the time; I was not the person who had responsibility for those people getting killed; I merely organized railroad transport of Jews being transported to extermination camps; I was just a pharmacist or a guard at Auschwitz; I didn’t personally kill anyone myself; I was blinded by belief in authority and ideology proclaimed by the Nazi government, and that made me incapable of recognizing that what I was doing was wrong.

  Bauer’s response, which he formulated again and again at the trials and in public, was as follows. Those Germans whom he was prosecuting were committing crimes against humanity. The laws of the Nazi state were illegitimate. One cannot defend one’s actions by saying that one was obeying those laws. There is no law that can justify a crime against humanity. Everybody must have his own sense of right and wrong and must obey it, independently of what a state government says. Anyone who takes part in what Bauer called a murder machine, such as the Auschwitz extermination apparatus, thereby becomes guilty of a crime. In addition, it became clear that many of the defendants whom he put on trial, and who gave as an excuse that they did what they did because they were forced to do it, were acting not out of compulsion but out of their own convictions.

  In reality, many, perhaps most, of Bauer’s prosecutions failed: the defendants were often acquitted by German courts even in the 1960’s. Bauer himself was frequently the target of verbal attacks and even of death threats. Instead, the significance of Bauer’s work was that he, a German, in German courts, demonstrated to the German public again and again, in excruciating detail, the beliefs and deeds of Germans during the Nazi era. Nazi misdeeds were not just the work of a few bad leaders. Instead, masses of ordinary German soldiers and officials, including many who were now high-ranking officials of the West German government, had carried out Nazi orders, and had therefore been guilty of crimes against humanity. Bauer’s efforts thereby formed an essential background to the German student revolts of 1968, to be discussed below.

  The change in German views of the Nazi era after I lived in Germany was made brutally clear to me by an experience 21 years later, in 1982. In that year my wife Marie and I spent a vacation in Germany. As we were driving along the autobahn and approaching Munich, an autobahn exit sign pointed to a suburb called Dachau, site of a former Nazi concentration camp (German acronym, KZ) that Germans had converted into a museum. Neither of us had previously visited a KZ site. But we didn’t anticipate that a “mere” museum exhibit would affect us, after all that we already knew of KZs through the stories of Marie’s parents (KZ survivors) and the newsreels of my childhood. Least of all did we expect to be affected by how Germans themselves explained (or explained away) their own camps.

  In fact, our visit to Dachau was a shattering experience—at least as powerful as was our subsequent visit to the much larger and more notorious Auschwitz, which is also an exhibit but not a German exhibit, because it lies within Poland. Photographs, and texts in German, vividly depicted and explained Dachau KZ and its background: the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the Nazi persecution of Jews and of non-Nazi Germans during the 1930’s, Hitler’s steps towards war, the operation of Dachau KZ itself, and the operation of the rest of the Nazi camp system. Far from shirking German responsibility, the exhibit exemplified Fritz Bauer’s motto “Germans holding judgment upon themselves.”

  What my wife and I saw then at Dachau is part of what all German children have seen from the 1970’s onwards. They are taught at length in school about Nazi atrocities, and many of them are taken on school outings to former KZs that, like Dachau, have been turned into exhibits. Such national facing-up to past crimes isn’t to be taken for granted. In fact, I know of no country that takes that responsibility remotely as seriously as does Germany. Indonesian schoolchildren still are taught nothing about the mass killings of 1965 (Chapter 5); young Japanese whom I have known tell me that they were taught nothing about Japan’s war crimes (Chapter 8); and it is not national policy in the U.S. for American schoolchildren to be taught in grim detail about American crimes in Vietnam, and against Native Americans, and against African slaves. In 1961 I had seen much less of that German acknowledgment of their nation’s dark past. Insofar as one can consider a single year to be the symbolic watershed for Germany in that respect, it was—as we shall now see—1968.

  Revolts and protests, especially by students, spread through much of the free world in the 1960’s. They began in the U.S. with the Civil Rights Movement, protests against the Vietnam War, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, and the movement called Students for a Democratic Society. Student protests were also widespread in France, Britain, Japan, Italy, and Germany. In all of those other countries as in the U.S., the protests partly represented a revolt of the younger generation against the older generation. But that confrontation of generations achieved a particularly violent form in Germany for two reasons. First, the Nazi involvement of the older generation of Germans meant that the gulf between the younger and the older generation was far deeper there than it was in the U.S. Second, the authoritarian attitudes of traditional German society made older and younger generations there especially scornful of each other. While protests leading to liberalization were growing in Germany throughout the 1960’s, the lid blew off of those protests in 1968 (Plate 6.4). Why 1968?

  Not just in Germany but also in the U.S., different generations have different experiences and acquire different names. In the U.S. we talk about broadly defined generations: baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and so on. But changes from year to year have been more rapid and profound in Germany than in the U.S. When you are getting to know a new American friend, and you and your new friend are relating to each other your life histories, you probably do not begin by saying, “I was born in 1945, and just knowing that fact will help you figure out a lot about my life and my attitudes without my having to tell you.” But Germans do begin to explain themselves to one another by saying, for example, “Ich bin Jahrgang 1945,” meaning “My year of birth was 1945.” That’s because all Germans know that their fellow citizens went through very different life experiences, depending on when they were born and were growing up.

  Examples are the experiences of my German friends of my own age, born around the year 1937. None of them grew up with what we Americans or younger modern Germans would recognize as normal lives. All of them had bad things happen to them as children, due to the war. For example, among my six closest German friends born around 1937, one was orphaned when her soldier father was killed; one watched from a distance the district where his father lived being bombed, although his father survived; one was separated from her father from the time that she was one year old until she was 11 years old, because he was a prisoner of war; one lost his two older brothers in the war; one spent the nights of his childhood years sleeping out of doors under a bridge, because his town was bombed every night and it was unsafe to sleep in a house; and one was sent by his mother every day to steal coal from a railroad yard, so that they could stay warm. Thus, my German friends of Jahrgang 1937 were old enough to have been traumatized by memories of the war, and by the chaos and poverty that followed it, and by the closure of their schools. But they weren’t old enough to have had Nazi views instilled into them by the Nazi youth organization called the Hitler Jugend. Most of them were too young to be drafted into the new West German army established in 1955; Jahrgang 1937 was the last Jahrgang not called up for that draft.

  Those facts about the different experiences of Germans born in different years help explain why Germany experienced a violent student revolt in the year 1968. On the average, the German protestors of 1968 had been born around 1945, just at the end of the war. They were too young to have been raised as Nazis, or to have experienced the war, or to remember the years of chaos and poverty after the war. They grew up mostly after Germany’s economic recovery, in economically comfortable times. They weren’t struggling to survive; they enjoyed enough leisure and security t
o devote themselves to protest. In 1968 they were in their early 20’s. They were teenagers during the 1950’s and early 1960’s, when Fritz Bauer was revealing the Nazi crimes of ordinary Germans of their parents’ generation. The parents of protestors born in 1945 would themselves have mostly been born between 1905 and 1925. That meant that the parents of Germany’s 1945 generation were viewed by their children as the Germans who had voted for Hitler, had obeyed Hitler, had fought for Hitler, or had been indoctrinated in Nazi beliefs by Hitler Jugend school organizations.

  All teenagers tend to criticize and challenge their parents. As Fritz Bauer in the 1960’s was publicizing his findings, most of the parents of young Germans born in 1945 didn’t talk then about Nazi times but instead retreated into their world of work and the post-war economic miracle. If a child did ask, “Mommy and Daddy, what were you doing during Nazi times?,” those parents answered their children with responses similar to those that older Germans willing to talk gave me in 1961: “You young person, you have no idea what it’s like to live under a totalitarian state; one can’t just act on one’s beliefs.” Of course that excuse didn’t satisfy young people.