Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

Like the Americans, though rather more reluctantly, the British introduced German involvement, setting up ‘denazification panels’ in January 1946. There was even a German appeal body, although the British could and did overrule its decisions if they felt it necessary.

  By June 1946, 66,000 Germans had been arrested and placed in civil internment camps or, in the most serious cases, prisons. In a month, 24,000 were cleared, leaving 42,000 still detained. Five hundred were put on trial. Over the entire two years and a bit after VE-Day, two million Fragebogen were evaluated and some 350,000 Germans excluded from office.43

  British policy was less rigorous than the American, but it was also slow and it was inconsistent, which in some ways was worse from the point of the view of the German population. The inconsistency was remarkable.

  In 1945–6, in the British-occupied province of Oldenburg, 41 per cent of those involved in food production and distribution, 31 per cent of railway employees and 30 per cent of postal employees were dismissed because of their Nazi records. The pattern was followed elsewhere in the same zone. So, for instance, a highly efficient local potato merchant in the North Rhineland by the name of Paul Kistermann – his role in food distribution admitted even by the British authorities as vital to his large, semi-rural community in a time of hunger and shortages – had his licence withdrawn because of past Nazi involvement. The result was that – again as the British themselves admitted – ‘immediate ill effects were felt’.44

  Meanwhile, in bizarre contrast, only 9 per cent of teachers and 8 per cent of police officials in Oldenburg were sacked.45 Given the high proportion of Nazis known to have been active in both these latter professions, the contrast is absurd and in its way quite sinister.

  As for the slowness of the British denazification, it was not only the job prospects of ex-Nazis that were blighted. The civil internment camps where many were held while awaiting processing were truly grim places, often crowded and unsanitary, with ration allocations for inmates dropping to 900 calories per day – more serious for detainees than for the rest of the civil population, who were also kept on dangerously short rations but could at least forage and trade and grow their own food.

  Although the British-run internment camps were not comparable with those where wretched millions had been incarcerated, tortured and murdered during the years of the Nazi regime, they were scandalous by the standards which the Western Allies had themselves set (the Soviets, as we shall see, were a very different matter). A House of Commons committee condemned the state of the camps and pointed out that it was damaging the prestige of the British occupiers as well as doing nothing to ‘attract Germans to the British way of life’. A senior Military Government official conceded that these lengthy detentions without trial were ‘not compatible with the professed restoration of the rule of law and the professed abolition of Gestapo methods’.46

  It must be admitted that there were, in fact, cases where precisely those ‘Gestapo methods’ were being used by British military men and officials operating in the name of justice and security. No. 74 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) was opened in June 1945 at Bad Nenndorf, a once-elegant spa town near Hanover. The unit was housed in a hotel centred around a Schlamm­bad (mud bath) complex, with the rooms formerly reserved for guests undergoing expensive health cures now fitted with special steel doors and functioning as cells. The aim was initially to detain and interrogate suspected former Nazis or SS members who might become involved in post-war resistance activities against the occupiers.

  Not only did No. 74 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre rapidly become a torture centre used against ex-Nazis, but in surprisingly short order, considering that the Soviets had been British allies so recently, also against suspected communists agents and infiltrators. Inmates were tormented with cold, with whippings and beatings, with sleep deprivation, with threats against their wives and children (justified by the perpetrators on the grounds that such threats were never carried out), with starvation, and even with the use of ‘thumb-screws’ and ‘shin-screws’. Some weighed less than 100 pounds when investigators finally gained access to the detention centre. Three died as a result of their privations.

  The strange thing was that many of the victims were not even German. One, allegedly a Frenchman, turned out to be a Russian intelligence agent. Others were Germans who had crossed from the Soviet Zone and, appalled by what they had witnessed, offered to spy for the West. They were tortured to see if their defection was genuine. One detainee, who had previously spent two years in Gestapo captivity, declared afterwards: ‘I never in all those two years had undergone such treatments.’

  It might have been a clue that all the German inhabitants – including many homeless refugees – were expelled from Bad Nenndorf when the Centre was opened. However, it was the death of an internee and the serious illness of others in January 1947 in a local hospital that caused the alarm to be raised and the London government to send over a police inspector to carry out an investigation. The result, to the intense embarrassment of the British, was news coverage, the closure of the camp and a court martial.

  The commander of the Bad Nenndorf camp was forty-five-year-old Colonel Robin Stephens, known as ‘Tin Eye’, a former luminary of the Peshawar Division of the Indian Army turned MI5 officer. Stephens was put on trial along with several of his interrogators. It turned out that Bad Nenndorf had become a dumping ground for soldiers subject to suspended sentences for assault or desertion, a group liable to be less inhibited in the use of violence than your usual Tommy. Several of the interrogators were also German-Jewish émigrés, and others Polish and Dutch in origin, and therefore hardly likely to go easy on their captives.47

  The shameful story of Bad Nenndorf became known in a bowdlerised form at the time of the court martial (only in the twenty-first century did the Freedom of Information Act allow journalists to make it fully public), but for Germans in the British Zone it was one among many instances that tended to give rise to a certain cynicism.

  There were good things about British rule – a certain principled fairness on a daily basis, a keenness to promote education and democratic institutions, a healthy pragmatism – but it also drew on the country’s imperial traditions in other, less attractive ways. Much behaviour reminded critical observers, including post-war Germans, of British arrogance and of the empire’s brutal treatment of recalcitrant natives in India and Africa and South-east Asia. These flaws would become manifest once more in the post-war empire, most obviously in Malaya, Aden and Kenya. Scandals such as Bad Nenndorf did little, in German eyes, to reinforce the right of the British to ‘re-educate’ them.

  Of the officers prosecuted for the Bad Nenndorf excesses, only the camp doctor, Captain Smith, was penalised. Although found not guilty of manslaughter at the court martial, he was convicted at a secret internal hearing of neglect and dismissed from the army at the age of forty-nine. One of the interrogators, Lieutenant Langham, a German-born émigré, denied mistreatment and was acquitted. ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens himself, who was tried in camera, was also acquitted of two charges and two others were dropped, enabling him to re-apply to join MI5.

  Three months after the closure of No. 74 CSDIC, a new, purpose-built interrogation centre was opened near the British garrison town of Gütersloh. The inmates would not be Nazis but suspected Soviet spies. Most of the interrogators employed had previously worked at Bad Nenndorf.48

  In other areas of denazification activity, again British policy swung between extremes. While initially the British had taken a relatively laissez-faire attitude with the ownership and management of major German companies, especially in the Ruhr – on the pragmatic basis that production needed to be maintained – by the autumn of 1945, partly under the influence of the American JSC 1067, the line was becoming harder.

  In September, most of the Krupp senior management was rounded up and dumped unceremoniously in an internment camp to await investigation and/or trial. Meanwhile, a British comptroller took
over and the few Krupp bosses who had never joined the NSDAP or the SS struggled to continue managing the company. On 1 December, seventy-six senior executives from other major Ruhr conglomerates, including Thyssen, Hoesch and the United Steelworks (Rohland himself had been picked up in the French Zone and handed over to the Americans), were arrested. Once in custody, they experienced the rigours of Bad Nenndorf, although they were not among those subjected to torture. Hundreds more executives were forced out from Krupp and other major heavy industrial concerns in these months, though not all were subject to arrest.49

  At heart, the British policy in denazifying German industry was two-pronged: first, to investigate and, where a case existed, to dismiss management; second, to strengthen the role of the trade unions, by additionally – after the initial bureaucratic objections mentioned earlier had been overcome – agreeing to grass-roots demands in Rhine-Ruhr heavy industry for works councils (Betriebsräte) that had some genuine power in decision-making within companies.50 These new labour organisations also played a role in humanising the process of denazification on a day-to-day level in factories and plants, giving non-Nazi workers a chance both to accuse particularly tainted managers or to intercede on behalf of managers or foremen who were considered decent despite their political records.

  The role of the workers was especially significant in the Ruhr mines, upon which so much depended in post-war Germany. From the mines came coal to give the stricken Reich electricity, heat, domestic and industrial gas supplies, and finally transport, in the form of steam-powered railway engines. Without coal, normal life in Germany – as elsewhere in the advanced industrial world in the 1940s – was simply not possible.

  In 1945 the Poles took over the other great source of high-quality coal in pre-war Germany, the Silesian fields. This was why the Ruhr, after 1945 in British hands, was so crucially important not just to the British Zone but to the whole of Germany. It was also why both the French, very stubbornly, and the Russians, though in a less consistently obstructive fashion, continued during the immediate post-war years to push for internationalisation of the Ruhr industrial area under four-power control. They withheld cooperation in other vital areas of inter-Allied collaboration in the hope of forcing such a settlement, thus preventing the political integration that might have made four-power occupation work, for the Germans as well as the victors.

  The denazification of the management of the Ruhr mines was intensive, and many managers and supervisors were dismissed in the period up to early 1946. This led to undoubted problems, in an industry where knowledge and experience affected not only productivity but safety. In January 1946, forty-six miners were killed at Peine, over the border in Lower Saxony, when a cage (elevator) carrying them to the surface suddenly plunged back into the depths of the mine. The disaster was blamed on inadequate safety measures.

  The next month, at Unna, twenty kilometres east of Dortmund, an even worse catastrophe saw almost five hundred miners trapped underground by a coal-dust explosion. Many of the mine’s inspectors had been sacked due to their Nazi affiliation. Temporary replacements had been recruited from among staff already in retirement, some of whom, it seemed, were no longer up to the exacting job. The same went for the rescue crews, who were also lacking key skills. The most senior inspector still surviving had just recently come out of a detention centre and was said to have had some kind of breakdown. When it came to the final phase of trying to fight the fires, the mine’s expert in this area, one Dr Stodt, also an ex-Nazi, had to be fetched directly from jail to the pit to lead the last-ditch struggle. He refused to cap the shaft and was rewarded with a handful more miners rescued to join the fifty-seven who had somehow been pulled out alive. In the end, the Unna disaster claimed 418 lives, the worst pit accident in German history.

  It was not absolutely certain that denazification had caused all, or even any, of these deaths, but the possibility existed. In March 1946 the British halted active denazification in the mining industry. A joint British–German commission was set up, including experts and miners’ representatives and a broad spread of political opinion, to consider where to go next. It was decided that revisions and appeals would be permitted – with nominations for this process accepted from the North German Coal Control, the overall supervisory body run by British technocrats, but also from the trade unions and works councils.

  During the course of that spring and summer, the commission considered 337 cases, ruling for reinstatement or retention in all but sixteen of them, although twenty-five men who remained employed suffered punitive demotion. Many hard-case Nazis did not apply for reinstatement, perhaps because they knew that a commission composed in part of their former work colleagues would be harder to fool than some blow-in Military Government official or small-town Spruchkammer.51

  The mining industry, though it ended up keeping many of its Nazis, at least underwent a reasonably thorough process. Things elsewhere could be farcical. At the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, near Brunswick, Hitler had planned to produce his KdF, or ‘people’s car’ (Volkswagen). A few specimen civilian models had been made before the war began, after which the plant manufactured nothing but vehicles for the Wehrmacht all through the war years. The plant was heavily bombed. However, as early as the autumn of 1945, light vehicles were being produced for British personnel under Military Government supervision. As part of the pepped-up denazification drive that went on throughout the spring and summer of 1946, there was a purge of the workforce: 179 key executives and other employees were sacked. By the beginning of the next year, 138 had been reinstated. Without them, the place simply didn’t function.52

  By not insisting on the universal filling out of Fragebogen, the British never had to deal with the numbers the Americans did. On the other hand, by 1946 they had 26,000 military officials administering their zone, as against the Americans’ mere 12,000. There were accusations at home in Britain that a bloated occupation bureaucracy was living well in requisitioned villas and profiting from the defeated enemy’s misfortune. There was also a suspicion that clever Nazis could hide more easily in the British Zone, because so long as they didn’t apply for a senior or sensitive job they would not have to submit to denazification. ‘Numbers of ardent Nazis,’ as Annan observed from his own experience, ‘learnt that their best chance was to lie low, to be employed as a clerk, and wait for the heat to die down.’53

  However, the size of the British military bureaucracy did mean that, for good or ill, it could retain more control of the denazification programme than could the Americans, for whom rapid transfer of power to the Germans was not just a democratic duty but a practical necessity. Whether this led to a more thorough denazification in the British Zone is doubtful, and although the British did keep more control of their German denazification panels than the Americans, there is no evidence that this led to less corruption or less inappropriate leniency. After all, few British officials spoke German. They were highly dependent on ‘their’ German officials and employees, who spoke English and were probably better educated and altogether more charming and entertaining than the embittered victims of the regime and the rough-and-ready socialist trade unionists who wanted a genuine purge in the zone. It must have been easy, especially as time went on and there were so many other critical practical problems pressing for solutions, to become tired of the anti-Nazis’ constant demands, protests and apparent obstruction.

  The results of British denazification were less spectacular in sheer numerical terms than those in the American Zone. Around 200,000 Nazis were either dismissed from their jobs or refused employment. The problem was that somehow most of those were ‘small fish’. In the extremely populous province of North Rhine-Westphalia, with around twelve million inhabitants, a total of only ninety accused were, after all was said and done, categorised within the two most serious categories as ‘major offenders’ or ‘offenders’. By early 1947, the British had decided to withdraw as completely as possible from the process.

  The government mini
ster responsible for the zone, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster John Burns Hynd, a former railway clerk and trade union official of no particular distinction, was replaced in April by a very different kind of politician, the aristocratic and high-minded Francis (Lord) Pakenham. Pakenham, a convert from conservatism to labourism and from Anglicanism to Catholicism, assured Germans of his goodwill and told his fellow peers in the British House of Lords that denazification was a ‘horrid tiresome business’:

  But I find in Germany to-day, on all levels – in the political Parties, in the Land governments, in the trade unions, in the universities and elsewhere among humbler people – many people coming forward, or going about their business, who are deeply conscious of their sad heritage, and who are deeply resolved to set things right, to wipe clean the slate and enable Germany to make a worthy contribution to Europe. 54

  In October 1947, the British formally handed over denazification to the now-elected Land governments of their zone, though they kept the power to categorise and try former Wehrmacht criminals, and also to administer the Civil Internment Camps, which still held 19,000 detainees. No new denazification processes would be initiated after January 1948.

  12

  Divide and Rule

  The two ‘outsider’ nations among the victors were consistently the French and the Russians – and of these two the French, during the first two years of the occupation, remained the more obstructive on matters of principle. Although the British and the Americans dis­­agreed on many issues, they rarely actively blocked each other’s post-war plans. This was, of course, partly because the British depended on American help in terms of food aid and also financial back-up when it came to the ruinous costs of running theirs, the most populous and urbanised of the zones.

  One reason why, for the first years of the occupation at least, the French remained ‘outsiders’ was because, despite having been offered their own zone in Germany, they had not been invited to join the ‘Big Three’ at Potsdam. Within days of the conference, France formally signalled its agreement with most of the Potsdam decisions, but, because it had not been part of the decision-making process, it felt entitled to cherry-pick which and to what extent.