Exorcising Hitler
Page 38
There was one final note about the French denazification campaign. The relatively personal and subjective nature of the process could lead to absurdities, anomalies and injustices (as could its opposite elsewhere in occupied Germany), but as Perry Biddiscombe wrote, ‘its humanism and recognition of the individual set the tone for a policy that would eventually take shape as Franco-German reconciliation’.19
So, for France and Germany – the ancient intimate enemies – a time that had begun with violence, revenge and oppression led, in a remarkably few years, to a friendship that would survive into the twenty-first century.
And the other outsiders, the Soviets? The system in the Soviet Zone, being a creature of Stalinism, all too often went beyond harshness and into sheer brutality. All the Allies, democratic or otherwise, had their civilian internment camps, their ‘holding pens’ for the denazification process. The Soviet ones turned, in many cases, into nothing less than concentration camps. In fact, they included the former Nazi concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, as well as the notorious Gestapo prison at Bautzen, which were emptied of their wartime inmates only to be filled in short order with real or perceived enemies of the Soviet occupation.
Between 1945 and 1950, according to official figures, 122,671 Germans passed through ‘special camps’ set up by the Soviet MVD (as the NKVD secret police were known after February 1946) in their Zone of Occupation. Of these, 42,889 were claimed to have died ‘of sickness’. Two years after the end of the war, a further 10 per cent of the prisoners in the Soviet Zone Gulag, mostly those judged fit enough to work, were creamed off and sent to labour camps in the Soviet Union itself.20 Only a small fraction were actually tried by Soviet tribunals.21
The numbers of dead and disappeared may, in fact, be gross underestimates. Estimates by American intelligence and the West German Social Democratic Party’s own usually reliable network of informants inside East Germany come to about double that. Mass graves unearthed since 1989, representing by no means all the dead of the camps but already pointing to tens of thousands of victims – including 16,000 sets of remains found in the vicinity of Bautzen prison alone – also indicate that the death toll may have been much greater. Only the opening of secret Soviet archives will bring some certainty into these estimates.22
They died, those who were not executed, of disease (especially tuberculosis, which was endemic, but also dysentery), of starvation and cumulative malnutrition. Conditions were bad in the West – they were bad for most Germans, imprisoned or not – but here they were lethal. The denazification laws were used ruthlessly not just against former Nazis but against anyone whom the post-war rulers of eastern Germany wished to crush or discredit.
The camp inmates were supposed to be Nazis or suspected security threats of various kinds, but it quickly became clear that the Soviets and their German protégés were using the Nazi smear as a way of dealing with anyone who appeared to threaten the rapid ‘Sovietisation’ of the zone. There were, of course, the ‘class enemies’ such as aristocrats, bourgeois or prosperous landowners – the remnants, who had failed to flee westward, of the groups expropriated in the winter of 1945–6. However, after the allegedly voluntary merger of the Social Democratic and Communist parties in the Soviet Zone, at Stalin’s behest, in April 1946, dissident Social Democrats and other activists who refused to join the communist-sponsored ‘block’ parties also found themselves targeted by the MVD as ‘hostile elements’ liable for arrest under the denazification directives.
Torture was common. ‘As a rule, interrogations took place in the night from eight pm to around five am,’ recalled a former inmate of Bautzen prison. With one man, who had lost a leg in the war and wore an artificial limb, the camp’s interrogators ‘. . . worked on his leg as they questioned him, in such a way that after a while there was just a bloody stump’.23
The MVD remained in overall charge until 1948. However, soon alleged enemies of the post-war state also began to be pursued by a nascent secret police force run by East German communists. This began in Saxony as ‘K-5’ and would eventually morph into the notorious Stasi.
Also especially at risk from the Soviet Zone authorities were dissident elements among German youth. All the occupiers were concerned about how to handle the ‘brainwashed’ young, who had grown up under Hitler. Young people, many of them only recently enthusiastically involved in the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls, seem to have represented a particularly thorny problem for the Soviets and their German allies. In the Western zones, the main source of friction with this section of the population seems to have been envy and sexual jealousy, arising from the attraction of young German women to the nylon, chocolate and cigarette-toting British and American occupiers. In the east, it was more socially and ideologically based. The MVD was aware of this, and typically chose to list it all under the drastic rubric of ‘Werwolf activity’, thereby justifying draconian measures.
In fact, although there was a tendency among the youth to sing the old Hitler Youth songs (sometimes with satirical lyrics aimed at the new rulers), to loiter around, as young people will, in a vaguely disreputable fashion, and to engage in low-grade black market activity, their main crimes consisted of posting anti-communist and anti-Soviet graffiti. Clandestinely circulating critical leaflets and pamphlets was also fairly common.
Dissatisfied and bored young people would also sometimes heckle Soviet films when they were shown in cinemas. In one case, in Dresden, a group of ‘young rogues’ (Lausejungen) hissed at a documentary film lauding Soviet food deliveries to Germany. The local German communist leader organised a check to ensure that these were not ‘paid agents’. In Leipzig, a circular complained that Soviet films were ‘being sabotaged by the public, which in itself is a victory for the enemy’.
Again, youths arrested were charged with membership of Werwolf groups.24 In Chemnitz, a group of young ‘reactionaries’ were arrested for asking awkward questions at a meeting of the new communist youth movement, the FDJ (‘Free German Youth’). They were delivered straight to the not-so-tender ministrations of the MVD.
Others who did the same thing were luckier. Ulrich Frodien, for instance, who had escaped from Breslau to Berlin, to Göttingen and then to the small town in the Soviet Zone where his doctor father now practised, also attended FDJ meetings. He was a little cleverer than the young people who ended up in the local Gulag. Ulrich and some friends became active in the youth movement, and appeared to be loyal, but remained critical when it came to some important political questions. The new regime, still not willing to drop its democratic façade and hoping gradually to draw even ‘tainted’ youth into its orbit, tolerated them, even though they were regularly overruled at meetings and conferences and increasingly heavily criticised. Attempts were made to nudge young Ulrich in the ‘right’ direction. When he attended a regional conference, he was even granted a brief interview with the Russians’ cultural dictator in conquered Germany, Colonel Tiul’panov.
The paranoid brutality of the new regime when it encountered opposition only grew as the ‘gradualist’ and relatively tolerant policy of the early post-war months was abandoned.
A key moment was the Soviet-encouraged merging of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties in April 1946 at a thousand-strong congress in Berlin to form the so-called ‘Socialist Unity Party of Germany’ (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands = SED). With 1.3 million members, the two left parties were more or less equally represented in the new movement (in fact, the SPD made up a slight majority), and initially Party posts were appropriately divided up between social democrats and communists. All the same, it fairly rapidly became clear that the communists had the upper hand, and it would become even clearer in the years that followed. Many social democrats in the Soviet Zone and also in Berlin did not support the merger, but only in West Berlin were they able to organise themselves properly without being harassed by the Soviets and their German allies.
The elections in the Soviet Zone in Octo
ber 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.