Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Meanwhile, amid the nervous silence and the hard work and the quiet ‘restoration’ of those who had been punished after 1945, Germany began to prosper once more. Professor Erhard, who had been part of the clandestine wartime cabal preparing for the post-war crisis, was made economic director of the Bizone and pushed through price deregulation in 1948 against the advice of the Allied experts. He was right, as the rapid improvement showed. In September 1949, Erhard became Minister of Economics in Adenauer’s government, a post he would hold for fourteen years with huge success.

  After January 1950, food was no longer rationed (in Britain, rationing did not finally end until mid-1954). A construction boom was under way. With the pump primed by the Marshall Plan and Europe eager to get back to work, the German ‘social market economy’ took off. The generation of young managers who had learned their skills in the Nazi armaments boom of the 1930s and early 1940s now turned to peaceful, export-led manufacturing in a post-war world crying out for machine tools and high-quality manufactured goods.

  As one writer has recently noted, ‘The social market economy of Ludwig Erhard had its roots in the policies of Albert Speer’.29 And it did no harm that the bombing and the chaos of 1939–45 had swept away much old plant and factory space as well as rusting infrastructure. In contrast, Britain continued with antiquated industrial practices, factories and equipment. Its long decline as a manufacturing nation accelerated, at the same time as Germany’s revival went into overdrive.

  Germany in the 1950s, like America and Britain and other Western countries during this decade, experienced a conservative interlude, where relations between the sexes appeared to retreat to something like their pre-war shape. Women had worked in factories and offices during wartime, and experienced financial as well as sexual freedom. Now, in most cases, they returned to home and children. German men had suffered the humiliation of defeat, the frustration and deprivation of long periods in Allied prison camps – the last, weary German POWs were not repatriated from the Soviet Union until 1955 – and many also experienced the shock of returning home to see that ‘their’ women seemed to prefer occupation soldiers.

  Adenauer’s Christian-conservative government, eager to turn the clock back to social ‘normality’, got the vote of the majority. The complaining rebels, pointing to society’s amnesia about the Nazi past, got little attention. The magazines were full of domestic bliss, sanitised war stories, consumer desire and portraits of Germans as victims led astray by the Nazi leadership. One of the runaway bestsellers in the Germany of the early 1950s was Ernst von Salomon’s brilliant Der Fragebogen (1951), an autobiographical novel and apologia pro vita sua, satirising the Allied denazification questionnaire and thereby the victors’ right to rule and judge Germany. Von Salomon, although a former far-right-wing activist convicted in his youth for involvement in the murder of Weimar Finance Minister Walther Rathenau, was a curious political beast. Although sympathising with many of Hitler’s aims, he had never joined the Nazi Party – for whose leaders he expressed an open, fastidious contempt – and had lived openly throughout the war with his Jewish female companion. Time magazine’s reviewer expressed the revulsion of many when he described the book’s American translation as redolent of ‘self-pity mixed with arrogant self-righteousness’. Distaste for Der Fragebogen was widespread in liberal circles in Germany and throughout the former Allied countries, but others in Germany and elsewhere applauded this conservative intellectual’s hard-headed, even cynical analysis of why Hitler had come to power and its exposure of alleged Allied hypocrisies.30 This was literature for the new post-Hitler German right.

  The government itself spent some time dealing with the past – but this mostly in the form of lengthy and thorough reports, based on the collation of hundreds of eyewitness reports, enumerating the sufferings and injustices suffered by Germans expelled from the eastern territories and from the Sudetenland during the brutal twilight of the Third Reich. It was mostly true, of course, but only one part of the past.

  As for Adenauer, his slogan during his successful re-election campaign in 1957 was: ‘No experiments!’ The double-edged meaning again expressed the spirit of the time. Nothing radical to the left – or right. The new West German state, under the Adenauer–Erhard duopoly that lasted until 1963, made a bargain with its citizens: we provide prosperity and social stability, and you accept democracy. And why shouldn’t you? Things are good.

  The price for this longed-for normality was conformity. Not the kind of draconian conformity demanded by the Nazis, but more like the Eisenhower-era, socially encouraged conformity in America – except with added Jesuits, given the clerical influence in the Adenauer government. And Axel Springer.

  Into the 1960s, members of the West German government still at times behaved, if not like Nazis, then in a way reminiscent of the authoritarian acolytes of the old ‘deep state’, who had undermined Germany’s last attempt at democracy during the Weimar Republic. The social and cultural focus of West Germany for the first fifteen years or so of its existence was deeply, at times oppressively, conservative. This manifested itself most notoriously in the 1962 ‘Spiegel Affair’, in the final months of Adenauer’s chancellorship. In October of that year, Rudolf Augstein, now a middle-aged, wealthy rebel but on this occasion no less a hero for all that, was arrested along with several of his Spiegel colleagues on possible treason charges. Their ‘crime’ was to have published a damning critique of the Bundeswehr’s ability to defend the country against a Russian attack, based on leaked documents originating from a recent NATO exercise.

  Augstein spent 103 days in custody, released only after press and popular outrage – and revelations of ministerial high-handedness – caused the near-collapse of Adenauer’s governing coalition. The price for the government was the resignation of Bavarian CSU politician Franz-Josef Strauss, the dynamic, ultra-conservative forty-seven-year-old Defence Minister, who, despite his initial denials, was proved to have been the driving force behind the prosecution and to have wildly exceeded his powers in the process. Strauss remained an important figure, but he never fulfilled his ambition of becoming Chancellor. The price for Augstein? Naturally, the uncomfortable days in a prison cell in Hamburg, but also the consolation of hearing large crowds gathering outside the jail every day to demand his release (and the prosecution of Minister Strauss). So embarrassed was the government that it felt forced to move Augstein to Koblenz to get him away from the sympathetic crowds.31 The press campaign on his behalf, and the widespread demonstrations and protests, were something new in post-war Germany. And there was a further consolation for Augstein the magazine proprietor – Spiegel’s circulation, already half a million, doubled. In 1965, the Federal Constitutional Court absolved Augstein and his colleagues of any guilt.

  There was a phenomenon in West Germany during the 1950s, after the abolition of the ration system at the very beginning of the decade, called the Fresswelle, the ‘eat wave’. After the near-starvation of the immediate post-war period, West Germans went crazy for food. Suddenly they could eat their fill, and then maybe some. And they did. This eat wave went on through the 1950s and into the 1960s.

  The playwright Berthold Brecht has a saying in his Threepenny Opera: ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’ – ‘First comes filling your belly*, then morality’. In other words, those with a full stomach find it easier to be good. By the 1960s, Germans had full stomachs. And some of them wanted very badly to be good. The mobilisation of public outrage over the ‘Spiegel Affair’ – sometimes described as ‘the beginning of [post-war] German democracy’ – was one indication, perhaps the greatest, that things were changing.

  The patient began to awake from the sleep cure and look around. The patient began to remember . . .

  There was already the first of several generational changes going on in Germany. The survivors of Hitler’s generation – those born in the 1880s and 1890s – were now old and fading from public life. Those of the following generation, the energetic ach
ievers of the Nazi regime such as Speer, born around 1900–1905, too young for the First World War but acutely aware of its humiliating aftermath, were moving into late or very late middle age. The next generation, those who had been born around 1920, who had spent their adolescence in Nazi Germany and served in the war as young men, were on the threshold of their ‘best years’. And then there was the generation that was around thirty, out in the world but not yet quite ready to make its mark, the so-called ‘Flak Auxiliary’ generation, born in the late 1920s, who as schoolboys had been drafted in to man the anti-aircraft guns against the Anglo-American bombers. Finally, there was a really new generation: the generation born in the early to mid-1940s. The student generation of the 1960s.

  It is often said that Germany’s re-examination of itself began in the mid-1960s. In fact, it seems, rather, to have begun in 1958, amid the late period of Adenauer-era conformity, when the ‘Central Bureau of the Land Justice Authorities for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes’ was set up at Ludwigsburg, just north of Stuttgart.

  The Central Bureau had been founded in response to the trial at Ulm in Bavaria, that same year, of former members of a killing squad in Russia. The state’s interest in them had been aroused, it seems, only because one of them had attempted to rejoin the civil service and reaccess his pension rights. Investigations uncovered a whole network of former killing squad members living law-abiding, productive lives in plain sight in West Germany. These men stood trial. The Ulm case, the first case of mass murder to go to trial since the foundation of the West German state, aroused real public interest in Nazi crimes, for the first time since the immediate post-war period.

  The task of the Ludwigsburg office was to deal systematically with crimes committed outside of normal German jurisdiction, for instance in concentration camps and other crime scenes not directly associated with warlike activity. Its role was to coordinate such investigations: it had, technically, no power to prosecute. Nonetheless, its work identified many more West German citizens, apparently living peacefully in various parts of the country, who had been involved in the working of Auschwitz extermination camp. These men had somehow escaped the original trial of Commandant Höss and his henchmen in 1947. Following a laborious process of legal and jurisdictional wrangling, they were taken into custody and a trial prepared.

  Meanwhile, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, to where he had fled in 1950 after years living under an assumed name in northern Germany. Eichmann, a senior SS officer who had been in charge of the transportation of Jews to the extermination camps, was tried in Jerusalem and executed, on 31 May 1962, after an internationally reported trial. A year later, the Auschwitz Trial (usually called the ‘Second Auschwitz Trial’) of twenty-two defendants began in Frankfurt. It lasted for 183 trial days, and the verdicts – six life sentences, various sentences from three years and three months to fourteen years, and three acquittals – were pronounced on 19 August 1965. The daily appearance at the stand of a total of 360 eyewitnesses with chilling stories to tell, and the presence of television cameras and newspaper journalists, brought home with shuddering immediacy to the German public, after twenty years of silence and forgetting, the full horror of what had been done in the name of the German people by these apparently ordinary men during those shameful years.

  The children of the war, the ones who had survived the malnutrition and disease that had led to such terrible infant mortality in the immediate post-war years, were now young workers and students. They began to ask questions of their parents and grandparents. They were not satisfied with many of the answers.

  It was and is often said of the Germans, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that they ‘denazified themselves’ on 8 May 1945. During the advance into Germany that year, an American major told the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White: ‘The Germans act as though the Nazis were a strange race of Eskimos who came down from the North Pole and somehow invaded Germany.’ Many observers at the end of the war would, like White, have remarked, tongue in cheek: ‘I have yet to find a German who will admit to being a Nazi.’32

  There is, of course, a non-cynical truth in this, to the extent that most Germans did, by the time the immediate post-war period began, wish to distance themselves from the Third Reich. Many – probably most – despised Hitler and the other leaders who had led the country astray and their people into such misery. At that moment, perhaps that was enough of a prophylactic against a recurrence of the Third Reich. Then, closing their ears to the arguments of the well-meaning Allied denazifiers, most submerged themselves in work, in reconstruction, recreating ‘normality’. These were physical as well as psychological imperatives.

  The Auschwitz Trial, however, and the great questioning that began in the 1960s, led to something else: a proper self-denazifying (or as the French put it: ‘auto-épuration’). Now large numbers of Germans really did start to look at and study the behaviour of their nation between 1933 and 1945, and try to draw conclusions. They had food in their bellies, roofs over their heads, jobs (or student bursaries), and they were not to be fobbed off with bland explanations.

  This led to excesses. The rebellious alternative culture in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s could be especially oppressive and obsessive. It dropped out of the Mom-and-Pop, glad-to-have-enough-to-eat conservatism of the Adenauer era and into a future where Mom and Pop’s ideas were not just boring but evil (hadn’t Mom and Pop been Nazis?).

  There was truth in the rebels’ accusations. Critical Germans were still in a minority, albeit a growing one. The ‘Spiegel Affair’ might have brought many thousands out on to the streets to demand more freedom, but according to a poll in 1966, 54 per cent of West Germans agreed with the statement that ‘In politics there is too much talk and not enough action. We need a strong man at the top, who will make short shrift of trivialities’, and 44 per cent were convinced that German youth lacked ‘discipline and good order’.* A total of 59 per cent agreed with the idea that ‘It is finally time to get a firm grip on all troublemakers, and not using kid gloves, as we have until now’.33 Even at this point of transition, the echoes of those same longings that had made Hitler’s regime so popular had by no means died away.

  To balance this continued presence among many Germans of old-fashioned nationalist-authoritarian values, it was true that by the 1960s the right-wing fringe parties that formed part of Adenauer’s coalition back in the early 1950s – the ‘German Party’, the GB/BHE and so on – had either dwindled or been subsumed into the larger parties. The expellee groups, while still influential, were no longer quite such a crucial element in the political equation, as the expellees and their children integrated into West German life and began to vote accordingly. German politics was now a three-way contest, with the two big ‘people’s parties’, the centre-right CDU and the centre-left SPD, potentially dependent on the parliamentary support of the socially liberal but pro-enterprise FDP for any government they might form. Neo-Nazi groups experienced local revivals, but never made it into the federal parliament, let alone the government.

  From 1966 to 1969, Germany had one of the most paradoxical governments of any Western state. Or perhaps it simply expressed the feel of the country. Adenauer had gone in 1963, and Ludwig Erhard’s government was not a success. In the grip of West Germany’s first recession since 1945, with more than half a million unemployed – considered shocking at the time – it had fallen as a result of dis­­agreements with its FDP partners about the tax increases needed to balance the budget (the tax-cutting FDP was against them). Under these circumstances, only one other possible partner existed: the SPD. Hence the idea of a so-called ‘Grand Coalition’, which took office on 1 December 1966.

  On the one hand, the administration was headed by a CDU Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who was a former Nazi Party member. The silver-haired Swabian lawyer had been a liaison man between Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry and the German Foreign Office. Obviously a Muss-Nazi, but a Party member nevertheless.
On the other, as his Foreign Minister in their so-called ‘Grand Coalition’, there stood Willy Brandt, the Social Democrat leader. Brandt had been forced to flee Germany for Scandinavia when Hitler came to power, and had even taken Norwegian citizenship. He had returned to Germany after the war as a major in the Norwegian army before deciding, at the low point of his birth-country’s fortunes, to revert to German nationality and help the reconstruction effort. Many conservative Germans still viewed him as a traitor.

  It was a pivotal moment. The joining, as it seemed, of anti-Nazi Social Democrat with ex-Nazi conservative caused purest disillusionment among many sensitive citizens. It led to the formation of an ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’, composed of many thousands of West Germans, who had decided that, with the Social Democrats’ ‘selling out’ to the right, a slip of paper dropped in a ballot box just didn’t make anything happen.

  Before long, a group of ‘urban guerrillas’ who called themselves the ‘Red Army Faction’ (also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) were going around stealing cars and kidnapping and shooting anyone they disapproved of, particularly ex-Nazis. Nazi methods for violent denazification. Such was the group’s revulsion at the hypocritical conservatism, as they saw it, of the German political and economic establishment, that they also rebelled against the privileged position of Jews in this despicable new Germany’s world view, allying themselves with Palestinian groups and even setting off a bomb at a Jewish Cultural Centre in Berlin.

  Germany subtly changed again in 1969. Willy Brandt finally became Chancellor, in coalition with the Free Democrats – the first Social Democrat to take office as head of a German government since Hermann Müller in 1928.