Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Brandt made treaties with West Germany’s eastern neighbours that recognised the post-war borders. He visited Warsaw and dropped on to one knee in front of the Warsaw Rising memorial, honouring the 200,000 Poles who died so pointlessly at German hands in the destruction of the Polish capital during that terrible summer of 1944. The conservative right and the refugee organisations didn’t like it, but they were no longer the power in the land that they had been in the 1950s when Adenauer put his uneasy coalition together and started post-war German democracy on its way. Brandt’s West Germany also finally recognised the reality of the East German state, though it never formally gave up its claim to represent all Germans.

  This was a different Germany, one starting to feel secure in its wealth and its institutions. A Germany that was now prepared to talk about the past, and to recognise what had gone wrong, without necessarily feeling that this undermined its right to exist. In the mid-1970s, Holocaust, a well-meant American mini-series chronicling the fate of the Weisses, a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, pierced the German television-viewing public to its heart. Where there had once been so little, now a flood of books and articles and television documentaries covered every aspect of Nazi malfeasance, and did not spare the German nation for its complicity. They continue to this day. Paradoxically, the further the nation moved from its ugly past, the more diligently Germans confronted it. ‘First comes filling your belly . . .’

  The generational change continued. From Chancellor Willy Brandt (born 1914), the resistance fighter, to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (born 1918), who served with the Wehrmacht but converted to social democracy as a returned soldier in the British Zone. Then, abruptly, came Helmut Kohl (born 1930), a child throughout the Nazi period and therefore the first West German Chancellor to be blessed with no possible responsibility for what happened before 1945. Perhaps appropriately, Kohl was also the first post-war West German Chancellor to become truly leader of all Germany.

  It was in November 1989, as Helmut Kohl attended a state dinner in Warsaw, that the Berlin Wall opened, the citizens of the failed state of East Germany poured through to the West, and a new era began for Germany and the world.

  After the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, the haemorrhaging of its population to the West all but ceased. If the reaction to the ‘Spiegel Affair’ in West Germany was hailed as the rebirth of West German democracy, the Wall was seen as East Germany’s ‘second birth’. They were, of course, two revealingly different phenomena – the flowering of critical consciousness in West Germany after 1962, a creative, positive thing; and the imprisonment of the East German population after 1961, a terrible suppression of possibility that permitted only the unimpeded continuation of a politico-economic tyranny.

  Nevertheless, the East German state seemed, in the 1970s, at its strongest. Aware of the regime’s unpopularity, the state planners had permitted some growth of consumer goods production after the Wall went up. A modest prosperity followed. Ten years later, most East German households had a refrigerator, a TV, a washing machine and even a car – though the waiting time for this might be seven years. It was even claimed, at one point in the mid-1970s, that the German Democratic Republic had overtaken Great Britain in its living standards. East German athletes were successful in the world’s arenas far beyond the country’s size and resources – a prominence that the regime naturally attributed to communism’s production of exceptional human material, but which later, it became apparent, was actually down to elaborate and subtle doping programmes in which the government itself was totally complicit.

  Above all, the East German state considered itself morally superior to its Western equivalent. Theirs was a totally cleansed, post-Nazi state, they claimed, whereas the Federal Republic was still tainted by the role Nazis played in its affairs. In the East, for instance, East Prussians, Silesians, Sudetenlanders and other expellees had from the start never been allowed to call themselves that, or even ‘refugees’. Their official title was ‘resettlers’. They were not permitted to form special organisations or write or speak about their suffering, or complain about their fate. If they did so, they were prosecuted. Organisations in the West such as the BdV, which continued to protest at the injustice of the post-war status quo, were attacked from East Germany as ‘revanchists’ or worse. East Germany might be a dictatorship, but it was the ‘better Germany’.

  East Germany was, however, also the less rich Germany. In fact, it was the broke Germany. It turned out that the impressive economic figures put out by its officials were more or less fraudulent. By the 1970s the country was massively in debt, getting by with foreign loans, some from the West, and by such stratagems as selling political prisoners to West Germany for as much as a hundred thousand marks apiece.

  Then the Soviet Union met its fate. Eastern Europe was no longer a fortress. East Germans could leave via Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And the German Democratic Republic itself came, in the fatal autumn of 1989, as it grandiosely celebrated its fortieth anniversary, to the end of the line.

  By the autumn of 1990, Germany was reunited under a Christian Democrat Chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Many years earlier, Axel Springer had maintained, ‘I shall reunite Germany, whether you believe it or not.’34 Springer himself died in 1985, just four years before his seemingly impossible dream came true, but for all his sins it must be said that he kept the faith. Forty-five years after Year Zero, Germany – not all Germany because the lost eastern provinces would never be regained – was one country again.

  After Kohl came Schröder. The wartime generation was beginning to disappear. Even the Flak Auxiliaries, the loyal but increasingly sceptical teenagers of those last wartime months, were ageing into their sixties and beyond. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (born 1944) was not quite a post-war baby. His father died a few months after his birth, killed in action with the Wehrmacht in October 1944. He grew up in straitened circumstances in a single-parent family, but the opportunities provided by the post-war ‘social market’ system enabled him to make it to the top. Schröder lived two-thirds of his life under the American defensive umbrella that guaranteed West German security and prosperity. All the same, he proved as friendly to Russia as to America.

  Germany’s first post-Nazi Chancellor, in the fullest sense, was and is Angela Merkel. Born in Hamburg, brought up in East Germany as the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, she is a qualified scientist, conservative and patriotic without being nationalistic. Her East German heritage is important. She was not brought up to feel any particular guilt about the German past – this had been largely dealt with by forty years of the communist government’s official ‘sin-eating’ ceremonies. Neither, though she recognised the importance of Germany’s role in the European Union, did Merkel have that visceral, bred-in-the-bone commitment to ever-increasing European integration that was so important to politicians brought up in the West, where the process was seen both as a defence against communism and a prophylactic against the return of Nazism.

  No longer feeling compelled to write cheques to every nation or individual that Germany ever wronged, a loyal European but also a loyal German, Frau Merkel is, like most Germans since 1945, also reluctant – for reasons all too apparent from the terrible story of the Third Reich’s defeat – to go to war. The international interventions in Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001, in which the German Bundeswehr has taken part, have been passionately opposed, and not just on the far left.

  Germany in the twenty-first century is, like everywhere else, imperfect. The absorption of the East after 1989 has, in a sense, proved no easier in the short term than dealing with the legacy of Hitler. By this time, most West Germans had accepted not just the formal externals of democracy, but had taken it to their hearts and become active democratic, often highly critical, citizens. The friendly takeover of East Germany (some saw it otherwise) involved hurt feelings, and the rejoining of seventeen million compatriots after almost half a century of separation was always going to be a tricky process.
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  East Germans were often quickly disillusioned with the democratic experience after 1990. They had, in fact, spent almost sixty years as subjects of a dictatorship, starting in 1933 with the Hitler adventure and then moving more or less seamlessly into Ulbricht’s austere and intolerant, though slightly less violent, version. Whether they liked it or not, many had become accustomed to a top-down command economy where mechanisms such as the market could be ignored or circumvented, and daily life, while it might sometimes be tedious and restrictive, had the feeling of security and the illusion of permanence. They had not had the Westerners’ forty years of deciding to accept, even love, capitalist democracy with all its faults and flaws as well as its virtues. And in the 1990s, they experienced nothing like the economic miracle the Westerners had benefited from in the 1950s – in a very different global market – and which had so aided acceptance of the post-war status quo in the Bonn Republic.

  Progress has been remarkable in some areas of the former German Democratic Republic, much less so in others, but there are signs that the East, though it has undergone painful changes and still faces serious challenges, is slowly integrating. Just as some had naively believed the Germans could be converted into instant democrats by discussion and education immediately after 1945, so there were those who had anticipated, in accordance with Chancellor Kohl’s never forgotten and often rued election promise, ‘blooming landscapes’ as the East’s future immediately after 1990. In fact, both evolutionary processes needed at least twenty years, and, in the East’s case, then some.

  Like the rest of the advanced world, modern Germany is concerned about being able to absorb immigrants. It worries about its identity. It struggles to deal with economic problems arising from the crisis that has hit the advanced world towards the end of the century’s first decade. But Germany also observes that its citizens have not gone rushing towards extreme-right solutions during the current serious economic crisis. Despite a few local successes for neo-Nazis in the troubled parts of the East, this is no replay of the 1930s in that regard. In fact, the far right in Germany seems to be meeting with appreciably less support than elsewhere in Europe, including in countries that were once part of the anti-Nazi coalition in the Second World War.

  From unpromising beginnings in 1945, when for the most part it simply succumbed to the inevitable and obeyed, Germany’s political and official class – the same pillars of society who once hated the Weimar Republic and set out to destroy it – along with most of the country’s voters, have come to believe that democracy works. Or at least, that it is less of a bad solution than dictatorship.

  In 1945, Eisenhower had emphasised sternly in his declaration to the German people that Americans came ‘not as liberators but as conquerors’. Exactly half a century later, Germany begged to disagree. According to a poll in 1995, a little more than half the population saw VE-Day, 8 May 1945, as a ‘day of liberation’, while a further 28 per cent saw it as a ‘day of liberation but also of defeat’. Only 13 per cent regarded the end of the Second World War as purely a ‘day of defeat’.

  Has Germany exorcised Hitler? Perhaps that is up to its people to decide. If it is any indication, Germans certainly feel inclined to continue their cleansing rituals on a regular, precautionary basis. But even if the old demon who died in 1945 has not yet disappeared completely, modern Germans seem to have banished his restless, malevolent ghost to somewhere very, very far away.

  * Adenauer had actually suffered serious facial injuries in 1917 when his mayoral limousine collided with a streetcar in Cologne. His bones and nose were ‘pushed in’ as a result, a slight but permanent disfigurement that gave him an oriental look.

  * When the DP finally collapsed in the 1960s, some of its prominent members joined the CDU, while others helped found the neo-Nazi NPD, which has survived into the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  * Decartelisation restored BASF, Bayer, Agfa and Hoechst as separate companies. Hoechst has recently merged with the French pharmaceuticals giant Rhône-Poulenc SA to become Aventis.

  * Gesamtdeutscher Block/Block der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (All-German Bloc of Expellees and Dispossessed).

  * In German there is a distinction between ‘fressen’ meaning eating (by animals) and ‘essen’ meaning eating (by human beings). Brecht’s use of the first coarsens the expression deliberately, as it does in the word ‘Fresswelle’.

  * The German phrase Zucht und Ordnung, though going back hundreds of years, was common in the Nazi period and implied ‘good breeding’ as well as discipline.

  Acknowledgements

  My profound thanks are due to all who agreed to be interviewed for Exorcising Hitler about their experiences during the 1940s, in the process sometimes revisiting traumatic experiences for themselves and their families. Their names are listed at the back of this book.

  I am also especially grateful to Steven Simon and Virginia Liberatore, who extended generous hospitality to my wife and me during our working visit to Washington DC. Dr Helmut Schnatz and Frau Ursula Schnatz were extraordinarily kind and attentive hosts in Koblenz, where they further provided me with a number of introductions that led to fascinating conversations about what happened in their beloved city during those grim years of defeat and deprivation.

  The staff of the National Archives at Kew, London, and the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland, were, as usual, helpful, informative and patient in their dealings.

  For their constant – not to say ruthless – encouragement, I should also gratefully acknowledge my agent in Britain, Jane Turnbull, and Dan Conaway at Writers’ House in New York. And for all the aforementioned, plus a strong dollop of patience, Bill Swainson, my editor at Bloomsbury Publishing in London.

  Finally, the warmest of thank-yous to Alice, my wife, who not only provided domestic and editorial support but also tirelessly and skilfully photographed documents during our archival research trips. As ever, I could have done none of this without her.

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