Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  Neumann, backed by the top military boss in the American zone, General Lucius Clay, helped to devise the notorious Fragebogen (questionnaire), the 131-point survey every German adult was required to fill out. On the basis of these detailed questions on past affiliations and sympathies, it was hoped, the U.S. military would be able to establish the guilt or innocence of at least twenty-three million people. A typical question would be: “Have you or any members of your family taken possession of property or assets stolen from others on the grounds of faith or race?” Another question concerned membership of university fraternities, as though these had been part of the Nazi apparatus instead of being banned after 1935. In truth, of course, answers were rarely honest. Submissions of the documents were postponed, sometimes forever. Endless appeals were launched. The Allies lacked sufficient staff, or knowledge, to assess the documents. Few Americans even spoke German, let alone read it. An already overwhelmed military administration, formally in charge of rebuilding democracy in Germany, was even further stretched by a new “Law No. 8,” which became effective on December 1.

  Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, the former resister in Berlin, made a note of this law in her diary, with approval:

  Three weeks ago the first measures were taken against Party members. Elimination of all Nazis from prominent positions in industry and commerce. Exclusion of Party members from cultural occupations. Former NSDAP members may only be employed as workers.10

  Andreas-Friedrich was sympathetic to the idea of putting old Nazis to work at clearing rubble and other unpleasant menial tasks. But hers was an uncommon perspective, it seems. She recorded what she heard people saying around her: “Unbelievable, this terror! Outrageous, this latest injustice. They can’t put twenty percent of the population under special law.” To which she responded in the privacy of her diary: “But they can! Have they [the Germans] forgotten how easily it can be done? Has it escaped them that these special laws are almost identical to those of eight years ago against the Jews?”11

  There was no sympathy for the protesting Germans from her. But the parallel she drew was part of the problem. Excluding people from society under a Nazi regime is one thing, but to do so in order to rebuild a democracy is an altogether trickier proposition. Besides, a simple admission of Party membership did not mean very much. Some 140,000 people lost their jobs, but many were petty officials and opportunists who had joined the Nazis out of fear or ambition, while bigger and more culpable figures remained untouched: the businessmen who didn’t bother to join the Party, but made millions from plundered Jewish assets; the bankers who hoarded gold from the teeth of murdered Jews; the professors who promoted noxious racial theories; the lawyers and judges who meticulously followed the decrees of Hitler’s Reich, prosecuting men and women for subverting the Nazi state or committing “racial shame” by falling in love with someone of an “inferior race.”

  Theodor Heuss had been a liberal journalist and politician before the war, and though not an active resister, he had loathed the Nazis. Heuss was the kind of German the Allies felt they could trust. In 1945, the Americans appointed him as Culture Minister of Baden-Württemberg. One of Heuss’s problems was the lack of capable schoolteachers to wean the young from twelve years of Nazi propaganda. His task was made more difficult by the purges. In a desperate letter to the Military Administration, he wrote that in his view only between 10 to 15 percent of the people dismissed in the purges had been convinced Nazis. But so many teachers had been fired that children were being deprived of an education. It would not be difficult, he argued, “to scrape away the brown veneer” from older teachers, educated before the Third Reich, and “reawaken their powers of good.” He begged the authorities for their confidence: “We promise to deliver the teachers from Nazism and to make them agents of new and better ideas, enabling them to educate youth in the right spirit.”12 He was turned down.

  Carl Zuckmayer, who returned to Germany from his American exile to write a report for the U.S. War Department, argued that the American purges were so clumsy, and so often missed the real targets, that there was a danger of denazification leading to renazification. German conservatives saw denazification as a socialist plot. They believed that the Allied authorities deliberately favored German radicals, who were keen to purge every city and town of anyone who could be tarred with the fascist brush. Zuckmayer tells a joke he heard in Austria about a man who went to the local police station to have his name registered. Why would he want to do that? asked the policeman. Because I’m a Nazi, replied the man. Then you should have registered with us a year ago, said the officer. To which the man replied: A year ago I was not yet a Nazi.13

  By the time this joke went the rounds, much of the task of sifting ex-Nazis from the supposedly innocent had been handed over, out of sheer necessity, to German committees. This move was formalized in the “Law for Liberation from National-Socialism and Militarism.” It turned into a farce. German politicians had little enthusiasm for further purges. Purging committees, supposedly peopled by radical revolutionaries, were in fact often filled with former Nazis. Catholic priests warned that it was sinful for Germans to offer damaging evidence against their compatriots. Local bigwigs who had made fortunes during the Third Reich paid their way out of trouble, often by producing some pathetic survivor of Nazi persecution as a favorable witness. The key word of this period, starting in 1946, was Persilschein, Persil being a “whitewashing” laundry detergent. Countless ex-Nazis received their Persil document washing out every speck of brown dirt from their recent past. Certificates showing that one had been a former prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp could be bought on the black market; not cheap at twenty-five thousand deutsche marks, but affordable to many a former SS officer.

  Things were little better in the eastern half of Germany, despite communist claims that the purges in the “democratic zone” had been a great success. In the late spring of 1945, the kind of German “antifascist” committees described by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich were put in charge of the purges. They were disbanded in the early summer when the German Communist Party (KPD) took over. In theory, purges were indeed more rigorous than in the Western zones. The foundation myth of the German Democratic Republic, after all, would be its proud history of “antifascism”; this was the “better Germany,” the Germany of resistance. Yet this myth was muddled by the assumption of German collective guilt, of a deep-seated Teutonic disease, which obsessed the communists. Some of their own rhetoric seems to have been infected by this German virus. The KPD demanded the total “liquidation” of the remnants of the Hitler regime.14 In one Brandenburg town, ex-Nazis were forced to pin swastikas onto their clothes. There was much talk of severe punishment. The district magistrate of another locality warned: “The Nazis will be handled the same way they handled us, that is: hard. We will force the slackers to work and if need be stick them in a camp . . . By next year we want a Germany purged of Nazis [Nazirein].”15

  Still, despite all these hard measures, the purges were almost as inadequate in eastern Germany as they were in the “capitalist zones.” Distinctions between “active” and “nominal” Nazis were supposed to be enforced, but often proved to be elusive. The Soviets soon grew tired of this distinction and ordered all former Nazi Party members to be dismissed from government posts, a task to be concluded in a few months—an impossibility, of course. They didn’t trust the Germans to handle the purges anyway, and never gave them proper guidelines. There was indeed reason for distrust in this matter. Many Germans refused to cooperate because it soon turned out that too much purging would lead to a collapse in education, social services, or any semblance of economic recovery. And so, Germans in Leipzig and Dresden, as much as in Munich or Cologne, found excuses to reinstate ex-Nazis in their old jobs, or shield ex-Nazis from prosecution. Even the Soviet authorities connived in this, when purges threatened to upset production quotas in factories under their control. Most “small” Nazis were comfortably absorbed into the Communist Party, wh
ose authoritarian ways they would not have found unfamiliar. Files were kept on the more important former Nazis in case they should turn out to be troublesome.

  The dilemma was the same in all zones. You couldn’t really gut the German elites, however distasteful they may have been, and hope to rebuild the country at the same time, no matter whether that country was to be a communist or a capitalist one. Very quickly the Allies saw economic recovery as a more important aim than restoring a sense of justice, albeit for opposite reasons. The Soviets wanted to rebuild their “antifascist” Germany as a buffer against capitalist imperialism; the United States, Britain, and their allies needed “their” Germany as a democratic bastion against communism.

  General Patton’s views in 1945 on denazification and former Nazis—that “this Nazi thing is just like a Democratic and Republican election fight” and that “we will need these people”—were historically crude and, so far as his own career was concerned, expressed too soon. Eisenhower had to fire him as military governor of Bavaria. But he was indiscreet rather than eccentric in his opinions. A year after Germany’s defeat and the initial purges, most American officials took Patton’s view. The British, in particular, had found the American keenness to punish the Germans ridiculous and counterproductive from the beginning. Con O’Neill, a Foreign Office official with total contempt for what he called “low-level zealots,” had this to say about Law No. 8’s stipulation excluding all Nazi Party members from anything but menial work: “As an example of systematic and meticulous imbecility, it would be hard to beat.”16

  The story of Hermann Josef Abs is instructive. Compared to other businessmen and industrialists, his crimes as a banker during the Third Reich might appear to be minor. Unlike Alfried Krupp, say, he did not employ women and children to be worked to death as slaves. Nor was he a personal friend of Himmler’s, like Friedrich Flick, whose coal and steel empire was a particularly brutal exploiter of concentration camp labor. Abs wasn’t even a Nazi Party member and SS officer, as were Wilhelm Zangen, chairman of Mannesmann in Düsseldorff, or Otto Ohlendorff, economic bureaucrat and leader of a murder squad in Ukraine.

  Abs never got his own hands dirty. As a native Rhinelander he felt nothing but disdain for the Prussian military spirit. A suave Catholic Anglophile with fluent English who had worked for Jewish banks before the war and been a good friend of Sigmund Warburg, Abs would most probably never have had anything to do with the Nazis if he hadn’t happened to be a highly ambitious German technocrat in the 1930s. But Abs was a director of the Deutsche Bank, and had enriched his concern by “Aryanizing” Jewish firms. Apart from handling Hitler’s private account, Abs was also the banker for companies such as Siemens, Krupp, and I.G. Farben, which built vast slave camps around Auschwitz. Abs may not have acted out of vulgar ideological zeal. In fact, he almost certainly didn’t. But without men like Abs, Hitler’s criminal enterprise would have been a great deal less efficient.

  When Abs was bundled into a British jeep after being found at the house of an aristocratic friend in June 1945, he feared the worst. Instead of finding himself in jail, however, he was ushered into one of the few hotels in Hamburg left standing, where his old friend from the City of London, a banker named Charles Dunston, greeted him with great warmth. Dunston had done business in Germany before the war, and rather admired the uniformed strutting of the Nazi movement. “It was like old times,” Dunston recalled about their friendly reunion. “I didn’t ask him about the war. It didn’t matter.” Abs excused his appearance, explaining the lack of proper shaving gear. But he looked just the same to Dunston: “Not a hair out of place. I immediately asked him whether he would help us rebuild the German banking system. Happily he agreed.”17

  Things did not go entirely as planned. The Americans, despite British protestations, still insisted that Abs should be arrested as a suspected war criminal. But once he was locked up in jail, Abs refused to give the British further financial advice unless he were released. It took the British three months to convince the U.S. authorities to let him go.

  Alfried Krupp, who met his American captors in the hall of his country estate in Essen with the words “This is my house, what are you doing here?” was put on trial in Nuremberg. As was the industrialist Friedrich Flick. When the British came to arrest Baron Georg von Schnitzler, director of I.G. Farben, responsible for slave labor in Auschwitz, among other things, he greeted them suavely, dressed in a golfing outfit cut from the finest Scottish tweed. It was such a pleasure, he declared, to be free once more to resume his old friendships with Lord X and Lord Y, as well as the Du Ponts of Wilmington, Delaware. They were such wonderful friends and it had been most painful to be cut off from them in the last few years.18 He was sentenced to five years for “plunder and spoliation.” Schnitzler returned to business and society after one year. Krupp was sentenced to twelve years for slave labor, and served three. Flick, too, was released from the comfort of Landsberg Prison after serving three years of his seven-year sentence. During his time in captivity, Flick had sought and received financial advice from Hermann Abs, who went on to take a leading role in the reconstruction of West Germany, sitting on the boards of the Deutsche Bank, Daimler-Benz, and Lufthansa, among many other companies. When control of the Krupp company was transferred to a foundation in the 1960s, one of the main supervisors of this transaction was Hermann Abs.

  • • •

  AT LEAST SOME OF HITLER’S industrial elite had spent some time in prison, albeit with access to good food and very acceptable wines. Their Japanese colleagues were spared even that fate. The purges in Japan, apart from arrests of suspected war criminals, were meant to be “preventative,” not “punitive.” What they were meant to prevent was the resurgence of “militarism.” The problem was that the Americans were unsure whom to purge, and too much inclined to view Japan as an Oriental version of the Third Reich.

  Who exactly had “misled the people of Japan”? Not the emperor, since SCAP had already decided he was innocent. The military organization that most closely resembled a Nazi-type outfit was the military police, the Kempeitai, much feared by Japanese and non-Japanese alike for its expert use of torture and murder. About forty thousand Kempeitai officers lost their jobs; few Japanese tears were shed over them. Other patriotic organizations, having to do with the Shinto religion, emperor worship, martial arts, or wartime economic planning, may have looked like Nazi organizations, but were not really the same at all. Nor was the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, founded in 1940 as a reformist political umbrella group to mobilize politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals for the war effort. It lacked a coherent ideology, and some of its founders were actually socialists. The War Planning Board included a few left-wing economists too. Even the policy on what to do with officers in the armed forces was unclear. First it was decided that all officers down to the rank of major had to be purged. Surely no one lower than that could have been in a position to mislead anyone. When Major General Richard Marshall, deputy chief of staff, got wind of this, he erupted in a fury. In his experience, Japanese captains and lieutenants had been the worst fanatics. If they were not added to the list, he said, they would mislead the Japanese people again. So they were added to the list as well.19 In short, SCAP’s Americans didn’t have much of a clue.

  If any institution had played a major role in the Japanese war effort, it was the bureaucracy: the Home Ministry, in charge of policing dissent, but also the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (absorbed during the war into the Munitions Ministry), in control of wartime industrial planning. And even the Ministry of Finance, which had a big hand in exploiting the resources of conquered Asian countries. Industrial bureaucrats had been responsible for massive slave labor operations, in the puppet state of Manchukuo, in other parts of China, and in Japan itself, where large numbers of people were put to work in factories and mines, mostly in atrocious conditions. But the U.S. Occupation guidelines for dealing with these cases were vague. Senior figures in
the top ranks were to be removed from office. Lower-ranking figures could remain in their jobs. The purged officials were not supposed to exert any more influence. It was never exactly clear how they could be prevented from meeting their former subordinates for informal consultations. And so they usually did.

  It was on the question of what to do with the business and industrial elites that the U.S. administration was most divided. The Supreme Commander, in his typical pompous manner, intoned: “It was these very persons, born and bred as feudalistic overlords, who held the lives of the majority of Japan’s people in virtual slavery, and who . . . geared the country with both the tools and the will to wage aggressive war.” They, he insisted, had to be “removed from influencing the course of Japan’s future economy.”20

  MacArthur actually said this in 1947, a year after the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (formally the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) had been convened, modeled on the Nuremburg trials. Other Americans took a very different view. The chief prosecutor of the Tokyo tribunal, Joseph B. Keenan, a former director in the U.S. Justice Department, said in that same year: “We have neither been offered nor have we found evidence of instances where prominent business and industrial leaders conspired with anyone to plan or initiate the war.”21

  How the Japanese themselves felt about purges depended on their politics. One letter writer to SCAP wanted him to understand that “99 percent of the Japanese people, at least until now, were absolute fanatics and militarists.”22 Another, more temperate correspondent claimed that the “bureaucrats are unprincipled, to the extent that they even allowed a fascist and a war criminal like . . . the former home minister, to keep his office. Even if there were a liberal among them, he would be timid and passive.”23