The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  In 1946, Abram undertook a mission to scour the Allied prisons in Germany for men “of the predictable type” ready to turn their allegiance from Hitler to Christ, and thus, in Abram’s thinking, America. In later years, Abram would say he had gone at the U.S. State Department’s request, and while it’s true that the State Department did send Abram and provide any support he needed, it was Abram who initiated the trip, writing to Undersecretary of State Major John H. Hildring that the men of the Senate and House prayer groups had insisted that Abram carry “the Idea” to defeated Germany. Abram sailed on the Queen Mary in June, launched a prayer cell of Swiss bankers in Zurich, and flew from Frankfurt to Berlin on the private plane of General Joseph T. McNarney, commander in chief of the U.S. Forces of Occupation, to meet with General Lucius D. Clay, soon to take over from Eisenhower as military governor. Everywhere, he met with the “Christian forces of Germany”—those who saw Germany’s suffering as penance for its embrace of the totalitarianism of a man rather than that of God. He found them all weeping, he wrote his wife, crying for their Führer, for the thousand-year Reich in the grave at age twelve, for the dead and the missing and the blank-eyed boys who had stumbled home in retreat from the Russians. In the West he wept with them; in East Berlin, he prayed with “secret cells” of Christians determined to overthrow communism. Even in the West, he believed, “atheistic devotees” of subversion—that is, those with strong anti-Nazi records, concentration camp survivors—had been elevated by an American military government blind to the threat posed by its eastern ally. “Nominal membership” in the Nazi Party was being held against good Christians with the necessary experience to govern. A coalition of leading German churchmen begged him to intervene, asking only that none but Christians be given authority.21

  In Frankfurt Abram, with the churchmen and the pillars of the Third Reich to whom they introduced him, “the most intelligent, honest and reliable people of Germany,” settled on a plan. They would provide Abram with a list of imprisoned men, “war criminals” according to the view of a certain un-Christian “element” among the Allies. Abram’s friends in the military government and back home in Washington would certify them as “men not only to be released but to be used, according to their ability in the tremendous task of reconstruction.” That September, U.S. secretary of state Jimmy Byrnes, under the advice of General Clay, delivered in Stuttgart a world-changing address, “Restatement of Policy on Germany.” The burden of reparations would be lessened, Germany would be allowed to keep more of its industrial base, and the purge of National Socialism would soon come to an end: “It never was the intention of the American Government to deny to the German people the right to manage their own internal affairs as soon as they were able to do so in a democratic way.”22

  In Frankfurt, Abram claimed, God personally revealed to Abram a key man to quietly help manage the internal affairs of Germany’s elite: Dr. Otto Fricke, an austere German churchman with an uncomfortable past. “You are God’s man for this hour in Germany,” Abram told him.23 Had Abram asked about Fricke’s role in Germany’s previous hour, Fricke would have begged off explaining his activities during the Third Reich. As a radio preacher, he’d been recruited by Goebbels to propagandize, charged with explaining to the German people the decadence of jazz. “Terrible disharmonies,” he warned. He presented as evidence of moral degeneracy the jazz standard “Dinah.”24

  Dinah,

  Is there anyone finer

  In the state of Carolina?

  If there is and you know her,

  Show her!

  History does not know if the recording Fricke played for a nation of secretly thrilled Aryans—the German love affair with jazz predated the nation’s fetish for Hitlerian opera—was of Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, or a bare-chested, shimmying Josephine Baker.

  Abram would not have asked.

  He never asked.

  IF WE ARE to understand the ease with which former Nazis and fascist sympathizers were born again as Christian Cold Warriors, we must consider for a moment the meaning of memory within the new religion—Christ at its center, no earthly Führer to serve—offered up by the Americans. And we must remember that this religion, a “spiritual Marshall Plan,” as Wallace E. Haines, Abram’s chief American representative in Europe, called it in a speech delivered at one of King Paul of Greece’s palaces, was new not just to the former fascists who received it but to the Americans who gave it, transformed by the sight of suffering. Not of the Jews, invisible to Abram’s men. Not of the Japanese—a missionary wrote Abram dozens of letters from the radioactive ruins, but he never received a reply. It was to Germany, the front line of the Cold War, that Abram’s heart turned; Germany that raised for American fundamentalism the question of theodicy: if God is both good and all-powerful, why does he permit the suffering of innocents? That is a question with which all faiths must struggle—or learn to ignore.

  Abram’s German brethren chose the latter path. In Germany, after the war, sleep. Hunger and terrible labor, yes, months and then years of clearing rubble, bent-back human chains of men and women and children carting away pieces of the country in which they once lived brick by brick. But it was starving, red-eyed slumbering work, a dead sleep without dreams. No one could afford dreams. No one wanted history, the past translated by the night-mind into a landscape of guilt and shame. In Nuremberg, a little girl asked her mother where the Jews of “Jew Street” are. Hush. There are none, darling, there never were. In Frankfurt a group of American officers, concentration camp survivors, and the kind of Germans Abram considered “subversive” gathered in a small theater standing among ruins on a darkened side street and screened a twenty-minute film they were considering showing to the German people. More bodies, many more bodies, great piles of them, and gold, buckets of gold teeth, and then more bodies, joyful, cheering, marching Germans at torch-lit rallies, and a voice-over in German, “You remember, I was there, you were there…” The lights came up in the theater, and the Americans and the German subversives promised one another, “This we will show to every adult German. We will make attendance compulsory.” The film played in every theater; but in the dark, Germany shut its eyes, literally, millions squeezing theirs shut until the short film was over and the main feature came up, a romance, a comedy, a subtitled Western. Anything but the German past.25

  “At times,” a German named Hans Kempe wrote Abram, “there are hours when I have to lie on the floor, as I can go no further.” Kempe ran a camp for 500 German men displaced by the war, men to whom Abram in America was drawn. They were once so strong and now so broken. Kempe sent Abram stories: one man, a former government official—a Nazi official, but what does that mean anymore?—came to Kempe and told him he could no longer believe in a God who would allow Germany to suffer.

  Their suffering was sweet. They had no fat and no meat, Kempe reported, but they’d gotten hold of sugar. That was their food. Kempe worked fourteen hours, eating sugar, and then collapsed. He lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling. There angels gathered. Angels and demons, “streams of grace” and a monster he called Hiob, sent by Satan to talk with him. Kempe rose. The men needed a mirror for shaving. This became his mission. He dispatched two to beg for one, and they returned with one and perhaps the men gathered round and stared at their reflections, Kempe staring at them staring. “Want, death, suffering, griefs and cares. Wherever I go, it is always the same.” He lay on his floor, stared at his ceiling, waited for Hiob. He heard a storm coming. His men thought it had passed, but he knew it was coming. They were sleeping, and they must open their eyes, not to the past, which must be forgotten—put a mirror between yourself and history—but to the future. “Whoever does not already realize that we are at the midnight hour will awake too late,” he wrote Abram. “The storm bells ring loudly.”26

  George Kennan heard them in Moscow. In 1946, the American diplomat padded through the embassy on a cold Russian winter night and sent his “Long Telegram” to Washington, “an eighteenth century P
rotestant sermon,” he’d call it, a warning, a prophecy, a prescription, the language of diplomacy channeling the spirit of Edwards: we are as spiders, dangling over the abyss; the flames are rising. The Soviet Union was greater than the men in Washington imagine. They could not see what Kennan saw, could not imagine what he imagined, when he lay in his bed at night, staring at his ceiling. The storm bells rang loudly in his ears, and so he rang them for Washington. “Containment,” he declared, a great clanging word. “Counterforce.” The bell cracks. This, say the history books, was the beginning of the Cold War.27

  But for Abram it had already started, and Kempe’s demons and bells were simply confirmation of the crisis he believed had long been coming, the notorious “B” of his nightmares now writ large. For Abram the Cold War began the moment Germany’s defeat was certain. By the time Kennan published the new creed of containment, under the pseudonym “X,” the first great public statement of American strategy, the American vision for the coming decades, Abram had already been gathering his forces.

  “The demand for this hour is for America to awake,” declared one of his many manifestos, a 1945 agenda for a meeting of government officials Abram had organized. “Awake”—as if wartime mobilization had been nothing but a bleary-eyed prayer before morning coffee. “With faith in God and confidence in the Christian people of America, the undersigned, representing various national agencies, believe that the time has come when we should unite our forces in an effort to promote such an awakening.” They would do so by establishing prayer cells first in every congressional district in the country and then overseas.28 Germany, on the front lines, must awaken, not to its past, to its destiny. Even in 1945, when “destiny” was dust in the German rubble, Abram believed that Germany still had one. And Germany’s destiny, he was certain, was in the hands of the Americans.

  ONLY ONCE, EVER so delicately, would Abram raise the subject of Germany’s recent unpleasantness. In 1948, Fricke wrote to Abram that he would be sending him a man named Gustav Adolf Gedat, a Lutheran pastor who had been a popular writer before World War II. Gedat was the honorary president of the German YMCA, an enthusiast for “boys’ work,” as it was called. He was a towering man, his shoulders sharp and so broad that his hairless head looked like a boiled egg made to stand on its narrow end between them. He believed as a matter of principle in big grins and bonhomie, but his face was made for sternness and his soul for discipline; the toothy, lipless grimace that emerges in photographs from his succession of chins calls to mind a malevolent giant in a nursery rhyme. At war’s end, Gedat was a staatsfiend, declared an enemy of the Nazi regime, and on this basis he built a brilliant postwar career, not to mention a castle in the Black Forest for his boys’ work, reconstructed with funds from American backers eager to support “good Germans.”29

  Maybe that’s what Gedat had become. But even Abram, determined to believe in the goodness of all men granted status by Jesus, wondered otherwise. “We have had some negative reports,” Abram wrote Fricke about Gedat in a letter marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” “because of his former Nazi connections and publications.” Abram did not care to know details one way or the other. Rather, he wanted to know if Gedat’s past would interfere with his work for the organization Abram had by then rechristened the International Council for Christian Leadership.

  “Dear Brother Vereide,” responded Fricke, an unusually intimate greeting for the German pastor. He thanked Abram for arranging the attendance of John J. McCloy, the high commissioner of the American Military Occupation, at Fricke’s most recent gathering of “really leading people.” But, he went on, he could not tolerate such an inquisition. Gedat “did what we all tried to do in 1933 and ’34,” he wrote, “find a synthesis between the new party and Christianity.” For this, other German churchmen, “willing to be the tools of Satan,” had denounced Gedat as a Nazi. Fricke’s “tools of Satan” would have included the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer had he survived, but such Christian resistance to Nazism meant nothing to Fricke. The truth, he argued, was that Gedat was a victim—of those unwilling to forget the past. “Even if Gedat had been a Nazi—which he has not been—and if he saw his failures, let us say only in 1945, and if he repented, would there not be the way of forgiveness from God and men?”

  Is this a clue to the actual date of Gedat’s repentance? In 1935, apparently still searching for synthesis, Gedat gave a speech in which he declared that “God ordered hunters to chase Jews to where God wants them.” Two years previous, he had welcomed the new regime as the kind of full-strength disinfectant needed to rid Germany of “materialism,” a concern that plagued him well into his postwar years. Gedat may have hoped that the Christian wing of National Socialism would triumph over its pagan mirror image.30 When it did not—the two strands of fascism remained intertwined throughout Hitler’s regime—Gedat turned against Hitler as a false prophet, a man bent on usurping Christ’s rightful place at the head of the nation. Gedat took his totalitarianism seriously, could not stand to see it reduced in the personality of this uncouth little Austrian. He did not believe the problem with Jews was racial. It was biblical. He did not believe in a master race; he believed in a master class of key men from all nations. For this, Hitler banned him from speaking and even imprisoned him, and then “materialists” shadowed him with accusations. Yes, Gedat was a victim.

  Would Abram join the materialists? Fricke wanted to know. Was Abram consumed by the “spirit of vengeance,” the “spirit of Morgenthau,” as Germans had taken to calling the tough policies of the Jewish American secretary of the treasury, the strongest advocate of denazification? Germans like Fricke struck a delicate balance with such implicit accusations. Allied justice equaled vengeance, they suggested, and vengeance was the stuff of the Old Testament. Putting their meaning more plainly would have been disastrous; even Abram would have recoiled, in 1948, from a German who blamed the Jews for his current troubles. Abram preferred the positive approach, the New Testament, New World, American method: reinvention. He called it reconciliation. To argue for anything else, he’d insist—to demand justice—was un-Christian.

  What did Morgenthau really want? No more than accountability. Not every German was a “willing executioner,” as the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen puts it—indeed, many were themselves executed—but the Third Reich was not something imposed on an innocent German nation, as Abram and other American fundamentalists believed, but something it had brought about.

  “It should be brought home to the Germans,” declared a directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered to Eisenhower in April 1945, “that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance has destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves. Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation.”31

  This attitude, believed millions of Germans, was the true crime against humanity. They had said they were sorry; would the Americans behave like Bolsheviks and Slavs—purveyors of “Asiatic nihilism,” as one of Fricke’s political allies wrote Abram—and refuse to forgive? “The world is playing a very dangerous game with the German people,” wrote Fricke, “if that repentance is not accepted.”32

  Abram replied immediately. The charges against Gedat had come from the liberal Federal Council of Churches. Not worth a dime. “I responded by pointing out how natural it would be for a man in Germany to look with hope to any aggressive leadership that could unite the forces against the Communistic infiltration…I am thrilled with the progress that is being made in Germany.”33

  GEDAT WAS AMONG the least tainted of the men that Abram and Fricke, and later Gedat himself, gathered into prayer cells to help forge the new West German state. But they were repentant men, this they testified to at every session. Repentant for what? It was hard to say. Every one of them claimed to have suffered during the war years. Men such as Hermann J. Abs, “Hitler’s banker” and a vice president of Abr
am’s International Christian Leadership (ICL), German division; Gustav Schmelz, a manufacturer of chemical weapons; Paul Rohrbach, the hypernationalist ideologue whose conflation of Germany with Christianity, and most of Europe with Germany, had inspired the Nazis to understand their war-hunger as divine; and General Hans Speidel, who had accepted the surrender of Paris on behalf of the Führer in 1940, insisted that he had never believed Hitler, had been forced into his arms by the Red Menace, had regretted the unfortunate alliance with such a vulgar fool, a disgrace to God’s true plan for Germany. They had done nothing wrong; they, too, if one gave it some thought, were victims.

  Perhaps some of them were. That is one of the many clever strategies of fascism: persecution belongs to the powerful, according to its rules, both to dole out and to claim as the honor due martyrs. Abram did not ask questions; he simply took out his washcloth and got busy with the blood of the lamb. He scrubbed his “new men” clean. Did it work? Abs, “Hitler’s banker,” became “Adenauer’s banker,” a key figure in the West German government’s financial resurrection. Schmelz kept his factory. Rohrbach wrote on, authoring tributes to Abram’s International Christian Leadership in the Frankfurter Allgemeine.