After the Reich
Page 47
Meanwhile the camps had become the object of a ghoulish voyeurism. The former prisoners continued to die in droves (200 a day in Mauthausen), while journalists, congressmen, senators and soldiers paraded around the huts. At Buchenwald tours began with the iron hook and the crematorium before visitors saw the macabre collection of tattooed-skin lampshades, shrunken heads and pickled organs apparently put together by Ilse Koch. Dead bodies were left around for days for the visitors to see. A tour of a concentration camp became part of the ‘ritual of exorcism and revelation in the occupied Germany of late April and early May 1945’. Typical was the reaction of Representative John Vorys who visited the Little Camp at Buchenwald and saw what appeared to be ‘absent-minded apes. Many were professors, doctors, writers or generals . . . They had preserved their spirits and had not sunk mentally to the bestial level of their living.’21
The Ministry of Information, as the British called their propaganda ministry, were anxious to make as much as they could from the opportunities offered by Belsen. They brought in the local mayors from Celle and elsewhere and showed them the pit full of bodies. SS men and women stood on the other side of the trench and a German-speaking officer read out an indictment. Wyand’s cameramen recorded the moment. One of the mayors wept, another was sick.22
The Fragebogen and Denazification
The Fragebogen
The Americans were hell-bent on purging the Nazi evil from the German body politic. Their policy for Germany was constructed on the adamantine plinth of JCS 1067, Clause 6 of which deemed the foremost requirement to be denazification as a punitive measure. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had drawn up the document in wartime, but it had received the support of Roosevelt, who was wallowing in Teutonophobia. As ever, the British limped after the Americans. The French and the Russians went their own ways.23 With its desire to impose a ‘peace of punishment’, JCS 1067 was Morgenthau’s last legitimate child and survived long after Truman formally relinquished the Plan. It proposed to tear down, rather than rebuild, and to help Germans only when it was necessary to avoid disease or disorder. JCS 1067 was responsible for the inhumane approach of the Americans and to some extent had a knock-on effect on the British in the first months of occupation. There were modifications, however, in that JCS 1067 allowed for some industrial activity in the conquered nation. To surrender to the Americans - as most Germans actively strove to do - was ‘a lottery ticket’. At best you might be released before all the other POWs, at worst you might die in the Rhine Meadow mud. JCS 1067 policy was largely overturned by Clay, who was ‘very nearly an independent sovereign’ in his German house. Clay rapidly came round to the idea that the best way to succeed was to allow the Germans to govern themselves.24
The chief instruments of denazification were the Fragebogen or questionnaires. They were also the first attempts on the part of the Americans to quantify National Socialism and exclude former Nazis from public life. One American writer questioned the legal foundation of denazification, calling it a ‘Nazi or communist concept of jurisprudence’.25 As many as thirteen million forms were printed and handed out either to those with dubious pasts or to Germans who were looking for employment. The number corresponded roughly to the number of Pgs. Ursula von Kardorff was subjected to a prototype of the Fragebogen as early as 7 May 1945, the day the Germans capitulated. Captain Herrell, the commandant in Günzburg, brought out something that looked like a book: he wanted to know if the women had been in the Party or the Frauenschaft (Nazi women’s league). She hadn’t known there were so many organisations, and the officer reminded her of the Gestapo.26
Margret Boveri got her first glimpse of the form on 5 June 1945, and thought the vetting system of her new lords and masters much more complicated that the Nazi one. The questionnaire consisted of twelve pages and 133 questions. It had been handed out to a crowd of doctors to determine if they had belonged to Nazi organisations. If they had, they were banned from practice. Ruth Friedrich saw the form at the same time. It asked a number of questions she could no longer answer with any certainty: how she voted in 1932, the numbers of her bank and post office accounts as well as those of close relations: ‘Is one supposed to commit perjury because one has a bad memory?’27
Some of their Allied tormenters had sympathy for the Germans’ wounded pride. Stern read through the Fragebogen and was struck by its ‘peculiar German’. He ‘wondered how on earth . . . [he] would answer some of these vague, some unintentionally humorous queries’. The Allies wanted to know, for example, whether the bombing had affected the interviewee’s health, work or sleep. Information was demanded about insurance and indemnity claims, and more questions about sewage, electricity and drainage. At a house in Munich’s Planetta Strasse, Stern interviewed a thirteen-year-old girl and an eighty-eight-year-old man who was ‘quite gaga’. One blind man came to the interview accompanied by his wife, who was almost completely deaf, an affliction she shared with her husband. Stern discovered that many Germans had been temporarily deafened by the bombing. The names had been drawn at random, ‘à la Gallup’.28 The idea that all Germans were to be questioned in this way, even those who had been in concentration camps, provoked another outburst of fury from Kurt Schumacher: ‘we want a just and objective examination of the facts’, he said in Kiel in the autumn of 1945.29
Ursula von Kardorff had to wait until the end of July. She was outraged by the 148 (sic) questions asked: how much you weighed, scars, distinguishing features, religion (and whether you had quit the Church), titles of nobility, earnings, whether you had worked in an occupied territory. The question about scars was to determine whether you had been a member of one of the wicked duelling fraternities, but they had been banned by Hitler. She found the question about how she had voted particularly absurd: firstly because it was so easy to lie and secondly because Germans were being told that the secret ballot was one of the foundation stones of democracy. In the end they found the form so comic that it put them all in a good mood: ‘in the old days it was having a Jewish grandmother that caused problems, now it is having a noble one. And what has the colour of my eyes got do with my political opinions?’30
No one escaped. Jünger came home in early September 1945 to find one on his desk. It was marked with the warning ‘False information will result in prosecution by the courts of the military government.’31 Had he known that Bishop Graf Galen, whose sermons had been dropped from British aircraft as propaganda, was also required to fill in the form, he might have felt relieved.32 In Jünger’s literary world, anyone who did not leave and take up residence abroad like the famous Thomas Mann was treated with the utmost suspicion by the Western Allies. One case was Erich Kästner, author of Emil and the Detectives. He had been banned from writing under the Third Reich, but that cut no ice with the interrogators. 33 One of the most bizarre examples of the American insistence on the Fragebogen was when Emmy Göring was required to fill one in. She, her daughter and her sister were all in Straubing Prison at the time. Her husband was awaiting trial at Nuremberg.
One of the questions was: ‘Did you have a relative or a close friend in the Party with a high position in the Third Reich?’
‘Yes, my husband, Hermann Göring,’ I wrote.
‘What post did he have?’
‘He was not in the SS. But the SA. He was Reichsmarschall, master huntsman, Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe . . .’
I tried to remember his other titles and ended up by sighing.
‘Why are you sighing like that?’ asked an American.
‘I can’t remember my husband’s titles any more.’
‘Don’t worry. Just write: Hermann Göring. We’ve got enough information on him already.’34
The nature of the questions on the form gave a fair indication of the sort of things (besides Nazism) that were offensive to the Allied Military Government. One thing they wanted to know was whether the interviewee had ever hoped for a German victory. Margret Boveri was not slow to point out that in other countries to hope for defeat would
be classically construed as treason. After May 1945 it was quite wrong to believe in German victory, but was it so bad in 1939, or 1940? It recalled the line of Talleyrand, who said treason was a question of dates.35
The question that had incensed Ursula von Kardorff was nobility, as enshrined in Question 18. The captain in Jettingen showed her a memorandum in which American soldiers were told how to sniff out a wicked Junker: find out if he had a potato schnapps distillery on his estate. The form required you to state whether you or your wife, your father, mother, wife’s father and mother, or either of your grandparents had belonged to an ennobled family. Antiquity of lineage was clearly synonymous with political unreliability and the Junkers in particular were accused of having helped in Hitler’s rise to power; and yet, of the people who had taken active steps to dispose of Hitler and his regime - particularly on 20 July 1944 - a very high proportion had been nobles, Junkers in particular. In the winter of 1945-6 the supposition that nobility and Nazi were in some way at one contributed to the lack of fuel. As an American interrogator told John Dos Passos, all the foresters had been sacked because of Question 18: ‘von This and von That, big time Nazis, every one’. The Fragebogen was the absolute authority, the litmus test. Another officer told Dos Passos ‘It’s the Fragebogen. The Fragebogen is the best thing in Germany . . . If they get past this, they can hold any job they want.’36
Question 25 was concerned with membership of a student corps. The author of the Fragebogen was possibly unaware that the famous student Burschenschaften had been suspended at the end of 1935 and not revived until after 1945. The first nail in their coffin had been a drunken student at Heidelberg who had rung Hitler’s adjutant to ask him to ask the Führer the correct way to eat asparagus. Hitler was not amused. Not only did pranks of this sort thenceforth go under the name of ‘Spargelessen’ or asparagus eating, all secret meetings of old members of the fraternities became de facto acts of opposition. Later on they proved recruiting grounds for the July Plotters.37
The Allies were obsessed with the need to stamp out ‘militarism’, and any connection with the armed forces was held against the supplicant. A joke ran round that one of the questions on the form was ‘Did you play with toy soldiers as a child? If so, what regiment?’38 The real Question 32 also went wide of the mark. It demanded to know if the applicant had been a member of the General Staff. The German staff officer, with carmine stripes on his trousers, was the intellectual of the army. In 1939 there were 824 of them, of whom 600 served in staff positions. Of these 359 were dead by 1945: 149 had been killed in action, 10 had died of natural causes and 143 were missing. There had been sixteen suicides, mostly in the aftermath of the July Plot, while another twenty-four had been executed for their part in the conspiracy. All in all some sixty staff officers were arrested as a result of the attempt on Hitler’s life - that is, 10 per cent. The names included Stauffenberg and Colonel Merz von Quirnheim who both died on the night, together with Colonel General Beck. Others who were executed were Field Marshal von Witzleben and Generals von Stülpnagel, Olbricht and Hoepner. General Staff officers such as the former army chiefs Hammerstein and Fritsch had also been opponents of Hitler and his war plans.39 The General Staff officer was liable to immediate arrest. He was seen as the symbol of German militarism, and the Western Allies did not want his expertise put at the disposal of the Soviets. On 22 June Radio Hamburg broadcast a speech by Bernard Montgomery saying that all General Staff officers would be imprisoned for life in special camps outside Germany.40
The problem remained that it was only once the properly completed questionnaire had been returned and vetted that a German could return to normal life. Until then he was in a sort of purgatory that left him outside the law. If you wanted to get on, you faced the ‘inquisition’ and filled in the form with its ‘sometimes stupid questions’, otherwise you were out of work and deprived of ration tickets. If you were not careful, you were declared a war criminal to boot.41
Denazification
The American policy was to locate the least objectionable German and give him the work, but insufficient zeal in denazification could still result in important heads falling. Membership of any Nazi Party-affiliated institution was enough to have you banned from office. The American-appointed minister president of Bavaria, Fritz Schäffer, was a known anti-Nazi, but the Americans sacked him because he did not hate all Nazis, and allowed some of them to figure in his administration. Another who fell from grace was General Patton, who had the temerity - indeed folly - to say that the ‘Nazi thing is just like a Democrat-Republican election fight’. He was relieved of his command. Elsewhere Patton’s approach had been attractively pragmatic: ‘we shall need these Germans’ was his line, and it turned out to be prophetic.42 The future German president Theodor Heuss urged restraint. He thought that only 10 to 15 per cent of Nazis were in any way dangerous, and that the Americans were too strict: ‘only he who has lived twelve years under the Nazi terror can judge how enormous this pressure was and how much heroism and political insight were required to resist it’.43 All hints of what Germany had been over the previous twelve years were to be expunged. In one town hall Dos Passos noted the gaps where the pictures of past mayors had been hung. When he asked why, he was told they wore the Geflügel (the fowl): the Nazi Party badge.44
The right way to denazify Germany was not generally agreed between East and West, and even the Western Allies had their fall-outs. The British were lukewarm, but in their sector of Berlin there was a little show of strength. One of George Clare’s first experiences in the city was interpreting for a British officer who was determined to keep a fire chief in office despite his Nazi past. He wanted efficient firemen, and he couldn’t give a damn about the man’s past. The only problem was that the other firemen were social democrats who had been persecuted by the Nazis and for that reason would not tolerate having one in their midst.45 In the Ruhr all the mining engineers were dismissed as Nazis. Then there were explosions that claimed hundreds of lives - including British - and General Templer decided that Military Government had been foolish.46
Clare’s office might have been feared by Berlin Nazis, but in general no one worried too much about the British, and visitors to their zone reported pro-Nazi graffiti they did not see elsewhere. The British attitude was allegedly not to disturb the status quo and to use re-education where possible. The results were not deemed successful in retrospect.47 The figures, however, do not always bear this out. By September 1946 there were 66,500 Nazis interned in the American Zone, and 70,000 in the British.48 In Nordrhein-Westfalen alone two and a half million cases were examined. The mill ground very fine and many of these men, and some women, were kept under lock and key and in terrible conditions for years. In general, however, they were either released at the end, or given a trifling punishment. The British had their own problems at home to worry about. Denazification was hardly their top priority. Around 80 per cent of Nazis were exonerated. By that time even the Americans had lost their enthusiasm and there were only 200 of them working in Public Safety, assisted by around thirty-five foreigners. They could not hope to be able to sift the evidence and they had no co-operation from the Russians whatsoever.49
The Russians were firm believers in collective guilt and any German was liable for punishment, even death. They set the Germans to work and gave them as little as they could to sustain life. They investigated half a million cases in their zone, around 3 per cent of the population, and, as in Austria, the Pgs were not allowed to vote in the various elections held in 1946. By 1948 they too had lost interest and ended the purge.50 The French attitude lay somewhere between the British and the Russians: it was less a question of guilt than ‘should this man play a role in public life or should he not?’51
One of the problems facing the Allies was the scale of the work before them. With twelve million Pgs in their midst it became clear after a while that their original ferocity would be tempered with time and that a lot of small fry would swim free. The Germans, for
their part, were more used to the methods used by the Gestapo or the NKVD and assumed that, once caught, they were for the high jump. Allied Military Courts, on the other hand, were snowed under with Nazis waiting to know their fates.52
Denazification was a fact of life for all Germans, even dead ones who had been hanged for their part in the plot to kill Hitler. In 1949 Charlotte von der Schulenburg had yet to receive her widow’s pension and was having difficulty providing for her children by Fritz-Dietlof. The problem was that her husband had been an early member of the Party, having joined in 1932, a fact that ‘was clearly more important than anything that he did afterwards’.53 Four years after the end of the war Charlotte had to go before a tribunal in Hanover to fight her late husband’s corner.
She sat on a bench outside the court waiting for her case to be called. Next to her were Jews and gypsies seeking recognition as victims of the Nazi state. She defended her husband’s memory bravely, clutching telegrams from Annedore Leber and Gustav Dahrendorf, but the problem was that a Prussian bureaucrat who had been condemned to death, in the same way as a common murderer, could not expect a pension for his wife. The law had to be changed before Charlotte could have her pension. She did not receive any money until 1952, and that was due to her as the widow of a Third Reich Regierungspräsident - the president of an administrative district.54