There was a joke doing the rounds (a variant of it is still told in Vienna): a man comes into a police station and tells the officer that he wishes to register as a Nazi. The policeman replies that he should have done that a year and a half ago. The man tells the policeman, ‘Eighteen months ago I wasn’t a Nazi!’
Dos Passos cites an interview with an American lieutenant whose business it was to interrogate Nazis. ‘My people are Jewish . . . so don’t think I’m not bitter against the Krauts. I’m for shooting the war criminals where we can prove they are guilty and getting it over with. But for God’s sake, tell me what we are trying to do?’ The lieutenant continued, ‘Hatred is like a fire. You’ve got to put it out. I’ve been interrogating German officers for the War Crimes Commission and when I find them half-starved to death right in our own PW cages and being treated like you wouldn’t treat a dog, I ask myself some questions . . . Brutality is more contagious than typhus and a hell of a lot more difficult to stamp out . . .’ He mentioned Patton and his habit of putting his foot in it, but he clearly approved. ‘All those directives about don’t coddle the German have thrown open the gates for every criminal tendency we’ve got in us.’55 The American hatred for the Germans continued to astound many people. Dos Passos met an eastern European in Berlin who spoke to him in French. The man asked him, ‘why do you Americans feel this desire for vengeance? I can understand it in the Russians, who suffered fearful injuries, but your cities were not laid waste, your wives and children were not starved and murdered.’ Dos Passos did not have an answer.56
For Zuckmayer there was a fundamental error behind the denazification policy: it failed to create a belief in a state of law because it failed to differentiate between the innocent and the guilty. The ideal liberation should have come about through a revolution within Germany. It was not going to be possible to clean up Germany by pushing a large number of its citizens before the courts. There were too many cases, and the witnesses were in many instances unreliable, as they knew they would come under the microscope themselves and the most important thing was to deny everything. The accused were protected - there was evidence of nepotism and intimidation. Denunciations were frequently made out of sheer bloody-mindedness and there were too few judges and lawyers around who were free from guilt.
The courts themselves had a hopeless task. In one Bavarian district Zuckmayer was told there were 11,850 former Nazis who were due to be examined by the Spruchkammer. The president of the chamber estimated that it was going to take between eleven and twelve years to acquit the work. In Stuttgart there were around 80,000 cases. Zuckmayer saw a danger of renazification as the suspects were forced to mark time before their cases came up for review. He was for a wide-ranging amnesty for the small fry, who were implicated in no particular crime other than opportunism or ideological commitment.
Zuckmayer gives an example of a minor case - a midwife who had her husband sent to Dachau for two years because he had had an affair with a young girl in the factory where he worked. He later threw a bust of her beloved Adolf out of the window, enabling her to denounce him. When her case came up the husband made a plea in mitigation. She had helped non-Aryans and delivered their children without question and had even waived payment in certain cases. She was a good midwife and performed a service to society. If she had committed a crime it was out of passion. She had also been sufficiently punished: she had lost the man she loved because of the Hitler bust. The judge accepted the plea, and let her off with a fine, and allowed her to continue working as a midwife.57
Franz von Papen, a former chancellor who had become a Nazi minister and ambassador, had never been a member of the Party. He had been acquitted at Nuremberg. A new trial was arranged for January 1947. He was to face a panel of seven judges: two Social Democrat lawyers and five members of democratic parties. The seven included two Jews. Bavaria’s minister for denazification called on the court to sentence Papen to ten years’ hard labour on the basis of his having profited from Nazism. Papen was given eight. His property was confiscated and he was deprived of his civic rights.58 Schacht, who was tried at Nuremberg alongside Papen, had an ingenious way of wriggling out of responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. A paper was produced that had been written at the time of the takeover of the Austrian National Bank by the Reichsbank, of which he was then president. It was a hymn of praise to the God-given Führer written by none other than Schacht. The banker was asked to comment: how did he find it? ‘I find it excellent!’ said Schacht. He told the tribunal what clever ‘deception’ (Tarnung) it was.59
The wives of the leading Nazis were put through a predictably humiliating trial. After leaving Straubing Prison, Emmy Göring was living in a hut near her husband’s castle at Veldenstein in Franconia. She was suffering from sciatica and had a high fever. She was nonetheless incarcerated in a rat-infested prison for two weeks along with the wives of Hess, Funk and Baldur von Schirach. The brides of Speer, Dönitz, Neurath and Raeder, on the other hand, were spared this indignity, although Speer’s wife Margarete was closer to Hitler than any of them, with the exception of Henriette von Schirach who was the daughter of his hard-drinking court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. As it was, Frau Göring was able to muster a good deal of testimony from Jews that she had helped them over the years, even if she clearly disappointed the president of the tribunal by failing to denounce her dead husband. She was classified ‘Group 2’ and allowed to return to her hovel.60
Another high-profile case was the English-born daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, Winifred. There was no doubt that ‘Winnie’ was besotted with her ‘Wolf’ - as she and her four children called Hitler - but after 1940 the Führer had avoided her. One of her grandchildren has even gone so far as to say that she had wanted to marry Hitler, and that with her at his side there would have been no war.61 Hitler kept away from Bayreuth, although he continued to see three of the four Wagner children (the eldest girl, Friedelind, emigrated to Switzerland and the United States, where she fanned the flames against her mother) and exempted the first son, Wieland, from military service as the heir to Bayreuth.
The Wagners all had questions to answer. Verena’s husband Bodo Lafferenz had been in charge of the Kraft durch Freude Nazi leisure organisation, and as such had held high rank in the SS. He was shipped off to an internment camp in Freiburg. Wolfgang had not been a Party member and could take refuge behind that fact, even if he had been entertained by Hitler and had been as close to him as the others. Party member Wieland had made himself scarce at the Americans’ approach, hiding in the French Zone until the coast was clear. He had been administering the town’s ‘concentration camp’ - an outside station of the more notorious Flossenbürg housing a few score inmates who were involved in technical research for the SS. He never mentioned his closeness to the regime in his remaining years, and set himself up as a hero of a debunking, cultural revolution in Bayreuth. His designs were meant to clear his grandfather’s operas of all their nationalist trappings, and as such they represent a major instance of the cultural and artistic purge of the arts that followed the Second World War. The Spruchkammer branded Wieland a ‘fellow traveller’. His mother took the rap.
The Americans entered Bayreuth after reducing a third of the town to rubble - including much of Wagner’s home, Wahnfried, though not the house of the master’s son, Siegfried, which had been called the Führerbau because it was made over to Hitler for his use during his visits to the festival. The Americans moved into the opera house on the Green Hill and created havoc playing jazz on Wagner’s and Liszt’s pianos. Winifred insisted that most of the damage was done by ‘coloured’ American GIs, who looted the theatre and shot up the sets with their revolvers. They also amused themselves by dressing up in the operatic costumes. Another story has it that German refugees stole the costumes, and for miles around you could see people fleeing Bayreuth dressed as characters from Wagner operas. The American authorities promptly banned the playing of Wagner’s music.62
Winifred took on
the role of the unrepentant Nazi, although she had performed numerous acts of intercession with the Party to save the lives of Jews and others who had fallen foul of the regime. Almost the first ‘Americans’ she received were Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, and Curt Riess, reporting for the army newspaper, the Stars and Stripes. The two Germans in American uniform were getting used to hearing that no one had been aware of the atrocities carried out by the regime, and that everyone had been against Hitler and was proud to possess a ‘“non-Aryan” granny’. Winifred therefore came as a surprise. First of all she insisted on speaking English to the freshly baked Americans - and was rather more proficient than they were. She made no bones about her friendship with Hitler. She praised his charm, his sense of humour and his good looks. This came from the heart, although she later admitted that she could not resist the temptation to rile the Germans in their borrowed clothes. Mann retired bruised.
The interview brought Winifred Wagner new fame. More reporters pitched up at her house in the Fichtelgebirge. Some wanted to know if she had slept with Hitler. She said no. She told them that Hitler had been misled by Bormann. She clearly possessed a ‘stuff and nonsense’ charm, and had seen enough of the Third Reich and its puffed-up officials to know how to deal with a few army interrogators. With time she won the conquerors round. One reason was her command of English, which made her an important source of information for the occupying forces.63
Meanwhile Thomas Mann had weighed in from his exile in America, publishing his reasons for not returning to Germany. He attacked those who had continued to pursue an artistic life under Hitler. One who felt that he was being indicted was Emil Preetorius, who had designed some of the most famous sets for Bayreuth, and whose anti-Nazi views and friendship with Jews had not only been well known but had put him in danger. Mann gave no credence to the idea of ‘inner emigration’ as expounded by Preetorius and others. Preetorius’s message to Mann was ‘My dear friend, you have no idea of the sorcery of terror.’ It was an argument forcefully put forward by Furtwängler when he asked Mann why he felt that Germans should have been deprived of the solace of Beethoven during the years of the Third Reich.64
Furtwängler’s humiliation began on 11 December 1946 in the Spruchkammer in the Schlüterstrasse in Berlin. This was run by the British major Kaye Sely as head of the Information Services Control Intelligence Section. His attitude to denazification was generally more indulgent than that of most gentiles, but it was not going to help Furtwängler much. The first session of the Spruchkammer lasted for five hours before it was adjourned so that more witnesses could be called. Heinz Tietjen, who had abandoned his lover Winifred Wagner to her fate, once again played a questionable role. Now he attempted to cover up for his intrigues at the Lindenoper. He had had enough of the vain Furtwängler and sought to promote the equally vain but considerably more ambitious Karajan. He became Goebbels’s stooge in his campaign to discredit the older conductor. 65 Furtwängler meanwhile expressed his astonishment at his treatment considering that he was the only member of the musical establishment to have actively opposed Hitler.cx
In words reminiscent of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Furtwängler said, ‘You have to work with the regime in order to work against it . . . Emigration would have been a more comfortable solution in any case.’ The Western Allies had plenty of dirt to throw at the conductor. Much of it centred on the critic Edwin von der Nüll, who had made unflattering comparisons between Furtwängler and Karajan, and whom the former had contrived to have sent to the front, where he perished. Nüll had been a pawn of Goebbels. Furtwängler’s defence had been limp, and the conclusion of the day was to direct the case to the Allied Kommandatura. Those who had hoped to be able to hear the conductor perform the Eroica the next day were to be disappointed.66
Behind the scenes there was the constant clamour of the émigrés who were determined to see the conductor as a cultural figurehead for the Nazis. Chief among them was Erika Mann. His old rival Toscanini also played a prominent role. Furtwängler had sealed his fate with many Jewish Americans when in 1936 he had been offered the position of principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic but chose to direct the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera instead. Once again he had been a victim of Nazi intrigue. News had been leaked to the press in order to compromise him with the New Yorkers.67
The Americans led the way with denazification, trying 169,282 cases. The Russians and the French weighed in at around 10 per cent of that figure at 18,328 and 17,353 respectively.68 The British seemed to show very little interest in the matter within their zone, handling a little over 1 per cent of the American cases, at 2,296. Clay had full belief in the process and thought the Allies were doing well. On 5 July 1945 he reported that denazification in the early ‘liberated’ cities of Aachen and Cologne was virtually complete. In Bavaria and Württemberg, however, it was going very slowly. In March 1948, the Russians made a point of releasing 35,000 minor Nazis from their camps.69
Clay had bagged 75,000 Nazis to date. Certain organisations were particularly thick with them. He estimated that the police administration was 100 per cent Nazi; the ‘Kripos’ or criminal police 60 per cent; the others 40 per cent.cy In the banking world of Frankfurt half those employed were Nazis; that meant 326 people. On the other hand the docility of the post-war Germans struck Clay as it did everyone else: the ‘German masses seem totally apolitical, apathetic and primarily concerned with [the] everyday problems of food, clothing and shelter’. They did not quite behave as he expected them to: ‘no general feeling of war guilt or repugnance for Nazi doctrine and regime has manifested itself. Germans blame Nazis for losing war, protest ignorance of regime’s crimes and shrug off their own support as incidental and unavoidable.’70
Clay continued bagging Nazis. In autumn 1945 he had 80,000 in the bag plus the same number of Waffen-SS and ‘Schupos’ - members of the Security Police who were interned with the POWs. On top of these he had around 75,000 Germans sacked because of their Nazi past, and 9,500 from financial institutions.71 On 8 December the number of imprisoned Nazis in the American Zone had risen to 90,000, and was to reach 100,000 by the end of the year. Another 25,000 members of paramilitary organisations were lodged with the POWs.72 It is not clear whether or not most of the SS men had been released. Certainly, most of the Nazis had been released by the summer of 1948. Clay admitted to holding 5,000 prisoners at that time, with some 25,000 more awaiting trial outside the camps. They were all hard-core cases. In September 1947 he turned his mind to the German scientists who had been taken to the US in Operation Paperclip, to work on the atom bomb and the rocket programme. In his opinion they should not have been exempt from trial.73
On 13 May 1946 Control Council Order Four was passed. All literature of a Nazi or militarist nature was to be confiscated. Clay was not impressed. He had, by his own admission, been banning and confiscating such books since the arrival of the Americans in Germany. He was particularly keen to replace school textbooks from the era of the Third Reich. It was an understandable measure, but taken to extremes it could only lead to absurd situations and scenes reminiscent of the Nazi book burnings when over-zealous local councils decided to expurgate their library collections.cz It also furthered the confusion - which reigned at the heart of the Control Council - that Nazism and ‘Prussianism’ were intimately related.74
Clay played the game while he was at the helm. In 1948 the Cold War was coming and JCS 1067 was replaced by the less stringent JCS 1779, which advocated economic unity and self-government. Clay was replaced by his deputy, John McCloy. Times had changed and the former banker was more interested in building a bridge to the Germans. His wife Ellen came in useful in all this: she was German, and a distant cousin of Adenauer’s second wife.75 McCloy himself went to Canossa: he paid a call on Frings and promised the prelate that he would review the sentences passed on German war criminals. The Americans began to release them in droves in 1949 in the interests of good relations with Adenauer’s government. 76
Seen as an
exercise in punishing criminals, denazification was a farce. A number of insignificant Pgs were treated with the utmost cruelty while the big fish went free. Most of the minor cases were not ideologically committed anyway. Some of the worst killers, those who sent thousands to their deaths, who carried out the executions in the east as members of police units, or who operated the trains which took Jews to the death camps in the General Gouvernement, were not punished at all; they retired from the police or the railways without anyone having called them to account, and died in their beds.
Nazis in the Austrian Woodwork
In Berlin, the Viennese George Clare was keeping an eye on Herbert von Karajan. He was well aware of the conductor’s Nazi past. The impresario Walter Legge came to see them in the Schlüterstrasse to enquire about his status, as he wanted to know if he was permitted to give concerts in Britain. He had been denazified in Vienna, but as Sely told him, ‘we always discount Austrian denazification’. Sely later sent Clare off to investigate, giving him the address of the British theatre and music officer Peter Joseph Schnabel - otherwise known as ‘MacSchnabel’ from his dandified ways and the fact that he had once performed the role of teaching the Cameron Highlanders to ski.
Clare found a room in the Park Hotel in Hietzing, a stone’s throw from British Army HQ in Schönbrunn, where his murdered parents had spent their honeymoon. He met Schnabel at Demel’s coffee house by the Hofburg. The Austrian Jew was doing a tour of the tables, kissing the hands of the local ladies. It soon dawned on Clare that Allied culture boffins were even more firmly wedded to the local terrain in Vienna than were those in Berlin: there was Schnabel and ‘George’ the Frenchman, whose Danubian accent gave him away. Also ‘one of us’ was the US captain Ernst Häussermann, who was deputising for another - Ernst Lothar. Finally the Russian representative dashed into the meeting late, and bearing a parcel. She had a ‘sweet’ excuse in her hand: it was a Sachertorte. Her name was Lily Wichmann, another Viennese.
After the Reich Page 48
