Germans Were Sorry After the Second World War, But Not About Nazism

Book Review: ‘Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955’, by Harald Jähner

Harald Jähner’s Aftermath (2019) provides a portrait of life in Germany in the decade following the demolition of the Third Reich.

VICTIMHOOD

Hannah Arendt was from a Jewish family that fled Germany upon the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. When she returned to Germany in 1949, she “described how [Germans’] generous forthrightness always died the moment she revealed that she was a Jew: ‘There generally followed a brief awkward pause; and after that came … a deluge of stories about how Germans have suffered’.” The Allied occupation authorities had been grappling with this for years by then.

The primary sociological fact Allied administrators confronted, and were shocked by, was that Germans saw themselves as among Hitler’s victims. And, as Jähner explains, the main psychological devices upholding this were, on the one hand, a focus on German sufferings during the war and immediately afterwards,¹ and, on the other hand, a complete silence about the Holocaust. In the explosion of speech and media in cities all across Germany, writes Jähner, the “one subject … persistently excluded … was the central one: the murder of the European Jews”.²

The German attempt to cow Britain into submission with “the Blitz” was repaid by Britain (and the American cousins) firebombing German cities, notably Hamburg and Dresden. In its death throes, the Nazi regime unleashed for the one and only time a genuine terror on sections of the population, inter alia to force Germans to participate in foredoomed last stand: this episode, in particular, was entrenched in German cultural memory and projected backwards as if it represented the entire Nazi period. In breaking the devil’s pact that started the war, Germany struck first, invading the Soviet Union, but the price was steep once the Soviets had been rescued by America and Britain, starting with the Red Army raping its way into Germany on a scale with few known precedents.

The Soviets had stolen a large chunk of eastern Poland and in turn annexed to occupied Poland a slice of Germany,³ which was ethnically cleansed of Germans, sending millions of malnourished and homeless people into a Germany that was in no condition to cope. These “expellees” (Vertriebene) would create a long-lasting strain on Germany’s social order,⁴ which at the time they arrived was non-existent, not helped by the Soviet looting of German heavy industry and really everything else under the cover of taking “reparations”. Germans took to organised theft to counter the dire scarcity,⁵ which reached its nadir in the “starvation winter” of 1946-47. Clearing the rubble from Germany’s flattened cities was a herculean task Jähner devotes a whole chapter to.⁶ The task was often given early on as a punishment to former Nazis by the Allied occupiers, including, famously, many women. Rubble-clearers officially stopped work in Dresden only in 1958 and their task was actually completed in 1977.

So, the Germans really had suffered, during the war and for two years afterwards. But where memory tends to soften events with distance, the Germans recalled their pain ever-more sharply as time passed,⁷ and the context of why these disasters had befallen Germany, what Germans had done (and not done), became ever-more deeply buried.

RESPONSIBILITY

The corollary of Germans conceiving of themselves as victims was a distinct fuzziness over where blame lay for what had happened. At some level, Germans knew that the Nazi State had started the war and they certainly knew that the Allied occupiers—at least in the American and to a lesser extent British and French zones—regarded them as complicit. Yet Germans tended to hold “the war itself generally responsible”, as Jähner puts it, and contended, in a contemporarily popular phrase, that “the little people on both sides” had been the victims. In doing this, the Germans saw themselves being magnanimous: it allowed them to forgive the Allies for destroying their country, and to work with them on reconstruction.

The Allies made some effort to force the Germans to reckon with what they had done, to put before them the evidence of the death camps, and the American military was under strict orders to treat the Germans coldly. This was based partly an attempt to avoid a repeat of the errors after the Great War—the Germans would be made to understand they had been beaten this time—and partly on an analysis that there had been mass civilian support for the Nazi regime. The Americans viewed their German charges as fanatics and criminals who would need a long period of re-education—unlike the Soviets, whose Communist theology said the Germans, the working class anyway, were victims of a Nazi “capitalist” power elite.

In the event, the American anti-fraternisation order was not seriously enforced—after a few months, there was a lot of fraternisation between the GIs and the Germans—and the rest of the Americans’ elaborate plans for remaking Germany went the same way. The Americans (and the British) ended up having to collaborate with, and by doing so reinforced, the German victimhood narrative, which could only be done by lifting the burden of guilt off most Germans.

The dubious decisions taken about how to fight the Anti-Nazi War had left half of Europe enslaved by the Soviet Union, and, while the Red Army had been stopped at Berlin, the Revolution was threatening to spread further west. When German sovereignty was restored in May 1949, the Soviets refused to relinquish their occupation zone, making it into a permanent bridgehead, the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR) or East Germany, from which they could menace the rest of the European Continent.

With Communism at the gates, the forces of what would become NATO needed to quickly establish a functional Federal Republic (or West Germany) to guard the frontline. This conflicted radically with any notion of doing justice: that would have necessitated executing hundreds of thousands of Germans, disproportionately from the elite, and imprisoning millions more for a very long time. The only way to get sufficient popular buy-in for a State that had “turned the page” from Nazism was to meet the people where they were, by enshrining the false idea that Germans had been (or felt themselves) “liberated” in 1945, and when it came to the practicalities of staffing such a State, the only people available were steeped in blood.

However much the Germans had suffered in the war they started and waged with such atrocious methods, the Germans got an extremely light touch of responsibility afterwards. It all began at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46—met in Germany alone with broad “indifference”, Jähner notes. The modicum of interest the Germans showed towards Nuremberg was that they intuited its real significance. Nuremberg had no value as a vehicle of justice, but it concentrated Germany’s guilt on two-dozen men, whose executions would secure everyone else a free pass.

Germans had already by the time of Nuremberg begun speaking of Nazism as a kind of drug—often simply and generically referred to as “evil”—that had, as it was said at the time, “abused the German capacity for enthusiasm” and other national traits.⁸ This “made it possible even for the most devoted Hitler-worshippers to feel duped rather than guilty”, Jähner explains. “Even the defendants [at Nuremberg] followed this tactic”, with lesser officials claiming “right at the start of the trial [to be] the seduced victims of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels”.

There were other trials within Germany, Jähner records. 900,000 National Socialists were brought before a court: 25,000 of them were convicted, including just 1,667 “major offenders”. In subsequent years, investigations were opened into 3.7 million Nazi Party members (out of 8.5 million); about a million reached a courtroom and far less than that were found guilty.

It might be thought Germans were pleased at how minimally they were punished for what they had done. Not so. The main effect of these trials was to increase the German sense of victimhood—and the collective rejection of the Allied-imposed efforts to settle accounts over Nazism. Jähner documents: “[M]any Germans formerly critical of Hitler’s regime … suddenly made common cause with former Nazis” to protest the denazification programs as an injustice and an affront by hateful foreigners.

THE PRACTICAL NAZI HANGOVER

The initial American attempt to dismiss officials who had joined the Party before 1937 was whittled down: by 1950, a year into West German self-government, one-third of these people were back at work. Many more returned to work soon afterwards. In 1951, denazification—already a farce—was officially abolished, and Article 131 of the new Constitution provided for the reintegration of Nazis dismissed in the Allies’ spasm of “victor’s justice”, as Germans saw it.

The post-occupation West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (r. 1949-63), said this amnesty was to “put the past behind us”, and set an example by appointing Hans Globke, one of the authors of the Nuremberg Race Laws, as head of the Chancellery. But even with Adenauer, a principled anti-Nazi during the war, there was something more to this. Adenauer regularly took the line that he was being practical, for example saying at one point, “One does not throw out dirty water while one does not have clean”, yet in a public speech—his inaugural speech as Chancellor to the Bundestag, no less—he said he was rehabilitating people who had “atoned for a guilt that was subjectively not heavy”, attributing the contrary view to “confusions of the post-war era”.

The outrage in West Germany about Globke’s appointment was restricted to the small number of committed German democrats. Ironically, Adenauer was the one acting democratically. “If the majority of the people had had their way, there would have been no denazification”, Jähner notes. “People were not shy about demanding ‘compensation for the victims of denazification’, or renaming war criminals as ‘war convicts’,” Jähner records. “Former Nazi officials ensured that they received unreduced pension claims from their work for the regime.” The Allies balked at this being done for members of the SS, legally designated a criminal organisation, but the Federal Republic did it anyway.

Curiously—since we have considerable data and it would have strengthened his argument—Jähner does not get into the extent to which “former” Nazis manned the West German government after sovereignty was restored, beyond saying there was a “strong presence of the old Nazi elite”.

It is known that in 1953, 72% of judges on the Federal Supreme Court—the highest judicial body in the land, the guardian of the “new” State—had Nazi “pasts”, with roles inter alia in providing the “legal” framework for the eugenics program and the escalating persecution of Jews that culminated in the Holocaust, and that figure rose to 80% by 1962. There are significant historical debates about how important NSDAP veterans in the judiciary were in protecting war criminals, and whether this cadre dictated the course of Germany’s legal-political evolution on other issues. Some have argued, for example, that having so many of the architects and enforcers of the Nazi approach to homosexuality stay at their posts delayed decriminalisation.⁹

Over-75% of the Justice Ministry staff had been Nazi Party members into the 1970s—a higher proportion than when Hitler was in power—and at least 15% of these employees were direct holdovers from the Nazi Justice Ministry. 90 of the most senior 170 lawyers in that period (53%) had been NSDAP members, and 34 of them had been in the Sturmabteilung (SA), i.e., first generation Nazis, loyal to the Party long before it came to power.

The Foreign Ministry was the same story: 40% of the leadership in the early 1950s had been Nazis—again, a higher proportion than 1933-45—and nature was the only thing that forced a reduction. A book released in 2005 forced the German State to admit how intimately the Foreign Ministry had been involved in the Holocaust, causing outrage among the Ministry’s custodians and retired officials, who were still committed to the idea of their institutional innocence.

More than half of the West German Interior Ministry up to the 1970s had been NSDAP members and at least 8% of them had served in that Ministry when it was run by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. (Despite Communist pretentions of a more thorough denazification, the East German Interior Ministry replicated these figures.)

As far as the eye could see in the West German State, the pattern was the same. People complicit in the Nazis’ worst crimes, some of them wholly unreconstructed and unrepentant, were restored as teachers, doctors, policemen, university professors, intelligence officers, and politicians—all of them, legions of murderers, paid by the West German government until the day they died.

Nor was this limited to the civil service and the broader “State sector”. It went right to the top of the State. 25 Cabinet Ministers in post-war Germany, plus one Chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger (r. 1966-69), and one President, Walter Scheel (r. 1974-79), had been Nazis. And it applied in the private sector, with the heads of the corporations that had benefited from Nazi slave labour, the staff at NGOs, and the rest of it.

CONFRONTING THE PAST

In the 1960s, finally, the dominance of “former” Nazis over the West German State and society began to decline, as Jähner notes. This development was a confluence of essentially three factors.

First, and most simply, the NSDAP members began to retire and die.

Second, the salience of the Holocaust began to rise in Germany—and around the world. Astonishingly, while Jähner mentions that “there was no widespread engagement with the murder of millions” until the Auschwitz trials of 1963, he does not mention the event that set the stage for this.

Israel tracked down Adolf Eichmann, the organisational architect of the Holocaust, in Argentina, in early 1960. The decision was taken to apprehend, rather than kill, Eichmann—which MOSSAD did in May 1960—to stage a counter-Nuremberg. The “trials” fifteen years earlier had buried the memory of the Holocaust most efficaciously, freeing the “international community” from any feelings of guilt as forged its consensus, lasting to the present day, that the Jewish State should be treated with a unique vindictiveness. (The United Nations Security Council had, naturally, condemned Israel for taking Eichmann into custody.) Now, Israel would put before this “international community” the evidence of the Holocaust they were so keen to forget,¹⁰ the great crime for which they will never forgive the Jews. The Eichmann trial from April to December 1961 had its intended effect, and Eichmann was sent to the gallows in June 1962.¹¹

While it is true that the preparatory investigations for the Auschwitz trials had begun in 1958, it is also true that the process was being stalled at every turn. It was in despair about West Germany ever putting Nazi war criminals on trial that a German Jewish prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, handed the intelligence on Eichmann to MOSSAD.¹² The resulting Eichmann trial catalysed the Germans into action, with the Auschwitz trials opening in Frankfurt in December 1963 and running until August 1965. But Bauer’s initial assessment had been correct. Out of over-8,000 living camp guards, just 800 were investigated, and only twenty-two were tried in court—for murder, it should be noted, not crimes against humanity or genocide. Two died before a verdict, two were acquitted, six received life sentences, and twelve got sentences between three and ten years.

The pitiful outcome of the Auschwitz trials was only half the story. The German public’s reaction to the trial, even at this late date, was telling: the press presented the defendants as aberrations—monsters who had nothing to do with the German people as a whole—and even within that framework a solid majority of Germans opposed putting the war criminals on trial. The phenomenon persisted: when Chancellor Willy Brandt (r. 1969-74) knelt in apology at the Warsaw Ghetto in December 1970, a strong plurality of West Germans objected. Jähner, in another strange decision, mentions none of this; he does not even give a perfunctory summary of the outcome of the Auschwitz trials.

Jähner mentions the Frankfurt trials as a bridge to the third factor, which he does devote a lot of attention to: the first generation born after the war came of age in the 1960s. “Nowhere else”, says Jähner, “were the global wave of protests of 1968 as remorselessly and as personally directed against the parents’ generation as in the Federal Republic. … [T]he wartime generation experienced the accusation of collective guilt all over again—this time from within the family.”

The German baby boomers had a lot of evidence on their side, as we have established, not least Chancellor Kiesinger, who was slapped on stage by a young woman in November 1968. As Jähner bluntly puts it, the rioting children of the 1960s accomplished “little of actual consequence” in terms of “a detailed examination of the Nazi involvements of their parents’ generation”: “They preferred to develop theories of fascism designed to identify capitalism as a preliminary stage of dictatorship, and to dramatise the reprisals they suffered as fascistic.” What some of them did accomplish was to plunge West Germany into effectively “a civil war”, as Jähner notes.

It is yet another curious decision from Jähner that the Baader-Meinhof Gang, formally the Red Army Faction (RAF), is nowhere mentioned. Perhaps he simply ran out of space; the quoted section above comes right at the end of 432 dense pages. The RAF was founded in 1970 and its worst carnage was inflicted after its original leaders committed suicide in 1976 and 1977. This was part of the “syndrome” of the organisation: hunted by the police for the bank robberies and terrorism, the RAF claimed this “repression” proved the need to fight “the Nazi State”, justifying further criminality, and once the leaders were dead—staging it to look like murder by the prison guards—a new cadre had a cause to frame their violence as “revenge”.

Not only are the RAF the most obvious example of Jähner’s point: they would have allowed him to close the circle on an earlier subject. Jähner documents that the Communist “newspapers” in the GDR had reacted with oceans of coverage to Hans Globke’s appointment, claiming this showed the Nazi system still operated beneath the façade of democracy in West Germany, the exact “argument” the RAF made—not coincidentally. The RAF was, from the start, supported from across the border by the Soviets’ colony in East Germany.

Jähner’s book is mostly about the internal dynamics of West Germany—despite the implications of his subtitle, he does not write much about East Germany—and he would not have been diverted from that: active measures can only exacerbate what already exists in a society; they cannot create social trends. It would also have allowed Jähner to note the irony that it was the RAF and other Soviet-underwritten “urban guerrillas” claiming to be fighting “fascism” who eventuated as the nearest thing West Germany had to operational Nazis, infamously helping the Palestinian terrorists separate out the Jewish hostages to be murdered at Entebbe in July 1976.

THE IDEOLOGICAL NAZI HANGOVER

Jähner’s dominant theme is that (West) Germans did not feel sorry or guilty for their complicity in the crimes of the Nazi government in the decade and more after Hitler’s demise: Germans felt sorry for themselves as “victims” of Nazism. The question that hangs over this—and really all discussion of post-war Germany—is one that Jähner approaches only allusively: To what degree did Germans feel sorry to have lost the Nazi government, and continue to hold to Nazi ideology? Jähner does say there were “tens of millions of still devoted Nazis” in Germany after the war, but his focus is how they were able to “integrate themselves into a society that had made a consensus out of anti-fascism, in terms of both its constitution and self-image”. It is hardly fair to criticise someone for a book they did not write, but assessing the success of integration requires some sense of the scale of the problem, and Jähner does provide evidence on this front, if only indirectly.

One thing Jähner points to is the public manifestations of Nazism in post-war West Germany, even under the stern gaze of the Allies and with Germans having every self-interest in putting “distance” between themselves and the fallen regime.

In November 1949, Wolfgang Hedler, an MP for the “German Party” (DP), which was stuffed with “former” Nazis, stood up and declared that the “fuss” over the Holocaust had obscured the key matter: “We might be divided on the issue of whether the use of gas to kill the Jews was the right one. There might have been other ways of getting rid of them.” Hedler was literally thrown out of the Bundestag after being beaten up by two Social Democratic Party (SPD) deputies and dismissed from his party, but the DP remained in West Germany’s first governing coalition.

Kielce, Poland, had been home to 24,000 Jews in 1939, a third of the city’s population. In July 1946, after 200 Jews returned home to Kielce from Nazi concentration camps or exile in the Soviet Union, a “blood libel” rumour spread, igniting a pogromist frenzy that murdered forty Jews. Most Jews decided that their time in the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—whose cities Jews had co-constructed and vastly populated—had ended. Jews took the extraordinarily painful decision to flee via Germany, the citadel of the Nazis until fifteen months earlier.¹³ As Jews started arriving in Munich, most of them planning an onward journey to the Holy Land where the struggle to restore the Jewish State was approaching its climax, Germans did not react well.

Jähner quotes from letters German citizens sent to the newspapers saying they were very attached to “the Jews from the old days”, an opinion they had kept remarkably quiet as Munich’s 11,000 Jews were annihilated, leaving only 400 by 1946, most of them highly assimilated and far removed from the Jewish religious world, either Christian converts or Jews in “mixed marriages”. The Jews one would never know were Jews and the Jews who had been incinerated, those Jews the Bavarians had no objections to, but these Jews, in the flesh and visibly Jewish, they were, said one letter, “the sputum, the yeast, and the scum” who had come from the East “to avoid regular work … and are now spreading themselves raggedly about the place”.

This kind of thing was not limited to the letter-writers in the post-war German newspapers. A polemic in 1952 by Henri Nannen—a pioneer of liberal journalism before the war and a Nazi propagandist during—relating to a personal scandal of Hans Habe, the lead journalist in the American zone, a nearly forgotten figure who did so much to revive the free press in West Germany, included snide barbs about Habe’s Jewish background. Jähner notes, this was “consistent with the striking thoughtlessness with which antisemitic clichés were dragged out, as if the Holocaust had never taken place.”

At one level, the flight of the most visible surviving Nazis—those eligible for prosecution even under the lax Nuremberg terms of guilt—buttressed the German victimhood narrative. Germans in Germany could claim that with the Nazi leaders who had seduced and/or terrorised them off in South America trying to keep the Third Reich alive in German colonies,¹⁴ or working for Arab States so they could continue the war against the Jews, the malignancy had been excised and those remaining in Germany were the regime’s victims. At another level, the continued zeal of the exiled Nazis increased suspicions. If such a large number of Germans who had the freedom to do so were still flying the swastika, it begged the question what the Germans in Germany would be doing if they could. Add to that the fact that even under occupation, as notorious a Nazi war criminal as Josef Mengele was able to find a support system to live in the Federal Republic until 1949, and instances where fanatics in West Germany defied the Allied repression of public Nazism could start to look less like isolated exceptions and more like the tip of an iceberg.

Coming at it from the other direction, there was what did not happen. In addition to finding that Germans considered themselves Nazism’s victims, writes Jähner, “the second phenomenon that surprised the Allies” was that there was no wave of violence by Germans against Nazi officials: “If [Germans] felt like victims, why did they not take revenge on their tormentors?”

Jähner goes on to note that the other source of civil disorder the Allies expected, a massive “Werewolf” resistance, never materialised: “Germans, who had gone on fighting furiously long after the situation had been proven hopeless, were revealed as the tamest of lambs as soon as they had capitulated. … Most of them had dropped their loyalty to the Führer as if flicking a switch—and at the same time wiped clean, at least in their own minds, the whole of the past.” Jähner leaves it there, reiterating that Germans retreated into themselves, behind a wall of silence and denial and self-pity about their sufferings.¹⁵

This omits that hundreds of thousands of German civilians did respond to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ “Werewolf speech” on 23 March 1945 and subsequent radio broadcasts demanding every German fight to the death by doing just that. In addition, perhaps 100,000 Germans killed themselves in a wave of mass-suicides between January and May 1945, including at least 7,000 confirmed during the Soviet capture of Berlin, because they could not bear to live in a world where the Nazi project had been defeated. This was before the capitulation and Jähner specifies he is referring to afterwards, but all cults are a matter of concentric circles: to have that many Germans willing to self-sacrifice for the Nazis right at the end gives a strong indication of how wide the circle of believers and sympathisers was, and casts grave doubt on the idea that a large numbers of Germans abandoned Nazism in or near May 1945.

As discussed above, Jähner pours scorn on the idea most Germans believed themselves “liberated” in 1945—or for a long time afterwards—and points out how insistent they were on the non-prosecution of, and the paying of pensions to, Nazis, including the SS killers. Another intriguing piece of evidence Jähner provides is discussing the Heimkehrer (“home-comers”), the German soldiers and intelligence officers—and death squad members and camp guards—returning from the front.

Jähner is most interested in the altered dynamics of the relationships the Heimkehrer came back to—the women more confident and beautiful, thanks to the newly available cosmetics; the men shattered, mentally and physically, in Soviet camps—which led to many of the relationships breaking down. But there was more. “These relationships carried within them the memory of the Nazi regime’s heyday”, notes Jähner, when Germans were richer and enjoyed luxuries such as never before, thanks to wealth stolen from murdered Jews and conquered States, and extracted from their enslaved populations—when the gas chambers and the killing fields of the East were working at full capacity. The returning husband felt “humiliated” that this idyll was gone: “doubly responsible for the family’s poverty; first through helping to start the war, and secondly by losing it. … [T]his feeling of failure on a personal level usually weighed heavier than their guilt for Nazi crimes” [italics added]. Jähner gives no indication that German women held the crimes of their husbands against them, either: the complaints were about the dullness and angry outbursts of these hollow men.

Art played, as Jähner sketches out, an unusually large role in the American effort to rehabilitate Germans. In 1946, a “General German Art Exhibition”, showing nearly 600 works, was put on in Dresden in the former Army Museum on Nordplatz. In one of Jähner’s rare uses of opinion poll data—most of his statistics relate to economics and demographics—we learn from the questionnaire given to visitors that 65% saw modern and abstract art as “degenerate”. Not that the questionnaire was needed: visitors swore at the curators and vented about the “lunatic rubbish” on display. In a poll in 1956, two-thirds of Germans preferred “real oil paintings of landscapes”, followed by religious-themed art. Even “prints of sad clowns” were more popular on German living-room walls than abstract art. “Might it be revealed through art that the majority of Germans still had profound sympathies for the defeated Nazi regime?”, Jähner muses. He does not venture an answer, yet the truth of it is he need not have relied on any measure so oblique.

Here we come to another omission. The U.S. Army did extensive surveys tracking German public opinion in their zone during the 1945-49 occupation, which are not mentioned in the book at all. At the end of that period, the surveys found, amongst other things:

• Hitler had quickly become personally unpopular.

• The German consensus—increasing to a stable majority by 1947—was that National Socialism was a “good idea badly carried out”: Hitler had gone too far.¹⁶

• Majorities believed Danzig, the Sudetenland, and Austria belonged to Germany.

• One-third thought “Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race”.

• Over one-third rejected the claim that “extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was not necessary for the security of Germans”.

• A fifth of Germans believed “only a government with a dictator is able to create a strong nation”; “this war was caused by a conspiracy between the International Bankers and the Communists”; and “the German people were the victims of a conspiracy by other nations”.

• 12% flat-out denied Germany had committed any crimes, saying such reports were an “invention of the propaganda of our enemies”. To underline: this is after Nuremberg and the other trials.

Two things should be noted about the negative post-war German view of Hitler. First, it had nothing to with the Holocaust or any other State crimes: he was seen to have failed as a national leader. Second, when unpacked, Hitler was not quite as unpopular as all that—there was certainly no flicking of a switch against the Führer. Into the mid-1950s, 10-15% of Germans were completely unreconstructed Führer devotees, regarding Hitler as the greatest statesman of the century and wishing they could vote for a man like him again. Another 22% thought Hitler had been an excellent ruler, despite a “few mistakes”. Simultaneously, nearly half of Germans (48%) thought that, “except for the war, Hitler would have been one of Germany’s greatest statesmen”, and one-third of Germans still said this at the end of the 1960s. There was also a persistent body of opinion, hovering at about a third, which blamed Hitler’s “advisers” for most of what went wrong. Few moved against Hitler while he was in power and it is doubtful Germans would have rejected him had he prevailed.

Ambiguities about Hitler himself to one side, it is clear the ideological pillars of Nazism remained strong within the population after the war. This is hardly surprising: it was those shared pillars that had connected Party and people to begin with.¹⁷ Hitler’s method of rule was as much to release and enable pre-existing German passions, as it was to channel and direct them.¹⁸ Germans were not, even retrospectively, conceptually opposed to the national project embodied by the Nazi government, least of all to the Imperial program—which was, after all, strategically near-identical to the Kaiser’s—and the Germans had little sympathy for the peoples they had massacred and enslaved putting this project into practice.

On the central issue, surveys of Germans in the American zone in 1949 directly asking about Jews showed that 40% of Germans remained committed antisemites and another 20% expressed some racial animus; only 20% showed little bias. This tallies with the tests of popular German attitudes towards Jews up to 1945 by the Nazi intelligence services. Germans did not share wholesale the Nazi preoccupation with, or biologically racist view of, Jews, but German antisemitism was powerful even in Weimar times: there was no popular will to defend this disliked minority and considerable active support for expelling Jews from Germany. German hostility to Jews grew during the process of intensifying anti-Jewish persecution that culminated in genocide, about which there was widespread knowledge and equally widespread moral indifference—at best—while it was going on.¹⁹

It was the attempt by Germans in the last months of the war, once it was clear the Nazi regime would be defeated, to repress what they knew that triggered the retreat into silence about the “Final Solution”, even in private, and the focus on their own suffering,²⁰ recasting themselves as Nazism’s victims, the trends Jähner documents so exhaustively. It was within this framework, though only after Hitler was dead, that Germans began speaking, and eventually feeling, negativity towards the Führer: Hitler came to serve as the Germans’ scapegoat and his death their absolution, the alibi for a nation that utterly rejected any suggestion of collective guilt.²¹

THE REMAKING OF GERMANY

More attention on just how deep-rooted Nazism remained in Germany after 1945 would have strengthened Jähner’s concluding thought that West Germany’s emergence as a liberal democracy, “in spite of the large-scale return of Nazi elites to their old posts, is a much greater wonder than the so-called economic miracle”.

Jähner argues that “[t]he collective agreement of most Germans to count themselves among Hitler’s victims” was the lynchpin that allowed the functioning of the “constructed friendships” of the Federal Republic with the West and the GDR with the Soviets that disestablished Nazism. Jähner is clearly morally uncomfortable with this fact: the victimhood narrative “amounts to an intolerable insolence”, he writes, and the “excuse” the Germans gave themselves—as with “the overwhelmingly lenient treatment of the perpetrators”—is “infuriating” from “the perspective of historical justice”. Nonetheless, Jähner contends, “it was a necessary prerequisite because it formed the mental basis for a new beginning”, and it was from this “extraordinary feat of repression … [that] later generations profited to a substantial degree”.

Repressing the past allowed German energies that might have been spent in rancorous public political arguments and legal cases seeking justice to be diverted to the immediate private sphere, to their everyday tasks and finding a way forward.²² Despite the hardships of the first two years of occupation, “normal” life returned rapidly to Germany, albeit slower in the East, where the marauding Red Army continued “forced intercourse”, as it was officially known, with German women on a terrifying scale long after the capitulation, and there was some friction as Germans were brought into obedience with History. (Jähner’s book gives only glimpses of how the GDR was implanted, which is a shame as a detailed examination of how Germans adapted from one form of totalitarianism to another might have been instructive, especially with the continuities on the “Jewish Question” as the East German Stasi spearheaded the Soviets’ undeclared war against Israel, fired by antisemitic doctrines that—while rechristened “anti-Zionism”—were very recognisable from the Nazi period.)

In West Germany, the self-perception of victimhood gave Germans the license for a lot of fun in the post-war years—they felt they had earned a right to enjoy themselves after a long national nightmare had been imposed upon them. By 1947, Germans were already going on holiday again, Jähner documents. Earlier than that, there was a glut of cultural activity, of cinema and literature, and a mania for dancing. Meanwhile, the expellees, the ethnic Germans from the East, were at one and the same time a boost to far-Right political trends, most obviously irridentism, and by their very presence a source of social dislocation and transformation, forming part of the swirl of “transgressive” marriages that took place across ethnic and religious lines, which gradually melded a new, more open national identity.

Jähner is very taken with the idea that the private initiative and even mistrust inherent in the vast black market activity up to 1948 fostered some democratic habits, and the combined experience of the black market and rationing “ensured that the ‘social market economy’,” a reconciliation of these two systems, “became an article of faith for generations”. Jähner devotes a lot of space to the changes in German sexual behaviour after the war, particularly the relationships of American GIs and German women, which he argues created a cross-fertilisation, so to speak, of cultural and social mores that “drew the sharpest line under the past”. Amid this romanticism, Jähner concedes that the biggest factor in the post-war West German order sticking was the economic miracle: the Federal Republic delivered enough material gain for enough Germans that it was perceived to have worked in a way that the Weimar Republic had not—and such a social compact induces legitimacy over time.

Jähner is surely correct that an honest accounting such as his is only possible in retrospect. People can only bear so much reality, and forcing Germans to reckon with the truth that they were not victims in the late 1940s—that they had thrown themselves at Hitler’s feet and the majority in their hearts still yearned for Nazism—would have made the rapid recovery that took place impossible. Behind the lie of victimhood, they could act out the construction of a New Germany, and four generations later the edifice is a fact, on foundations secure enough to handle the truth.

One implication of this Jähner draws out is that Germany’s official sense of “moral superiority” over other nations in how it has dealt with the darkness in its history—the State’s self-conception as a “world-export champion in the field of coming to terms with the past”—is unwarranted. Jähner could have gone further and pointed out that such “coming to terms with the past” as there has been in Germany was initiated from the outside.

In the ‘Afterword’, Jähner mentions almost in passing that, in the German willingness to denazify (at least officially) under the cover of the victimhood narrative, “The radical shock of disillusionment played a central part”. But Jähner then assigns equal weight to “the attraction of more relaxed ways of living as embodied by the Allies”, and the various post-war experiences—the “education” in the black market, integrating the expellees, and arguing about abstract art. This is to blur the distinction between cause and effect. The German willingness to consider alternative ways of living depended on the “disillusionment” with Nazism, and disillusionment only set in—however slowly—as a result of Nazism’s devastating defeat.

While the “counter-extremism” or reprogramming version of denazification was a dismal failure, what we might call “practical denazification” worked: whatever people felt in their hearts and minds, ideas can be killed—by military defeat. Physically destroying the ability of an ideological government to rule, killing a substantial enough proportion of the determined ideologues, and demonstrating to the bulk of the population that the cost of pursuing the ideological project is personal catastrophe—that they will be reduced to living among the rubble and subjected to the humiliation of foreigners dictating their fate—has a way of making the ideology publicly unfashionable. And over time, the face grows to fit the mask.

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NOTES

1. Post-war Germans were particularly incensed by the returning exiles. Germans resented the sense of moral superiority from their Allied overlords, but accepted there was nothing they could do about it. Criticism from Nazism’s refugees, returning to Germany on the back of Allied tanks, was a different matter. The Nazi concept of the volk community lasted long after the war, Jähner writes, and figures like journalist Hans Habe, who had spent time in America and brought the perspective of having lived in a developed democracy, were despised—publicly so. Even those returnees who avoided public life and tried to perform quiet tasks like education were treated with great hostility. But there was one exile, Thomas Mann, the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, whom the Germans wanted back. Mann’s return could help restore Germany’s pre-1914 image as a centre of culture.

In August 1945, Walter von Molo, former chairman of the poetry section of the Prussian Academy of Arts and by his own estimation at least a titan of German culture, wrote an open letter to Mann: “Please come soon, look into the furrowed, sorrowful faces, see the unspeakable suffering in the eyes of the many who played no part in the glorification of our darker side, who were unable leave their homes because so many millions of people here had nowhere else to go, here in what had slowly become a concentration camp, in which everyone was either inmate or guard.”

Mann was so disgusted by this obscene self-pity—to claim when the crematoria at Auschwitz were barely cold that Germans were the victims of concentration camps—that he wrote a ferocious reply, entitled, ‘Why I Am Not Returning to Germany’, in which he attacked the German intelligentsia wholesale, perhaps especially those who had remained in “internal exile” writing non-political books during the Nazi period. “In my eyes”, Mann wrote, “books that were published in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are less than worthless … They have a smell of blood and shame about them. They should all be pulped.”

2. Upholding the German victimhood narrative necessitated silence about the Holocaust: any examination of the latter would have collapsed the former. For example, the widespread answer Germans gave when they were asked about the Holocaust—“we did not know”—would have been untenable. During the war, one of the few objections from the German population to the deportation and extermination of the Jews was that the Jews should be retained as hostages to prevent and deter Allied area bombing raids. Germans meant this in the most literal sense, writing from all over Germany to Joseph Goebbels to complain of the folly of deporting Germany’s Jews to the killing fields in the General Government when the Jews could have been herded into German cities as human shields. Some appealed to Goebbels in his own terms, noting that if the Allies still went ahead with their terror-bombing, it would provide the Nazi government with splendid propaganda when it published the number of slain Jews the next day. Other Germans forthrightly told Goebbels that the Reich should announce it would shoot ten Jews for every Aryan killed in a British or American bombing.

The Germans, thus, knew full well Jews were being slaughtered and had no moral or substantive objection to the fact; some of them had a tactical difference with the Führer over how to handle the Jewish Question. And even this objection was largely within the framework of antisemitism: most of the letters Goebbels received spoke of the Allied air raids as “retaliatory”—a number of letters thought specifically for the Kristallnacht pogrom—and otherwise worried about the “revenge of the Jews” that would fall on Germany if steps were not taken to blunt the Allied air campaign, which all of them seemed to take for granted was moving Germany closer to defeat. In other words, Germans generally saw issues through the prism of the “Jewish World Conspiracy” theory and, while viewing the fight against this demonic edifice as a good in itself, judged that the Nazis had been “clumsy” in how they went about it.

See: Ian Kershaw (2008), Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, pp. 204-05.

3. In effect, Poland—the State the Nazis and Soviets had jointly attacked to start the Second World War—was shrunk and shifted 150 miles to the west by the Soviets.

4. Alongside the expellees, there was another population on German territory, the non-German “displaced persons” (Verschleppte), which in the short-run caused even more social and civic strain, Jähner explains. The “displaced persons” (DPs) were generally called “foreigners” (ausländer) by the Germans, or the “homeless” (heimatlos), often followed uncharitably by “rabble” (gesindel). The DPs were the survivors of the camps, eight million or more foreign nationals, some Jews, but most of them people forcibly transferred to Germany to serve in the Nazi “labour battalions”.

The Nazis had always feared a slave revolt and in the last few months this had become a panic; treatment for the slave labourers had become increasingly gruesome, and, as the Nazi defeat loomed, the slaves’ use was deemed to be at an end: they were massacred in huge numbers. Some of the slaves, particularly Poles and Frenchmen, had been preparing to rebel, and had created make-shift knives for the purpose. Once freed, after their own brutal treatment and the mass-murder of their comrades, the DPs wanted revenge on the Germans—any Germans. Villages and isolated houses across Germany were set-upon, looted, and their inhabitants murdered. The shocking episode on 20 November 1945 near Bremen, when a group of Polish DPs from Tirpitz Camp invaded a house and slaughtered a family of thirteen people, including children, became even more astonishing when the only survivor, Wilhelm Hamelmann, 43, publicly forgave those who had murdered his wife and children, and asked that they be pardoned.

The DP issue overwhelmed the Americans at first, Jähner documents: there were simply insufficient U.S. troops in Germany. When the Americans did start arresting DPs guilty of murder, the DPs—mostly Russians, Poles, and Hungarians—were genuinely flabbergasted to be told they had broken the law. The DPs assumed that the lawlessness of the Nazi era still prevailed, only reversed: that now Germans were fair game for plunder and murder. The German POWs, disciplined and dispirited, conscious of being beaten, were positively submissive. The DPs, understandably, felt differently, and attempts to house them—first in German homes and then in new camps—proved a nightmare: suspicious, traumatised, and angry, the DPs were persistently aggressive and frequently riotous.

Then there was the problem of Eastern European DPs attacking Jewish DPs, housed together as co-nationals. The Americans finally agreed in late August 1945 to house Jews separately, something Jewish leaders had been asking for, and the Americans had resisted, feeling uneasy about separating Jews again. The completely unexpected arrival of more DPs from Eastern Europe in July-August 1945, mostly in the form of 100,000 Jews who fled a wave of pogroms in Poland, the worst in Krakow on 11 August, added to the tension in the camps and the American logistical challenge.

By late 1945, Allied soldiers, their initial sympathy evaporated, were more warders than caregivers at the DP camps, as Jähner puts it: gates were locked and patrolled. When the Allies turned to the compliant remnants of the German security apparatus in their custody for help in arresting looters and murderers in the DP camps, this was perceived as an intolerable provocation and led to more riots.

The repatriation rate of about 100,000 per day was impressive in the circumstances of the wasteland Continent, but it dropped 90% in September 1945. Allied militaries and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) had trouble getting the remaining DPs to leave. As Soviet rule was fastened on the Captive Nations, many DPs, above all the Poles, resisted deportation, and the Russian DPs—promised to Stalin at Yalta—in many cases preferred to die rather than go home, either forcing “death by GI” scenarios or in several grisly episodes staging mass suicides, notably in January 1946 in Dachau.

5. The organised theft became known, Jähner records, as fringsing after the Cardinal of Cologne, Josef Frings, who had relativised the Commandment not to steal in a sermon.

6. “The war had left about 500 million cubic metres of rubble behind [in Germany]. … Piled up [on the Zeppelin field at the Reich Party rally grounds], 300 metres by 300, the rubble would have produced a mountain 4,000 metres high”, Jähner notes.

7. From Jähner: “Superlatives that placed the suffering of the Germans high above the suffering of other nations sluiced through the German press, through brochures and tracts [in the post-war period]. And here we may talk about repression in an entirely literal sense: the authors wallowed so expansively in their own suffering that there was no room and no thought left for the true victims.”

8. A similar phenomenon was seen in Rwanda, where, at the gacaca trials after the genocide, people disclaimed any personal responsibility and said they had been possessed by Satan.

9. On the specific issue of homosexuality, the timeline does not suggest the “former” Nazis in the West German judiciary had much impact. In the post-war wave of decriminalisation in the Free World, West Germany was among the earliest, in 1969, following Greece (1951), the state of Illinois in the U.S. (1962), and England (1967). The only European States to decriminalise in the twentieth century before 1945 were Greece, some in Scandinavia, and Poland, interestingly, in 1932.

10. Ronen Bergman (2018), Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, p. 88.

11. The one unfortunate aspect to the Eichmann trial was it left us with Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil”, and the popular beliefs surrounding it. Eichmann was a fanatical Nazi, whose only regret in life was that he had not finished with the Jewish people, but Arendt, whose reporting for The New Yorker and subsequent book frames the popular history in the English-speaking world, was completely deceived by Eichmann’s self-presentation in the trial as a mediocre bureaucrat “just following orders”.

12. Rise and Kill First, p. 87.

13. Jähner writes: “Having to seek refuge in the land of the Nazis, of all places, required a great struggle on the part of many Jews; they could only justify it by considering occupied Bavaria to be no longer German but American.”

14. The primary Latin American States to receive Nazi fugitives were Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, all of them with significant German settlements that had been brought under Nazi influence in the 1930s, and governments, often despotic and military in character, which had been well-disposed towards the Third Reich.

The Argentine ruler, Juan Perón (r. 1946-55), had coordinated with Berlin in 1944, when he was still vice president, for officials of the Nazi government—and those of its Ustasha colony in Croatia—to be received in Argentina, which thousands of them were. A sizeable number of Nazis who ended up in other Latin American States had first arrived in Argentina. This was true, for example, of Joseph Mengele, the doctor who ran the hideous medical experiments at the camps: he managed to hide in Germany for four years, before fleeing to Argentina in 1949, moving to Paraguay in 1959 after the savage regime of Alfredo Stroessner (r. 1954-89) had taken power, and taking up residency in Brazil in 1960, where he died in 1979.

Uruguay is similar to these three, but at a lower register because it has a smaller German population and its period of military rule began later, in the 1970s.

Chile, more resembling the Uruguayan case, is complicated by the issue being so polemical due to the myths and morality stories surrounding the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. There were Nazi fugitives involved in Pinochet’s security apparatus—when, how many, and what they did is all contested—and the most prominent case, Walter Rauff, who initially spent a decade in Ecuador, is once again very complicated. Similarly, while some Nazis did show up in German colonies in Chile, the most infamous of these colonies, Colonia Dignidad, was a horror show for other reasons. The regular coverage of the Dignity Colony as a “Nazi cult” is a half-truth—it was (is? again, complicated) a cult that had some former servants of the Nazi government in it—and the available evidence is the rumours Mengele spent time there are false.

15. Jähner quotes from an extraordinary article published in January 1947, ‘What Makes Us So Unpopular Around the World?’, in the magazine Der Standpunkt (Point of View). The author’s self-professed “harsh answer” was not harsh on Germany: “Germany is the problem child of Europe, the whipping-boy of the world. It is as true in the family of the world’s nations as it is in human families: there are favourite children. The role of the pet is played by Switzerland—and the enfant terrible is Germany. Chance? Fate? It cannot be explained in terms of nature, history or national development.” Jähner insists the author “was not malicious, and certainly not naïve”—she did mention Hitler—but one doubts his judgment.

16. That Nazism was a good idea poorly executed was the view of a solid 47% plurality of Germans up to the end of 1946 and an outright majority of 55% thereafter, with 64% of more educated Germans and Protestants supporting this view, and nearly 70% of under-30s. The number of Germans who actively thought Nazism had been a bad idea diminished over the period from 41% to about 30%.

17. As the U.S. Army report puts it, German opinion even in 1949 indicated “that Hitler may merely have tapped a set of underlying perspectives while, to be sure, reinforcing them at the same time through his propaganda.”

18. Even within the Nazi regime, Hitler tended to set the broad objective and lower officials then competed to supply the policies—creating the dynamic of “cumulative radicalism”, as underlings sought to out-do each other in catching the Führer’s eye. See: Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, pp. 39-41.

19. Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, pp. 4-11.

20. Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, pp. 9-11.

21. The U.S. Army survey consistently found that over-90% of Germans rejected the idea of collective war guilt.

22. For a historical analogue of Germany’s repression of the past—albeit one less morally fraught—one might look to Britain’s response to the Civil Wars, crystallised in the Indemnity and Oblivion Act (1660), which officially treated the entire Interregnum as if it had not happened. True, the general amnesty excluded a cadre of senior officials from the Puritan regimes who were hunted to the ends of the earth for decades afterwards. True also that the issues around the Civil Wars underlay the 1688 “Glorious Revolution”—effectively a coup—and the fallout from that, the shadow war with the Jacobites, lasted into the 1740s. Still, British stability after 1660 was notable when compared to, say, the hundred years after the American Civil War. The U.S. pursuit of justice in the aftermath through Reconstruction collapsed, resulting in a period of apartheid and terror that at its height was in some ways crueller to black citizens than slavery, and the issue has remained explicitly present in American politics down to the present day, in a way very different to the implicit faultline in British politics between Cavaliers and Roundheads.