In the U.S., American World War II vets receive a lot of respect. There are many programs for vets to ensure that no one was left behind after the war. We have memorials to fallen WW2 soldiers and honor them yearly.
What about Nazi veterans who survived the war? Does the German government (which is staunchly anti-Nazi now) support them in any way? Do they receive any sort of pension or healthcare? Or were they left to fend for themselves after the war?
Just to clarify, I’m not asking about the upper-echelon officers of the regime. I’m curious about the enlisted men and low-level officers who served only out of the sense of survival for themselves and their families.
Generally, the law makes not distinction of political views (i.e. between Nazis and non-Nazis) for benefits to veterans of WWII. Times of conscripted service and POW times are counted towards the general (statutory) pension entitlement (that all employed people contribute to); AFAIK pension benefits for professional soldiers as well as disability benefits are (were, for the most part) separately dealt with in the normal civil service benefits framework.
Health care would have been be covered mostly in the normal statutory health insurance scheme (i.e. no difference between vets and non-vets because none was necessary).
The general attitude to the common soldiers of WWII is that they did not get to decide whether to go to war, and that what distinguishes them from later generations is their date of birth.
(personally, when I think of people who were 20 years old in 1942, as opposed to me who was 20 years old in 1982, I think “there but for the grace of God…”)
My understanding is that the German government doesn’t discriminate against those who fought in and survived WWII. How would that benefit German Society in general? You would be making “martyrs” out of these people and which would help keep the Neo-Nazi movement alive.
Of course they don’t have public parades celebrating Nazis and WWII either. Why would they?
It sounds as if you are asking about veterans of the armed forces, the Wehrmacht soldiers, and not members of specific Nazi groups like the SS? Because the normal Wehrmacht soldiers and officers are, as Mops said, treated like other soldiers. They were drafted, and had no option of denying the draft (death penalty for Wehrkraftzersetzung= defetaism, which included also simply saying that the war was lost or being critical of any officer).
Additionally, the Allies did wage a war against the civilian population, and Stalin had told the Russian soldiers to take revenge on the German women, so Hans Schmidt becoming a soldier to defend his family against the hordes of barbarians from the East, and to take revenge or stop the bombs falling every night was reasonably expected of a normal person and not Nazi-evil.
The POWs who returned from Russia up until the 50s and the soldiers left behind earlier were left alone with their memories and conflicted ideology and without help to integrate into society, but that’s more because in the 50s, society in general didn’t believe in therapy, and everybody was eager to move on, forget all this, and just live and enjoy that there was food on the table and stuff to be bought in the stores.
Soldiers returning after the war had to deal with the problem of their ideology and the state they had fought for collapsing and learning that everything they had believed in was wrong; they had to cope with the horrors they had seen and experienced on the battlefield (both the horrors of a world war and some also with the Nazi mass shootings or the Army shootings of hostages).
They also had started out from a macho society where men protected the women who stayed at home. When they returned, women had worked 12 hr shifts in factories during the war, and started rebuilding homes from bombed ruins afterwards, raising children with almost nothing to eat. Not everyone was ready and willing to step aside and become a helpless wife again (many were eager to relinquish responsibility and stop the difficult work of scrounging).
Many women had been told that their husband had died, but some turned out to be missing and found their bed occupied when returning years later, because the wife had moved on with her life, or needed a friendship with an allied soldier to survive.
The POWs from Russia returned in the 50s just as the economy was starting to pick up and when people wanted to put everything behind them. They were an unwelcome reminder of the past, and nobody wanted to help them with their nightmares and other problems, even if they had wanted to talk, which they had learned that a real man doesn’t, anyway.
They did have a demonstrationof silent memory yesterday in Dresden for the victims of the huge bombing there on Feb. 13th, but this was mainly done to deny the Neo-nazis a chance to twist this date into a “Germans were the real victims” lie.
A data point for what constanze has related:
Thirty-some years ago I worked with a fellow who had been a German soldier during WWII. He explained that he was just doing his duty in service to his country, as I imagine many or most of his comrades were. When he returned home after the war, he felt unappreciated and even unwanted. He thought many of his countrymen saw the soldiers as unpleasant reminders of things they’d rather forget. Feeling he no longer had a real home there, he came to the U.S. I don’t know just what year he immigrated, or how he was received here. The thing he talked about was feeling betrayed by his country after serving it.
Not trying to hijack, but does anyone know of a movie or book along this line?
This makes me think of *Gone With the Wind *when she gets home after they have lost the war; everything has changed. She’s flat broke, the whole area has gone to pieces and there are still Union soldiers around and not being too nice. Quite different from what the other guys had.
Is it just me, or does this sound really familiar? Sometime in about 1972-75 in America?
If asked today, my Dad would have similar sentiments about his “warm welcome back” from S.E. Asia.
Interesting stuff, Constanze and Gary.
I have a friend who married a gal from Nuremberg, and I asked her one time almost this very question.
In return, I received almost the same response.
One of the most iconic plays would be “Draussen vor der Tür” (Outside or in front of the door), which is rather depressing.
The general genre is Trümmerliteratur(literature from the ruins), with Heinrich Böll and Borchert as well-known names.
The topic of soldier coming home after the war to find his wife in the arms of someone else is of course not specific to the German soldiers of WWII, but rather occurs after every longer war, so it’s been treated in literature often.
I’m a bit reluctant to post the following, because this is a loaded subject for me as a German, and I don’t want to deny any of the bad things the Wehrmacht was responsible for in WW2, but the OP sounds like making the common mistake of equating Wehrmacht soldier = Nazi. This is not correct. The Wehrmacht, other than organsiations like the SS or SA, was not a NSDAP organisation, it was the regular German armed forces, with almost any male German who was fit for military drafted during the times of WW2.
I tried to find statistics about the proportion of NSDAP members in the Wehrmacht to no avail, but I very much doubt that they were the majority, even among the officers.
Of course you can argue (and believe me, this has been argued over and over in post war Germany till today) that the German forces were a willing tool of Hitler and his party, but the expression “Nazi veteran” for any former soldier of the Wehrmacht who fought in WW2 is historically incorrect.
With geriatric medicine, mostly.
Remember that the very youngest soldiers would be at least in their 80’s now, and many of them even older. If not dead & buried.
I believe that the US VA hospitals have reported that US WWII veterans are dying off at the rate of more than 1,000 per day now. I’d expect German vets are much the same.
When I was in college, I worked in a warehouse and, one summer, was paired with an older gentleman who turned out to have fought for the German army in WWII.
He was quiet about it until he found out I was interested, non-judgemental and (probably most importantly) half German (and spoke it a little).
The quote above happened to him. He was told that his wife had died in a bombing raid. It wasn’t until he had immigrated to the U.S. and 10 years later he found out his wife was alive. He says he was told they did that in order to make him fight harder and was common practice toward the end of the war.
He met his wife but he and she had remarried…they talked and said their goodbyes and never met again.
{Interestingly enough I asked how a German POW could immigrate to the U.S. in 1946. He said it wasn’t that hard 
probably because he spoke English. Sometimes you really have to love the U.S…seriously 
}
That’s weird, I hear that one of the biggest reasons that more regular Wehrmacht did not surrender on the Western Front was that they were told there would be reprisals against their family. Which isn’t to say that the Nazis didn’t try mutually illogical strategies occasionally.
Please keep in mind this was a older guy and what he said. I can’t verify if what he said was true. He was also interesting in that I did get the feeling from him that he thought Germans were better than others and was sorry Germany lost (though he didn’t say that). He was not a ‘nice guy’.
His stories were fasciniating though. They didn’t glorify himself so I don’t think he was just telling stories to the youngin but were generally true. My favorite was the time he volunteered for a patrol in exchange for a 1 week pass. He said he never volunteered for anything again
So I have to ask - what about the SS and other more political or “elite” branches? Is there a difference between the Allgemeine and Waffen? Between say the Herman Goering Panzer vets and the average Luftwaffe vet? Or is it more a case of barring a particular individual being a known war criminal a vet is a vet?
It’s complicated. Officially, after WWII, there was the process of Denazifaction for every adult to go through. Everybody was obliged to list their membership in Nazi organisations, and would then be evaluated by the board and placed into one of several categories ranging from innocent/ resistance over Mitläufer (minor follower) and Nazi up to war criminal. Depending on the status, a monetary or prison fine and limits for further political service were handed out.
In practise, when they started with the small fry, found out that evaluating millions of people after a war and the refugee situation from the East had destroyed a lot of records (and people destroying incriminating evidence themselves), it was impossible to find out if somebody was lying. It was also popular to get a priest or similar to issue a “Persilschein” (Persil was a popular laundry soap) that you were innocent. Sometimes this was a deal for food (people were hungry to the point of starvation in the later war years and afterwards till the money change), sometimes it was a tit-for-tat of two guilty people giving each other clean papers.
Added to that was the practical problem that if all offical Nazi members would have been removed from all political or admin. positions and put into prison for the next several years, the country would have been shut down, because you can’t take away the majority of the admin. in every town and city.
So most mid-guilty people were declared to be less guilty as followers.
And a lot of real high-ranking Nazis just kept their mouth shut and in the rush to rebuild the country both physically and politically (a Restauration set in under Adenauer, helped partly by the desire of the Americans to recruit the new West Germany as ally in the cold war, so exposing and arresting more Nazis was counterproductive for them, too) they rose to high positions.
It needed the next generation, the 68 students revolt, to ask questions of their fathers generation “How could you allow this to happen? Why didn’t you resist? What did you do in the war?” and demand that Nazi judges and Nazi politicans be thrown out of office.
The general view is that, while normal people were drafted into the normal Army (Wehrmacht) without a choice, to end up in one of the SS divisions, you had to apply specially and fulfill special requirements (purity of lineage). Therefore members of these special groups are considered more Nazi than normal veterans. (With the caveat of things being more complicated because regulations changed as the war went on. In the last days, the Volkssturm was called, drafting men over 60, disabled, and teens of 15 years. Technically, these teens could also be considered veterans for serving a couple of days before the surrender, but I have never heard of that.
They also used divisions of Hitler youth as helpers at the Flak (anti-aircraft guns), see infamously Pope Ratzinger and the discussion about this).
Practically today, (besides the mentioned biological solution as people get older and older), people keep quiet and pretend to be normal veterans. A few prominent ones have been tried as war criminals, sometimes late (Nazi crimes were exempt from the expiration of process on purpose).
He probably lied. Officially, there were a lot of exclusions after the war for German males to legally get into the US, if they were members of … If he lied or had good fake papers, and spoke good English, he had a good chance.
In the interest of fullness and truth. it’s necessary to point towards the controversal Wehrmacht-Ausstellung (exhibition) organized by Reemtsa several years back. It was a collection of war crimes done not by the special SS divisions (who would follow the regular Army in the East, get together Jews, Poles etc., tell them to dig a mass grave and shoot hundreds of people at once. Einsatzgruppen, they were called) but by the normal Army. One famous case was in Italy, when a group of civilian hostages were executed after a terrorist attack, and it was only in the 1980s that this was publically brought to court and the responsible officer tried.
Precisly because this exhibition challenged the view of the children, grandchildren and veterans themselves that they were just doing their duty for the country and protecting their families, but still being honourable soldiers, it was met with enormous controversy. This wasn’t helped when Reemtsa had to publically apologize and retract some of the more extreme claims as historically incorrect, leading to another backlash, with the Neonazis of course using it as a new excuse for their tired old themes.
Despite single terrible incidences that need to be known, the majority of the Wehrmacht soldiers were indeed just people trying to do their jobs as soldiers.
About lying: people lying about what they did and did not do during the Nazi time is a very common theme in German society. There’s a famous movie “Das schreckliche Mädchen” (the horrible girl), a young teenager in the city of Passau, who grew up hearing all about the elder generations resisting the Nazis. But when she starts researching herself for a school project, she is being blocked from the archives and meets reluctance and closed mouths from the same people who used to talk freely. Finally, with a lucky break in the archives, she uncovers that a KZ (concentration camp) was in the city, and that all those grandparents and parents who talked about resisting really did know and were complicit.