Constanze, you’re doing a great job here in concisely summarizing the (West) German post war history of dealing with millions of ex (or still) Nazis. The real divide in handling the subject in fact was 1968 and the years that followed. While my parents during the late forties and fifties still were partially taught in school by former NSDAP members, the most of my teachers (in the eighties) had been students during the sixties/early seventies, and thus mostly had a different stand on German history (at least they were firm democrats).
Btw., wasn’t the movie “Das schreckliche Mädchen” based on a true story?
The link to the “schreckliche Mädchen” is already given bei EinsteinsHund above.
And the 68-movement is what we call the political part of the students protests, different from those who just smoked a joint and wore long hair simply because it was fashion, and from the Hippies who wanted to withdraw from society to live peaceful.*
Though in an interesting twist of history, a lot of those Hippies that were concerned about healthy eating and clothes, and went to live in the countryside a more natural life, now own successful companies in the organic food or clothes sector, employing dozens or more of people.
One point that might be important is that there were two Germanies prior to reunification. Does anyone know if atitudes towards WWII vets were different in East Germany than in West Germany?
Well in East Germany, as communists they were violently anti-Nazi and not interested in papering things over like in the West, but I don’t know details. I’ve also heard that in the 1950s, a lot of East Germans were put into prisons, some deported into other Eastern Bloc countries, without proper trials, many of them innocent. This was not mentioned again afterwards during the communist rule.
I don’t want to defend the SS but not everyone who joined the SS did so because they were a Nazi. The pre-war police agencies in Germany (the regular police who dealt with normal criminal investigations) were incorporated into the SS when the Nazis took power. Presumedly some police officers stayed on the job and became members of the SS because they still wanted to oppose regular criminals.
The SS also had a military branch, the Waffen-SS, which fought alongside the regular army. Because of political influence, the Waffen-SS often got priority on receiving the best equipment. Some Germans saw this and made the pragmatic decision that if they were going to end up being conscripted anyway they might as well volunteer for the Waffen-SS and join a better-equipped unit. (And after 1943, some Germans were conscripted directly into the Waffen-SS.)
Following the war, Soviet paranoia went into overdrive. Stalin went on a rampage of purges of anybody who he thought even might be a German sympathizer or harbor anti-Soviet thoughts. This included not only East Germans, but Soviet POWs that had been held in German prisons, most of whom were accused of being traitors or collaborators because they had surrendered. A huge number were sent east to the Siberian camps with sentences of 25 years or more. There must have been a huge, collective sigh of relief when he croaked in 1953.
There was. Khruschev’s big initiative domestically was de-Stalinization, to the extent that he delivered a remarkably full and frank report of Stalin’s crimes to the Party Congress.
And because of these purges in the DDR, the later discussions of the guilt of society as a whole didn’t happen there. That’s why the Neo-Nazis today have much larger support in East Germany. Even there it doesn’t amount to much, though - 17,000 people prevented a few hundred right extremists from coopting the memorial of the Dresden bombings recently.
Just an aside: I remember reading that a popular chant by Army men near the end of the Korean War went “Joe’s dead, so they said; hurrah, hurrah, that’s one less Red.”
I imagine the party-member problem was the same as in the soviet bloc or Iraq - to even be considered for some better jobs, you had to be a member of the ruling party. You can’t be neutral - noncommital would be taken for harbouring doubts about the regime. You had to at least go through the show of being part of it.
(This is what was so disasterous aout firing all the Baathists in Iraq - they basically eliminated anyone, for example, who had any experience in police work, judges, teachers, administrators in any significant organization, etc. Society can’t function with all of it’s core workers gone; and the “downtrodden” never had a chance to get any practical experience in those positions…)
I recall reading a discussion of looking for Nazi war criminals in the post-war occupation. One fellow mentioned that some very high-up regional administrators in the US Army actively obstructed the nvestigators. The fellow speculated whether this was some sort of collusion (i.e. financial or new friendships) or whether it was motivated by the desire to keep very in power civilians with very anti-communist views.
I too remember talking a few times to a fellow who had been in the GermanArmy during the war, then emigrated to Canada.He had been a teenager at the time, so he didn’t sound like he was terribly invested in any ideology, he treated the whole thing as a joke. It was more like “Yeah, I was in the German army, these things happen to people, you know.”
He told about the time he captured an American air crew with his shovel; apparently they were digging trenches when a bomber flew over at about 100 feet and he guys bailed out landing between him and the crew’s stack of guns. He had to keep yelling at them and waving his shovel to distract them while one of the others went around them to get the guns before the Americans realized the situation.
He also mentioned the time he met Hitler, who apparently was a very charming fellow. He and a group of fellow students in Berlin were bumped out of their rush seats when Hitler and his entourage decided to go to the opera at the last minute. Hitler talked to them on the way in, and apologized for he inconvenience and displacing them. I guess Hitler did NOT apologize to Poland or Czeckoslovakia…
This. There’s a story in my family regarding my grandfather and great-grandfather getting into significant trouble with the local NSDAP official over their noncommital attitude.
I don’t know the exact details and unfortunatly can’t ask my grandfather for clarification, but the main issue was that my family were Danes living in Northern Germany (Bismarck mucking around with those damn borders).
My grandfather was about 17 in 1944-45, and as such beginning to be eligible for semi-forced drafting. My great-grandfather, no fan of the regime due to his family/heritage, was petrified that his son would be drafted. But he knew that by enrolling him in the Hitler Youth, he would be counted as ‘already serving the nation’ and thus ineligible, so off went my great-grandfather to enroll him. Cut to a few months later, and both of them get called up to the local Nazi’s office to draft him.
Although my great-grandfather was right the legalistic aspects of his son’s inequality, the local Nazi knew full well that this Dane wasn’t exactly a fan of the regime. Despite having ** enrolled his own son in the Hitler Youth**, the official was so enraged that he pulled a gun and waved it around, making my great-grandfather and his son lie on the floor for ages, ranting at them for their lack of patriotism.
Although as I have grown older I have on occasion doubted all the stories I have heard from various (multinational, not only German) sides of my family about their personal involvement in the war, it is certainly true that being noncommital was, to the individual, and dependant on their standing within the local community, very dangerous.
I can only offer a personal anecdote which probably can’t be confirmed because the guy is surely dead and forgotten by now.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s I had some contact with the public prosecutor in a middle sized West German city where I was stationed. Every two months or so he was required to personally present himself at some office in Bonn, then the federal capital, because of something he had done as a company commander on the Eastern Front. It always seemed the better part of discretion not to ask. I was given to understand, however, that it had something to do with the murder of civilians, whether Jews or Slavs I do not know.
Had he been a big Nazi he never would have attained what was a pretty important public office. He was just another junior officer. Twenty-five years after the end of the war the Federal Republic was still keeping track of him.
One of the machinists who taught me my trade came over after WW2 as well, along with his surviving sister Sister Maria and his brother Fr Christian. Only reason those 2 survived out of a family of 11 kids was they were in orders in Spain. He was an officer, and from the way he described it the enlisted did not have to be party members but the officers did. Unpopular officers [those that were not all gung ho party members] tended to get sent to the Eastern front. He survived the Eastern Front, and made it all the way back because he was into winter sports and had thoughtfully brought along all 3 sets of silk and wool skiing underwear, and as officers were allowed a bit of leeway in uniform, he had a great coat made of much thicker wool than the issue greatcoat. As he said, a certain amount of hardening his heart against others suffering gave him troubles for a long time afterwards.
By December 1936, HJ membership stood at just over five million. That same month, HJ membership became mandatory for Aryans, under the Gesetz über die Hitlerjugend law. This legal obligation was re-affirmed in 1939 with the Jugenddienstpflicht and HJ membership was required even when it was opposed by the member’s parents. Massaquoi claims,[9] though, that the war did not allow the law to go very far. From then on, most of Germany’s teenagers belonged to the HJ. By 1940, it had eight million members. Later war figures are difficult to calculate, since massive conscription efforts and a general call-up of boys as young as 10 years old meant that virtually every young male in Germany was, in some way, connected to the HJ. Only about 10 to 20% were able to avoid joining.
So besides being non-Aryan (and I really don’t care about your background), your family would have had to have worked damned hard to keep your grandfather out of the Hitler Youth.
My grandfather was a member before he emigrated to the United States. I’m not 100% sure of the year, but my mother was born in the USA in 1938.
Oh, I completely agree that the story sounds a little off, especially regarding the dates as to mandatory HY conscription. As I said, I have had reason to doubt the perfect veracity of the stories I have heard from my family, especially my grandfather himself.
That being said, my great-grandfather, to all accounts, was a virulent anti-Nazist, by virtue of his heritage, and it is this virulence that a) led the local NSDAP official to despise him so, and b) for me to give credence to any story that shows him defying them. It may well be that this story happened significantly earlier, but I feel that I can say with a relative degree of certainty that if you were known in your community to have, shall we say, less than enthusiastic feelings regarding the party, you were very much at risk.