Exorcising Hitler (4 page)

Certainly, the creation of a communist-totalitarian satellite state in East Germany was Moscow’s achievement. There is very little likelihood that without Russian direction and control, not to mention its cohorts of tame German communists, such a state would have evolved spontaneously out of the ruins of Nazism. The form of statehood achieved in the Western-occupied parts in the late 1940s was, perhaps, more complicated in its origins and took a lot longer for its final shape to become clear. In particular, the Western-oriented ‘Federal Republic’, created almost exactly four years after the end of the war out of the British, American and French zones, would, at least initially, remain much more like pre-war Germany than its rival, the Soviet-controlled ‘Democratic Republic’.

The consensus on the success or failure of the occupation(s) of Germany has wavered and changed in the years since 1945. At the height of the Cold War, when West Germany was a valued ally and bulwark against communism, the story ran that the Germans had embraced democracy pretty quickly after 1945 – at least where they were given the chance, i.e. in the West. The Western Allies, so this version of the story went, had provided the Germans in their zones with the framework and the education for this successful transformation. Within a few years, West Germans were firm friends of America, France and Britain, fellow members of NATO. This was the natural consequence of the wise occupation policies pursued. The Western victors had embraced a much less harsh attitude than had been apparent after the First World War, and more especially a less punitive economic policy.

Certainly, by and large, the positive story was the one that the elites of the countries involved, including West Germany itself, France (which by the 1960s was locked in a positively romantic embrace with its former hereditary enemy), America (whose own free and easy popular culture and decentralised politics had also influenced the new Germany) and Britain (which prided itself on giving the West Germans a liberal education system and efficient trade unions) had agreed upon.

The Soviets, with their mass expulsions, rapes and pillage, had made an even worse start than the Western Allies. Their belated and often clumsy attempts to curry, if not favour with the natives, then at least a little less unpopularity, failed to conceal the fact that the East German government was essentially an imposed puppet regime. The discontent of the population compelled the building of a fortified border, first (1952) in the German–German interface that ran down the middle of the former country from Lübeck to Hof and then (1961) in that last refuge of inter-Allied rule, Berlin. In 1953 the population of the Soviet Zone rose up in an open rebellion that could only be suppressed by massive use of force and a range of repressive measures that included hundreds of executions and thousands of long prison sentences. The seventeen million Germans unfortunate enough to find themselves in the Soviet Zone after twelve years of Nazi dictatorship were then seamlessly subjected to more than forty years of a competing brand of totalitarianism, marginally less brutal and at least not racist, but no less disappointingly oppressive for that. Even worse, the new communist bosses went around claiming that, unlike the West German elite, they represented a clean break with the Nazi past and were therefore morally superior.

Both Cold War versions were somewhat true, or at least not gross distortions. West Germany was not quite the rapidly resuscitated bastion of freedom and tolerance that many presented her as. The framework for some such existed, just as it had been between 1918 and 1933. However, as we shall see, at the time of the foundation of this part-state in 1949, 60 per cent of those polled among its fifty-something-million population still thought that Nazism was a good idea gone wrong – a figure that was actually substantially worse than in earlier, post-war opinion polls. When asked if, were the necessity to arise, they would choose security over freedom of expression, a majority saw security as the greater good. Many also continued to espouse various forms of anti-Semitism.

Large numbers of Nazis, many of them guilty of crimes against their own people as well as against innocent enemy nationals, went unpunished at the hands of the West German state. Even when proceedings against such malefactors were initiated, they often found protectors within sections of the post-war establishment. The social and cultural focus of West Germany for the first fifteen years or so of its existence was deeply, at times oppressively, conservative.

The political and cultural revolution of the 1960s, driven mostly by young people who had been barely old enough for kindergarten at the end of the war, affected West Germany more intensely than any other Western country, up to and including America. Suddenly, after twenty years of restoration and reconstruction but relatively little re-evaluation, there were ageing war criminals on trial before West German courts, there was talk of the Holocaust (largely ignored in the 1950s), there was a national debate about the country’s past and where it should be heading. In effect, the debate that might have been had in the years immediately following the German defeat (which many among the occupiers and the fairly small numbers of passionate German anti-Nazis had wanted to have) finally began to take place more than twenty years later. It has continued, and continues to shape the varied, vibrant and tolerant Germany we see in the twenty-first century.

Not that forms of fascism, many directly based on the Nazi model, have been entirely banished from the new Germany. Denazification, even the self-directed, subtle and long-term kind that ultimately triumphed in Germany, could never be and has never been complete. A substantial minority support exists in the reunited Republic – as it does, to be fair, elsewhere in Europe – for dark, xenophobic fantasies of racial purity and perfect ‘order’. The difference from the 1930s is that the numbers are relatively small, and there is no support for such ideologies within the cultural, political or for that matter the economic elite.

As for East Germany, for all its pretence of ideological purity, and its claims to have been the only post-war German state to properly cleanse itself of the Nazi infection, there is in fact strong evidence that the Marxist-Leninist spell under which its people were forcibly placed, while outwardly different, was every bit as subtly damaging as West Germany’s hyper-capitalist orgy of forgetting. Perhaps it was worse, because there was no 1960s, no younger generation asking awkward, often unfair questions of their elders, as there was in West Germany. East Germany claimed to have solved the national problem through communism, but in fact, after 1989, the bacillus of Nazism was found to have survived in far more virulent forms in the so-called ‘German Democratic Republic’ than in its capitalist-democratic competitor state. It is in the East that the neo-Nazis have most of their electoral strongholds, and where, in certain vulnerable towns and cities, they can seriously affect their fellow citizens’ quality of life.

In modern Germany, there is much talk about what was bad in the past, but at the same time there is also increasing debate about the suffering of Germans in the twentieth century, whether in the bombing of the country’s cities during the Second World War, or in the forced expulsion of millions from ancestral German territories, or under the sometimes harsh, vengeful and often plain incompetent interregnum of the Allied victors that followed defeat. So Jörg Friedrich’s passionate, tendentious 2003 account of wartime bombing,
Der Brand
(The Fire), for all its flaws, unleashed a cleansing national debate about German victimhood. So, likewise, bestselling works about the brutal ‘population transfer’ from the eastern provinces, most prominently Andreas Kossert’s
Kalte Heimat
(Cold Homeland, 2008), have made this other facet of German suffering the subject for rational debate rather than simple accusation.

So far as this book’s core subject matter is concerned, post-war and denazification history have become quite fashionable – particularly since reunification opened the East German archives – enabling scholars to take a more variegated and nuanced view of what was achieved (or not achieved) in freeing Germany from the shadow of Nazism.

Writers in the former Allied countries, especially Britain and America, have also – in part encouraged by a new flourishing of ‘occupation studies’ in the wake of the Afghan and Iraq wars – taken a long, hard look at what the Allied occupation of Germany actually involved. Books such as Giles MacDonogh’s
After the Reich
have taken an aggressively forensic line, rightly detailing the failures and brutalities, but often failing to explore the unspeakable Nazi occupation policies during the previous six years that helped cause the Allied powers and their individual representatives (down to the most humble, frightened, sometimes angry soldier) to behave as vengefully as they did. More balanced treatments, such as Perry Biddiscombe’s indispensable
The Denazification of Germany
(interestingly informed by his earlier work on the Nazi
Werwolf
resistance movement and its offshoots), have, inevitably, also been able to devote limited space to examining the roots and the consequences of the process.

What is clear from important work such as Biddiscombe’s is that Germany’s experience between 1944 and 1949, roughly the period of post-war denazification, was neither straightforward nor complete. The beginnings of Germany’s journey back to international respectability and prosperity, and eventually even to moral wellbeing – in short, to what passes among the community of nations for normality – were halting, compromised, sometimes brave and noble, sometimes forced or self-serving, and mostly no more than just that: beginnings.

Like all such human progressions, Germany’s was both aided and hindered by external and chance forces. History was still working away in the background, enigmatic and almost inconceivably complex, even while victors and vanquished alike struggled to find some way of making sense of what had happened and was continuing to happen. These had been truly terrible years and, even with the advent of peace, the misery was by no means over. Many of the things that subsequently happened to all involved were much worse than they had hoped, while others were, especially in the end, much better than expected.

The story of Germany’s enforced transformation begins, as it must, in the thick of war, when a still defiant German heartland was bracing itself for the now inevitable enemy invasion. Although the Allies had broad ideas about what they needed to do once they controlled the enemy’s country, much policy was as yet only sketchily defined, and would be made on the hoof according to the exigencies and anxieties of the moment.

So we join the advancing Allied troops at the point when they took their first modest and cautious steps on to the soil of the Third Reich.

The day was, as it happened, 11 September – or as Americans usually express it, September 11 – 1944.

1

Into the Reich

Ninety-six days after the Allies’ first landings on the Normandy beaches, a seven-man patrol of the 2nd Platoon, Troop B, 85th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, attached to the 5th Armoured Division, 1st United States Army, crossed the River Our from Luxembourg into the pre-war territory of the Third Reich.

The bridge that normally straddled the border had been demolished by the retreating Wehrmacht, but the waters of the Our were shallow enough for Sergeant Warner W. Holzinger and his men to wade across and cautiously make their way on to the far bank. Encountering no enemy troops, they proceeded up the slope on the German side.

Soon the Americans observed a German farmer at work in the field. Sergeant Holzinger – a German-American who spoke his parents’ language – addressed the man, who offered to show them the enemy bunker system. Led by this disarmingly friendly native, they walked a mile or more into Reich territory and, sure enough, found themselves gazing at a set of German fortifications – in this case, consisting of nineteen or twenty concrete pillboxes. Adjoining one of these, incongruously, locals had constructed a chicken shed. There was no sign of enemy forces.
¹

Deciding not to push their luck, the American soldiers quickly retraced their steps and returned to the Allied-held side of the river. They reported at about 18:15 hours on 11 September to their platoon commander, Lt Loren L. Vipond.

The news of their incursion into Germany was quickly radioed to the Headquarters of Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, Commander of the First Army, from where the long-awaited message flashed around the world: the Allies had finally pierced the Reich.
²

The 2nd Platoon’s dart across the border was the first of several undertaken by American units. In early evening, a company of the 109th Infantry, 28th Division, crossed the Our on a bridge between Weiswampach, in the northern tip of Luxembourg, and the German village of Sevenig. Near St Vith, Belgium, a patrol from the 22nd Infantry, 4th Division, likewise went over the border near the village of Hemmeres and roamed around the countryside for a while. The GIs rounded up and talked to some civilians. Many had been evacuated by the SS. Those of the German population who remained had largely taken to the nearby woods, though for these country people the exigencies of peace proved unsuited to the imperatives of war. A local woman from the small farming community of Heckuscheid reported a little melodramatically: ‘Suddenly we realised that the people who had gone back into the village to feed the livestock had not returned: they had been arrested by the Americans who had in the meantime advanced into the village.’
³
To provide proof of their success, the border-crossers brought back a German cap, some currency and a sample of earth.