Exorcising Hitler (61 page)

The patient began to awake from the sleep cure and look around. The patient began to remember . . .

There was already the first of several generational changes going on in Germany. The survivors of Hitler’s generation – those born in the 1880s and 1890s – were now old and fading from public life. Those of the following generation, the energetic achievers of the Nazi regime such as Speer, born around 1900–1905, too young for the First World War but acutely aware of its humiliating aftermath, were moving into late or very late middle age. The next generation, those who had been born around 1920, who had spent their adolescence in Nazi Germany and served in the war as young men, were on the threshold of their ‘best years’. And then there was the generation that was around thirty, out in the world but not yet quite ready to make its mark, the so-called ‘Flak Auxiliary’ generation, born in the late 1920s, who as schoolboys had been drafted in to man the anti-aircraft guns against the Anglo-American bombers. Finally, there was a really new generation: the generation born in the early to mid-1940s. The student generation of the 1960s.

It is often said that Germany’s re-examination of itself began in the mid-1960s. In fact, it seems, rather, to have begun in 1958, amid the late period of Adenauer-era conformity, when the ‘Central Bureau of the
Land
Justice Authorities for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes’ was set up at Ludwigsburg, just north of Stuttgart.

The Central Bureau had been founded in response to the trial at Ulm in Bavaria, that same year, of former members of a killing squad in Russia. The state’s interest in them had been aroused, it seems, only because one of them had attempted to rejoin the civil service and reaccess his pension rights. Investigations uncovered a whole network of former killing squad members living law-abiding, productive lives in plain sight in West Germany. These men stood trial. The Ulm case, the first case of mass murder to go to trial since the foundation of the West German state, aroused real public interest in Nazi crimes, for the first time since the immediate post-war period.

The task of the Ludwigsburg office was to deal systematically with crimes committed outside of normal German jurisdiction, for instance in concentration camps and other crime scenes not directly associated with warlike activity. Its role was to coordinate such investigations: it had, technically, no power to prosecute. Nonetheless, its work identified many more West German citizens, apparently living peacefully in various parts of the country, who had been involved in the working of Auschwitz extermination camp. These men had somehow escaped the original trial of Commandant Höss and his henchmen in 1947. Following a laborious process of legal and jurisdictional wrangling, they were taken into custody and a trial prepared.

Meanwhile, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, to where he had fled in 1950 after years living under an assumed name in northern Germany. Eichmann, a senior SS officer who had been in charge of the transportation of Jews to the extermination camps, was tried in Jerusalem and executed, on 31 May 1962, after an internationally reported trial. A year later, the Auschwitz Trial (usually called the ‘Second Auschwitz Trial’) of twenty-two defendants began in Frankfurt. It lasted for 183 trial days, and the verdicts – six life sentences, various sentences from three years and three months to fourteen years, and three acquittals – were pronounced on 19 August 1965. The daily appearance at the stand of a total of 360 eyewitnesses with chilling stories to tell, and the presence of television cameras and newspaper journalists, brought home with shuddering immediacy to the German public, after twenty years of silence and forgetting, the full horror of what had been done in the name of the German people by these apparently ordinary men during those shameful years.

The children of the war, the ones who had survived the malnutrition and disease that had led to such terrible infant mortality in the immediate post-war years, were now young workers and students. They began to ask questions of their parents and grandparents. They were not satisfied with many of the answers.

It was and is often said of the Germans, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that they ‘denazified themselves’ on 8 May 1945. During the advance into Germany that year, an American major told the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White: ‘The Germans act as though the Nazis were a strange race of Eskimos who came down from the North Pole and somehow invaded Germany.’ Many observers at the end of the war would, like White, have remarked, tongue in cheek: ‘I have yet to find a German who will admit to being a Nazi.’
³²

There is, of course, a non-cynical truth in this, to the extent that most Germans did, by the time the immediate post-war period began, wish to distance themselves from the Third Reich. Many – probably most – despised Hitler and the other leaders who had led the country astray and their people into such misery. At that moment, perhaps that was enough of a prophylactic against a recurrence of the Third Reich. Then, closing their ears to the arguments of the well-meaning Allied denazifiers, most submerged themselves in work, in reconstruction, recreating ‘normality’. These were physical as well as psychological imperatives.

The Auschwitz Trial, however, and the great questioning that began in the 1960s, led to something else: a proper self-denazifying (or as the French put it: ‘
auto-épuration
’). Now large numbers of Germans really did start to look at and study the behaviour of their nation between 1933 and 1945, and try to draw conclusions. They had food in their bellies, roofs over their heads, jobs (or student bursaries), and they were not to be fobbed off with bland explanations.

This led to excesses. The rebellious alternative culture in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s could be especially oppressive and obsessive. It dropped out of the Mom-and-Pop, glad-to-have-enough-to-eat conservatism of the Adenauer era and into a future where Mom and Pop’s ideas were not just boring but evil (hadn’t Mom and Pop been Nazis?).

There was truth in the rebels’ accusations. Critical Germans were still in a minority, albeit a growing one. The ‘
Spiegel
Affair’ might have brought many thousands out on to the streets to demand more freedom, but according to a poll in 1966, 54 per cent of West Germans agreed with the statement that ‘In politics there is too much talk and not enough action. We need a strong man at the top, who will make short shrift of trivialities’, and 44 per cent were convinced that German youth lacked ‘discipline and good order’.
*
A total of 59 per cent agreed with the idea that ‘It is finally time to get a firm grip on all troublemakers, and not using kid gloves, as we have until now’.
³³
Even at this point of transition, the echoes of those same longings that had made Hitler’s regime so popular had by no means died away.

To balance this continued presence among many Germans of old-fashioned nationalist-authoritarian values, it was true that by the 1960s the right-wing fringe parties that formed part of Adenauer’s coalition back in the early 1950s – the ‘German Party’, the GB/BHE and so on – had either dwindled or been subsumed into the larger parties. The expellee groups, while still influential, were no longer quite such a crucial element in the political equation, as the expellees and their children integrated into West German life and began to vote accordingly. German politics was now a three-way contest, with the two big ‘people’s parties’, the centre-right CDU and the centre-left SPD, potentially dependent on the parliamentary support of the socially liberal but pro-enterprise FDP for any government they might form. Neo-Nazi groups experienced local revivals, but never made it into the federal parliament, let alone the government.

From 1966 to 1969, Germany had one of the most paradoxical governments of any Western state. Or perhaps it simply expressed the feel of the country. Adenauer had gone in 1963, and Ludwig Erhard’s government was not a success. In the grip of West Germany’s first recession since 1945, with more than half a million unemployed – considered shocking at the time – it had fallen as a result of disagreements with its FDP partners about the tax increases needed to balance the budget (the tax-cutting FDP was against them). Under these circumstances, only one other possible partner existed: the SPD. Hence the idea of a so-called ‘Grand Coalition’, which took office on 1 December 1966.

On the one hand, the administration was headed by a CDU Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who was a former Nazi Party member. The silver-haired Swabian lawyer had been a liaison man between Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry and the German Foreign Office. Obviously a
Muss-Nazi
, but a Party member nevertheless. On the other, as his Foreign Minister in their so-called ‘Grand Coalition’, there stood Willy Brandt, the Social Democrat leader. Brandt had been forced to flee Germany for Scandinavia when Hitler came to power, and had even taken Norwegian citizenship. He had returned to Germany after the war as a major in the Norwegian army before deciding, at the low point of his birth-country’s fortunes, to revert to German nationality and help the reconstruction effort. Many conservative Germans still viewed him as a traitor.

It was a pivotal moment. The joining, as it seemed, of anti-Nazi Social Democrat with ex-Nazi conservative caused purest disillusionment among many sensitive citizens. It led to the formation of an ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’, composed of many thousands of West Germans, who had decided that, with the Social Democrats’ ‘selling out’ to the right, a slip of paper dropped in a ballot box just didn’t make anything happen.

Before long, a group of ‘urban guerrillas’ who called themselves the ‘Red Army Faction’ (also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) were going around stealing cars and kidnapping and shooting anyone they disapproved of, particularly ex-Nazis. Nazi methods for violent denazification. Such was the group’s revulsion at the hypocritical conservatism, as they saw it, of the German political and economic establishment, that they also rebelled against the privileged position of Jews in this despicable new Germany’s world view, allying themselves with Palestinian groups and even setting off a bomb at a Jewish Cultural Centre in Berlin.

Germany subtly changed again in 1969. Willy Brandt finally became Chancellor, in coalition with the Free Democrats – the first Social Democrat to take office as head of a German government since Hermann Müller in 1928.

Brandt made treaties with West Germany’s eastern neighbours that recognised the post-war borders. He visited Warsaw and dropped on to one knee in front of the Warsaw Rising memorial, honouring the 200,000 Poles who died so pointlessly at German hands in the destruction of the Polish capital during that terrible summer of 1944. The conservative right and the refugee organisations didn’t like it, but they were no longer the power in the land that they had been in the 1950s when Adenauer put his uneasy coalition together and started post-war German democracy on its way. Brandt’s West Germany also finally recognised the reality of the East German state, though it never formally gave up its claim to represent all Germans.

This was a different Germany, one starting to feel secure in its wealth and its institutions. A Germany that was now prepared to talk about the past, and to recognise what had gone wrong, without necessarily feeling that this undermined its right to exist. In the mid-1970s,
Holocaust
, a well-meant American mini-series chronicling the fate of the Weisses, a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, pierced the German television-viewing public to its heart. Where there had once been so little, now a flood of books and articles and television documentaries covered every aspect of Nazi malfeasance, and did not spare the German nation for its complicity. They continue to this day. Paradoxically, the further the nation moved from its ugly past, the more diligently Germans confronted it. ‘First comes filling your belly . . .’

The generational change continued. From Chancellor Willy Brandt (born 1914), the resistance fighter, to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (born 1918), who served with the Wehrmacht but converted to social democracy as a returned soldier in the British Zone. Then, abruptly, came Helmut Kohl (born 1930), a child throughout the Nazi period and therefore the first West German Chancellor to be blessed with no possible responsibility for what happened before 1945. Perhaps appropriately, Kohl was also the first post-war West German Chancellor to become truly leader of all Germany.

It was in November 1989, as Helmut Kohl attended a state dinner in Warsaw, that the Berlin Wall opened, the citizens of the failed state of East Germany poured through to the West, and a new era began for Germany and the world.

After the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, the haemorrhaging of its population to the West all but ceased. If the reaction to the ‘
Spiegel
Affair’ in West Germany was hailed as the rebirth of West German democracy, the Wall was seen as East Germany’s ‘second birth’. They were, of course, two revealingly different phenomena – the flowering of critical consciousness in West Germany after 1962, a creative, positive thing; and the imprisonment of the East German population after 1961, a terrible suppression of possibility that permitted only the unimpeded continuation of a politico-economic tyranny.

Nevertheless, the East German state seemed, in the 1970s, at its strongest. Aware of the regime’s unpopularity, the state planners had permitted some growth of consumer goods production after the Wall went up. A modest prosperity followed. Ten years later, most East German households had a refrigerator, a TV, a washing machine and even a car – though the waiting time for this might be seven years. It was even claimed, at one point in the mid-1970s, that the German Democratic Republic had overtaken Great Britain in its living standards. East German athletes were successful in the world’s arenas far beyond the country’s size and resources – a prominence that the regime naturally attributed to communism’s production of exceptional human material, but which later, it became apparent, was actually down to elaborate and subtle doping programmes in which the government itself was totally complicit.