The German War (96 page)

As a leading Protestant theologian, Paul Althaus also felt obliged to offer intellectual leadership and published a short article addressing the issue of ‘Guilt’. Like others, he had been quick to blame the Nazi ‘leadership’ for ‘terrible mistakes’ and ‘serious injustice’ in his early post-war sermons, but now looked for reasons why that same leadership should not be judged at Nuremberg. Althaus focused not on the war crimes and their consequences, but on the human nature of which they were a mere manifestation, claiming that ‘all evil that occurs somewhere in my nation, yes, somewhere in humanity, stems from the same roots in the human soul which is the same everywhere and in all ages’. Having made specific acts disappear into an abstract, universal and timeless sense of human sinfulness, it was easy for him to conclude that only God Himself could judge the evil of these acts, for ‘this community of guilt in its depth and breadth is beyond the understanding and justice of a human court. Human judges cannot and may not speak to me about it.’
³³

As a leading protagonist of nationalist Protestantism, Althaus had warned his fellow Germans after the First World War that 1918 meant more than just defeat: God had judged them and found them wanting. Whereas the God he evoked after the earlier war had been the punitive deity of the Old Testament, after 1945 Althaus came to emphasise His ‘merciful will’. ‘We cannot atone in any other way,’ he wrote in 1946,

than that we, Christianity in Germany, first of all step humbly under Christ’s cross representing our entire people with our needs and shame over the terrible things which have happened: ‘Christ, you lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us and lift the curse, the ban from our land.’

It is possible that Althaus’s rediscovery of mercy was perfectly genuine: his disabled daughter had been lucky to escape the selections of psychiatric patients for medical murder. Yet during the rest of 1945 the theologian reminded his congregation about the ‘blood sacrifice’ of ‘millions of dead German soldiers’, without mentioning the millions of soldiers and civilians Germans had killed. When he preached about the ‘6 million from the east’, he was speaking of the German refugees, although the number he chose related to the murdered Jews. When he spoke of the Polish ‘hangmen’ who had shot eighteen Germans in 1939 in Thorn, he made no reference to millions of Poles killed by the German occupiers. And when he referred to the ‘guilt’ of the American and British bombing, he did not mention how the Germans had waged war. Althaus was entrusted by the Americans with chairing the denazification tribunal at Erlangen: although they then suspended him from his professorial chair for lack of action, it was restored to him in 1948. During this tumultuous time, no colleague broke ranks and denounced Althaus as one of the principal authors of the ‘Aryan paragraph’ which had excluded converted Jews from the Protestant Church. Nor did anyone signal that his ‘theology of order’ and ‘theology of creation’ had provided intellectual legitimacy to Nazism and to anti-Semitism. Instead, Althaus remained a key player in German Protestantism long after his academic retirement in 1956.
³⁵

When Martin Niemöller asked an audience of Erlangen students in January 1946 why no clergyman in Germany had preached about ‘the terrible suffering which we, we Germans caused other peoples, over what happened in Poland, over the depopulation of Russia and over the 5.6 million dead Jews’, he was shouted down. Niemöller remained a radical and outspoken figure. Within the Confessing Church, he had become the sharpest critic of Nazi religious policies; for this he was arrested in July 1937 and sent to Dachau. Niemöller also remained a German nationalist, volunteering to serve again in the German Navy on the outbreak of the Second World War. On his release in 1945, Niemöller admitted at a press conference in Naples that he had ‘never quarrelled with Hitler over political matters, but purely on religious grounds’. In October 1945, however, he persuaded the other ten members of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany to sign the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, which admitted:

Through us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries. That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole Church: we did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the National Socialist regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing by our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.

It was a controversial document, wrung from its signatories by the insistence of representatives of Protestantism in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Britain and the USA, who attended the synod, that they could re-establish ties with the German Protestant Church only if their co-religionists accepted moral responsibility. Beyond the general confession, the document avoided all reference to the war, but even so, it went too far for most German Protestants, who felt it amounted to a humiliating concession to the Allies on a par with the Versailles Treaty’s clause about German war guilt in 1919. Not until 1950 did the synod concede that ‘through acts of omission and silence’ German Protestants ‘have been guilty before the God of mercy for the iniquity which has been perpetrated against the Jews by members of our nation’. It would take decades to evoke a more candid and openly self-critical admission.
³⁶

Although the political Left rode a wave of popular support in both Eastern and Western occupation zones, even in its old heartlands of the Ruhr, Saxony and Berlin it was building on very different cultural foundations from those that existed before 1933. The new generation who joined the Social Democrats, the Communists and the trade unions were very different from the leaders who returned from exile or imprisonment. These were people who had gone through the Hitler Youth, BDM, the Reich Labour Service and the flak or had served in the Wehrmacht. The old associational life of the Left could not be rebuilt; nor could its old moral values.
³⁷

In April 1945, after the US Army occupied Düsseldorf, Marianne Strauss emerged from hiding. Immediately she threw herself into political activity, spending her evenings and weekends at meetings, eager to seize the moment and bring about the transformation of German society that she and the other members of the small socialist organisation which had hidden her since August 1943 had awaited. Marianne tried to recruit for the Bund by joining the re-founded Communist Party and becoming an activist in its Free German Youth movement. In April 1946, she started writing full-time on the arts for the Communist newspaper
Freiheit
and also worked for the German service of the BBC in the British Zone. But already she was admitting in a letter to one of her British cousins that ‘one recognises how illusory were the hopes we placed in Germany’s ability to develop and change. Sometimes I feel that the Germans have learned nothing.’ Within a year, Marianne, who in May 1945 had automatically identified herself as a German rather than presenting herself to the Allies as a Jew, was no longer sure about counting herself amongst them and began thinking of leaving Germany.
³⁸

Wartime beliefs had not disappeared with Nazi rule. In June 1945, a Catholic priest in Münster told Allied investigators how widespread the view still was in his area that their wartime bombing represented ‘the revenge of World Jewry’. In August, US Intelligence in Germany reported that only the Russians were hated more than the Americans. Germans were willing to accept that Britain and France had been forced into the war but could not understand US intervention. No one seemed to remember that it was Hitler who had declared war on the United States. Interviewers found that the ‘Jewish war’ still provided the key explanation for American actions against Germany, and German defeat seemed only to have confirmed the ‘power of world Jewry’. Hardly anybody thought that the German people as a whole were responsible for the suffering of the Jews, although 64 per cent agreed that the persecution of the Jews had been decisive in making Germany lose the war. Still, there was a large minority of respondents – 37 per cent – who, even in conditions of Allied occupation, were prepared to endorse the view that ‘the extermination of the Jews and the Poles and other non-Aryans’ had been necessary for ‘the security of the Germans’. It was clear that most Germans still believed they had fought a legitimate war of national defence.
³⁹

This was not what any of the victorious Allies had intended. The Americans had pursued the most ambitious re-education and denazification policy in 1945 and 1946, forcing Germans to visit the liberated concentration camps or, sometimes, to view film footage from Buchenwald and Dachau before receiving ration cards. Many turned their faces away, unwilling or unable to look. Others began to disparage the films and photographs as propaganda staged by the Allies. Even the word ‘re-education’, with its connotations of sending juvenile delinquents to reformatories or ‘asocials’ to concentration camps, sounded offensive to German ears. The Americans found that their efforts were bearing little fruit. Between November 1945 and December 1946 they had conducted eleven polls, finding that on average 47 per cent endorsed the proposition that National Socialism had been ‘a good idea carried out badly’; in August 1947, 55 per cent of those polled endorsed this view. The level of support amongst those under 30, those with high-school education, amongst Protestants, and those living in West Berlin and in Hesse was even higher, reaching 60–68 per cent – and this at a time when openly advocating National Socialism still potentially carried the death penalty.
⁴⁰

*

In the Soviet occupation zone, a quite different political and ideological course was pursued, as Communist leaders like Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht returned from Soviet exile determined to transform the country and prevent the re-emergence of fascism by creating a new cult and set of norms based around the heroic example of Communist fighters against fascism. In April 1945 Pieck affirmed the German people’s ‘deep implication’ in Nazi crimes, and the view that Germans had brought their sufferings on themselves was disseminated in
Dresden,
a short documentary film made in 1946 about the bombing of the city. Hopes that the German people would embrace the heroic example of the ‘Anti-fascist Resistance Fighters’ persisted and particular emphasis was placed on education and propaganda efforts amongst German prisoners of war. In his attempt, however, to establish effective rule over the Soviet occupation zone, Pieck now welcomed returning prisoners of war instead of continuing to blame them, explicitly confining German guilt to a small circle, the ‘Hitler clique’. As early as 1946, he went so far as to equate the innocent suffering of ‘millions of German people’ who ‘had been driven to death on the battlefields and in the
Heimat
by the Hitler government’ with that of ‘millions’ – he did not say of what nation or ethnicity – who ‘had been murdered and tortured to death by an inhuman terror in the concentration camps’.
⁴¹

Here the shift from ‘collective guilt’ was effected far more smoothly than in the West. From 1947, East Germans were encouraged to commemorate their war dead on Remembrance Sunday as ‘victims of fascism’, exploited and sent to their death by the ‘Hitler clique’. Out of the heroic ‘Anti-fascist Resistance’, socialist Germany had been born. With its overblown language of sacrifice, rebirth, optimism and collective endeavour, many of the phrases had a ring familiar from Nazi appeals to the ‘national community’, although the Communists’ goals of peaceful reconstruction were more bathetic and achievable. By this point, actual veterans of the ‘Anti-fascist Resistance’ such as German-Jewish Communists who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain were met with suspicion when they opted to return to East Germany from exile in Britain.
⁴²

Austria followed an even shorter route to transforming its citizens from perpetrators into victims. Taking its cue from the Allies’ Moscow Declaration of 1943, on 27 April 1945 Austrian independence from the Reich was declared, with the assertion that the
Anschluss
of March 1938 had made Austria the ‘first victim’ of National Socialist aggression. Ten years later, a State Treaty was signed, giving formal Allied recognition to the non-aligned Second Republic, and its first article enshrined this myth. When Austria opened a permanent exhibition in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1978, it once more presented itself as a pure victim of the Nazis.
⁴³

The formal creation of two German states in 1949 was rapidly overshadowed by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Now both the Soviet Union and the United States urged their German clients to rearm. Official pronouncements in East Germany shifted dramatically. In February 1949, the official Socialist Unity Party paper,
Neues Deutschland,
dedicated half its Sunday supplement to commemorating the destruction of Dresden four years earlier. There were photographs, which would soon become iconic, of the dead piled up in the Altmarkt square to be burned, eyewitness reports and an article by the city’s mayor. For the first time, the wanton and needless destruction was blamed on the British and Americans. It set the tone for the new Cold War confrontation and there was again talk of the ‘Anglo-American terror attacks’ – only the ‘Jewish’ epithet was omitted from Goebbels’s original turn of phrase. In 1964, a new memorial was unveiled at the Heide Cemetery where the remains of those killed in the Dresden raids were interred. Its circle of fourteen stelae gave visual form to the equivalence Pieck had drawn between victims of Nazi persecution and the German war dead. Seven columns bore the names of concentration camps, the other seven the names of bombed cities from around the world. Across the open circle of stelae Dresden faced Auschwitz.
⁴⁴

In the West, Chancellor Adenauer responded to the American pressure to rearm by asserting in the Federal Parliament in 1951 that ‘there has been no breach in the honour of the former German Wehrmacht’. Members of Parliament welcomed the opportunity to proclaim that ‘the age of collective guilt is now at an end’. As the new democracy paid court to the corps of non-commissioned officers and senior commanders it needed to form its own armed forces, the cult of ‘sacrifice’, ‘duty’ and ‘honour’ re-emerged. Meanwhile the other old professional elites were also welcomed back into the West German state. In 1951–53, the West German Parliament guaranteed the employment rights and pensions of former civil servants and military personnel, including those who had been transferred to the Gestapo or Waffen SS. Ingeborg T. might never have had the pleasure of walking with her husband down the streets of Soest in the few months that he ranked as a Wehrmacht general in 1945, but he did secure a general’s pension. Old networks proved strong within the professional elites. Soon 43 per cent of the West German diplomatic corps were former SS men and another 17 per cent had served in the SD or Gestapo. In Bavaria, where American efforts at denazification had gone further than in the other Western zones, 77 per cent of Finance Ministry officials and 94 per cent of judges and state prosecutors were former Nazis. The Federal Republic had taken over Allied decrees recognising the persecution of political prisoners and Jews and its courts and administration complied, reluctantly, with survivors’ compensation claims: Marianne Strauss began her legal claim in September 1945 and, redefined by successive Federal laws and rulings, it continued into the 1970s. No ruling by the Allies had been made on behalf of the Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses or homosexuals, and for decades West German courts held out against recognising their claims, as many of the same civil servants and judges who had persecuted them as ‘asocials’ or ‘pacifists’ under the Third Reich continued to rule over their cases until they finally retired in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Uniquely amongst former political prisoners, communists’ claims were also routinely rejected on the grounds that they supported a ‘totalitarian’ regime. The Cold War also altered the status of claimants in East Germany: Frieda Rimpl’s husband Josef – a Jehovah’s Witness – had been executed in December 1939 for refusing to serve in the Wehrmacht. She had duly been recognised as a ‘victim of National Socialist persecution’ and paid a widow’s pension by the Saxon Social Security Office; in November 1950, she received a letter informing her that she had been ‘de-recognised’ and the payments terminated.
⁴⁵