The Third Reich at War (124 page)

Lower down the military hierarchy, the diarist and letter-writer Wilm Hosenfeld was taken prisoner by a Red Army unit as he retreated from Warsaw on 17 January 1945 and put into a prison camp. His health deteriorated, and he suffered a stroke on 27 July 1947. By this time he was able to write letters to friends and family, and he desperately listed as many as he could remember of the Poles and Jews whom he had rescued, trying to get them to petition for his release. Some did. But it was to no avail. As a member of the German military administration during the Warsaw uprising of 1944, he was accused of war crimes, put on trial and sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment. On 13 August 1952 he suffered another stroke, this time fatal.
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Many other German prisoners of war were kept in Soviet labour camps for a full decade after the war, until their final release in the mid-1950s. Civilian life proved difficult to adjust to for many of them. The soldier and long-time stormtrooper Gerhard M. found that the hardest thing to bear about the new political world he entered on 8 May 1945 was the fact that he was no longer able to wear a uniform. ‘I have always liked wearing a uniform,’ he confided to his diary, ‘and indeed not just because of the many silver insignia . . . but mainly because of the forceful appearance of the breech-trousers and the better way the clothes fitted.’
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He could not understand why he was not allowed to resume his prewar duties as a fireman. ‘Yeah,’ the new head of the fire service told him, ‘you Nazis risked a very loud tone up to now, but now it’s all over with that.’ Gerhard M. found his dismissal incomprehensible. ‘I absolutely couldn’t pull myself together.’ Bitterly he reflected on the war ‘that our leaders, who had built Germany up in such exemplary fashion, unleashed a war of the strength of the world and thereby allowed the destruction of what not only they but also previous generations had created, merely because they wanted to go down in history as great military leaders’.
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It took another nine years before he was able to resume his career in the fire service.
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Others found it equally difficult to come to terms with their new situation and achieve a self-critical distance to their Nazi past. As a former leading member of the League of German Girls, Melita Maschmann, afraid like many of Allied retribution, hid in Alpine valleys in Austria, using forged papers and living off bartered or stolen food, until mid-June 1945, when she was finally arrested and identified. Imprisonment finally brought home to her the fact that the Third Reich was over. The best thing about prison, she later recalled, was the enforced idleness, which gave her time to reflect and recuperate from the years of hard and unremitting effort she had put into the Nazi cause. The limited amount of ‘re-education’ to which she was subjected was, she said, lamentable, and the re-educators were often less educated than middle-class women such as herself, who frequently bettered them in argument. She refused to believe the stories of the extermination camps and dismissed the photographs she was shown as fakes. When she listened to a radio relay of the closing speech of the head of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, at the Nuremberg trial in 1946, she felt betrayed by his admission of guilt and put it down to the stress of imprisonment. She remained convinced, as she wrote in her notes at the time, ‘that National Socialism as the idea of racial renewal, the Greater German Reich and a united Europe . . . was one of the greatest political conceptions of modern times’. She thought it more honourable to undergo the process of denazification as a convinced Nazi than to be written off as a fellow traveller. And for some years afterwards, idealistic as ever, she devoted herself to helping former Nazis in distress, giving away much of her earnings in the process. It took a dozen years for her to achieve a degree of distance to the Nazi past, helped by religion, and in particular by her friendship with an Evangelical pastor. She enrolled as a university student and actively sought out the acquaintance of foreign students from other races. The final stage in her liberation from the ideology which had consumed her for much of her earlier life was her acceptance that the reports she began to read about the fate of individual Jews in Warsaw and the camps were true. Nazism, she concluded, had possessed the ability to attract many good, idealistic young people who were so carried away by their enthusiasm and dedication to the cause that they blinded themselves to what was really happening. She herself, however, remained susceptible to the appeal of ideologies, and later in her life became seriously interested in Indian spirituality.
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IV

German cultural life resumed relatively quickly after the war, encouraged by the Allies. But those who had been too closely involved in Nazi propaganda were unable to resume their careers. In the film world, Emil Jannings was forced to retire to his farm in Austria, dying in 1950; Leni Riefenstahl found it impossible to make films any more, and devoted her time to photography, celebrating the life of Nubian tribes and filming underwater life on coral reefs; she died in 2003, aged 101. Riefenstahl always claimed that she had been entirely unpolitical, but few who had seen
Triumph of the Will
were able to believe her. By contrast, Veit Harlan successfully defended his record in a denazification trial on the grounds that he was an artist, and the propaganda content of his films had been imposed on him by Goebbels. He made a few more films before he died in 1964.
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Werner Egk, the leading modernist composer of the Third Reich, was able to resume his career, becoming a conservatory director and playing a central part in the reconstruction of musical life in West Germany; he died in 1983, laden with honours, a year after Carl Orff, whose postwar career was similarly successful. The former head of Goebbels’s Chamber of Music, composer Richard Strauss, was perhaps too eminent to be disturbed by denazification proceedings; living quietly in Vienna, he survived the war to produce a final sequence of limpid, Mozartian works that count among his best, from the
Metamorphoses
for string orchestra to the oboe concerto; he died in 1949 before he could hear the first performance of his final masterpiece, the
Four Last Songs
.
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The postwar career of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler was longer, but also more controversial. A denazification tribunal cleared him of all charges, and he continued to conduct and make recordings as a freelance up to his death in 1954, but the offer of an appointment as principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was rescinded in 1949 after protests by eminent Jewish musicians including Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein. His fellow-conductor Bruno Walter, forced into exile under the Nazis because of his Jewish ancestry, told him forcefully that throughout the Nazi years

your art was used as a conspicuously effective means of propaganda for the Regime of the Devil, that you performed high service to this regime through your prominent image and great talent, that the presence and performance of an artist of your stature abetted every horrible crime against culture and morality, or at least, gave considerable support to them.
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Furtwängler claimed to have intervened on behalf of Jewish victims of the regime, as he had indeed done in a few individual cases early on in the Third Reich. But, Walter pointed out, he had never been in danger, and he had carried on his career as Germany’s leading conductor throughout the whole period. ‘In light of all that,’ he concluded, ‘of what significance is your assistance in the isolated cases of a few Jews?’
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Hitler’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker, was also brought before a denazification tribunal, but he could point in mitigation of his close association with Hitler to a number of instances in which he had helped people in distress, including a Jewish woman who modelled for Maillol, Dina Vierny. Breker had visited Heinrich M̈ller, head of the Gestapo, and secured her release from the French transit camp from which she was due to be deported to Auschwitz. He had also helped Picasso evade the attentions of the Gestapo in Paris. Breker’s sculptures were popular not only with Hitler but also with Stalin, who offered him a commission in 1946 (Breker declined, saying: ‘one dictatorship is sufficient for me’). All of this, bolstered by 160 affidavits testifying to the probity of his conduct during the Third Reich, succeeded in having him classified merely as a ‘fellow traveller’, with a fine of 100 Deutschmarks plus the costs of the trial (which he never paid). He subsequently rebuilt his career, partly with the help of architects from Speer’s old office, and his admirers organized exhibitions of his work, but his campaign for rehabilitation did not succeed with the mainstream art world, which continued to regard him primarily as the state sculptor of the Third Reich all the way up to his death in 1991. A commentary in a leading conservative German newspaper on his ninetieth birthday the year before described him as ‘the classic example of a seduced, deluded and also overbearing talent’.
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Of more immediate interest to the Allies after the war than artists and composers were the scientists and engineers who had worked so expertly, and to such little effect, on wonder-weapons like the V-1 and V-2. Special teams were put together by the Soviet and American authorities to locate and take key military technological equipment back home for further development. The inventors of the nerve gases Sarin and Tabun were arrested and interrogated; jet engines, advanced submarines, rocket planes and much more besides were dismantled and taken away for study. The Soviets removed several thousand scientists and engineers to work on updating their military technology and equipment, while the British and Americans turned their attention to the V-2 rocket team, Together with Wernher von Braun and some of his staff, they oversaw the launch of three V-2 missiles from the German North Sea coast in October 1945. 120 of the rocket programme staff, including von Braun, were taken off to a new base near El Paso, in Texas, to work on rocket development; they were not made available for the trial of those responsible for the crimes committed at Camp Dora. By 1950 the programme had been relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, where it became the leading missile development centre in the USA, eclipsing previous institutions like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Ten years later, building on the experience of the V-2, von Braun and the Huntsville team constructed the mighty Saturn rocket, which was used to launch men into space and within a decade to send them to the moon. Not only the Americans but also the Soviets, the British and the French used the expertise of members of the Peenemünde team wherever they could find them, in developing and building a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, rendered infinitely more dangerous than their German predecessor by the invention of the atomic bomb.
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Other scientists, notably the pioneers of atom bomb research Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, remained in Germany and resumed their careers. Hahn took over the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1946, unsuccessfully opposing its renaming as the Max Planck Society at the behest of the British occupation authorities in the wake of the great scientist’s death in 1947. What Hahn did succeed in doing, however, was to distance the Society successfully from its close involvement in Nazi research, a topic that remained undiscussed until almost the very end of the twentieth century. Hahn went to Stockholm to get his Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission, and died in G̈ttingen in 1968. Werner Heisenberg became director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and rejoined the international scientific community, dying in 1971. His rivals, the champions of ‘German Physics’, did not prosper. Heisenberg had the pleasure of testifying against Johannes Stark at the latter’s trial in 1947. Stark’s sentence of four years’ imprisonment was in the end not implemented, and he died, largely forgotten, in 1957. Ten years before, his mentor Philipp Lenard had died at the age of 85. Other, more minor figures in the German Physics movement were systematically shut out of academic life when it resumed again after the war.
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V

The ordinary, unassuming citizens whose voluminous and conscientiously kept diaries form such a vital record of everyday life under the Nazis suffered a variety of fates after the war. Dr Zygmunt Klukowski published a five-volume work on German war crimes and the underground resistance in the Zamos’c’ area. This led to his being called as a witness in one of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Klukowski soon found himself living under another dictatorship, however, as the Soviet occupying power suppressed the Polish nationalist movement and installed a Communist regime in power. Klukowski now helped the Polish underground resistance to the Communists and kept a diary of the Communist terror, just as he had done of the Nazi. He was arrested by the Soviet political police twice, and, though he was not imprisoned, he was demoted from his long-held post of head of hospital to the status of a humble ward physician. In 1952 he was arrested again, while trying - unsuccessfully - to prevent his son Tadeusz from being executed for resistance activities, and spent four years in Wronki prison. In the thaw of 1956 he was pardoned and rehabilitated, and moved to Lublin, where he published his war diaries two years later. These made him famous: the book was quickly reprinted, and won a major literary prize, to go along with numerous other Polish national awards. By this time, however, Klukoswki was already suffering from cancer. He died on 23 November 1959, and was buried in Szczebrzeszyn, along with other soldiers of the Home Army: in 1986 the town erected a monument to him in the main square. His diaries reached a wider readership with their publication in English in 1993 on the initiative of his surviving son and grandson and remain the most vivid and detailed record we have of life in Poland under German occupation.
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