Apparently, no more was heard from Public Safety on this issue.
* Kreis = District in German. An administrative area between state (Land) and community level. In modern Germany there are around 420 of these for a population of 81,000,000, urban and rural, giving an average of slightly less than 200,000 per Kreis.
† Oberlandesgericht = Higher Regional Court.
* The demobilisation process depended on a system of ‘points’, which were awarded for length of service, length of overseas duty, number of children, decorations and citations earned by men and their units, etc. Generally, a total of eighty-five guaranteed a man his return to civilian life.
* PR/ISC = Public Relations/Information Services Control.
11
Persil Washes White
The determined denazifiers were lucky in one sense. Unlike Patton, the otherwise conservative General Clay held on to his conviction that a political purge of the occupied areas was a necessity.
Clay believed in business, he wanted to modify JCS 1067 as much as he decently could so that Germany and its industries could pay their keep, and he was decidedly in favour of a capitalist post-war Germany. All the same, he also felt strongly about cleansing the political Augean stables in the zone as thoroughly – but also as quickly – as possible so that the country could genuinely move on to a democratic as well as a more prosperous future.
That much of the policy carried out by the AMG and its officials in the summer and autumn after the victory was very tough is hard to deny. There were officers, like Patton, who sympathised with the Germans (though perhaps not in quite such extreme terms), disliked the DPs (sometimes with good day-to-day reasons) and thought that denazification was paving the way for communism. There were equally many, if not more, who believed passionately in the most thoroughgoing of purges.
Certainly, the effects of investigation by the AMG’s denazification teams could be devastating so far as incriminated individual Germans and their families were concerned. From the substantial town of Kempten in Allgäu, south-western Bavaria, AMG officials reported:
1. On 31 Oct 45, Dr Bernhard Wagner, former city treasurer, and his wife and child attempted triple suicide. Morphine had been taken by all three but the dose was lethal to the child only. Since the morphine failed to kill, Frau Wagner opened the veins on Dr Wagner’s wrist. He died the next day in hospital. Frau Wagner is recovering and will be tried for attempting suicide and murder.
2. The suicide was evidently caused by the removal of Dr Wagner from his position and his imminent re-arrest by CIC. He had returned only a few days before from several weeks in an internment camp having been taken into custody by CIC as a mandatory arrest. The day before the suicide, he had been summoned by CIC for another interview and as a result he evidently assumed that he would be interned once more.1
By the end of the winter, more than 42 per cent of public officials had been summarily dismissed by the occupation forces. It was all very well cleansing the Augean stables, but who was going to run them once they were cleansed?
With political parties for Germans now licensed at local level, and communal elections set for January 1946, so far as general attitudes in Bavaria regarding denazification were concerned, American intelligence led with several examples chosen to typify different views in the Land:
a. Among small and humble Nazis the reaction is mainly one of anxiety and fear. A railway switchman, for example fears that he may lose his job and his home, and reports, in a manner inimitably Bavarian: ‘Ich will meine Ruhe haben’ [I want my peace]. He now sympathises, he says, with the Social Democrats, and hopes to see Germany rebuilt.
b. A middle-aged working woman, wife of a PG [Parteigenosse, or Nazi Party member], and a refugee from the Sudetenland, plaintively asks: ‘How did we earn this? We always tried to do the right thing and didn’t know the party was so bad’.
c. More spirited Nazis are beset by similar fears, but do not deny their principles. ‘The Americans are seeking to destroy Germany,’ says a female high-school teacher bitterly, ‘and this is one of their techniques of doing it’. A former Nazi official says: ‘Yes, we are guilty of being Nazis and must suffer for it’. A former Professor of the alleged science of Rassenkunde [literally: racial lore] warns that the purge will produce an intelligent proletariat which will be communistically inclined and which will prove a menace.2
The resentment and fear of the power of the AMG was not necessarily combined with a desire by Germans at this point to rule themselves. In fact, another report, from Friedberg, a suburb of the city of Augsburg, stated:
There is frequent comment concerning the handing over of the civil administration from the Military Government to the civilians [that] is being made soon. One comment is that the American authorities are not interested enough in the affairs of their occupation zone and want to release themselves of the burden of responsibility as soon as possible. It is noticed that the semi-step of self-government is being taken only by the American forces.3
It seemed that, in the eyes of the defeated, the occupiers could not win. The catch was, of course, that without structured German involvement, governing the zone except on the most basic level would be impossible. Similarly, if the Americans persisted in pursuing denazification alone, the process would take several years, perhaps even longer, and would, moreover, always be seen as an alien imposition.
As we have seen, millions of American troops had already been repatriated and demobilised. Final American withdrawal from Europe was still planned for 1947. German self-denazification was therefore convenient, even essential, for the American occupiers, but it was also consciously part of democratisation. The Soviets had been the first to set up (appointed) German-run Land governments in their zone in July 1945. The Americans were acutely aware of invidious comparisons, should they – the world’s democratic paragons – delay the transition to German self-rule in their own zone.
The Soviets were also the first to allow the formation of post-war political parties. The Communist Party (KPD) was officially refounded in Russian-controlled Berlin a little more than a month after the end of the war, followed rapidly by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), then a Christian Conservative Party (the Christian Democratic Union = CDU) and a Liberal Party (Liberal Democratic Party of Germany = LDPD). However, the uniquely close relationship between the Russians and their ready-made German communist allies – many of whom had returned after years of exile in the USSR – assured the KPD of a crucial, though not yet openly dominant role. The rapid consolidation of the parties in the Soviet Zone into the ‘Unity Front of Anti-Fascist Democratic Parties’ was early evidence of this covert control. On 9 July, the Russians instituted five provinces, or Länder, and appointed German officials to head them. In October, the German authorities were supposedly given ‘full powers’.
The US authorities followed piecemeal with their own appointed Land governments – in Bavaria, Greater Hessen and Württemberg-Baden – composed of supposedly ‘clean’ German politicians (mostly from the pre-Hitler period) and officials. These bodies also made up a Länderrat (Council of Länder), constituted under American supervision at a conference in Stuttgart on 17 October. The council’s task was to liaise with and take instructions from the occupiers on a zone-wide level, though General Clay emphasised in his speech to the founding conference that the Germans should assume responsibility for their own government as soon as possible, and that the establishment of a free press and broadcasting system were also a high priority.4
Political parties were permitted, though at first only on a district basis and subject to a licensing procedure to ensure their democratic credentials. Within three months of that, the military administration had begun the process of holding free elections on the American model, the first of the occupiers to do so. Parties on a Land level were allowed from January. Organisation on zone level had to wait.
That the Americans took the lead in the race to give post-war Germans the chance to vote freel
y was hardly surprising, given the almost religious importance the US placed on democracy, but the speed with which the AMG did so was impressive.
In January 1946, elections took place on a village level, in April on the Kreis level and in May for city councils. Finally, in June there followed elections to constitutional conventions for each of the Länder. It was a consciously decentralised model. Like the individual American states, the Länder were to have the right to promulgate their own laws and define their own governmental systems. Referenda on these Land constitutions, combined with legislative elections, would take place at the end of the year.
The plans for German self-denazification ran parallel with these political developments. Democratisation and denazification were intimately connected imperatives. One legitimised the other – certainly as far as the outside world was concerned, and hopefully, the occupiers thought, so far as the average German in the American Zone was concerned, too.
The permanence and legitimacy of these developing institutions had now to be clearly established. When the Germanised version of the ‘Law for the Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism’ – drafted by the AMG’s lawyers under consultation with German colleagues – was approved by the Land premiers on 5 March 1946, the signature ceremony was symbolically located in the metropolis that had been the birthplace of Nazism and Hitler’s favourite city: Munich. Each of the three state governments now acquired a Minister for Denazification. Under him extended a network of 545 denazification tribunals (Spruchkammern), organised at Kreis level, and with a total German staff for the entire system of around 22,000. Each of these thousands of officials was implausibly supposed to have been thoroughly vetted by the US Army Special Branch.
The highly unpopular Fragebogen (literally: question sheet) was now renamed a Meldebogen (report sheet). The tribunals could classify their subjects as major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, fellow travellers – or as exonerated of all involvement. Oversight would still be exercised by Military Government officers at a regional level, but the local Germans were indeed allowed a lot of freedom – more than in any other zone.
There were also some concessions on principle. It was now assumed that only around a quarter of Germans in the zone counted as contaminated.5 The possibility was also conceded, for the first time in the post-war period, that denazification should be about rehabilitation, not just punishment. While any German who had ‘contributed to the development or support of National Socialism or militarism’ would be ‘called to account’, he would also be given the opportunity to vindicate himself on the basis of a ‘just consideration of his individual responsibility and his actual conduct, taken as a whole’.6 This was either a masterstroke of sensitive humanitarianism or a licence to acquit. Only time, and the tendencies of individual tribunals, would tell which.
Things were made easier for the tribunals, as the year went on, by the exemption of Party members born after 1919 (unless they had committed serious crimes), who were considered to have been subjected to brainwashing, and to disabled veterans. A reasonable and humane exemption, preserving many genuinely devastated lives from further misery, this nevertheless represented a useful loophole for the truly guilty.
So the new-model denazification took off, a little slowly at first. There were all kinds of problems. These included shortages of office space, of office furniture and equipment and, significantly, of professional qualified and educated staff. Many otherwise suitable candidates were tainted by Party membership and could not join the tribunal system until they had themselves been cleared. Since each tribunal had, according to the law, to be headed by a qualified judge, the Americans immediately ran into exactly the same problem as the British – the difficulty, given sky-high rates of Nazi Party membership among lawyers, of finding ‘untainted’ law officers.
The tribunal process was not technically a legal proceeding, though it involved a prosecutor, an accused, a defender and a jury (the tribunal, or Spruchkammer, itself) and could take place in public with all the adversarial trappings of a ‘trial’. The difference was that tribunals technically decided ‘responsibility’, not guilt – a concession to the Germans who objected to ex post facto laws being applied.7 However, by no means all cases got so far. The flood of business would simply have overwhelmed the system, which even as things stood was stretched up to and beyond its limits. It was generally only when the prosecutor decided to charge a former Nazi in one of the serious categories that a hearing was necessary. This could be held in public, if based on oral evidence, or in private if based on written evidence. The tribunals decided in secret by a majority vote. In fact, in the first five months after they were set up, of 583,985 cases that came before the tribunals, 530,907 were dealt with without the necessity of a trial. So less than 10 per cent went to public hearings.8
Perhaps it was inevitable that Germanised denazification would run into so many problems right from the start, and grow worse as the process rolled out. In the early months of the occupation, the opponents of Nazism had been able to expect that, if they could gain the support of local American military officials – particularly public safety officers – they could bring about some changes in their communities and make sure that at least some of the guilty were punished for what they had inflicted on their fellow citizens and the wider world between 1933 and 1945.
In Bavaria, there was a period even after the ‘Germanisation’ of the process where the appointment of a communist, Heinrich Schmitt, as minister promised to turn denazification into a genuinely radical process. But Schmitt, though efficient and incorruptible, operated in an openly political way, which disturbed many both among the populace and within the Military Government. He was also openly radical in his goals, an unabashed social engineer. Schmitt believed strongly that it would only improve society if former Nazi big shots were forced to slide down to unskilled labourer level – the result of being found guilty of activism and banned from government service and the professions. This would act as a warning to others, a case of elementary social justice, and give an opportunity for decent, untainted Germans with hitherto limited life chances to climb the post-war social ladder.
Schmitt did not last long in his post. American intelligence investigated his department and found he was stuffing it with fellow communists. With elections now taking place, Bavaria’s post-war conservative party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) – founded from a collection of old Catholic Centre Party members, veterans of the pre-war Bavarian People’s Party and former Nazis – was gathering a dominant political momentum, and also flexing its muscle. In May, Schmitt’s ministry was purged. In June, Schmitt himself was forced out, despite the personal respect in which he was held by Major Walter Louis Dorn, the American history professor who had spent the war years with the CIA’s predecessor, OSS, and was adviser on denazification first to Eisenhower and then to Clay. Schmitt, Dorn admitted, was simply too controversial and was seen as a barrier to wider public acceptance of the programme.9
The new minister, Anton Pfeiffer, was a pre-war Catholic politician of the familiar anti-Nazi but strongly nationalistic and socially conservative type. A member of the CSU, ‘untainted’ Pfeiffer may have been, but like the CSU itself he disliked the denazification law they had been forced to accept, seeing it as little more than victors’ justice, and did his best to render it all but ineffective. He insisted to his American overseers that only 30,000 Nazis in Bavaria belonged to categories I and II, and snubbed tribunals run by leftists.
While Pfeiffer was minister (until December 1946), the tribunals reclassified at least 60 per cent of senior Nazis, often only fining them, and reinstated more than 75 per cent of the officials formerly dismissed by the Americans. It got so bad, from the Americans’ point of view, that in October Premier Hoegner had to be warned to report improper behaviour by the tribunals to the US authorities.
The fact was, Germanised denazification rapidly descended into a farce, and not just in Bavaria, as Clay himself was forced to adm
it. Nazis, often comfortably situated and able to hire clever lawyers to represent them at the hearings, ran rings around the untrained and often relatively uneducated members of the tribunals. A torrent of denazification certificates – popularly known as Persilscheine (‘Persil certificates’ – after the well-known detergent produced by Henkel & Co., which naturally washed white) – descended on the guilty in Bavaria and elsewhere in the American Zone. The tribunals, hated as they were in many circles, in fact proved so forgiving that they were known satirically as ‘follower factories’, producing from once-rabid Nazis hundreds of thousands of mere political passengers of convenience or compulsion who were deemed worthy of the mildest punishments.
There was evidence, as American intelligence realised from censoring letters sent abroad from the zone, as well as listening in on phone calls, that the tribunals were in many cases not only incompetent and politically lax, but corrupt. CIC Region IV Munich reported in August 1946: ‘Censored letters make clear the existence of a black market in securing statements of innocence for former Nazis; dozens of intercepted communications seem to indicate that Nazis trade endorsements of their guiltlessness and mutually certify to their anti-Nazi attitude and anti-Nazi activities in the past.’10 The report continued damningly, in a snapshot of the bleak situation in the tribunals and a Bavarian government machine that was rapidly becoming a tool of the conservative-nationalist CSU:
Letters from smaller communities seem to indicate that the CSU very commonly gives aid and comfort to former [Nazi] party members. In several letters the CSU is called the CNSU, i.e. the Christian National Socialist Union. Many communications complain that former Nazis still occupy leading positions in Bavaria. Letters from returned Prisoners of War, who have participated in re-education courses as, e.g. Ft Mead in the United States, express disappointment with the Bavarian political situation and a feeling of hopelessness that PW’s returning from America, indoctrinated in American democracy, are not utilised or employed by Military Government.11
Exorcising Hitler Page 33