The Third Reich at War
Page 92
Towards the end of the war, Adolf Eichmann had formed a small partisan resistance movement in the Austrian Alps on the orders of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, with the assistance of Otto Skorzeny and the former Romanian Iron Guard leader Horia Sima. But Himmler soon put a stop to the enterprise, and Eichmann went underground, using forged identity papers. Fearing discovery, he too took advantage of the Vatican’s policy of helping ‘anti-Communist fighters’ to escape to Latin America and arrived in Argentina, where the quasi-fascist dictatorship of Juan Peron provided a refuge for a variety of former Nazis and SS men. One of them was Otto Skorzeny, who had escaped from a prison camp in Germany in 1948 and lived in a variety of locations, including Spain and Ireland (he died in Germany in 1975). Eichmann’s identity and location were discovered by the anti-Nazi state prosecutor in Hesse, Fritz Bauer, a Jewish German who had spent the war in exile in Sweden. At his prompting, the Israeli secret service kidnapped Eichmann in Buenos Aires in May 1960 and smuggled him to Jerusalem, where he stood trial for mass murder the following year amidst a blaze of publicity. He was sentenced to death and hanged at midnight on 31 May 1962.254
III
From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, the political climate of the Cold War militated against any major war crimes trials in West Germany. It was widely felt, both by the NATO Allies and by the West German government, that such trials would fuel East German charges that the country was rife with Nazi criminals, and perhaps also destabilize the Federal Republic’s fledgling democracy by alienating large numbers of ex-Nazis who feared that they too might be brought before a court. By 1958, however, there were signs that the situation was beginning to change. The foundation of a Central Office of the Provincial Justice Administrations in Ludwigsburg laid the basis for the nationwide co-ordination of prosecutions. But it was the Eichmann trial that really put pressure on the West Germans to act. Once more, Fritz Bauer was the driving force behind the investigations. These culminated in the trial of a number of SS officers and guards in Frankfurt am Main in 1964. The last commandant of Auschwitz, Richard Baer, who was arrested in 1960 after having lived for many years as a forestry worker under a false name, was to have been a defendant, but he died before the trial began. In the dock were twenty-two men including block leaders, SS camp guards and others who were accused of specific acts of individual, physical violence against prisoners. More than 350 former inmates travelled to the court to give evidence. In August 1965, seventeen of the defendants were given mostly lengthy prison sentences. The trial proved a crucial turning-point in bringing the attention of the younger generation of West Germans to the crimes of the Third Reich; it was followed by four smaller trials in West Germany, in which more Auschwitz guards and block leaders were sentenced to imprisonment. The East Germans riposted with a trial of their own, arresting and executing the camp doctor Horst Fischer in 1966. He had been practising medicine openly in the communist state, under his own name, without hindrance, for more than twenty years before his arrest.255
The survival in positions of responsibility in postwar Germany of men like Fischer suggested strongly to many observers that the process of ‘denazification’ carried out by the Allies had been less than thorough. In the years immediately following the end of the war, millions of Germans were required to fill in and submit lengthy forms on their activities and beliefs under the Third Reich. They were then brought before tribunals, which heard evidence from interested parties and categorized the individual concerned as a Nazi, implicated in Nazism, a fellow traveller, or uninvolved. The process was vast in scope. More than 3,600,000 people in the western zones were affected, of whom 1,667 were classified as ‘chief culprits’, just over 23,000 as ‘incriminated’, and slightly more than 150,000 as ‘less incriminated’. Thus under 5 per cent were judged to have been hard-core Nazis. 996,000 were categorized as merely nominal members of the Nazi Party (27 per cent), and 1,214,000 were exonerated (33 per cent). By the time the process was wound up, in 1948, 783,000 remained uncharged, 358,000 were amnestied, and 125,000 remained unclassified. In a similar process carried out in the Soviet Zone, more than 300,000 people were dismissed from their jobs, and 83,000 were banned from further employment altogether. Denazification could not, of course, ban all 6.5 million members of the Party from employment in positions of responsibility. The need for the expertise of judges, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, bankers and many others was too great. Many of those who had condemned political offenders to death in the courts, taken part in ‘euthanasia’ killings in the hospitals, preached Nazi doctrines in the schools and universities, or participated in ‘desk-top murders’ in the civil service resumed their posts. The professions closed ranks and deflected criticism of their behaviour in the Third Reich, and a veil of silence descended over their complicity, not to be lifted until after the leading participants retired, towards the end of the century.256
The intrusiveness of the action alienated Germans, who wanted above all to forget, and popular approval of denazification as revealed in opinion polls fell from 57 per cent in March 1946 to 17 per cent in May 1949. The superficiality of the denazification process failed to change many of the Nazi views held by those it affected. And yet, overall, despite everything, the action was a success. The open expression of Nazi opinions became a taboo, and those who revealed them were generally forced to resign their posts. The internment, screening and trial before denazification tribunals of tens of thousands of hard-core Nazis opened the way for the re-emergence of anti-Nazis - Social Democrat, Catholic, liberal - and others who had taken no part in the regime, to occupy leading positions in politics, administration, culture and the media. Attempts to revive Nazism in the form of neo-Nazi political movements like the Socialist Reich Party or, later, the National Democratic Party never won more than marginal popular support; if they were too blatant, like the former, then they were legally suppressed. A postwar career like that of Werner Best, who survived more than one trial and condemnation to spend the rest of his long life - he died in 1989 - organizing help for former Nazis and campaigning for a general amnesty, was unusual. All the same, public opinion polls revealed that a majority continued well into the 1950s to regard Nazism as ‘a good idea, badly carried out’, and a worryingly large proportion of the population considered that Germany was better off without the Jews. It was not until the arrival of a new generation on the scene, symbolized by the year 1968, that a real confrontation with the past began. Nevertheless, the political culture of both East and West Germany was from the outset based on a vigorous repudiation of Nazi ideology and values, including the long tradition of German nationalism and militarism that had persuaded so many people to support it. The realities of the total defeat and, in the 1950s and 1960s, the prosperity generated by the ‘economic miracle’ persuaded the overwhelming majority of Germans to embrace the political culture of parliamentary democracy, European integration and international peace with growing enthusiasm and commitment.257
Few Germans found adjusting to this new world easy. Many still regretted the failure of the Third Reich. When Hitler’s former military commanders came to write their memoirs, they took the opportunity to put forward the unrealistic but for many years widely accepted view that, if only Hitler had let them get on with the job, they could have won the war. The conduct of the German army on the Eastern Front went uncriticized in these works, and for decades, therefore, unquestioned. General Gotthard Heinrici was eventually captured on 28 May 1945 and did not get back to Germany until 1948. For the rest of his life he remained convinced that he had fought in a good cause - the German cause. He died peacefully on 13 December 1971.258 Field Marshal Fedor von Bock was not so lucky. On 3 May 1945, in compulsory retirement since the summer of 1942, he was being driven with his wife, his stepdaughter and a friend through the countryside towards Oldenburg, hoping to meet his friend Field Marshal Manstein to discuss the end of the war. The car was spotted by a British fighter plane, which swooped low over it and strafed it with bullets. The car burst i
nto flames; Bock staggered out, the only survivor; he was picked up and taken to hospital, but died of his injuries the following day.259 Among other senior military commanders, Walther von Brauchitsch died in a British prison in 1948, Gerd von Rundstedt was captured and interrogated by the British but never faced trial because of his heart condition, and died in 1953; Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered at Stalingrad, lived in East Germany until his death in 1957, still outwardly committed to the Communist cause he had embraced in captivity; Erich von Manstein was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment by a British military court in 1949 for crimes against non-combatants, was released in 1953 and became a military adviser to the West German government, dying in 1973. Like the tank commander Heinz Guderian, who was briefly imprisoned after the war and died in 1954, Manstein was widely respected for his generalship; questions about his involvement in Nazism and its crimes went largely unanswered.
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.260 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.’261 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’.262 It took another nine years before he was able to resume his career in the fire service.263
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.264
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 1964.265 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.266
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.267
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?’268
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’.269