After the Reich (68 page)

The right way to denazify Germany was not generally agreed between East and West, and even the Western Allies had their fall-outs. The British were lukewarm, but in their sector of Berlin there was a little show of strength. One of George Clare’s first experiences in the city was interpreting for a British officer who was determined to keep a fire chief in office despite his Nazi past. He wanted efficient firemen, and he couldn’t give a damn about the man’s past. The only problem was that the other firemen were social democrats who had been persecuted by the Nazis and for that reason would not tolerate having one in their midst.
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In the Ruhr all the mining engineers were dismissed as Nazis. Then there were explosions that claimed hundreds of lives - including British - and General Templer decided that Military Government had been foolish.
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Clare’s office might have been feared by Berlin Nazis, but in general no one worried too much about the British, and visitors to their zone reported pro-Nazi graffiti they did not see elsewhere. The British attitude was allegedly not to disturb the status quo and to use re-education where possible. The results were not deemed successful in retrospect.
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The figures, however, do not always bear this out. By September 1946 there were 66,500 Nazis interned in the American Zone, and 70,000 in the British.
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In Nordrhein-Westfalen alone two and a half million cases were examined. The mill ground very fine and many of these men, and some women, were kept under lock and key and in terrible conditions for years. In general, however, they were either released at the end, or given a trifling punishment. The British had their own problems at home to worry about. Denazification was hardly their top priority. Around 80 per cent of Nazis were exonerated. By that time even the Americans had lost their enthusiasm and there were only 200 of them working in Public Safety, assisted by around thirty-five foreigners. They could not hope to be able to sift the evidence and they had no co-operation from the Russians whatsoever.
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The Russians were firm believers in collective guilt and any German was liable for punishment, even death. They set the Germans to work and gave them as little as they could to sustain life. They investigated half a million cases in their zone, around 3 per cent of the population, and, as in Austria, the Pgs were not allowed to vote in the various elections held in 1946. By 1948 they too had lost interest and ended the purge.
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The French attitude lay somewhere between the British and the Russians: it was less a question of guilt than ‘should this man play a role in public life or should he not?’
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One of the problems facing the Allies was the scale of the work before them. With twelve million Pgs in their midst it became clear after a while that their original ferocity would be tempered with time and that a lot of small fry would swim free. The Germans, for their part, were more used to the methods used by the Gestapo or the NKVD and assumed that, once caught, they were for the high jump. Allied Military Courts, on the other hand, were snowed under with Nazis waiting to know their fates.
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Denazification was a fact of life for all Germans, even dead ones who had been hanged for their part in the plot to kill Hitler. In 1949 Charlotte von der Schulenburg had yet to receive her widow’s pension and was having difficulty providing for her children by Fritz-Dietlof. The problem was that her husband had been an early member of the Party, having joined in 1932, a fact that ‘was clearly more important than anything that he did afterwards’.
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Four years after the end of the war Charlotte had to go before a tribunal in Hanover to fight her late husband’s corner.

She sat on a bench outside the court waiting for her case to be called. Next to her were Jews and gypsies seeking recognition as victims of the Nazi state. She defended her husband’s memory bravely, clutching telegrams from Annedore Leber and Gustav Dahrendorf, but the problem was that a Prussian bureaucrat who had been condemned to death, in the same way as a common murderer, could not expect a pension for his wife. The law had to be changed before Charlotte could have her pension. She did not receive any money until 1952, and that was due to her as the widow of a Third Reich Regierungspräsident - the president of an administrative district.
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There was a joke doing the rounds (a variant of it is still told in Vienna): a man comes into a police station and tells the officer that he wishes to register as a Nazi. The policeman replies that he should have done that a year and a half ago. The man tells the policeman, ‘Eighteen months ago I wasn’t a Nazi!’

Dos Passos cites an interview with an American lieutenant whose business it was to interrogate Nazis. ‘My people are Jewish . . . so don’t think I’m not bitter against the Krauts. I’m for shooting the war criminals where we can prove they are guilty and getting it over with. But for God’s sake, tell me what we are trying to do?’ The lieutenant continued, ‘Hatred is like a fire. You’ve got to put it out. I’ve been interrogating German officers for the War Crimes Commission and when I find them half-starved to death right in our own PW cages and being treated like you wouldn’t treat a dog, I ask myself some questions . . . Brutality is more contagious than typhus and a hell of a lot more difficult to stamp out . . .’ He mentioned Patton and his habit of putting his foot in it, but he clearly approved. ‘All those directives about don’t coddle the German have thrown open the gates for every criminal tendency we’ve got in us.’
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The American hatred for the Germans continued to astound many people. Dos Passos met an eastern European in Berlin who spoke to him in French. The man asked him, ‘why do you Americans feel this desire for vengeance? I can understand it in the Russians, who suffered fearful injuries, but your cities were not laid waste, your wives and children were not starved and murdered.’ Dos Passos did not have an answer.
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For Zuckmayer there was a fundamental error behind the denazification policy: it failed to create a belief in a state of law because it failed to differentiate between the innocent and the guilty. The ideal liberation should have come about through a revolution within Germany. It was not going to be possible to clean up Germany by pushing a large number of its citizens before the courts. There were too many cases, and the witnesses were in many instances unreliable, as they knew they would come under the microscope themselves and the most important thing was to deny everything. The accused were protected - there was evidence of nepotism and intimidation. Denunciations were frequently made out of sheer bloody-mindedness and there were too few judges and lawyers around who were free from guilt.

The courts themselves had a hopeless task. In one Bavarian district Zuckmayer was told there were 11,850 former Nazis who were due to be examined by the Spruchkammer. The president of the chamber estimated that it was going to take between eleven and twelve years to acquit the work. In Stuttgart there were around 80,000 cases. Zuckmayer saw a danger of
re
nazification as the suspects were forced to mark time before their cases came up for review. He was for a wide-ranging amnesty for the small fry, who were implicated in no particular crime other than opportunism or ideological commitment.

Zuckmayer gives an example of a minor case - a midwife who had her husband sent to Dachau for two years because he had had an affair with a young girl in the factory where he worked. He later threw a bust of her beloved Adolf out of the window, enabling her to denounce him. When her case came up the husband made a plea in mitigation. She had helped non-Aryans and delivered their children without question and had even waived payment in certain cases. She was a good midwife and performed a service to society. If she had committed a crime it was out of passion. She had also been sufficiently punished: she had lost the man she loved because of the Hitler bust. The judge accepted the plea, and let her off with a fine, and allowed her to continue working as a midwife.
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Franz von Papen, a former chancellor who had become a Nazi minister and ambassador, had never been a member of the Party. He had been acquitted at Nuremberg. A new trial was arranged for January 1947. He was to face a panel of seven judges: two Social Democrat lawyers and five members of democratic parties. The seven included two Jews. Bavaria’s minister for denazification called on the court to sentence Papen to ten years’ hard labour on the basis of his having profited from Nazism. Papen was given eight. His property was confiscated and he was deprived of his civic rights.
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Schacht, who was tried at Nuremberg alongside Papen, had an ingenious way of wriggling out of responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. A paper was produced that had been written at the time of the takeover of the Austrian National Bank by the Reichsbank, of which he was then president. It was a hymn of praise to the God-given Führer written by none other than Schacht. The banker was asked to comment: how did he find it? ‘I find it excellent!’ said Schacht. He told the tribunal what clever ‘deception’ (
Tarnung
) it was.
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The wives of the leading Nazis were put through a predictably humiliating trial. After leaving Straubing Prison, Emmy Göring was living in a hut near her husband’s castle at Veldenstein in Franconia. She was suffering from sciatica and had a high fever. She was nonetheless incarcerated in a rat-infested prison for two weeks along with the wives of Hess, Funk and Baldur von Schirach. The brides of Speer, Dönitz, Neurath and Raeder, on the other hand, were spared this indignity, although Speer’s wife Margarete was closer to Hitler than any of them, with the exception of Henriette von Schirach who was the daughter of his hard-drinking court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. As it was, Frau Göring was able to muster a good deal of testimony from Jews that she had helped them over the years, even if she clearly disappointed the president of the tribunal by failing to denounce her dead husband. She was classified ‘Group 2’ and allowed to return to her hovel.
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Another high-profile case was the English-born daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, Winifred. There was no doubt that ‘Winnie’ was besotted with her ‘Wolf’ - as she and her four children called Hitler - but after 1940 the Führer had avoided her. One of her grandchildren has even gone so far as to say that she had wanted to marry Hitler, and that with her at his side there would have been no war.
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Hitler kept away from Bayreuth, although he continued to see three of the four Wagner children (the eldest girl, Friedelind, emigrated to Switzerland and the United States, where she fanned the flames against her mother) and exempted the first son, Wieland, from military service as the heir to Bayreuth.

The Wagners all had questions to answer. Verena’s husband Bodo Lafferenz had been in charge of the Kraft durch Freude Nazi leisure organisation, and as such had held high rank in the SS. He was shipped off to an internment camp in Freiburg. Wolfgang had not been a Party member and could take refuge behind that fact, even if he had been entertained by Hitler and had been as close to him as the others. Party member Wieland had made himself scarce at the Americans’ approach, hiding in the French Zone until the coast was clear. He had been administering the town’s ‘concentration camp’ - an outside station of the more notorious Flossenbürg housing a few score inmates who were involved in technical research for the SS. He never mentioned his closeness to the regime in his remaining years, and set himself up as a hero of a debunking, cultural revolution in Bayreuth. His designs were meant to clear his grandfather’s operas of all their nationalist trappings, and as such they represent a major instance of the cultural and artistic purge of the arts that followed the Second World War. The Spruchkammer branded Wieland a ‘fellow traveller’. His mother took the rap.

The Americans entered Bayreuth after reducing a third of the town to rubble - including much of Wagner’s home, Wahnfried, though not the house of the master’s son, Siegfried, which had been called the Führerbau because it was made over to Hitler for his use during his visits to the festival. The Americans moved into the opera house on the Green Hill and created havoc playing jazz on Wagner’s and Liszt’s pianos. Winifred insisted that most of the damage was done by ‘coloured’ American GIs, who looted the theatre and shot up the sets with their revolvers. They also amused themselves by dressing up in the operatic costumes. Another story has it that German refugees stole the costumes, and for miles around you could see people fleeing Bayreuth dressed as characters from Wagner operas. The American authorities promptly banned the playing of Wagner’s music.
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Winifred took on the role of the unrepentant Nazi, although she had performed numerous acts of intercession with the Party to save the lives of Jews and others who had fallen foul of the regime. Almost the first ‘Americans’ she received were Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, and Curt Riess, reporting for the army newspaper, the
Stars and Stripes
. The two Germans in American uniform were getting used to hearing that no one had been aware of the atrocities carried out by the regime, and that everyone had been against Hitler and was proud to possess a ‘“non-Aryan” granny’. Winifred therefore came as a surprise. First of all she insisted on speaking English to the freshly baked Americans - and was rather more proficient than they were. She made no bones about her friendship with Hitler. She praised his charm, his sense of humour and his good looks. This came from the heart, although she later admitted that she could not resist the temptation to rile the Germans in their borrowed clothes. Mann retired bruised.