Exorcising Hitler (53 page)

This lack of regard for regulatory inconveniences could also apply when it came to respect – or lack of it – for the integrity of other Allies’ jurisdictions. American records report French gendarmes appearing at a house in the suburbs of Munich and hauling a German teenager off in a staff car. He was later found to be in prison in the French Zone. It turned out that the boy’s brother-in-law had escaped from a French POW camp. The family were told frankly that if the fugitive did not return himself to French custody, the boy would be shipped off to do labour in France in his place.

To the outrage of the American authorities, no permission had been sought by the French, no notification made of their journey into the American Zone. Even aside from the kidnapping of the boy, the very unnotified presence of the French officials in the American Zone was illegal. When challenged by the boy’s relatives, who enjoyed the full support of the American authorities, the French liaison officer in Munich replied smoothly that he would, of course, do his best to right this grave wrong, but it would, equally naturally, help a great deal if the escapee would give himself up as the gendarmes had originally requested  . . .
¹³

In the first months of the occupation, moreover, there was some ‘wild purging’ of the administrative and economic machine reminiscent of the recent vengeance against French collaborators after the liberation. It was, however, at the heart of the French denazification system that the character of the suspects, not simply their paper membership of the Nazi Party, be taken into account. In fact, unlike in the other zones, simple membership of the Nazi Party as such was of no material interest to the French authorities. As the French representative to the Berlin four-power
Kommandatura
put it: ‘We can’t ignore our directives . . . but we can interpret them with a little more attention to the individual and his circumstances.’
¹⁴

It was also true that the French were willing to make good their mistakes. Thus, after enthusiastically sacking three-quarters of all teachers in their zone in the weeks after victory, faced with a crisis when reopening the schools again in September the French authorities simply rehired them en masse
– albeit initially without job tenure. The same applied to technical experts with shady political records. These were hired on a month-to-month basis, with their supervisors held responsible for their conduct.
¹⁵
French flexibility on matters of principle, like British pragmatism, distinguished their denazification activity from the American and, in a different way, Russian programmes.

It was also in the French Zone that the Germans were earliest involved in the process. A semi-devolved system (‘
auto-épuration
’)
was introduced as early as autumn 1945. There were ebbs and flows of strictness – often when the politicians in Paris saw fit to shake things up, or one of the other occupiers criticised the French Zone as ‘an El Dorado of tolerance’ or similar – and the procedural bureaucracy, imported wholesale from France, could be stifling.

Particularly in the
Land
of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, with its capital in the picturesque university city of Tübingen and presided over between 1945 and 1947 by the local SPD leader, Carlo Schmid (who had been born in France and lived there until he was five), the denazification scheme was considered a model one, a ‘golden mean between an excessive degree of severity and an inadequate standard of leniency’. It was flexible, but could be harsh when the situation seemed to call for strict measures.

In the end, after a shaky start, and appearances often to the contrary, French
épuration
may well have been as thorough (a relative judgement) as the best of the American system.
¹⁶
The manageable size of the French Zone undoubtedly helped, as did the fact that only one in seven Germans had to fill out a
Fragebogen.
In the two years up to the spring of 1947, the French had processed a little more than half a million of them, but they processed them successfully and thoroughly.

In contrast to the French treatment of German POWs and internees, the actual result of their denazification campaign was relatively mild. Three years after the end of the war, some 133,000 inhabitants of the French Zone were classified as above ‘fellow traveller’ status, but eventually only 18,000 ended up classified in a way that brought automatic penalties. Even then, demotions and fines were a more popular punishment than imprisonment, leading to general agreement that, despite the French reputation for revenge and occasional individual brutalities, the denazification in their zone may well be classed as the least harsh.
¹⁷
So, for instance, only thirteen Germans throughout the entire French Zone were found guilty of being ‘major offenders’ – against 1,654 in the American Zone.
¹⁸

There was one final note about the French denazification campaign. The relatively personal and subjective nature of the process could lead to absurdities, anomalies and injustices (as could its opposite elsewhere in occupied Germany), but as Perry Biddiscombe wrote, ‘its humanism and recognition of the individual set the tone for a policy that would eventually take shape as Franco-German reconciliation’.
¹⁹

So, for France and Germany – the ancient intimate enemies – a time that had begun with violence, revenge and oppression led, in a remarkably few years, to a friendship that would survive into the twenty-first century.

And the other outsiders, the Soviets? The system in the Soviet Zone, being a creature of Stalinism, all too often went beyond harshness and into sheer brutality. All the Allies, democratic or otherwise, had their civilian internment camps, their ‘holding pens’ for the denazification process. The Soviet ones turned, in many cases, into nothing less than concentration camps. In fact, they included the former Nazi concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, as well as the notorious Gestapo prison at Bautzen, which were emptied of their wartime inmates only to be filled in short order with real or perceived enemies of the Soviet occupation.

Between 1945 and 1950, according to official figures, 122,671 Germans passed through ‘special camps’ set up by the Soviet MVD (as the NKVD secret police were known after February 1946) in their Zone of Occupation. Of these, 42,889 were claimed to have died ‘of sickness’. Two years after the end of the war, a further 10 per cent of the prisoners in the Soviet Zone Gulag, mostly those judged fit enough to work, were creamed off and sent to labour camps in the Soviet Union itself.
²⁰
Only a small fraction were actually tried by Soviet tribunals.
²¹

The numbers of dead and disappeared may, in fact, be gross underestimates. Estimates by American intelligence and the West German Social Democratic Party’s own usually reliable network of informants inside East Germany come to about double that. Mass graves unearthed since 1989, representing by no means all the dead of the camps but already pointing to tens of thousands of victims – including 16,000 sets of remains found in the vicinity of Bautzen prison alone – also indicate that the death toll may have been much greater. Only the opening of secret Soviet archives will bring some certainty into these estimates.
²²

They died, those who were not executed, of disease (especially tuberculosis, which was endemic, but also dysentery), of starvation and cumulative malnutrition. Conditions were bad in the West – they were bad for most Germans, imprisoned or not – but here they were lethal. The denazification laws were used ruthlessly not just against former Nazis but against anyone whom the post-war rulers of eastern Germany wished to crush or discredit.

The camp inmates were supposed to be Nazis or suspected security threats of various kinds, but it quickly became clear that the Soviets and their German protégés were using the Nazi smear as a way of dealing with anyone who appeared to threaten the rapid ‘Sovietisation’ of the zone. There were, of course, the ‘class enemies’ such as aristocrats, bourgeois or prosperous landowners – the remnants, who had failed to flee westward, of the groups expropriated in the winter of 1945–6. However, after the allegedly voluntary merger of the Social Democratic and Communist parties in the Soviet Zone, at Stalin’s behest, in April 1946, dissident Social Democrats and other activists who refused to join the communist-sponsored ‘block’ parties also found themselves targeted by the MVD as ‘hostile elements’ liable for arrest under the denazification directives.

Torture was common. ‘As a rule, interrogations took place in the night from eight pm to around five am,’ recalled a former inmate of Bautzen prison. With one man, who had lost a leg in the war and wore an artificial limb, the camp’s interrogators ‘. . . worked on his leg as they questioned him, in such a way that after a while there was just a bloody stump’.
²³

The MVD remained in overall charge until 1948. However, soon alleged enemies of the post-war state also began to be pursued by a nascent secret police force run by East German communists. This began in Saxony as ‘K-5’ and would eventually morph into the notorious Stasi.

Also especially at risk from the Soviet Zone authorities were dissident elements among German youth. All the occupiers were concerned about how to handle the ‘brainwashed’ young, who had grown up under Hitler. Young people, many of them only recently enthusiastically involved in the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls, seem to have represented a particularly thorny problem for the Soviets and their German allies. In the Western zones, the main source of friction with this section of the population seems to have been envy and sexual jealousy, arising from the attraction of young German women to the nylon, chocolate and cigarette-toting British and American occupiers. In the east, it was more socially and ideologically based. The MVD was aware of this, and typically chose to list it all under the drastic rubric of ‘
Werwolf
activity’, thereby justifying draconian measures.

In fact, although there was a tendency among the youth to sing the old Hitler Youth songs (sometimes with satirical lyrics aimed at the new rulers), to loiter around, as young people will, in a vaguely disreputable fashion, and to engage in low-grade black market activity, their main crimes consisted of posting anti-communist and anti-Soviet graffiti. Clandestinely circulating critical leaflets and pamphlets was also fairly common.

Dissatisfied and bored young people would also sometimes heckle Soviet films when they were shown in cinemas. In one case, in Dresden, a group of ‘young rogues’ (
Lausejungen
) hissed at a documentary film lauding Soviet food deliveries to Germany. The local German communist leader organised a check to ensure that these were not ‘paid agents’. In Leipzig, a circular complained that Soviet films were ‘being sabotaged by the public, which in itself is a victory for the enemy’.

Again, youths arrested were charged with membership of
Werwolf
groups.
²⁴
In Chemnitz, a group of young ‘reactionaries’ were arrested for asking awkward questions at a meeting of the new communist youth movement, the FDJ (‘Free German Youth’). They were delivered straight to the not-so-tender ministrations of the MVD.

Others who did the same thing were luckier. Ulrich Frodien, for instance, who had escaped from Breslau to Berlin, to Göttingen and then to the small town in the Soviet Zone where his doctor father now practised, also attended FDJ meetings. He was a little cleverer than the young people who ended up in the local Gulag. Ulrich and some friends became active in the youth movement, and appeared to be loyal, but remained critical when it came to some important political questions. The new regime, still not willing to drop its democratic façade and hoping gradually to draw even ‘tainted’ youth into its orbit, tolerated them, even though they were regularly overruled at meetings and conferences and increasingly heavily criticised. Attempts were made to nudge young Ulrich in the ‘right’ direction. When he attended a regional conference, he was even granted a brief interview with the Russians’ cultural dictator in conquered Germany, Colonel Tiul’panov.

The paranoid brutality of the new regime when it encountered opposition only grew as the ‘gradualist’ and relatively tolerant policy of the early post-war months was abandoned.

A key moment was the Soviet-encouraged merging of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties in April 1946 at a thousand-strong congress in Berlin to form the so-called ‘Socialist Unity Party of Germany’ (
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands
= SED). With 1.3 million members, the two left parties were more or less equally represented in the new movement (in fact, the SPD made up a slight majority), and initially Party posts were appropriately divided up between social democrats and communists. All the same, it fairly rapidly became clear that the communists had the upper hand, and it would become even clearer in the years that followed. Many social democrats in the Soviet Zone and also in Berlin did not support the merger, but only in West Berlin were they able to organise themselves properly without being harassed by the Soviets and their German allies.