Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past

The Politics of Amnesty and Integration

Norbert Frei, Joel Golb

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231507905
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Of all the aspects of recovery in postwar Germany perhaps none was as critical or as complicated as the matter of dealing with Nazi criminals, and, more broadly, with the Nazi past. While on the international stage German officials spoke with contrition of their nation's burden of guilt, at home questions of responsibility and retribution were not so clear. In this masterful examination of Germany under Adenauer, Norbert Frei shows that, beginning in 1949, the West German government dramatically reversed the denazification policies of the immediate postwar period and initiated a new "Vergangenheitspolitik," or "policy for the past," which has had enormous consequences reaching into the present.

Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past chronicles how amnesty laws for Nazi officials were passed unanimously and civil servants who had been dismissed in 1945 were reinstated liberally—and how a massive popular outcry led to the release of war criminals who had been condemned by the Allies. These measures and movements represented more than just the rehabilitation of particular individuals. Frei argues that the amnesty process delegitimized the previous political expurgation administered by the Allies and, on a deeper level, served to satisfy the collective psychic needs of a society longing for a clean break with the unparalleled political and moral catastrophe it had undergone in the 1940s. Thus the era of Adenauer devolved into a scandal-ridden period of reintegration at any cost. Frei's work brilliantly and chillingly explores how the collective will of the German people, expressed through mass allegiance to new consensus-oriented democratic parties, cast off responsibility for the horrors of the war and Holocaust, effectively silencing engagement with the enormities of the Nazi past.

PART I

A Legislation for the Past

Parliamentary and Administrative Junctures

The German parliament, or Bundestag, has never been the scene of a general debate concerning the Nazi past—a debate held independently of specific legislative goals. Nevertheless, policies concerning that past were being shaped there from the very beginning. A taste of what would come was offered by the reactions to the short speech Social Democrat Paul Löbe delivered to open the new parliament on the afternoon of 7 September 1949: on two occasions hecklers interrupted the president—chosen by virtue of seniority—as he carefully broached the Nazi period. No one took special exception to Löbe’s mention of the “massive weight of guilt” on the German side—this was far enough removed from any “collective guilt” tonalities and was cloaked with the standard distinction between the Nazi leadership, on the one hand, and the German Volk, on the other. Presumably, Löbe was not only convinced on this particular occasion that “a criminal system” had piled guilt “on the shoulders of our Volk.” For memory had drawn him back to the Reichstag’s dramatic meeting on 23 March 1933, when the Social Democratic Party (SPD) alone voted against the Authorization Act, which destroyed the constitution and in effect ceded power to Hitler. The perspective furnished by this early act of resistance (the “patriotic deed”) appeared to rule over Löbe’s entire approach to the “Third Reich.” A single catcall came from the ranks of the Communists; among the legislators from the “bourgeois” parties, more than a few had offered Hitler carte blanche after the torched Reichstag had been relocated to the Kroll Opera House. Correspondingly, the bourgeois ranks maintained their silence—surely less out of decorum than discomfiture. But real disorder burst forth shortly after Löbe once more cited the Social Democratic opposition to the Authorization Act, this time recounting that it had cost the party 24 lives—the erstwhile Reichstag president’s attempt to answer the charge leveled by “outside critics” that the German people had offered no resistance to the Nazi terror. “The other parties also had victims—we don’t want to draw up any accounts here” was one of the complaints voiced from the right-wing parties. The 73-year-old Löbe, in fact, had simply been too slow in proceeding with his line of argument, that “the Communists also had many victims, as did members of the earlier Center and other representatives extending to the right-wing parties”—all these victims demonstrating the unfounded nature of the “outside” charges.¹

Very touchy when it came to internal matters, but ready for practical consensus and displaying solidarity toward the outside world: this was the face to be shown for years by the Bundestag whenever the past became a legislative theme. A striking shyness was revealed when it came to looking back accurately on the dark facts, not to mention showing the courage to confront them in vivid detail. But despite all the self-imposed “duty to be objective,” all concord in resolving difficulties, and all the efforts at verbal discretion, such confrontations could not always be avoided. This was the case whenever the issue was collective amnesty, or managing the political purging, or rehabilitating the officials and military men affected by it—in short, whenever a policy for the past was meant to be constructed. On such occasions it was necessary to discuss the past, at least through intimations.

The first direct debate emerged mere days after the Bundestag’s convening: from every corner calls were already sounding for both amnesty and an end to denazification. The smallest political factions struck the most strident tones, with the German Party from Lower Saxony struggling most vociferously for a past-political profile. As early as 8 September 1949 the party’s 17-member team had succeeded in formulating the interests of all so-called lesser offenders and simple fellow travelers. They did so through an emergency motion, directed at a not-yet-existent federal government, requesting a placing on the agenda of “laws for the immediate cessation of denazification and an amnesty for all members of groups 3 and 4,² or similarly situated groups affected by the consequences of previous denazification.”³ A week later, the Catholic based Center Party drafted an amnesty law of its own; the draft envisioned impunity for those convicted of crimes, committed during the occupation period, “linked to enthusiasm for the democratic idea or opposition to surmounted National Socialism”—or (space now being offered for less worthy motives) other crimes “that were determined or favored by the troubles and insecurity of the times.”⁴ On 20 September, Alfred Loritz’s right-wing populist Economic Reconstruction Association demanded an immediate amnesty “for all crimes that can be qualified according to the penal laws as infractions and misdemeanors”; this included transgressions that the Nazi wartime economy laws had defined as crimes but that were not perpetrated out of “especially crude self-interest,” thus causing no “especially heavy damage to the Volksgemeinschaft.”⁵ The next day Loritz added a request for a “general amnesty for all fellow travelers and lesser offenders.”⁶

That both the Christian Democrats and the Liberals refrained from such requests almost certainly reflected, above all else, a lack of desire to take the initiative away from the emerging West German government.⁷ For, at least since an official statement of Adenauer’s on 20 September, it was perfectly clear that the alliance formed between the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU-CSU), together with the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the German Party, would not remain inactive in this sphere for long. As the chancellor explained it, “much misfortune and mischief” accompanied “denazification”; while those “truly guilty” of crimes during the National Socialist period had to be punished with appropriate severity, the distinction between “two classes of human beings in Germany,” namely the “politically objectionable” and the “politically unobjectionable,” now needed to “vanish as fast as possible.” The confusion caused by the war and its aftermath, Adenauer declared, had imposed great trials and temptations on many people. For this reason, understanding was called for in the case of many lapses and transgressions. The federal government had thus decided to “let bygones be bygones” whenever it seemed justifiable. Making his voice heard through the cheers of his party supporters, the chancellor now announced that as part of the amnesty question the possibility of “applying to the High Commissioners for a corresponding amnesty for punishments imposed by the Allied military courts” was being examined.⁸

Despite the lackluster impression made by Adenauer’s assessment as a whole,⁹ at crucial points it lacked neither careful precision nor a certain artfulness. Showing restraint in his choice of words, the chancellor had captured the hopes of many: those schooling themselves in self-pity as the Entnazifizierungsgeschädigte—individuals “damaged by denazification.” Without promising something outside his powers, he had awakened hopes among condemned war criminals and those close to them. With energetic polish he rounded off his remarks in this direction—they had all been placed in his speech’s second half—with the promise “to draw the necessary lessons from the past, in the face of all those undermining our state’s existence, whether they can be classified as radicals of the right or left.” The brief condemnation of “anti-Semitic endeavors manifest here and there” that directly followed was apparently meant to strengthen that tone of resolution, but as Kurt Schumacher complained the day after, its effect was in fact all too “flat and weak.”¹⁰ It was left to the leader of the opposition to make the halfway clear statement that “the Hitlerian barbarism”—Hitlerbarbarei—had dishonored the German Volk through the extermination of 6 million Jewish human beings.” It is remarkable that the SPD chairman laid so much stress on the “dishonor” experienced by the Germans, declaring that “we will have to bear its consequences for an unforeseeable period.” To be sure, this formulation needed to be understood against the background of Schumacher’s particular form of nationalism—of his persistent emphasis on German duty and responsibility, now taking the form of a demand for concrete help for the survivors, “mostly older and sick individuals.”¹¹ But it would seem to reveal as well a partiality quite similar to that prompting Adenauer’s statement that he considered it “unworthy, indeed in itself incredible, that after everything occurring in the National Socialist period, there are said to be people in Germany who still persecute or despise Jews because they are Jews.”¹²

With his rather skewed pronouncement, the chancellor here hinted at much that would emerge and reemerge over the following months, and following years, in public debates. This amounted to a readiness to aid those former Volksgenossen and party members who were, to varying degrees, guilty—indeed to an enthusiasm for the process. Such enthusiasm stood in stark contrast to the somewhat understandable inhibitions and uncertainties regarding the few Jewish survivors—but also to manifestations of overt distancing from those survivors, often less easy to grasp. Adenauer’s governmental address omitted any liberating word—for which many were waiting¹³—regarding the Jewish victims: an omission that was perhaps no coincidence, but rather an augury of this intercession on behalf of both perpetrators and “nominal” Nazis. It was quite clearly the case that an intrepid engagement on behalf of a persecuted minority was a far less pressing task than shaping a policy for the past benefiting a German majority—one whose actual suffering (e.g., through expulsion and bombing) and false claims to victim status (through denazification or “military conviction”) had only begun with the crumbling of Hitler’s regime.

CHAPTER 1

The Amnesty Law of 1949

The German Federal Republic, depicted as an innocent swaddled baby, is handed by the Western powers to a distinctly grandfatherly Mr. Germany. In 1949 this caricature illustrated the widespread view of the founding of the West German state as a totally new beginning.¹ The counterpart to this view was an equally widespread, fervently felt desire for a wholesale eradication of the huge number of guilty verdicts pronounced since 1945 in the framework of denazification. In the autumn of 1949, a fixed notion on the collective horizon of expectations was that the expiatory measures imposed by the Allies—measures accepted strictly because of the Allied presence—would generally end with the restitution of German statehood. Put somewhat differently, in the beginning—even before Adenauer—was the idea of amnesty.²

Certainly this wish for a tabula rasa did not involve a consistent expression of moral indifference or a deliberate apologetics. Often (perhaps for the most part) it was grounded in the complicated circumstances surrounding postwar guilt and punishment—circumstances often experienced as unjust. Examples of such experiences were the gradually abating rigor of the denazification process, accompanied by a shift from penalizing to promoting many heavily implicated individuals; unequal access to ration coupons; periods of internment that were often haphazard; and the simple feeling of having atoned enough through aerial bombardment, flight, and expulsion. An additional factor was the increasing German familiarity with the role of amnesty as a political-legal instrument, which reflected an increasing recourse to it. In order to tidy up the denazification process, the occupation authorities had in fact declared many amnesties.³ Similarly, to disencumber a judiciary whose ranks had been highly thinned through the purging of Nazis, between 1947 and 1948 amnesty laws had been passed in the German states (the Länder) controlled by the Americans and British, as well as in those controlled by the French; these sometimes covered prison sentences of up to one year. To be sure, such amnesties were directed first and foremost at crimes committed in the hunger years for survival’s sake—they expressly excluded all crimes motivated by a desire to “maintain Nazi rule,” by “militarism,” and by an intent to spread Nazi ideology. A June 1947 regulation issued by the Central Judicial Office of the British zone makes it perfectly clear that the intent was in fact not to provide relief for Nazi criminals: it exempts from punishment all deeds previously declared punishable by the Third Reich alone (e.g., “racial” transgressions), along with crimes committed either in opposition to Nazism or in order to escape Nazi persecution.⁴ In addition, in the spring of 1949 the British-American zone’s economic council decided on amnesty for tax-related offenses.⁵

Nevertheless, as early as the summer of 1949, different plans being considered by the justice ministries of the various West German Länder all nurtured the hope for a broad “federal amnesty”⁶; called on the occasion of the state’s foundation, such an amnesty was quite clearly meant to extend beyond the limited realm of economic offenses. The recommendation of the minister of justice “not to speak separately of crimes against humanity and organizational offenses,” but rather to quietly integrate them with other types of crime reveals the direction things had taken⁷: the longing for amnesty no longer stopped short of judgments passed by the Allied military courts and German Spruchgerichte—the inquest courts set up in the British zone. In this manner, the conceptual step toward including genuine Nazi crimes had now been taken. What remained open, for a time, was the extent to which the federal legislators would be able to elaborate on this concept under the critical gaze of the Allied High Commissioner.

In any case, when the fresh-faced cabinet met on 26 September 1949 to initiate discussion of an amnesty law, its desirability went without saying.⁸ Adenauer appeared to capture the widely shared viewpoint succinctly: “In view of the confused times behind us, a general tabula rasa is called for.” Still, the extent to which the federal government was authorized in the matter was unclear. Looking back on standard recent practice, Thomas Dehler, justice minister of the new German state and a Free Democrat, voiced the opinion that any amnesty law had to be passed in collaboration with the Länder. He was here adhering to the stance taken in the “Frankfurt Plan” formulated by Walter Strauß, his unloved Christian Democratic Union (CDU)–appointed state secretary—a plan that Strauß had already submitted on 12 September.⁹ Strauß’s proposal itself reflected the debate unfolding in previous months among the justice ministries of the different Länder.

Dehler’s reservations in light of possible sensitivity on the part of the Länder were shared by his cabinet colleagues Fritz Schäffer, Gustav Heinemann, and Franz Blücher: a circumstance sparking Adenauer’s instinct for power. It seemed the issue at hand might also offer a chance to demonstrate the proper relation between the Länder and the federal government. In any event, without beating around the bush, the chancellor indicated the situation resembled that “in a monarchy when a king ascends the throne. The federation has now been born and the President is on the scene. In light of this event, within the German Volk the broadest possible circles expect an amnesty.” Dehler was given the task of clarifying the legal situation.

On account of clearly courageous behavior during the Third Reich, Dehler had little fear of being sullied by contact with those who were politically tainted.¹⁰ Only a week later the federal justice minister presented his colleagues in the Länder with a draft of a “Law for Granting Exemption from Punishment.” Dehler’s position now was that the federal government’s authority “was not to be doubted”; in view of the matter’s urgency, he was requesting that things “such as comments and suggestions” regarding this “thoroughly” conside...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I. A Legislation for the Past: Parliamentary and Administrative Junctures
• Part II. A Past-Political Obsession: The Problem of the War-Criminals
• Part III. Fixing Past-Political Limits: Judicial Norms and Allied Intervention
• Conclusion
• Postscript for the American Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Sources and Literature
• Index