Denazification
Denazification was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War. It was carried out by removing those who had been Nazi Party or SS members from positions of power and influence, by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with Nazism, and by trying prominent Nazis for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials of 1946. The program of denazification was launched after the end of the war and was solidified by the Potsdam Agreement in August 1945. The term, in the hyphenated form de-nazification, was first used in 1943 by the Pentagon, intended to be applied in a narrow sense with reference to the post-war German legal system. However, it later took on a broader meaning, according to historian Frederick Taylor.
Very soon after the program started, due to the emergence of the Cold War, the western powers and the United States in particular began to lose interest in the program, somewhat mirroring the Reverse Course in American-occupied Japan. Denazification was carried out in an increasingly lenient and lukewarm way until being officially abolished in 1951. The American government soon came to view the program as ineffective and counterproductive. Additionally, the program was hugely unpopular in West Germany, where many Nazis maintained positions of power. Denazification was opposed by the new West German government of Konrad Adenauer, who declared that ending the process was necessary for West German rearmament.
On the other hand, in the Soviet occupation zone and later East Germany, denazification was considered as a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society, and the country was stricter in opposing Nazism than its counterpart.
Not all former Nazis faced judgment. Performing special tasks for the occupation governments could protect Nazi members from prosecution, enabling them to continue working and in some cases reach prominence, as did special connections with the occupiers. One of the most notable cases involved Wernher von Braun, who was among other German scientists recruited by the United States through Operation Paperclip and later occupied key positions in the American space program.
Etymology
The term, in the hyphenated form de-nazification, was first used in 1943 by the Pentagon, intended to be applied in a narrow sense with reference to the post-war German legal system. However, it later took on a broader meaning, according to historian Frederick Taylor.Overview
About 8million Germans, or 10% of the population, had been members of the Nazi Party. Nazi-related organizations also had huge memberships, such as the German Labor Front, the National Socialist People's Welfare organization, the League of German Women, and others. It was through the Party and these organizations that the Nazi state was run, involving as many as 45million Germans in total. In addition, Nazism found significant support among industrialists, who produced weapons or used slave labor, and large landowners, especially the Junkers in Prussia. Denazification after the surrender of Germany was thus an enormous undertaking, fraught with many difficulties.The first difficulty was the enormous number of Germans who might have to be first investigated, then penalized if found to have supported the Nazi state to an unacceptable degree. In the early months of denazification there was a great desire to be utterly thorough, to investigate every suspect and hold every supporter of Nazism accountable; however, it was decided that the numbers simply made this goal impractical. The Morgenthau Plan had recommended that the Allies create a post-war Germany with all its industrial capacity destroyed, reduced to a level of subsistence farming; however, that plan was soon abandoned as unrealistic and, because of its excessive punitive measures, liable to give rise to German anger and aggression. As time went on, another consideration that moderated the denazification effort in the West was the concern to keep enough good will of the German population to prevent the growth of communism.
The denazification process was often completely disregarded by both the Soviets and the Western powers for German rocket scientists and other technical experts, who were taken out of Germany to work on projects in the victors' own countries or simply seized in order to prevent the other side from taking them. The US took 785 scientists and engineers from Germany to the United States, some of whom formed the backbone of the US space program.
In the case of the top-ranking Nazis, such as Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Streicher, and Speer, the initial proposal by the British was simply to arrest them and shoot them, but that course of action was replaced by putting them on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials in order to publicize their crimes while demonstrating, especially to the German people, that the trials and the sentences were just. However, the legal foundations of the trials were questioned, and many Germans were not convinced that the trials were anything more than "victors' justice".
Many refugees from Nazism were Germans and Austrians, and some had fought for Britain in the Second World War. Some were transferred into the Intelligence Corps and sent back to Germany and Austria in British uniform. However, German-speakers were small in number in the British zone, which was hampered by the language deficit. Due to its large German-American population, the US authorities were able to bring a larger number of German-speakers to the task of working in the Allied Military Government, although many were poorly trained. They were assigned to all aspects of military administration, the interrogation of prisoners of war, collecting evidence for the War Crimes Investigation Unit, and the search for war criminals.
Application
American zone
The Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 directed US Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower's policy of denazification. A report of the Institute on Re-education of the Axis Countries in June 1945 recommended: "Only an inflexible long-term occupation authority will be able to lead the Germans to a fundamental revision of their recent political philosophy." The United States military pursued denazification in a zealous and bureaucratic fashion, especially during the first months of the occupation. It had been agreed among the Allies that denazification would begin by requiring Germans to fill in a questionnaire about their activities and memberships during Nazi rule. Five categories were established: Major Offenders, Offenders, Lesser Offenders, Followers, and Exonerated Persons. The Americans, unlike the British, French, and Soviets, interpreted this to apply to every German over the age of 18 in their zone. Eisenhower initially estimated that the denazification process would take 50 years.When the nearly complete list of Nazi Party memberships was turned over to the Allies, it became possible to verify claims about participation or non-participation in the Party. The 1.5million Germans who had joined before Hitler came to power were deemed to be hard-core Nazis. In May and June 1945, 700 were arrested daily, and 18,000 total by August. By September, 82,000 were in internment camps.
Progress was slowed by the overwhelming numbers of Germans to be processed and by difficulties such as incompatible power systems and power outages, as with the Hollerith IBM data machine that held the American vetting list in Paris. As many as 40,000 forms could arrive in a single day to await processing. By December 1945, even though a full 500,000 forms had been processed, there remained a backlog of 4,000,000 forms from POWs and a potential case load of 7,000,000. The Fragebögen were, of course, filled out in German. The number of Americans working on denazification was inadequate to handle the workload, partly as a result of the demand in the US by families to have soldiers returned home. Replacements were mostly unskilled and poorly trained. In addition, there was too much work to be done to complete the process of denazification by 1947, the year American troops were expected to be completely withdrawn from Europe.
Pressure also came from the need to find Germans to run their own country. General George Patton wondered if it was "silly to try to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany". He wrote, "It is no more possible for a man to be a civil servant in Germany and not have paid lip service to Nazism than it is for a man to be a postmaster in America and not have paid lip service to the Democratic Party or Republican Party when it is in power". Patton told the press that a controversy over whether Fritz Schäffer was suitable as Minister President of Bavaria was "just like a Democrat-Republican election fight".
Eisenhower replaced Patton with Lucius D. Clay as commander of Third United States Army and military governor of Bavaria for his statements. Nazis were, nonetheless, often the ones with training, experience, and willingness to cooperate ; some non-party members probably had been turned down for membership, which made them less desirable than those who had joined. Those with individual natures great enough to defy Nazi rule probably would not work well under American rule. Schäffer—a leader in the Bavarian People's Party who had described the Nazis as "saviors of our Fatherland"—and Franz Oppenhoff in Aachen had shown that anti-Nazis did not necessarily believe in democracy.
Military Government Law No. 8, announced on 26 September 1945, probably as a reaction to the Patton and Schäffer cases, prohibited Nazi members from any business employment other than laborer. Local detachments applied the directive to public employment as well, causing Wasserburg am Inn to lose 20 doctors, likely the entire number. Ortsgruppenleiter, the lowest-priority detainees, had been just released but were immediately rearrested. In January 1946, a directive came from the Control Council entitled "Removal from Office and from Positions of Responsibility of Nazis and Persons Hostile to Allied Purposes". One of the punishments for Nazi involvement was to be barred from public office and/or restricted to manual labor or "simple work". At the end of 1945, 3.5million former Nazis awaited classification, many of them barred from work in the meantime. By the end of the winter of 1945–1946, 42% of public officials had been dismissed. Malnutrition was widespread, and the economy needed leaders and workers to help clear away debris, rebuild infrastructure, and get foreign exchange to buy food and other essential resources.
Another concern leading to the Americans relinquishing responsibility for denazification and handing it over to the Germans arose from the fact that many of the American denazifiers were German Jews, former refugees returning to administer justice against the tormentors and killers of their relatives. It was felt, both among Germans and top American officials, that a desire for revenge might contaminate their objectivity.
As a result of these various pressures, and following a January 15, 1946, report of the Military Government decrying the efficiency of denazification, saying, "The present procedure fails in practice to reach a substantial number of persons who supported or assisted the Nazis", it was decided to involve Germans in the process. In March 1946, the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism came into effect, turning over responsibility for denazification to the Germans.
The German-run denazification program differed in two ways: It differentiated between five levels of Nazi participation, and the length of prohibition from public life or business would be based on the scale of the crimes. Each zone had a Minister of Denazification. On April 1, 1946, a special law established 545 civilian tribunals under German administration, with a staff of 22,000 mostly lay judges, enough, perhaps, to start to work but too many for all the staff themselves to be thoroughly investigated and cleared. They had a case load of 900,000. Several new regulations came into effect in the setting up of the German-run tribunals, including the idea that the aim of denazification was now rehabilitation rather than merely punishment and that someone whose guilt might meet the formal criteria could also have their specific actions taken into consideration for mitigation. Efficiency thus improved, while rigor declined.
Many people had to fill in a new background form, called a Meldebogen, and were given over to justice under a Spruchkammer, which assigned them to one of five categories:
- V. Persons Exonerated. No sanctions.
- IV. Followers. Possible restrictions on travel, employment, and political rights, plus fines.
- III. Lesser Offenders. Placed on probation for two to three years with a list of restrictions. No internment.
- II. Offenders: Activists, Militants, and Profiteers, or Incriminated Persons. Subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment up to ten years, performing reparation or reconstruction work, plus a list of other restrictions.
- I. Major Offenders. Subject to immediate arrest, death, imprisonment with or without hard labor, plus a list of lesser sanctions.
More "efficiencies" followed. The tribunals accepted statements from other people regarding the accused's involvement in Nazism. These statements earned the nickname of Persilscheine, after advertisements for the laundry and whitening detergent Persil. There was corruption in the system, with Nazis buying and selling denazification certificates on the black market. Nazis who were found guilty were often punished with fines assessed in Reichsmarks, which had become nearly worthless. While the military government was aware of the fines' nominal cost, requiring a hearing for each case prevented mass acquittals of many individuals. In Bavaria, the Denazification Minister, Anton Pfeiffer, bridled under the "victor's justice", and presided over a system that reinstated 75% of officials the Americans had dismissed and reclassified 60% of senior Nazis. The denazification process lost a great deal of credibility, and there was often local hostility against Germans who helped administer the tribunals. Threats and even violence against tribunal members had become fairly commonplace.
By early 1947, the Allies held 90,000 Nazis in detention; another 1,900,000 were forbidden to work as anything but manual laborers. From 1945 to 1950, the Allied powers detained over 400,000 Germans in internment camps in the name of denazification.
By 1948, the Cold War was clearly in progress, and the US began to worry more about a threat from the Eastern Bloc rather than the latent Nazism within occupied Germany.
The delicate task of distinguishing those truly complicit in or responsible for Nazi activities from mere "followers" made the work of the courts yet more difficult. US President Harry S. Truman alluded to this problem: "though all Germans might not be guilty for the war, it would be too difficult to try to single out for better treatment those who had nothing to do with the Nazi regime and its crimes." Denazification was from then on supervised by special German ministers, like the Social Democrat Gottlob Kamm in Baden-Württemberg, with the support of the US occupation forces.
Contemporary American critics of denazification denounced it as a "counterproductive witch hunt" and a failure; in 1951, the provisional West German government granted amnesties to lesser offenders and ended the program.