West Germans and the Nazi Legacy

Caroline Sharples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415892407
• eBook ISBN: 9781136472060
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This book constitutes a new history of the complex memory cultures that persisted within post-war West Germany, examining the attitudes of ordinary people to the second wave of Nazi war crimes trials ushered in during the 1960s. It explores responses to the prospect of continuing investigations, the reception afforded to the defendants, and the sheer resonance that such proceedings could generate within a local community. Drawing upon case studies from across the Federal Republic, it bridges a gap between the current historiography and localised memory studies, and analyses of war crimes trials. Far from viewing the 1960s as an uncomplicated decade of change, this book emphasises the range of voices that were competing to make themselves heard during this period, whether they came from survivors' groups, crusading journalists and students, or from former prisoners of war, veterans' organisations and the war widowed. This diversity of opinion and experience enabled the persistence of silences, distortions and mythologies that could afford some level of distance to be imposed between the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide, and the ordinary West German population. The process of 'coming to terms with the past' was thus complicated and protracted.

1 The Victors and the Vanquished

In October 1943, the Allies signed the Moscow Declaration, announcing their intention to punish anyone guilty of atrocities, massacres and executions at the end of the Second World War. While this move came in the wake of growing reports of extreme violence being committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, nothing could have prepared them for the horrifying sights that greeted troops liberating the concentration camps in early 1945. Mounds of corpses and thousands of skeletal survivors appalled observers, who immediately asked how such crimes could be possible in a modern, cultured and civilised nation state. In the immediate post-war period, there was a fervent Allied desire to acquaint the German population with the murderous reality of National Socialism and the issue of bringing those responsible for both the war and the Holocaust to account gained a new urgency. It was not until the London Charter of 8 August 1945, though, that the establishment of an International Military Tribunal (IMT) was formally decided upon as the best means for achieving this.¹

Conducted in Nuremberg, a city long associated with Nazi Party rallies, as well as the notorious 1935 race laws, the tribunal was intended to be a symbolic affair. Twenty-one surviving members of the Nazi leadership faced counts of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.² The proceedings, which lasted for almost a year, have long been heralded as setting a precedent for international law. The pedagogic ambitions harboured by the Allies were laid bare in the opening address by Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson when he stated, ‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated’.³ This sense of ‘never again’ was reiterated in the wider Allied programmes of re-education and denazification between 1945–9. However, the extent to which any of this succeeded in fostering a critical engagement with the crimes of the Third Reich among the general German population is debatable. For many Germans struggling to come to terms with total defeat in 1945, it would be very difficult to get past the fact that the impetus for such measures was coming from the victors of the recent war.

In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, the Allies embarked upon a series of measures to shock the German public into confronting the grim nature of the Nazi regime. Those living near concentration camp sites were forced to tour the facilities and, in some cases, even help bury the dead. Elsewhere, there were cases of the German population being marched to watch newsreel footage from the liberation which the Allies hoped would inspire reflection and some acceptance of collective responsibility.⁴ The extent to which these ‘lessons’ sank in, though, is unclear. Writing about West German campaigns during the 1950s to secure the release of thousands of German prisoners of war still being held in Soviet captivity, Robert Moeller draws upon various posters and images produced by the SPD which depict the soldiers behind barbed wire, in stripped uniforms and with shaven heads.⁵ The connotations of such images suggest that the iconic imagery of the concentration camps had, indeed, seeped into the West German consciousness and thus it could be argued the Allies’ re-education activities had some effect. However, rather than inspiring a critical engagement with the Holocaust itself, it became a means to perpetuate a narrative of German suffering. The appropriation of this recognisable symbol of persecution to recall the plight of interned soldiers, many of whom had been charged by the Russians of having committed war crimes themselves, is indicative of the way in which the distinctive experiences of ‘ordinary’ Germans and the victims of racial persecution were blurred after the war.

The effects of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg upon the German population are similarly worthy of closer attention. The legacy of the IMT is multifaceted. Its sheer size, international constitution and use of then novel technology in the form of simultaneous translation all gave it a unique and remarkable character. It has consequently enjoyed much scholarly and public interest, inspiring films and television miniseries. Courtroom 600 itself within the Nuremberg Palace of Justice has become a popular tourist attraction, receiving 13,138 visitors in 2005 alone, and a permanent memorial and exhibition have now been created at the site.⁶ These factors, together with the trial’s obvious significance for the development of international criminal law, particularly the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’, have lent themselves to a very celebratory representation of the proceedings. Michael Marrus, for example, emphasises its historical importance as the first comprehensive documentation of the Holocaust for a non-Jewish audience.⁷

Other scholars, though, have been rather more circumspect in detailing the resonance of the IMT. One of the key criticisms that has been levelled at the Nuremberg tribunal concerns the way in which the Holocaust was depicted as just one in a series of Nazi transgressions. Furthermore, when discussing the Nazi genocide, the various camps tended to be grouped together in quite an uncomplicated manner. There was an emphasis, for example, on the scenes in the western camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, locations that British and American troops had become all too familiar with, while the significance of the Operation Reinhard camps in the east was not fully grasped.⁸ The identity of the Holocaust victims themselves was similarly obscured. The USSR placed an emphasis on Soviet ‘victims of fascism’ while the West preferred to speak in quite universal terms, reluctant to elevate the suffering of any one victim group over another. Such issues give weight to Erich Haberer’s conclusion that the IMT ‘minimised the Holocaust, marginalised the victims and misrepresented the complexity of the continent-wide implementation of the Nazi genocidal policies’.⁹

A slightly more positive assessment of the IMT’s role in the formation of Holocaust memory is offered by Tony Kushner, who points to its significance in giving currency to the figure of six million murdered Jews as well as making people more aware of the Nazis’ killing methods. However, he adds that ‘in Britain and the United States, the public soon tired of the meticulous attention to detail in the trials and there was relief when they finally finished nearly a year later’.¹⁰ The sheer length of the proceedings and its primary basis upon the submission of official documents generated by the perpetrators themselves created a rather sterile atmosphere. Such a format, together with frequent debates within the court over procedural matters or the accurate translation of a particular phrase, was not necessarily conducive to sustaining the interest of the lay public. Donald Bloxham, describing the principal feature of the IMT as one of ‘tedium’, comments on how even those directly involved in the proceedings failed to ‘summon up enthusiasm for the central event in their lives’; he cites the example of Justice Biddle and reporter Rebecca West, who were much more wrapped up in their own brief relationship.¹¹

Traditionally, historians have likewise depicted the German people as having little interest in the case, fuelling the conventional image of the immediate post-war era as one of collective silence or evasion with regards to the recent past. More recently, Christoph Burchard has emphasised how emerging Cold War tensions meant that the IMT engendered differing responses in the East and West of the country. He argues that while East Germans embraced the message to deal with Nazi perpetrators, their Western counterparts remained suspicious and pessimistic about the precedent set at Nuremberg; it was only with reunification in 1990, Burchard claims, that the legacy of the IMT was finally reappraised and Germany began to truly accept the concept of international law.¹²

An analysis of contemporary German responses to the IMT, however, shows that reactions were far too complex to be easily dichotomised along East-West lines, or even in terms of Left-Right political cultures. By exploring the complicated responses to Nuremberg, we can trace the early tensions associated with Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the beginnings of generational conflict over the Nazi past and the difficult relationship between the victors and the vanquished in the immediate post-war period.

In order for the Allies’ educational objectives to be achieved, it was clearly necessary to ensure that details of the IMT were relayed to as wide an audience as possible. In December 1945, just one month into the proceedings, the Chief of the U.S. Information Control Division, Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, boasted that twelve million Germans living within the American occupation zone had access to such information through the media.¹³ Summaries of the tribunal’s progress were included in the weekly newsreels while the New York Times, surveying a sample of eleven newspapers licensed within the U.S. zone, found that 19 percent of their columns were devoted to the IMT.¹⁴ More recently, Akiba Cohen’s analysis of trial coverage within three of the leading Western newspapers at the time, Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt has agreed that the IMT attracted great attention, with just under a third of reports making the front page.¹⁵

However, despite all of the Allies’ best intentions, popular responses to the IMT seemed relatively muted. Throughout the trial, external observers within the international media and foreign consulates maintained a close eye on German behaviour. An examination of these sources suggests that the IMT failed to attract widespread or sustained public interest. Indeed, there seems to be some disparity between McClure’s account of the scale of press and radio coverage and the reality of daily German contact with the trial. Reporting for the New York Times, Raymond Daniell argued that any reports on the IMT within the licensed German press had been published for political reasons rather than any genuine interest in or moral commitment to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. In addition, when discussing the printing of indictments at the start of proceedings, he commented:

It was interesting to watch the Germans skip that part of the paper. As far as reader interest was concerned, the space might have been used to better advantage for almost anything else.… In Frankfurt, it is very noticeable that in restaurants newspaper readers fold their papers so that they can ignore the unpleasant reminders from Nuremberg. The trials are rarely discussed in conversation.¹⁶

Similarly, just days into the case in November 1945, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick noted ‘it’s too bad more Germans are not present at the trial and that it is not extensively reported in German or, better, fully broadcast so that the people most concerned should know the inevitable details of the plot they supported’—a comment which clearly contradicts McClure’s assessment of media coverage.¹⁷ Raising concerns over just how much of a lasting impact the trial could thus hope to achieve, McCormick added:

Nobody seems to care what happens to Göring and Streicher. The Nuremberg trial is more remote from Nuremberg than it is from New York. Certainly it is more scantily reported in Germany than in the United States.… While the accused represent Germany, Germans as a whole appear curiously uninterested in them.¹⁸

It is all very well decrying the apparent public apathy to the Nuremberg proceedings, but it is necessary to consider just what sort of a response could ever have been expected from a population suddenly having to contend with the collapse of a political regime, total defeat, foreign occupation and division. O’Hare McCormick’s conclusion that the IMT was enjoying a greater resonance in the United States than in Germany may well be accurate, but her article failed to recognise the legitimate reasons for this disparity. The Americans, for example, did not have to deal with the economic woes or pressing needs for reconstruction that the Germans were now facing. Indeed, when Daniell referred to the idea that many people would have preferred the newspapers to deal with other issues, coverage of food and fuel supplies and the means to trace missing relatives were among his suggestions for topics that currently held the utmost importance for the population.¹⁹ Understandably, the struggle for day to day subsistence in the aftermath of the war took precedence over events in a Nuremberg courtroom. The trauma of these recent experiences, meanwhile, meant that it was ‘easier’ to treat 1945 as something of a ‘Zero Hour’ and concentrate on the prospect of a brighter future ahead. The United States was unencumbered by any sense of personal guilt or responsibility for the Third Reich and the Holocaust, perhaps making it psychologically far easier for the audience there to devour details of the IMT as they could treat it as something of a macabre curio. For foreign observers, the terrible revelations emerging from Courtroom 600 could be dissipated with the reassuring thought that this was a ‘German problem’ and not one that they themselves necessarily had to think very deeply about. This was a period, after all, when many commentators, desperately trying to comprehend how such atrocities could have ever occurred, were speaking of the need to ‘re-civilise’ the Germans in the wake of their apparent descent into medieval-style barbarism.²⁰ On a more basic level, of course, McCormick’s claim that the press coverage was higher in the United States than in Germany may also have something to do with the fact that U.S. publications were not as hampered by a lack of paper or ink as their heavily rationed European counterparts.

It must also be stressed that any apparent lack of public interest in the IMT was far from confined to Germany. In Britain too it seems that the tribunal was unable to sustain public attention. Interest peaked at a few key moments, such as the screening of the atrocity films, the testimony of Hermann Göring and the final sentencing of the accused. However, the trauma of the Holocaust was such that even the Jewish Chronicle adopted a restrained style of coverage, preferring to generate many more columns on the struggle over Palestine as a means of looking to the future rather than dwelling on a painful past.²¹

Nevertheless, the fundamental notion that there was little, if any, German engagement with the IMT is flawed. The local Nürnberger Nachricten attacked the foreign accusations of German disinterest—typi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Victors and the Vanquished
• 2. ‘The Murderers among Us’
• 3. Recalling Resistance
• 4. Eichmann: A Nation on Trial?
• 5. One of Us
• 6. Draw a Line?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index