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Postwar Germany

~ 1945-1949

Postwar Germany

Category Archives: Denazification

Checklist for authoritarian “change”

15 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by Anika in Denazification, Politics and government, postwar

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authoritarian, change, elections, germany, government, politics, postwar, usa

After a lot of talking with friends and family about what’s going on in the USA, it’s pretty clear to me what I’m most concerned about. It’s the echoes of authoritarian regimes. Just echoes for now. But when power is concentrated into the hands of a single party, it’s up to people concerned with freedom to stand up and look at what the dangers are. Postwar Germany took a long, hard road analyzing its authoritarian past and trying to build safeguards so it never happens again. But first, it had to recognize the problem.

Last night, I did up a little graphic laying out some of the basic techniques of authoritarian regimes — right or left. This isn’t about one political ideology or another, it’s about concentrated power, how it’s taken and what is done with it. Nazi Germany did this right along with the Soviet Union. Modern Russia, Turkey and other countries did many of these things, or are in the process of doing them. I left a lot off the list for space reasons. What do you think should be added?

It’s up to us to recognize the similarities and be sure things don’t get out of hand.

checklist-for-change3

 

 

8 million Nazis

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Anika in Denazification

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berlin, document, germany, munich, nazi, party

After the war, when Germany went into denial (which lasted quite a few years, if Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-M1129-300,_Berlin,_Document_Centernot decades), many people insisted they had never been in the Nazi Party. Their papers, they thought, were destroyed, or unavailable in the eastern lands then controlled by the Soviets. Impossible to confirm their claim, right?

One German’s gutsy gamble in the last days of the war spoiled this game.

His name was Hans Huber, manager of a paper mill in Munich. On April 15, 1945, Hans had a visitor who informed him a large amount of paper would arrive soon that must be destroyed — immediately.

Three days later, the trucks began to arrive. Twenty trucks per day, nine days long. Each contained mounds (or rolls) of paper.

But not just any old paper. The central membership register of the Nazi Party.

Every party member from the NSDAP’s founding had a duplicate card stuck in the register and stored in steel cabinets in Munich’s Arcissstraße. Everyone including Hitler.

But there was more. The party applications themselves, with personal information, photos,and signatures also fell into Huber’s hands. SS documents too, handwritten notes from Himmler, Gestapo papers. In all, he had 50 tons of paper that could incriminate big and small Nazis alike.

When he realized what he had, Huber – no Nazi – decided to bluff. He delayed pulping the paper. He claimed he didn’t have enough coal, or his machines broke down because they didn’t have spare parts. Two weeks later, the Americans took Munich.

You’d think they would have jumped on such a treasure. But at first, the army was looking for real treasure — gold and art — not paper. Huber said he approached the Americans in May 1945, but no chance. They didn’t want paper.

In the fall, he finally came across an army archivist who took a look at the paper. “Any damn idiot” could see how important it was, Sargent B. Child told colleagues later.

But even then, the Nazi documents weren’t a sensation. They traveled to a warehouse near Kassel where the US military government collected and cataloged material found across Germany. As focus shifted to war crimes trials, the Allies saw the untold value of Huber’s paper. Right there was the documentary proof of membership in the NSDAP, along with other papers that could be used in war crimes trials.

In January 1946, 15 train loads of papers traveled to their final home — the Berlin Document Center. In his memoir, George Clare described the center that year.

I had expected to find a big barracks of a place but what I actually saw when I arrived at Wasserkäfersteig was a largish suburban villa, like so many in Zehlendorf. However, the high barbed-wire double-fence round the periphery of its extensive grounds, the floodlights and the armed, steel-helmeted sentries told me I had come to the right spot.

The Americans controlled the archive until 1994, and it’s now a part of the German Bundesarchiv.

And no one who was ever in the German Nazi Party could deny it and get away with it.

*Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-M1129-300 / Donath, Otto / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The Fragebogen

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by Anika in Denazification

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baden wurttenberg, denazification, fragebogen, international military tribunal, nazis, postsdam, potsdam conference

At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the Allies decided to rid Germany of its Nazi elements. The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg tried the big name Nazis for war crimes. Another solution had to be found to assess just how complicit in the regime other Germans in the western zones were.

The Americans and British produced the famous Fragebogen, 131 questions on six pages. The questionnaire summarized the life, professional and political activities of the person who filled it out. At first, only German civil servants such as police, judges and city government officials had to fill out the form. Early in the process, many were removed from office because of their brown pasts. The Americans with 13 million forms for their Zone had high hopes for the Fragebogen.

Reality didn’t live up to those hopes. The Germans were too busy surviving in the ruins, still stunned by defeat, not interested in delving into their pasts. Some protested that a questionnaire was too simplistic a way to decide someone’s guilt or innocence. When German Spruchkammer were set up to conduct hearings of people suspected of complicity with the Nazis, public opinion felt the little people were being persecuted while the bigger fish got away. They weren’t altogether wrong. After a first intense wave of denazification, the Americans and British saw it was impossible to fire so many Germans with expertise in the very things the Allies needed to help rebuild the country. Many old Nazis returned to their jobs.

The Landesarchiv Baden-Wurttenberg has a wonderful copy of a Fragebogen, with all questions in German and English. It’s a fascinating look at how thorough the Allies wanted to be. It asks everything from military service to membership in Nazi organizations to whether the person was involved in stealing Jewish property. The first 3 pages are reproduced here, with a.link to the Landesarchiv’s full 6-page Fragebogen.

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