Table Of Contentf r e i AdenAuer’s GermAny And the nAzi PAst “one of the most important
contributions to the debate on
the Politics of Amnesty And inteGrAtion Germany’s nazi past.”
—Fritz Stern, author of Einstein’s German World
nOrbert Frei is professor of modern history at OF all the aSpectS OF recOvery in pOSt-
ruhr-university bochum. he is the author of many war Germany perhaps none was as critical or
t A
as complicated as the matter of dealing with nazi
books on twentieth-century German history, h d
including The Führer State. he lives in Germany. e e criminals, and, more broadly, with the nazi past.
P n while on the international stage German officials
norbert frei
JOel GOlb is a berlin-based editor, translator and acclaim from Germany for o A spoke with contrition of their nation’s burden of
l u guilt, at home questions of responsibility and retri-
literary historian.
AdenAuer’s GermAny And the nAzi PAst it e foreword by fritz stern bution were not so clear. in this masterful exami-
i r nation of Germany under adenauer, norbert Frei
c
’
s s shows that, beginning in 1949, the west German
“the merit of Frei’s work lies in the thorough historical investigation of three government dramatically reversed the denazifica-
o G
important aspects of political dealing with the nazi past—achieving an f e tion policies of the immediate postwar period and
r initiated a new “vergangenheitspolitik,” or “policy
A
original scholarly contribution that expands and deepens our historical
m m for the past,” which has had enormous conse-
knowledge, and one that cannot be overlooked.”
n A quences reaching into the present.
—Die Zeit e n
s y adenauer’S Germany and the nazi paSt
t
A chronicles how amnesty laws for nazi officials
“the value of this book, which makes for bitter but important reading, rests y
n were passed unanimously and civil servants who
on the close analysis of sources in the dialectical process of constructing a A d had been dismissed in 1945 were reinstated liber-
n
democracy after 1945.” d t ally—and how a massive popular outcry led to the
—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung h release of war criminals who had been con-
i
n e demned by the allies. these measures and move-
t n ments represented more than just the rehabilita-
e
A tion of particular individuals. Frei argues that the
G
r z amnesty process delegitimized the previous politi-
i
A cal expurgation administered by the allies and, on
t P
a deeper level, served to satisfy the collective psy-
i A
o chic needs of a society longing for a clean break
s
n t with the unparalleled political and moral catastro-
cOlumbia univerSity preSS
phe it had undergone in the 1940s. thus the era of
new yOrk
adenauer devolved into a scandal-ridden period of
www.columbia.edu/cu/cup
reintegration at any cost. Frei’s work brilliantly and
ISBN 0-231-11882-1 chillingly explores how the collective will of the
German people, expressed through mass alle-
giance to new consensus-oriented democratic
Jacket deSiGn: chanG Jae lee parties, cast off responsibility for the horrors of the
Jacket imaGe: © SOvFOtO/eaStFOtO/picturequeSt war and holocaust, effectively silencing engage-
printed in the u.S.a. ment with the enormities of the nazi past.
columbia translated by joel Golb
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/12/02 10:10 Page i
ADENAUER’S GERMANY
AND THE NAZI PAST
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/12/02 10:10 Page ii
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/12/02 10:10 Page iii
ADENAUER’S GERMANY
AND THE NAZI PAST
The Politics of Amnesty
and Integration
Norbert Frei
Translated by Joel Golb
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/18/02 14:47 Page iv
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York, Chichester, West Sussex
Publication of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte
Vergangenheitspolitik© 1997 Verlag C.H. Beck, München
English Translation Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press
All rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frei, Norbert.
Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi past : the politics of amnesty and
integration / Norbert Frei; translated by Joel Golb.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-231-1882-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Denazification. 2. Germany (West)—Politics and government.
3. Germany—Politics and government—1945–1990. I. Title
DD259.4 .F72413 2002
940.53/144/0943–dc21 2002073502
CIP
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable
acid-free paper
Printed in the United States of America
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/12/02 10:10 Page v
CONTENTS
Foreword by Fritz Stern vii
Introduction xi
PART I
A Legislation for the Past: Parliamentary and
Administrative Junctures 1
I. The Amnesty Law of 1949 5
2. The “Liquidation” of Denazification 27
3. The Rehabilitation and Pensioning of the “131ers” 41
4. The Amnesty Law of 1954 67
PART II
A Past-Political Obsession: The Problem of the
War-Criminals 93
5. The War-Crimes Issue Preceding the
Bonn Republic 97
6. The Politicization of the War-Criminal Question
(1949-50) 121
v
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/12/02 10:10 Page vi
vi CONTENTS
7. The Debate Under the Sign of Rearmament
(1950-51) 147
8. A “General Treaty” instead of a “General Amnesty”
(1951-52) 177
9. The Windup of the War-Criminal Problem 203
PART III
Fixing Past-Political Limits: Judicial Norms and Allied
Intervention 235
10. The Hedler Affair and the Establishment of Criminal-
Legal Norms (1950) 237
11. The Rise and Banning of the Socialist Reich Party
(1951-52) 251
12. The Naumann Affair and the Role of the Allies
(1953) 277
Conclusion 303
Postscript to the American Edition 313
Acknowledgments 315
Notes 319
Sources and Literature 417
Index 461
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/12/02 10:10 Page vii
FOREWORD
M
ost people know two things about modern Germany:
that Hitler’s Germany, the most popular tyranny of the last century, ini-
tiated an unprecedented slaughter, the Holocaust, and that today’s Fed-
eral Republic is a democratic polity, peaceful and responsible. But we
know or remember less about the process by which the country man-
aged the transition from a state of horror to a state of constitutional order
and stability.
How Germans dealt with the legal and political legacies of the Nazi
past remains an important and instructive issue. We live in a world in
which questions about how to make the transition from a criminal
regime occupy nations in many parts of the world, from Eastern Europe
to South Africa and Latin America. We could assume that Germany pro-
vides an extraordinary example of a successful transition. And on the
whole it does—with a most tortured and ambiguous beginning.
It is precisely that beginning, by now forgotten and hitherto not fully
explored, that Norbert Frei, a German historian of the postwar genera-
tion, reconstructs with admirable thoroughness, political insight, and
moral sensitivity. His study begins with the establishment of the Fed-
eral Republic in 1949—when the three Western occupying powers
granted partial sovereignty to the newly elected government in Bonn,
vii
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/12/02 10:10 Page viii
viii FOREWORD
reserving for themselves certain formal and informal rights. The new
state had to assume the task of denazification, of dealing with the mul-
tiple legacies of Nazi criminality and German complicity. The most
memorable effort at justice had been at the several Nuremberg trials of
the Third Reich’s principal leaders on charges that included the plan-
ning of incursionary war and genocide; sentences ranged from prison
terms to death, whereas a few of the accused—amidst public contro-
versy—were acquitted. By 1949, some of the convicted remained in jail,
a few still under sentence of death. After the creation of what came to
be known as West Germany, much of the remaining burden of dealing
with the Nazi past devolved on Germans themselves. (Frei does not treat
developments in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany,
which remained under Soviet tutelage.) The new political authorities
had to deal with the past in specific political and legal contexts: who
should be prosecuted and for what offenses, who should be compen-
sated for losses or for penalties the Allies had imposed earlier, and who
should be barred from public office in light of what acts in the past.
These matters dominated politics in the early years of the Bonn Repub-
lic: they had to be decided collectively by the executive and parliament,
by political parties whose existence depended on popular suffrage, and
by a judiciary that was largely a carryover from the Third Reich.
Frei examines the vast political-cultural space in which the deci-
sions concerning amnesty and integration were taken: he analyzes the
government initiatives and the party responses, all political moves made
with an eye to organized lobbies and popular opinion. The prevailing
mood favored a hasty end to prosecution, seen by some Germans as
Allied retribution, “victors’ justice,” and by a few even as a symptom of
the vindictiveness of world Jewry. West Germans, including millions of
resentful expellees from Polish and Czech lands, had no desire to delve
into the past, to try and punish compatriots who had served the Nazi
state to the last. More, many of them were uncomfortable with the few
Germans who had actively resisted Hitler, most notably those connected
with the July 20 coup against him, traitors in the eyes of all too many.
The two major parties—the Christian Democrats and the Social
Democrats—realized that, as Frei correctly states, “they would have to
fish for their votes from a people whose overwhelming majority some
ten years earlier would have voted for Hitler in a free and secret elec-
tion.” Hence both parties—with differences between them—recognized
the political need for leniency, for virtual amnesty, for condoning con-
tinuities in political careers. Even forthright democrats recognized the
force of what one prominent and irreproachable writer of the time pro-
pounded: a person’s right to political error or faulty judgment. This view
Frei_00_i-x_asn 6/12/02 10:10 Page ix
FOREWORD ix
could be read as a plea for exculpation: supporters of Nazism had com-
mitted an “error,” not a crime. West Germany’s political class came to
think that a genuine or radical purge of all those who had been impli-
cated in the Third Reich, individuals and organizations, would result
in massive alienation and an anti-Bonn mood, just as there had been a
fatal anti-Weimar mood.
Frei carefully considers the non-German players in the ongoing
struggle: among them were the three Allied high commissioners with
their reserve powers. The American, John J. McCloy, mindful that the
Korean War and the cold war generally made eventual German support
of the United States an imperative, often enough acceded to Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer’s pleas for leniency or clemency, especially toward
industrial leaders. But there were limits, and German politicians as well
as the German public had to reckon with the continued rights of the
high commissioners; they also had to heed warnings from German com-
mentators that yielding all too frequently to nationalist truculence
would arouse a critical “foreign response.” Jeering comments from the
putatively antifascist East Germany about the many ex-Nazis in West
German political life were regarded as a nuisance in the propaganda
war between the two states. (We now know that the East German regime
covertly sanctioned the use of former high-ranking Nazis.) Bonn also
had to contend with and separate itself from large numbers of organized
extreme right-wing elements, people filled with contempt for the Allies
and with disdain for the West. So the “brown” past was more than a
smudge on the new landscape; there was no tabula rasa for Bonn, no
Stunde null, no total break with elements of the previous regime.
The great achievement of this book is to trace for the first time in
meticulous detail the debates and decisions, the motives and compro-
mises, that Germans made in this initial period of transition. Author and
subject are splendidly matched: Frei has an eye for complexity. He casts
his historic net widely and shrewdly; he depicts in depth the emergent
political culture in which these issues were tackled; he has drawn on a
vast array of sources, some hitherto untapped, both from the public
sphere and from private papers of the leading actors. This is an astound-
ing and successful work of scholarship, leaving the reader with a mount-
ing unease about the lack of a radical cleansing but with a clearer grasp
both of conditions at the time and the success of later efforts to correct
or abandon certain soothing distortions, such as the notion that a small
gang around Hitler was solely culpable while most Germans were inno-
cent or ignorant. We can now appreciate the great achievements of later
generations, most notably perhaps Frei’s own, and the courage and can-
dor of men such as Willy Brandt or Richard von Weizsaecker.
