Denazification
The policy of eliminating all traces of National Socialism (NS) from postwar Germany through public and private sector purges; the most controversial of all U.S. policies in its zone of occupation.
Pursued between 1945 and 1948 by the four occupying powers (the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France), U.S. denazification policy was initially the most sweeping and punitive. Denazification was enormously unpopular among Germans, and by 1952, the West German government had authorized the reinstatement of thousands of Germans who had lost their positions in the purges and formally terminated denazification.
During the war, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed that postwar Germany would be democratized, demilitarized, decartelized, and denazified. After the war, however, each occupying power (which by then included France) pursued denazification in different ways, their respective policies shaped by three factors: (1) the manner in which each occupier administered its zone; (2) its particular conceptions of National Socialism’s relationship to German society; and (3) the emerging conflict between the wartime Allies. U.S. and Soviet policies were initially the most extensive and ideology driven, though their guiding assumptions about German society and their ultimate objectives were very different. France, and especially Great Britain, tended to take a more pragmatic and often more lenient approach.
In 1945, most U.S. policymakers expected a brief occupation. Given tremendous domestic political pressure to demobilize and the U.S. Army’s unwillingness to assume long-term responsibility for civil affairs in occupied Germany, U.S. officials decided that the Germans themselves would have to bear the bulk of the responsibility for their nation’s physical, political, and economic reconstruction.
Yet they also assumed that a democratic future and lasting peace depended upon the elimination of all traces of NS from German society. U.S. denazification policy mandated either the automatic arrest or removal of a given individual from public or private sector employment, based on whether he or she had belonged to the NSDAP or had supported the dictatorship in more than a “nominal” manner. This policy of categorical removals reflected a conception of NS as having its foundations mainly in Germany’s most influential institutions: the party, the state (which included the educational establishment), the military, and industry. In practice, however, all adult Germans were to be subject to the denazification policy.In the very first stages of the occupation, denazification was only one of the many responsibilities assigned to local military government detachments. Soon, however, “Special Branch” units were created to handle the purges. Every adult German was required to complete a lengthy questionnaire (Fragebogen), detailing the subject’s personal, professional, and political past. To discourage falsification, the questionnaires themselves contained the warning that the Allies had possession of NSDAP records, against which answers would be checked. Occupation and counterintelligence officials would then review the completed questionnaires and make a recommendation for retention or dismissal. By June 1946, Special Branch teams had collected 1,613,000 questionnaires and had ordered the barring or removal from employment of 373,762 persons.
The sheer magnitude of the purges, the inability of the military government to handle the workload, and much negative publicity in the American press led the military governor, U.S. Army general Lucius D. Clay, to hand over primary responsibility for denazification to the Germans. By June 1946, 316 local civilian tribunals
(Spruchkam.m.ern) had been created, with anti- or at least non-Nazi Germans selected to preside over the cases and pass judgments.
Regional German Ministries for Political Liberation provided the main oversight of the tribunals, though the verdicts were subject to approval by U.S. officials. Once again, every adult (some 13.5 million people in the American zone) had to fill out a background questionnaire (the Meldebogen, a much shorter version of the Fragebogen) and submit it to his or her local Spruchkammer. The tribunal would place the defendant in one of five categories: (1) major offenders; (2)activists, militarists, and profiteers (“Be- lastet”); (3) less incriminated; (4) followers or fellow travelers (“Mitlaeufer”); and (5) exonerated. Most defendants were categorized as “followers.” Penalties ranged from short prison terms to temporary barring from employment to nominal fines.From the beginning, the policy suffered from many problems, above all that of reconciling the desire for a brief occupation with the perceived necessity of an extensive purge. This dilemma divided U.S. officials, many of whom viewed the purges as obstructing physical and political reconstruction, whereas others believed an uncompromising purge was a necessary step toward a stable and peaceful postwar Germany. Hence policy enforcement was often uneven as occupation officials with differing conceptions of Germany’s past and future struggled to maintain security, restore civic life, and carry out denazification.
The sheer magnitude of the program also presented insurmountable difficulties. Millions of files and hundreds of thousands of cases had to be processed, and there were simply too few qualified U.S. and German personnel available to do the job. The vagaries of policy enforcement in occupied Germany led to many negative press reports in the United States about the “failures” of denazification. Such reports pressured Clay to widen the scope of the purges in 1945, which in turn exacerbated the administrative burden and heightened animosity among the Germans.
The unpopularity of the purges among Germans was yet another major problem.
Prominent German intellectuals and church officials labeled the policy unjust, and it was ridiculed in the German press. Many held that denazification amounted to a charge of “collective guilt” and did not take into account the complexities of life under a dictatorship. Many also believed that numerous criminals had been allowed to go free, whereas those with allegedly little or even no real connection to NS were prosecuted. The new democratic German political leadership in the western zones—most notably Konrad Adenauer—understood that the objects of denazification proceedings were now their constituents and pressured U.S. authorities to bring the program to an end. Not surprisingly, then, within only a few years of West Germany’s creation in 1949, the new government in Bonn allowed those who had lost their positions in the purges to regain their jobs and ended the denazification program altogether.The Spruchkammer process also suffered from a number of fundamental weaknesses. The caseload remained overwhelmingly large, and U.S. officials noted a lack of qualified Germans committed to carrying out the letter of the law. The accused relied on affidavits (known derisively as Persilscheine, after a popular brand of detergent) from mutually reinforcing personal networks, thus distorting the evidentiary basis for making reasonably objective judgments. Above all, the use of affidavits turned denazification from a means of removing former Nazis from influential positions in society into a political and legal whitewash. Thousands of former Nazis who underwent a Spruchkammer trial could thereafter be reinstated to their former jobs and would be under no compulsion to account for or discuss their pasts in public.
Finally, the emerging cold war between the former wartime Allies compromised the Allies’ original intentions with regard to the purges. The U.S., British, and Soviet governments, for instance, raced to obtain former Nazi intelligence officers and scientists for their respective military, scientific, and commercial establishments.
As four- power agreement over Germany’s future failed to materialize, the Americans, British, and French on the one side and the Soviets on the other sought to secure the allegiance of Germans in their respective occupation zones. This meant far less emphasis on reckoning with the past in the form of unpopular war crimes trials and denazification and a greater emphasis on reconciliation and reconstruction. This development, combined with the tribunal process many flaws, led the United States to relinquish oversight of denazification in 1948.Steven Remy
See also Nuremberg Trials; U.S. Plans for Postwar Germany; World War II
References and Further Reading
Boehling, Rebecca. A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reform and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996.
Bower, Tom. Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America, and the Purging of Nazi Germany—A Pledge Betrayed. London: Little, Brown, 1995.
Frei, Norbert. Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Remy, Steven P. The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Vollnhals, Clemens, ed. Entnazifizierung: Politische Sduherung und Rehahilitierung in den vier Besatzungszonen 1945—1949. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991.