Jost DUELFFER: “Nazism will not be restored in Germany”
Considering the current situation in Germany, where some right-wing parties have won in local elections, is there any danger that Nazism will be revived?
No. Of course, one should never say “never,” but after more than 60 years it is highly unlikely that Nazism will be restored to power in Germany. There are right-wing parties in many democratic countries in Europe. Right-wing parties are common in most established democracies.
How did the Denazification process take place in Germany? What methods were used in the struggle against Nazism?
Well, you must know that the four major Allied powers took responsibility for Germany after the Second World War, namely Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. They resolved to prevent any manifestation of National Socialism and to destroy it basically by their own policies. This decision was adopted at the Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945. The four Allied powers took on the responsibility to implement this decision by dividing Germany into four zones. One of them was in the Soviet sphere of influence. You probably remember this. These zones developed differently. For example, I could compare the Soviet and the American zones. The rule of automatic arrest functioned in all the zones, which meant that prominent National Socialists were imprisoned, so that people could determine whether they were guilty of murder. Don’t forget that during the Second World War Germany’s policy was one of genocide and mass murders, especially in the countries of Eastern Europe, for example in your country, Poland, and the former Soviet Union.
But initially, thanks to the joint efforts of the four states, only the most prominent National Socialists were tried during the Nuremberg Trial of 1945-46. Denazification took place differently and involved the exposure of Nazi functionaries throughout the country. Many of them were automatically arrested, especially middle-ranking functionaries of the Nazi Party, the SS, and similar organizations.
Parallel to this procedure citizens’ committees were spontaneously formed in the British and US zones. Later, they tried to systematize this work in the American and British zones by formulating a questionnaire consisting of 143 questions. The answers to this questionnaire allowed the authorities to determine whether a person was innocent or belonged to one of five categories, beginning with the most powerful Nazi down to a rank and file one. The citizens’ committees handed down rulings in this matter. But it took two or three years for people to realize that this system was imperfect. The courts worked too slowly: observing all formalities and the length of the procedures, it was impossible to hand down verdicts in the cases of five million individuals.
Therefore, for the most part the procedure was abandoned. The main criminals were convicted during the trial in Nuremberg and many courts in the different occupation zones. Several dozen people were sentenced to death. However, these trials played a paramount role in the first years after the first years after the Allies took control of Germany. At the very beginning there were many arrests: 64,000 in the British zone; nearly 100,000 in the American zone; 30,000 in the French zone; and 70,000 in the Soviet zone.
In the Soviet zone, the process of Denazification took place with significant differences. If during the course of social changes people were ready to build a new socialist Germany, they were more readily accepted for work on the reconstruction of the Soviet zone that became the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
To a certain extent, former National Socialists, or fascists, could prove their change of views by working for the restoration of the new Germany. In keeping with these views, special camps were created in the Soviet zone of occupation for 150,000 people, of which one-third died of hunger and ill-treatment. Some prisoners were shipped to the GULAG. At the same time, the restructuring of the democratic order into a socialist society was taking place in the Soviet zone. Thus, the GDR represented itself as a genuine antifascist state in Germany, in which some Nazis were acquitted of charges that had been laid against them earlier. The process of Denazification was mostly abandoned in 1948 because it turned out to be ineffective, and in the Western zone many high-ranking Nazis were able to continue their work in society.
Did ideological work on the Denazification of the Germans take place and was it successful?
Naturally, it is always difficult to find out what people really think. That is why initially they tried to do this with the aid of a questionnaire consisting of 143 questions that everyone had to fill out. One of the first questions was: “Were you a member of the Nazi Party, the SS, SA, or other organizations of the Nazi system? How deeply were you involved in them?” Then the authorities tried to locate testimonies from other people who could corroborate or disprove whether a specific individual was a convinced Nazi or not. Such testimonies were transformed into a kind of cleansing procedure, and they were named after the Persil laundry detergent (Persil powder certificate). You could always find nice friends to say that you were never a Nazi but perhaps behaved like a Nazi. So this procedure was very inefficient. At the time it was very rare to obtain objective information about people’s real behavior in the Nazi period. In the Western zone the system occasionally led to an arrest, someone was jailed, and later released. But on the whole it was not really efficient, I think.
What was developed instead — I mean what we usually call propaganda, which educated people?
The main principles of Denazification were common to the four allies. The Soviet side believed that there was no real Denazification in the West. In all over 12 million questionnaires were distributed, but the process of checking them was too slow, and therefore it was abandoned. All told, they managed to interview two or three million individuals in the citizen’s courts. All this took time. If a serious accusation was laid against a person, he was arrested, but the authorities might find out whether he had truly committed a crime against humanity much later.
Later, in the 1950s, how was the work to educate the German nation carried out?
You should remember that the Allies were responsible for West Germany and East Germany until the mid-1950s. The Federal Republic of Germany became independent or sovereign only in 1955. There was a kind of allied guidance to look after both of the republics; that was one aspect, and the other side was that Denazification in the sense of checking the masses in German society, that continued in the late 1940s, three or four years after the war. But another process began in the late 1950s. Then, individuals who had worked in concentration camps, in the genocide or occupation of Ukraine, Belarus, or the Soviet Union, were persecuted because new information had emerged, and this continued in the 1960s and 1970s. Awareness had changed in the FRG. But it was a relatively small proportion of people who had committed crimes in a very evil sense, and even that could not always be satisfactorily proven. In both East and West Germany there were many former Nazis or people who had been in leading positions during the Nazi period.
When did Denazification stop being a problem in West Germany?
It ceased to be a problem in 1950, but public debates intensified again in the 1960s and even the 1970s. At that time, the younger generation of students brought up the question of their parents’ involvement in the Nazi period, meaning some 20 years after these events. In West and East Germany the examination of this topic turned into a permanent process that continues to this day. You probably know that one of the most famous German novelists, Nobel Prize winner Gunter Grass, who always had been a moral authority in Germany, recently revealed that when he was a young man he was a member of the SS. This became a major problem during discussions of his moral traits. It was not a question of specific crimes that he may not have committed. The discussion continues, and that means that the public is sensitive to this question, which will never cease to be important for the public and the media. The real problem disappeared in the late 1940s, but public attention to it has not weakened since then.
Was educational work aimed at convincing people of the evils of Nazism conducted in schools and universities?
One of the most important things that the Allied powers did in Germany was to introduce new textbooks to schools and universities, and these were helpful in the first 5 or 10 years after the Second World War. Then the restructured German society began independently writing textbooks that contained practically no mention of Nazism. Within universities were marginal wings of right radicalism, but nothing important emerged from them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a neo-Nazi party called the National Democratic Party, which participated in the elections, obtained between eight or nine percent of the vote in some German states.
Who in Germany was responsible for this type of educational work?
Since Germany has a federal system, the education system is controlled locally, in states and territories. We do not have a central state education agency, so ministries of education are formed by liberal politicians from democratic parties. Universities have autonomous rights, and the state can influence them only through textbooks. We had many problems in the 1960s and 19070s, when right- wing groupings of neo-Marxists emerged.
Do you know if Germany’s experience with Denazification was used by other countries?
I don’t think that the Germans’ experience was used directly. There were “purifications” in many European countries after the Second World War, which were born of their own experiences with collaborators, etc. I don’t know whether our experience was closely studied by the former communist countries after 1989-90. Germany has a research institute for the creation of textbooks. It has a broad base for exchanging information on how to create a democratic textbook for any country. This work is very effective. The question of overcoming the image of the enemy is also being examined within the framework of the common history of British-German, French-German, and also possibly Russian-German relations. I don’t know whether this concerns neo-Nazism or fascism, or whether it just deals with information exchange.
What ideological problems between the East and West Germans appeared after reunification?
Ideological problems were connected with the first free elections during which post-socialist parties obtained less than 20 percent of the vote, and bourgeois parties obtained the majority. Ideological problems were reflected in the teaching staff of universities. In East German universities “sensitive” disciplines are mostly taught by former West Germans. This does not concern schoolteachers, who in time received new textbooks from West Germany. The question here was their willingness and ability to change their views...it is very difficult to reach conclusions or make generalizations. There was no ideological problem here. It was solved by the elections, and later Marxist-Leninist ideology was accepted as a minority ideology, as a characteristic feature of the Party of Democratic Socialism. The former ideological dichotomy between the East and West led to the emergence of a strong minority of post-socialist parties in the East in the majority of spheres of public life. At the same time, representatives of democratic parties, which were characteristic of West Germany, are in the majority. In historiography former “blank spots” of the Communist past were uncovered and thoroughly researched after reunification.
Who is monitoring to make sure that neo-Nazism does not reemerge?
Like before reunification, there was no single federal organ in the FRG. This is the responsibility of territorial bodies, which are pluralistic. In the former GDR this was the responsibility of the Ministry of State Security whose documents, after reunification, were gathered into one archive, which is accessible to the public. So if someone was watched and reported on, today, 10 years later, s/he can visit the Berlin archive and get the information that was gathered during the existence of the GDR. There you can obtain documents and see what information was collected about you in the days of the GDR. You can find out whether your husband or wife, neighbor, or good friend was involved. This is, of course, a completely different problem from neo-Nazism, which is possibly a greater problem in the territories of former East Germany. Sympathizers of this movement use foreign Nazi symbols, but the disturbing results in territorial elections in East Germany are explained to a greater degree by social questions in this part of the country compared to West Germany.
Was there any punishment for those who worked in East Germany’s Ministry of State Security?
If they had committed crimes, yes. But it was more of a truth commission. People found out who had been, and is, spying on them. And those people who spied on their fellow citizens lost face. Not too many of those who spied were tried. In the GDR, people were tried for their involvement in murders of people crossing the border into West Germany. No one was persecuted for being a member of a state body or the Communist Party of the GDR. There were many people like that, but nobody bothered them.
So, if they were honest and did not commit crimes, they were not punished?
There were very many people involved in the security organs, who helped them gather information. Since they are experts, most of them continued to work in their professions, but not in government service. If they had not committed a crime, they retained their positions. But in the majority of cases, the leading positions were occupied by people from West Germany. Of course, you cannot change the whole society and appoint new people. In Germany the influence of Western administrators was used in many cases that have no parallels with other countries.
What is your view of the situation in Poland, where there are plans to punish former security agents financially?
I am not sure about what is going on in Poland. But I want to note that we have fully opened access to our secret documents. After reunification the Ministry of State Security of the GDR was completely disbanded, and people lost their jobs. But they were not punished for doing their job. So there was no such situation in Poland in the immediate years after the overthrow of communism. Only now there has begun a more or less conservative condemnation of all the people who were involved in the old regime, regardless of their specific performance during and after this period.
Do you think it is beneficial for society to gain access to such secret documents, to know more about those who were collecting information about them?
Yes. There were debates in 1990, and a citizens’ movement was organized to open the archives. It is true that we can land in a difficult situation when we find out that our neighbor once spied on us. But opening the archive is a very nice way of purifying oneself. People said: “Yes, my neighbor spied on me. I will never talk to him again,” or “I can forgive him.” So, it was a very good thing that the information in the archives became open.
