KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (117 page)

The reactions of ordinary Germans to the KL crimes varied, as they had done throughout the Third Reich. Some continued to look away, preoccupied with their own lot. But it was hard to avoid the topic in 1945–46 and there
was plenty of talk, arising from both Allied pressure and personal interest. Some Germans expressed shame and outrage, coupled with the demand for the harsh punishment of perpetrators.
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On the other side of the debate stood those who dismissed stories about the atrocities as Allied propaganda, and defended the KL as well-run institutions for the detention and reeducation of dangerous outcasts,
giving a new lease on life to Nazi propaganda.
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Most Germans probably found themselves somewhere in-between. They acknowledged that terrible things had happened, and sometimes expressed genuine revulsion, but they denied any responsibility. First, they claimed that the crimes had been carried out behind their backs by Nazi fanatics. This was the myth of the invisible camp, which expunged all
memories of the pervasive (if partial) popular knowledge of the KL, from the open terror of the early camps to the death marches at the end. Second, many Germans relativized the crimes by equating the fate of prisoners with their own. This was the myth of German victimhood: both prisoners and ordinary Germans, it was said, had suffered under the Nazis and the war. Many Germans therefore bristled
at charges of collective guilt, leading to an exculpatory campaign spearheaded by senior politicians and clergymen. As early as Sunday, April 22, 1945, just six days after the U.S.-led tour of Buchenwald, a proclamation read in Weimar churches declared that locals held “no blame whatsoever” for crimes that had been
“entirely unknown.”
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These myths became entrenched in the late 1940s, aided by
the Allies’ abandonment of denazification, and formed a major part of early German postwar narratives about the Third Reich.
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In the young Federal Republic of Germany, the memory of the KL was initially marginalized, reflecting a wider social and political consensus to leave the Nazi past behind. It was time to move on, most Germans felt, and focus on rebuilding their lives and their country.
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The widespread amnesia in the early 1950s benefited the remaining KL perpetrators. It emboldened calls for amnesties, amid mounting cries of Allied “victors’ justice.” Under pressure from the new West German government, a strategic ally in the escalating Cold War, the U.S. authorities released most SS prisoners; the last Camp SS defendant from the U.S. Dachau trials walked free in 1958. British
and French courts also enacted amnesties (as did the Polish and Soviet authorities).
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Some convicts returned to their old vocations. Professor Otto Bickenbach, for one, was allowed to practice as a physician after a tribunal accepted his claim that Natzweiler prisoners had volunteered for his deadly phosgene experiments. Many former Camp SS professionals, meanwhile, found new jobs: having been
released in 1954, the Gross-Rosen commandant Johannes Hassebroek earned his living as a salesman.
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With little political pressure on the prosecution authorities, there were few systematic investigations, and convictions for Nazi crimes dropped dramatically; in 1955, just twenty-seven defendants were charged by West German courts, down from 3,972 in 1949. The trials were coming to an end, it
seemed, and anyone who had not yet been sentenced would probably never face justice.
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Crucially, most SS fugitives stayed under the radar by adjusting to the postwar norms of liberal society, pointing once more to the importance of socio-psychological causes of KL crimes; in a different environment, these former Camp SS perpetrators kept their heads down and led law-abiding lives.
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While their
behavior altered, their convictions often remained unchanged. Remnants of the core Camp SS networks survived, with former staff and their families held together by nostalgia for the past. Interviewed by the Israeli historian Tom Segev in 1975, the ex-commandant Hassebroek scoffed: “The only thing I regret is the collapse of the Third Reich.”
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While the memory of the camps faded in the early
Federal Republic, it did not disappear altogether. This was partly due to the contentious issue of reparations, which vexed leading West German politicians and industrialists during the 1950s and 1960s. Keen to draw a line under the past, the German authorities reluctantly offered direct compensation to some victims and made lump-sum payments to Israel, Western European states, and Jewish organizations
(represented by the Claims Conference). Designed to help West Germany gain admission to the international community, rather than to help all victims, these measures resulted in a system riddled with inequities, injustices, and indignities (as we saw in the case of Edgar Kupfer and Moritz Choinowski). Those left completely empty-handed included many former slave laborers, as German industrialists
argued that the Nazi regime had compelled them to deploy KL prisoners.
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One survivor who challenged this falsehood was Norbert Wollheim, a German Jew who had survived working for IG Farben at Auschwitz-Monowitz. In 1951, he brought a civil case against the chemicals giant, which turned into a long-running political and legal drama, and ended in 1957 with an out-of-court settlement of thirty
million DM paid to the Claims Conference (other big German corporations criticized the agreement, and successfully fought civil actions by survivors).
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Criminal trials also kept the KL in the public eye in the 1950s. The press still reported on proceedings, which now mostly concerned Kapos and low-level SS officials, such as Private Steinbrenner, the would-be murderer of Hans Beimler in Dachau,
who was sentenced to life by a Munich court in 1952.
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Toward the end of the decade, in particular, individual cases gained extensive media exposure, stimulating more critical engagement with the camps. This included the trial of Gustav Sorge and Wilhelm Schubert. Both had survived the Siberian coal mines and returned to West Germany in 1956. But they were not among those Nazi perpetrators embraced
on their return from Soviet captivity. Quickly rearrested, they were tried once more, under the spotlight of the national and international press, and sentenced to life (for a second time) in early 1959.
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Sorge died in prison in 1978, one of a few Camp SS convicts who faced up to the past (“We had lost our sense of right!” he once shouted at a psychologist). Schubert, by contrast, stayed true
to his cause. Released in 1986, he built a shrine in his flat with an SS picture of himself surrounded by images of Hitler and other Nazi leaders; his funeral in 2006 drew a crowd of neo-Nazis.
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Popular attitudes in West Germany continued to change in the 1960s. This was due, in part, to the renewed interest in survivor memoirs. In 1960, the longtime chancellor Konrad Adenauer himself used
the foreword to a memoir to criticize those compatriots who wanted to burnish the nation’s image by burying memories of KL horrors committed by Germans.
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Even more important were high-profile court proceedings that signaled a more systematic judicial approach, propelled by the creation of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in 1958. Most significant was the
first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt between December 1963 and August 1965. In the dock stood twenty defendants, headed by two of the former adjutants (Commandant Richard Baer, arrested in 1960, died of a heart attack before the trial). The accompanying media storm, with almost one thousand articles in national newspapers alone, as well as programs on radio and television, caught the attention of most
Germans. “Damn it!” one reader wrote to a Frankfurt paper in December 1964, “give it a rest with your reporting about Auschwitz already.”
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The West German proceedings resulted in imperfect justice, as perpetrators often benefited from the kind of legal protection they had denied their victims.
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The trials also produced imperfect history lessons. Media reports were irregular, in particular
in mammoth cases like the trial of Majdanek staff, which opened in Düsseldorf in November 1975 and concluded five years and seven months later, setting a record for the longest and most expensive West German trial.
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What is more, the reporting only scratched the surface. This was most obvious, perhaps, in the continued treatment of defendants as an abnormal species. Here, the tone had been set
by the Allied proceedings and the early West German cases, including the second trial of Ilse Koch—dubbed by the press as the “red-headed green-eyed witch of Buchenwald”—who was rearrested after her release from U.S. detention and sentenced to life in 1951 by an Augsburg court (she later suffered from mental illness, convinced that former KL prisoners would abuse her in her cell, and committed
suicide in 1967).
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Popular reactions to the West German trials of the 1960s and 1970s were mixed; the Auschwitz trial, in particular, briefly galvanized the opposition to further proceedings against Nazi perpetrators. At the same time, however, the cases confronted the population with more detailed images from the KL than ever before and gave a vital impetus to pedagogical and cultural initiatives,
often led by a younger generation, which did much to generate a more differentiated memory culture.
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By the 1980s, the distorted picture of the KL, as painted in the early Federal Republic, had developed many cracks. In particular, the myth of the invisible KL lost its power after local activists uncovered the myriad links between SS camps and the wider population. Historians and campaigners
also began to turn a spotlight onto victim groups who had been obscured in public memory. Just as there had been prisoner hierarchies in the Nazi period, there were survivor hierarchies after the war. From the start, social outsiders—including homosexuals and Gypsies—were pushed to the bottom, by prevailing prejudices and also by former political prisoners determined to dissociate themselves from
more unpopular victim groups. As early as 1946, some “asocial” and “criminal” survivors joined together to protest against their marginalization in a short-lived journal of their own. Suffering in the camps, they announced, should not be measured by the color of a survivor’s triangle. But they were not heard. Social outsiders were widely excluded from compensation and commemoration, and it took
decades before they were recognized as KL victims.
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It would be wrong to paint the 1980s as a golden period. The Nazi past was still contentious in the Federal Republic and popular memory of the camps remained patchy. Few Germans fully understood the operation of the KL system or its dimensions; many main camps and almost all satellite camps remained obscure. There was also confusion over who
had suffered inside and over who had run the camps, as one-dimensional perpetrator images persisted. Nonetheless, public memory had shifted significantly since the foundation of the Federal Republic. Above all, most Germans now accepted a moral obligation to commemorate the camps and their victims.
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It was a somewhat different story in the Austrian Republic across the border. Building on the myth of Austria as the first foreign victim of Nazi tyranny, the political and social elites evaded a full confrontation with Austria’s Nazi past until well into the 1980s. While the West German legal apparatus coordinated its pursuit of KL perpetrators, Austria went the other way and effectively
abandoned prosecutions in the early 1970s. One of the last trials, against two SS architects involved in the construction of the Birkenau gas and crematorium complex, ended in a travesty of justice in 1972. Not only did the jury find the defendants innocent, it awarded them damages. Most Austrians ignored this case and others like it, leaving the national Communist newspaper to fume about scandalous
judgments that turned Austria into a “sanctuary for Nazi mass murderers.”
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This chimed with the views of Communist leaders in the German Democratic Republic in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, who rarely passed up the chance to castigate others for letting Nazi criminals off the hook, all the better to burnish their own antifascist badge of honor. In reality, the number of trials in East Germany,
extensive early on, had also declined sharply by the mid-1950s. GDR leaders wanted to move on, too, and released convicted criminals, while many former Nazi supporters were silently integrated into the new state. Prosecutions for KL crimes edged up again in the 1960s and became more coordinated, partly to keep step with West Germany. Among the defendants was Kurt Heissmeyer, the physician behind
the tuberculosis trials on Georges Kohn and other children in Neuengamme, who had lived as a respected lung specialist in Magdeburg, tacitly protected by the local elites; he was sentenced to life in 1966 and died soon after. However, such proceedings were highly politicized and did little to stimulate a more direct confrontation with the Nazi past, as they gradually did in West Germany.
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Since the GDR proclaimed itself as the successor to the resistance against Nazism, concentration camps gained a central place in the national narrative. The Socialist Unity Party (SED) took ownership of their commemoration, drawing on self-glorifying accounts by Communist survivors like Rudi Jahn, who boasted in an early mass publication that Buchenwald had been a “headquarter in the fight to free
Europe of Fascists.” The conversion of such hyperbole into official history was facilitated by the influx of former KPD prisoners into state positions (though none reached the highest offices of state, unlike in Poland, where the Socialist Józef Cyrankiewicz, a major player in the Auschwitz underground, became prime minister in 1947). As living embodiments of the antifascist spirit, former Communist
prisoners held a special status and were expected to bolster the official version of the camps, popularized in a spate of memoirs in the 1960s and 1970s (alleged renegades, meanwhile, were written out). The approved GDR account of the camps was also enacted during ceremonies at memorials, above all at Buchenwald, which was transformed into a shrine to the Communist resistance.
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