Year Zero (25 page)

MacArthur liked to refer to Willoughby, born in Germany as Karl von Tscheppe und Weidenbach, as “my pet fascist.” With good reason. A hunting man with a soft voice, silky manners, and a nasty temper, Willoughby had a tendency to see Jewish and communist conspiracies everywhere, including inside the U.S. military administration itself. The French ambassador, too, fell under his suspicion because he happened to have a Russian name. Willoughby enjoyed warmer relations with the conservative courtiers around Emperor Hirohito than with SCAP's New Dealers. After his retirement in the 1950s, Willoughby moved to Madrid to advise General Francisco Franco, a man he much admired. However, since he was formally in charge of the occupation police, it was Willoughby's duty to see to the dismissal of public figures he privately approved of. After listening to one of Willoughby's interminable rants against the purges, Whitney remarked: “I submit that anyone who is so opposed to a program is the wrong man to implement it.”
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And that, it turned out, was that, at least for the time being.

In Germany, the main thinker behind the purges of former Nazis was Franz Neumann, a Marxist who ended up working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Neumann was a Jewish refugee from Germany, where he had made a name before the war as a political theorist and labor lawyer. During his exile in the U.S., he
prepared a denazification guide for the U.S. government together with Herbert Marcuse, one of several refugee Marxist scholars associated with the Frankfurt School. The Third Reich, according to their thesis, was a typical case of “totalitarian monopolistic capitalism.”
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Behind the Nazi movement stood the industrialists. Persecution of the Jews had been a maneuver to deflect popular discontent about monopoly capitalism.

Neumann, backed by the top military boss in the American zone, General Lucius Clay, helped to devise the notorious
Fragebogen
(questionnaire), the 131-point survey every German adult was required to fill out. On the basis of these detailed questions on past affiliations and sympathies, it was hoped, the U.S. military would be able to establish the guilt or innocence of at least twenty-three million people. A typical question would be: “Have you or any members of your family taken possession of property or assets stolen from others on the grounds of faith or race?” Another question concerned membership of university fraternities, as though these had been part of the Nazi apparatus instead of being banned after 1935. In truth, of course, answers were rarely honest. Submissions of the documents were postponed, sometimes forever. Endless appeals were launched. The Allies lacked sufficient staff, or knowledge, to assess the documents. Few Americans even spoke German, let alone read it. An already overwhelmed military administration, formally in charge of rebuilding democracy in Germany, was even further stretched by a new “Law No. 8,” which became effective on December 1.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, the former resister in Berlin, made a note of this law in her diary, with approval:

Three weeks ago the first measures were taken against Party members. Elimination of all Nazis from prominent positions in industry and commerce. Exclusion of Party members from cultural occupations. Former NSDAP members may only be employed as workers.
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Andreas-Friedrich was sympathetic to the idea of putting old Nazis to work at clearing rubble and other unpleasant menial tasks. But hers was
an uncommon perspective, it seems. She recorded what she heard people saying around her: “Unbelievable, this terror! Outrageous, this latest injustice. They can't put twenty percent of the population under special law.” To which she responded in the privacy of her diary: “But they can! Have they [the Germans] forgotten how easily it can be done? Has it escaped them that these special laws are almost identical to those of eight years ago against the Jews?”
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There was no sympathy for the protesting Germans from her. But the parallel she drew was part of the problem. Excluding people from society under a Nazi regime is one thing, but to do so in order to rebuild a democracy is an altogether trickier proposition. Besides, a simple admission of Party membership did not mean very much. Some 140,000 people lost their jobs, but many were petty officials and opportunists who had joined the Nazis out of fear or ambition, while bigger and more culpable figures remained untouched: the businessmen who didn't bother to join the Party, but made millions from plundered Jewish assets; the bankers who hoarded gold from the teeth of murdered Jews; the professors who promoted noxious racial theories; the lawyers and judges who meticulously followed the decrees of Hitler's Reich, prosecuting men and women for subverting the Nazi state or committing “racial shame” by falling in love with someone of an “inferior race.”

Theodor Heuss had been a liberal journalist and politician before the war, and though not an active resister, he had loathed the Nazis. Heuss was the kind of German the Allies felt they could trust. In 1945, the Americans appointed him as Culture Minister of Baden-Württemberg. One of Heuss's problems was the lack of capable schoolteachers to wean the young from twelve years of Nazi propaganda. His task was made more difficult by the purges. In a desperate letter to the Military Administration, he wrote that in his view only between 10 to 15 percent of the people dismissed in the purges had been convinced Nazis. But so many teachers had been fired that children were being deprived of an education. It would not be difficult, he argued, “to scrape away the brown veneer” from older teachers, educated before the Third Reich, and “reawaken their powers of
good.” He begged the authorities for their confidence: “We promise to deliver the teachers from Nazism and to make them agents of new and better ideas, enabling them to educate youth in the right spirit.”
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He was turned down.

Carl Zuckmayer, who returned to Germany from his American exile to write a report for the U.S. War Department, argued that the American purges were so clumsy, and so often missed the real targets, that there was a danger of denazification leading to renazification. German conservatives saw denazification as a socialist plot. They believed that the Allied authorities deliberately favored German radicals, who were keen to purge every city and town of anyone who could be tarred with the fascist brush. Zuckmayer tells a joke he heard in Austria about a man who went to the local police station to have his name registered. Why would he want to do that? asked the policeman. Because I'm a Nazi, replied the man. Then you should have registered with us a year ago, said the officer. To which the man replied: A year ago I was not yet a Nazi.
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By the time this joke went the rounds, much of the task of sifting ex-Nazis from the supposedly innocent had been handed over, out of sheer necessity, to German committees. This move was formalized in the “Law for Liberation from National-Socialism and Militarism.” It turned into a farce. German politicians had little enthusiasm for further purges. Purging committees, supposedly peopled by radical revolutionaries, were in fact often filled with former Nazis. Catholic priests warned that it was sinful for Germans to offer damaging evidence against their compatriots. Local bigwigs who had made fortunes during the Third Reich paid their way out of trouble, often by producing some pathetic survivor of Nazi persecution as a favorable witness. The key word of this period, starting in 1946, was
Persilschein
, Persil being a “whitewashing” laundry detergent. Countless ex-Nazis received their Persil document washing out every speck of brown dirt from their recent past. Certificates showing that one had been a former prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp could be bought on the black market; not cheap at twenty-five thousand deutsche marks, but affordable to many a former SS officer.

Things were little better in the eastern half of Germany, despite communist claims that the purges in the “democratic zone” had been a great success. In the late spring of 1945, the kind of German “antifascist” committees described by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich were put in charge of the purges. They were disbanded in the early summer when the German Communist Party (KPD) took over. In theory, purges were indeed more rigorous than in the Western zones. The foundation myth of the German Democratic Republic, after all, would be its proud history of “antifascism”; this was the “better Germany,” the Germany of resistance. Yet this myth was muddled by the assumption of German collective guilt, of a deep-seated Teutonic disease, which obsessed the communists. Some of their own rhetoric seems to have been infected by this German virus. The KPD demanded the total “liquidation” of the remnants of the Hitler regime.
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In one Brandenburg town, ex-Nazis were forced to pin swastikas onto their clothes. There was much talk of severe punishment. The district magistrate of another locality warned: “The Nazis will be handled the same way they handled us, that is: hard. We will force the slackers to work and if need be stick them in a camp . . . By next year we want a Germany purged of Nazis [
Nazirein
].”
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Still, despite all these hard measures, the purges were almost as inadequate in eastern Germany as they were in the “capitalist zones.” Distinctions between “active” and “nominal” Nazis were supposed to be enforced, but often proved to be elusive. The Soviets soon grew tired of this distinction and ordered
all
former Nazi Party members to be dismissed from government posts, a task to be concluded in a few months—an impossibility, of course. They didn't trust the Germans to handle the purges anyway, and never gave them proper guidelines. There was indeed reason for distrust in this matter. Many Germans refused to cooperate because it soon turned out that too much purging would lead to a collapse in education, social services, or any semblance of economic recovery. And so, Germans in Leipzig and Dresden, as much as in Munich or Cologne, found excuses to reinstate ex-Nazis in their old jobs, or shield ex-Nazis from prosecution. Even the Soviet authorities connived in this, when purges
threatened to upset production quotas in factories under their control. Most “small” Nazis were comfortably absorbed into the Communist Party, whose authoritarian ways they would not have found unfamiliar. Files were kept on the more important former Nazis in case they should turn out to be troublesome.

The dilemma was the same in all zones. You couldn't really gut the German elites, however distasteful they may have been, and hope to rebuild the country at the same time, no matter whether that country was to be a communist or a capitalist one. Very quickly the Allies saw economic recovery as a more important aim than restoring a sense of justice, albeit for opposite reasons. The Soviets wanted to rebuild their “antifascist” Germany as a buffer against capitalist imperialism; the United States, Britain, and their allies needed “their” Germany as a democratic bastion against communism.

General Patton's views in 1945 on denazification and former Nazis—that “this Nazi thing is just like a Democratic and Republican election fight” and that “we will need these people”—were historically crude and, so far as his own career was concerned, expressed too soon. Eisenhower had to fire him as military governor of Bavaria. But he was indiscreet rather than eccentric in his opinions. A year after Germany's defeat and the initial purges, most American officials took Patton's view. The British, in particular, had found the American keenness to punish the Germans ridiculous and counterproductive from the beginning. Con O'Neill, a Foreign Office official with total contempt for what he called “low-level zealots,” had this to say about Law No. 8's stipulation excluding all Nazi Party members from anything but menial work: “As an example of systematic and meticulous imbecility, it would be hard to beat.”
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The story of Hermann Josef Abs is instructive. Compared to other businessmen and industrialists, his crimes as a banker during the Third Reich might appear to be minor. Unlike Alfried Krupp, say, he did not employ women and children to be worked to death as slaves. Nor was he a personal friend of Himmler's, like Friedrich Flick, whose coal and steel empire was a particularly brutal exploiter of concentration camp labor.
Abs wasn't even a Nazi Party member and SS officer, as were Wilhelm Zangen, chairman of Mannesmann in Düsseldorff, or Otto Ohlendorff, economic bureaucrat and leader of a murder squad in Ukraine.

Abs never got his own hands dirty. As a native Rhinelander he felt nothing but disdain for the Prussian military spirit. A suave Catholic Anglophile with fluent English who had worked for Jewish banks before the war and been a good friend of Sigmund Warburg, Abs would most probably never have had anything to do with the Nazis if he hadn't happened to be a highly ambitious German technocrat in the 1930s. But Abs was a director of the Deutsche Bank, and had enriched his concern by “Aryanizing” Jewish firms. Apart from handling Hitler's private account, Abs was also the banker for companies such as Siemens, Krupp, and I.G. Farben, which built vast slave camps around Auschwitz. Abs may not have acted out of vulgar ideological zeal. In fact, he almost certainly didn't. But without men like Abs, Hitler's criminal enterprise would have been a great deal less efficient.

When Abs was bundled into a British jeep after being found at the house of an aristocratic friend in June 1945, he feared the worst. Instead of finding himself in jail, however, he was ushered into one of the few hotels in Hamburg left standing, where his old friend from the City of London, a banker named Charles Dunston, greeted him with great warmth. Dunston had done business in Germany before the war, and rather admired the uniformed strutting of the Nazi movement. “It was like old times,” Dunston recalled about their friendly reunion. “I didn't ask him about the war. It didn't matter.” Abs excused his appearance, explaining the lack of proper shaving gear. But he looked just the same to Dunston: “Not a hair out of place. I immediately asked him whether he would help us rebuild the German banking system. Happily he agreed.”
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