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While the battle for Aachen was still raging in mid-October 1944, a US Army psychological warfare unit filed one of the first reports from German territory. It found ‘a latent and possibly deep-seated sense of guilt, owing to the brutalities committed by the German armies in Europe, particularly in the east and against the Jews’, adding that: ‘Germans have resigned themselves to the idea of retribution and only hope that the Americans would moderate the rage of those who will punish them. But the idea of punishment they do accept.’4
What was remarkable in the summer of 1945 was the victors’ frequent need to start some kind of dialogue with the conquered enemy, to force individual Germans to understand what they had done.
By the time Hannah Arendt visited Germany in 1949, she was struck by her former fellow countrymen’s lack of emotional engagement and unwillingness to discuss what had happened.
Let no one be under any illusions and think he can come along later and say: I was always a good democrat under these dreadful Nazis. The Jew will give you the correct answer irrespective of whether you say you have been the greatest admirer of Jews or the greatest hater of Jews. He will treat the one like the other. For his thirst for vengeance encompasses the German nation.7
As the Allies fixed new borders in post-war Europe, both Soviet Ukraine and Poland were moved westwards, with the cattle truck continuing to service the demographic reordering of eastern Europe.
Germany had lost some of its most productive agricultural regions to Poland in the Allied settlement of national borders at Potsdam in 1945. During the first three post-war years, as crisis after crisis hit transport, food, heating fuel and clothing, Germans experienced levels of hunger which were far worse than anything they had endured during the war itself – mainly because the Nazi requisitioning of food had displaced shortages on to other Europeans.11
Families pinned photos to the noticeboards of railway stations in the hope that a returning comrade might bring them news of their loved ones. Clergymen published prayers for the missing in their parish newsletters and in September 1947 the Protestant Inner Mission dedicated a week of prayer to them. The services were to take Jeremiah, 29:14 as their first reading. Its last verse ran: ‘I will be found by you’, declares the Lord, ‘and I will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you’, declares the Lord. ‘And I will bring you
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In December 1949, Dr August Töpperwien was released from his prisoner-of-war camp in Poland and returned to Solingen. His house had been bombed, but Margarete and their two children had survived the war. Töpperwien rejoined the staff at his old grammar school in the position, as a senior high-school teacher, a Studienrat, which he had occupied for the fourteen years before he was called up to the Wehrmacht.20
When parts of the Soviet Union were gripped by famine in 1946–47, German prisoners were subjected to the same harsh conditions as the rest of the population: yet there was no retaliation for the policy of deliberate starvation which the Wehrmacht had inflicted on the 3.9 million Soviet prisoners of war it captured in 1941, and which had killed 2.8 million of them by early 1942. By the end of 1953, another 20,000 German prisoners had been released, leaving just 10,000 in the Soviet Union.
Part of the problem was that during the final phase of the war the Wehrmacht had lost track of its own losses: by the summer of 1944, it had under-reported military deaths by 500,000. Losing whole army groups in the summer’s retreats had meant also leaving both dead and wounded behind.
No nation – however free of guilt it feels (which in any case never happens – guilt is always on both sides!) – is entitled to damn a whole nation, to take away all its freedoms, just by the right of the victor. Woe to the vanquished! Neither before nor since do I feel guilty for the war and all the horrors in the concentration camps as well as the shameful deeds committed in our name. – You, Mummy, my brothers and many, many among us bear just as little guilt. That’s why I also categorically reject collective guilt!
Her one regret remained that she had not been able to walk the streets of her home town with her husband after he was promoted to the rank of general. Now a dependent evacuee mother, it would have gone a long way to compensating her for the status she had lost. But more fundamentally, she believed that ‘A nation without a military is unarmed and that means the same as being without honour.’29
The Allies set about dismantling not just the explicitly Nazi emblems of the Third Reich but also the memorial culture of sacrificial death that had sustained it. The inscription ‘Germany must live, even if we must die’ vanished from the military cemetery at Langemarck alongside the elaborate monuments the Nazis had erected for the dead of the First World War.
‘We cannot atone in any other way,’ he wrote in 1946, than that we, Christianity in Germany, first of all step humbly under Christ’s cross representing our entire people with our needs and shame over the terrible things which have happened: ‘Christ, you lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us and lift the curse, the ban from our land.’34
During this tumultuous time, no colleague broke ranks and denounced Althaus as one of the principal authors of the ‘Aryan paragraph’ which had excluded converted Jews from the Protestant Church. Nor did anyone signal that his ‘theology of order’ and ‘theology of creation’ had provided intellectual legitimacy to Nazism and to anti-Semitism. Instead, Althaus remained a key player in German Protestantism long after his academic retirement in 1956.35
When Martin Niemöller asked an audience of Erlangen students in January 1946 why no clergyman in Germany had preached about ‘the terrible suffering which we, we Germans caused other peoples, over what happened in Poland, over the depopulation of Russia and over the 5.6 million dead Jews’, he was shouted down.
Through us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries. That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole Church: we did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the National Socialist regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing by our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.
It was a controversial document, wrung from its signatories by the insistence of representatives of Protestantism in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Britain and the USA, who attended the synod, that they could re-establish ties with the German Protestant Church only if their co-religionists accepted moral responsibility.
Not until 1950 did the synod concede that ‘through acts of omission and silence’ German Protestants ‘have been guilty before the God of mercy for the iniquity which has been perpetrated against the Jews by members of our nation’. It would take decades to evoke a more candid and openly self-critical admission.36
The old associational life of the Left could not be rebuilt; nor could its old moral values.37
In August, US Intelligence in Germany reported that only the Russians were hated more than the Americans. Germans were willing to accept that Britain and France had been forced into the war but could not understand US intervention.
In the Soviet occupation zone, a quite different political and ideological course was pursued, as Communist leaders like Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht returned from Soviet exile determined to transform the country and prevent the re-emergence of fascism by creating a new cult and set of norms based around the heroic example of Communist fighters against fascism.
From 1947, East Germans were encouraged to commemorate their war dead on Remembrance Sunday as ‘victims of fascism’, exploited and sent to their death by the ‘Hitler clique’.
By this point, actual veterans of the ‘Anti-fascist Resistance’ such as German-Jewish Communists who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain were met with suspicion when they opted to return to East Germany from exile in Britain.42
Austria followed an even shorter route to transforming its citizens from perpetrators into victims. Taking its cue from the Allies’ Moscow Declaration of 1943, on 27 April 1945 Austrian independence from the Reich was declared, with the assertion that the Anschluss of March 1938 had made Austria the ‘first victim’ of National Socialist aggression. Ten years later, a State Treaty was signed, giving formal Allied recognition to the non-aligned Second Republic, and its first article enshrined this myth. When Austria opened a permanent exhibition in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1978, it
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Ingeborg T. might never have had the pleasure of walking with her husband down the streets of Soest in the few months that he ranked as a Wehrmacht general in 1945, but he did secure a general’s pension.
No ruling by the Allies had been made on behalf of the Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses or homosexuals, and for decades West German courts held out against recognising their claims, as many of the same civil servants and judges who had persecuted them as ‘asocials’ or ‘pacifists’ under the Third Reich continued to rule over their cases until they finally retired in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
There was no ‘Stalingrad syndrome’, no real desire to avenge the defeat. Instead, the letters became part of a culture of reconciliation, translated into numerous languages and recrossing the Iron Curtain to appear in Russian and East German collections; they were even made obligatory reading in Japanese schools.
But even if reference to ‘the fallen’ still carried an echo of active, patriotic sacrifice, commemoration of the war was gravitating towards seeing soldiers as unwitting, passive and innocent victims.
Now, Liselotte Orgel used her wartime technique of angling the shot from below to accentuate the sense of strength and purpose in the man, conjuring up an uplifting message: simple manual work could reconstruct not just Germany’s shattered landscape but also Germans’ shattered bodies.49
Ernst Guicking’s luck held. After only a few weeks’ incarceration as a prisoner of war, he returned, finding Irene and their two young children at her parents’ home in Lauterbach. Her training as a florist and his childhood on the farm saw them through the post-war years: they began to grow flowers and vegetables on a strip of land next to the house. In 1949, Irene realised her pre-war dream and opened a modest flower shop of her own. When asked in 2003 whether she and Ernst had ever talked to their children about the war, Irene replied: ‘I don’t think so, I don’t think so, no. I don’t
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While the next generation began to ask why Germans had unleashed such a calamity on the world, the older one was still locked into the calamity they had themselves suffered.
