Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

Doing so would have led them to the legions of homegrown German antifascists. But, among the Allies, it was only the Soviets who sought to cultivate these groups. Fearing bolshevism, the Western Allies marginalized Germany’s internal pro-democracy forces, some of which leaned left. Eventually, amid the hardening politics of the Cold War, the Soviets also abandoned German activists. The diversity of opinion among antifascists in the Soviet-occupied zone was quashed as Soviet-backed authorities and security forces imposed an uncompromising official Marxism on the population. Many of those authorities and agents were themselves former Nazis. Once the bane of Eastern Europe, responsible for incalculable carnage in the USSR, these Germans were now useful to Stalin’s cause. And so denazification sputtered in the East as well.