Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich

by Harald Jähner

The 75 million or so people collected on what remained of German soil in the summer of 1945 hardly merited the name of a society. People talked about ‘no man’s time’, the ‘time of the wolves’ in which ‘man had become a wolf towards his fellow man’.

The Holocaust played a shockingly small part in the consciousness of most Germans in the post-war period.

The Jews were not even explicitly mentioned in the much-debated admissions of guilt by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in August 1945.

The fact that even well-intentioned people refused to think about what would happen to their deported neighbours has left trust in the human species severely shaken even into the present day. And the majority of Germans at the time were guilty of this.

They saw themselves as the victims, and thus had the dubious good fortune of not having to think about the real ones. Because,

For Friedrich Luft the end of the war, later to be called Zero Hour by some, had struck on 30 April. In Aachen, 640 kilometres west of Berlin, the war had already been over for six months; it had been the first German city to be taken by the Americans in October 1944.

In the corporate head offices, courts and offices of the Federal Republic most of the Nazi elite cheerfully carried on. Such continuities were concealed by talk of Zero Hour, which served to emphasise the desire for a new beginning and stress a clear normative watershed between the old state and the new, even though life, of course, carried on and dragged any amount of Third Reich legacy with it.

What better solution than to enlist the very people who had instigated the disaster in the first place? In the first weeks after the war ended, so-called ‘Party Member deployments’ were organised; former Nazi Party members were pressed to work to help remove the rubble.

Unlike in many cities, where the Anti-Fascist Committees initially worked in collaboration with the city administrations, the mayor of Duisburg saw the punitive action by the citizens’ committee as an illegitimate assumption of power.

The clerks and officials in Berlin were overseen by the ‘Ulbricht Group’, a group of exiled members of the Communist Party of Germany, led by future German Democratic Republic (GDR) leader Walter Ulbricht, and other returning communist emigrants who had arrived with the Red Army to reorganise city life and reinforce confidence in the Russian administration.

staff of 5,000 operated this strange railway, which ran through the scorched remains of Dresden as if through a ghostly dreamland. The last train ran in 1958, the official end of rubble clearance in Dresden. Even by then, however, by no means all areas of the city had been cleared. Even though, by as early as 1946, broad swathes of the city centre had been swept so clean that the author Erich Kästner described how he could walk for three quarters of an hour without passing a single house,

was not until 1977, 35 years after the end of the war, that the last rubble clearance brigade in Dresden was able to lay down its tools.

In the summer of 1945 about 75 million people lived in the four occupied zones of Germany. Some 40 million, far more than half of them, were not where they belonged or wanted to be.

The Orthodox Jews from the East in turn distrusted the Munich Jews for their worldly leanings and their ‘Germanness’, which rendered them indistinguishable from Bavarians. They did not recognise them as ‘real Jews’.

Behind a two-metre fence, ‘a regular Eastern Jewish shtetl life came into being, with its own administration, political parties, police, camp law-court, religious institutions such as synagogues, a mikvah and a kosher kitchen, a health service, professional training facilities, schools, kindergartens, theatre groups, orchestras, sporting associations and much else besides.’25

‘Hardcore DPs’ was the term given by the military administration to those who were unwilling to return home – about 150,000 of them, from all nations – and were still living in camps after 1951, in spite of countless repatriation and access programmes.

In this by now genuinely cramped space, the jostling German regional cultures clashed dramatically. After the war local mentalities differed much more than they do today. When swarms of pleasure-loving Catholic Sudeten Germans suddenly appeared in the pietistic regions of Württemberg, it was a real culture shock for the more strait-laced and devout locals.

Part of the reason for the bitterness of these conflicts was the fact that the refugees were genuinely changing Germany.

But in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the north-east it was 45 per cent, in North-Western Schleswig-Holstein 33 per cent, and even in the much bigger Bavaria it was 21 per cent.

Dull though it might sound, the law was a miracle of political negotiating strategy. The disputes over this spectacular redistribution operation were fought out with such obstinate ferocity that in the end hardly any ordinary citizens recognised what an admirable decision had finally been made and put into effect.

This in turn, during the boom years, turned into an unsentimental compromise-based society in which everyone felt only tolerably well treated. A new nationalism could hardly be built on this hotly disputed foundation – not a bad starting point for the young democracy.

Not all Germans could understand the appeal of carnival, certainly not the Protestants from the far north of the country. In 1947 the reporters of Hamburg’s Der Spiegel wrote about the madness that had broken out upon the shores of the Rhine.

Carnival became a popular metaphor for the Janus-headed nature of post-war Germany. The defeated society was shifting slowly into one based on merrymaking.

These post-war parties weren’t so much dancing on a sinking ship as on one that had already capsized. The partygoers were amazed that they were still alive, and consequently prone to giddiness.

Many had longed for the moment of return. In the nation’s living rooms photographs stood in for the men while they were at the front. Children were encouraged to look at them over and over again, so that the father could lodge at least in their imaginations.

We no longer hold the old ‘positions’ that we once did (in Bavaria, for example, 64 per cent of officials and 46 per cent of clerks were dismissed as a result of the denazification law).

Germans can now speak more openly about the fate of women after the war, but mention is hardly – if ever – made of the different mentalities in East and West Germany.

The German women were soon universally known as ‘Veronika Dankeschön’ (Veronica Thank-you), a play on the abbreviation VD for venereal disease.

Voluntary decline coupled with wild passion was so contrary to the mores of the time that post-war society tore itself apart over the issue.

First, though, towards the end of 1946, people in East and West Germany once again had to deal with the fear of imminent death. It was unclear to many whether and how they would be able to survive the coming winter.

Later Cardinal Frings himself was caught Fringsing; when Cologne churches were subjected to a systematic search by the British, huge amounts of illegally stored coal were found.

Seldom could a population have, on balance, given the police so little work as that of the two German states in the 1950s and they would also be liberally mocked for their eager conformity.

June 1948 the long-missed goods that had been held back suddenly reappeared in great quantities from hidden kitchen gardens. In theory, anyone could now order a Volkswagen, at a cost of 5,300 DM and with a delivery time of only eight days.

It was quite a happy summer, although the material situation for most of the population was only improving very slowly. The aphorism ‘half of economics is psychology’ is thought, appropriately enough, to go back to the Federal Republic’s second post-war Chancellor, Ludwig Erhard.

The fact that the shelves could fill again so quickly demonstrated the genuine promise of the economy and industry, which had been much less severely damaged than was commonly assumed.

The historian Christoph Stölzl would later write: ‘If a visitor to Germany between the 1960s and the 1980s had asked where he could experience the character of Germany in a single day, one would have had to send him to Wolfsburg.’

While the factory was erected at great speed, the quaint garden city remained a dream on paper. Hardly anything beyond a small but elegant housing estate, built on the Steimker Berg for the families of the leading engineers and technicians, was ever constructed.

Only a few copies of the Volkswagen, designed by automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche, had been built. Rather than the Beetle, it was the Kübelwagen, a military utility vehicle, with an open bodywork and bucket seats on a reinforced chassis, the clumsy answer to the American Jeep, that came rolling off the factory floor.

Once his superiors had got over its comical appearance they were quite taken with the Beetle, and happy for it to be driven round under their auspices. But the threat of disassembly hung for a long time over Wolfsburg Motor Works, even after the factory had resumed its activity. The British Army ordered 10,000 of the highly reliable cars to restock their decimated fleet.

And the factory needed a workforce. In the period between 1945 and 1948 the number of new appointments and dismissals was three times as high as the overall number of employees.

In the local elections in Lower Saxony in 1948 Wolfsburg sank even lower. The far-right German Right Party (Deutsche Rechtspartei, DRP) won 15,000 of 24,000 votes and thus became the largest faction in the council – in the other boroughs in Lower Saxony the DRP rarely achieved over 10 per cent.

What was the source of this renewed outbreak of right-wing extremism? If it had been widespread throughout Germany it would have surely led the Allies to immediately forbid all preparations for the establishment of the Federal Republic.

The works council of the Volkswagen factory saw ‘all the manual and white-collar workers as a closed, democratically run, performance-oriented community’, which made common cause in fighting the battle for the future.

Wolfsburg had become the epitome of a factory society. There was hardly a works that so perfectly illustrated the notorious Stamocap – state monopoly capitalism – as post-war Marxists called the system in which state and private capital had become indistinguishable.

The Catholic Church could, however, claim to have criticised sexual liberalisation even during the Nazi regime.

After the passage of Article 131 of the Constitution in 1951, dealing with the reinstatement of those officials who had lost their posts after the end of the war because of edicts of the Allies, a whole cohort of incriminated former Nazis returned to official service.

The Ulbricht Group’s task was to identify politically reliable Germans who could be used to construct a new administration. They

Without basic trust in the goodwill of the victors lasting peace would have been impossible.

The practical consequences of this attitude were apparent in the prohibition on fraternisation, which the Western Allies had enacted just prior to their victory over Germany. They forbade their soldiers to have any contact with the civilian population beyond the barest necessities.

The author Ernst von Salomon wrote a novel about this supposed impertinence, entitled The Questionnaire, which became one of the biggest bestsellers of post-war Germany after its publication in 1951. Using the questionnaire as the basis of the book, he develops a 600-page autobiography, proving that the complex life of a nationalist, conservative German intellectual could not, with the best will in the world, be captured by such a foolish set of questions.