Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

by Harald Jähner

Seen from our contemporary point of view, with the Holocaust so clearly before our eyes, and with the memory of the crimes committed by a substantial core of German culture, the most startling and shocking aspect of this law is the matter-of-factness with which the police and the public supported war criminals, even those accused of serious crimes.[37]

According to the spirit of the age it was not important where someone came from, but only where they wanted to go, as many, including Hermann Lübbe, phrased it. But how could one know where one was going if one didn’t know where one came from? Was every new beginning not destined for failure without an engagement—if only a legal one—with the past?

If the majority of the people had had their way, there would have been no denazification worthy of the name. Yet without denazification, no stable democracy would have been imaginable, in which the will of the people was appropriately expressed. It was a paradoxical impasse, which would have been impossible to grow out of without resorting to repression.

That denazification should have occurred in spite of a widespread refusal to engage with the past, and that both German states were cleansed of Nazism in spite of the large-scale return of Nazi elites to their old posts, is a much greater wonder than the so-called economic miracle. Almost as unsettling as the scale on which Germany became a global nightmare is the somnambulistic certainty with which it went on to regain its respectability.

Let’s stop Nazi racial rabble-rousers, Jew-murderers, Slav-killers, socialist-slaughterers, all of yesterday’s Nazi shit from spreading its stench over our generation. Let’s catch up on what was missed in 1945. Let’s drive out the Nazi plague. Let’s do a proper denazification once and for all. […] And in the process we will paralyse the whole apparatus of this rotten society.[3]

The children confront their parents.