Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In the Soviet-occupied zone the Nazi legacy was treated a little differently. Although Soviet judges and lawyers took part in the Nuremberg trials, the main emphasis in denazification in the East was on the collective punishment of Nazis and the extirpation of Nazism from all areas of life. The local Communist leadership was under no illusions about what had taken place. As Walter Ulbricht, the future leader of the German Democratic Republic, put it in a speech to German Communist Party representatives in Berlin just six weeks after the defeat of his country, ‘The tragedy of the German people consists in the fact that they obeyed a band of criminals . . . The German working class and the productive parts of the population failed before history.’ This was more than Adenauer or most West German politicians were willing to concede, at least in public. But Ulbricht, like the Soviet authorities to whom he answered, was less interested in extracting retribution for Nazi crimes than in securing Communist power in Germany and eliminating capitalism.