Life After the Third Reich Quotes

“You can have vengeance or peace, but you can’t have both. Former US President Herbert Hoover,”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“In 1945, Germany’s armed forces had been defeated and the symbols of National Socialism removed and consigned to history, but the legacy of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich remains with us to this day in the form of racism, xenophobia and extremism in all its forms. As Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism: … if there is such a thing as a totalitarian personality or mentality […] extraordinary adaptability and absence of continuity are no doubt its outstanding characteristics. Hence it might be a mistake to assume that the inconstancy and forgetfulness of the masses signify that they are cured of the totalitarian delusion … The opposite might well be true.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“In all, 22 former SS members appeared in the dock to answer charges before a packed court, including the world’s press, although only 17 were ultimately convicted and received nominal sentences. But the trial was not just about the fate of the guilty individuals. It was to put on record what had taken place at Auschwitz and other concentration camps and to give surviving victims a voice. German schoolchildren and students were among the 20,000 attendees who heard harrowing testimony from eyewitnesses, and so over the course of the trial – which ran from 20 December 1963 until 19 August 1965 – the conspiracy of silence was finally broken and the German public forced to confront it past.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“In 1958 Fritz Bauer, an ex-lawyer imprisoned by the Nazis, was appointed Attorney General in the state of Hesse and decided to bring the camp commandant and a number of SS guards to face justice in Germany. But he was up against a conspiracy of silence within sections of the post-war administration and the collective amnesia of the general population. The crimes committed at Auschwitz were perpetrated in Poland outside the jurisdiction of German courts, so the federal court had to be convinced that the interests of justice would be served by authorizing the regional court of Hesse to indict the accused. The defendants would seek to evade personal responsibility by claiming they were soldiers acting under orders and the testimony of surviving witnesses was assumed to be unreliable after 20 years. Furthermore, German law required irrefutable evidence of murder. Mere cruelty was not considered to be a serious enough offence. Eight thousand SS men had served at the camp from May 1940 to its liberation in January 1945 and identifying those who had committed individual acts of murder was thought to be practically impossible. They had melted into the community, leaving Bauer and his small team of young, idealistic lawyers (Georg Friedrich Vogel, Joachim Kugler and Gerhard Wiese) to track them down.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Ironically, his Communist counterpart in East Germany was also a former anti-Nazi. Walter Ulbricht escaped to Russia during the Hitler years and became a stalwart supporter of Joseph Stalin. He then returned to Germany in 1945 to head the new Socialist Unity Party, lobbying for reform and independence from the Soviet bloc while at the same time advocating the building of the Berlin Wall. He blamed, … the 10 million Germans who in 1932 cast their votes for Hitler in free elections, although we Communists warned that ‘He who votes for Hitler, votes for war.’ … The tragedy of the German people consists of the fact that they obeyed a band of gangsters. The Communist state ensured East Germans would not make the same mistake again by depriving them of the right to vote.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“War child and psychoanalyst Hartmut Radebold confirmed this in an interview with Der Spiegel on 28 March 2013: Many children have unconsciously adopted the symptoms of their parents. One patient dreams of the tank attacks that his father experienced. The adults have conveyed much more through gestures and insinuations than they realize. This has been absorbed by the children and incorporated into their identities. Parents unconsciously pass on tasks to their children: Carry on with the family, do a better job and protect us, so we don’t decompensate.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Alexandra Senfft, the granddaughter of a Nazi war criminal and the author of a foreword to Kriegskinder, a book of childhood memories of the Second World War says: What the Kriegskinder did not come to terms with they passed on to us grandchildren. Psychologists have found that many grandchildren internalized their grandparents’ experience even if the Nazi era was never spoken of. Grandchildren thus often possess the family memory without having experienced the events themselves.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“A generation of children who had lived through the war grew up haunted by memories they had unconsciously suppressed. Some were even haunted by memories they had acquired from their parents and grandparents, who refused to talk about those times, but who conveyed their experiences in other ways without meaning to.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Newspapers such as Der Ruf employed young journalists who vilified the American occupation forces and accused the new American-funded radio stations (RIAS and Radio Liberty) of peddling propaganda, but reading the uncensored views of the more articulate members of the population proved instructive to those in the Allied administration, who were prepared to listen and to learn from them. Among the lessons they learned from the new German press were that restrictive measures on their own only brought resentment and that imposing democracy was counterproductive”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Peter de Mendelssohn, press officer for the British Control Commission, was entrusted with verifying the credentials of German journalists and organizing a free press in the British zone (Der Spiegel and Die Welt were considered reliable by their German readership). Equally significant was the contribution made by progressive educator Robert Birley, future headmaster of Eton, who reformed and restructured the German educational system. Literacy, numeracy and the core subjects had all been fatally neglected during the Hitler years, as National Socialist indoctrination took priority over the basic curriculum, leaving a generation semi-literate and woefully ill-informed.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“But although these intellectual emissaries were accused of participating in little more than a public relations exercise, there were serious efforts made by the Allies to contribute to the regeneration of German culture.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Orwell rejected the idea that the civilized world could always rely on reason to overcome the irrational and denied that fascism was alien to British culture. He warned against complacency and having blind faith in the inevitable progress of civilization, because the ‘fascist streak’ lies within us all, to some degree. Anxiety, insecurity and instability could lead to intolerance of other races and the persecution of those who could be used as a convenient scapegoat for current ills.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Orwell’s warning Orwell discouraged the Allies from viewing Nazi Germany as something ‘other’ and urged them instead to see it as a social phenomenon that appealed to the emotions and to those who held certain personal beliefs, which would explain the growth of fascism outside Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Hitler’s personal appeal to his followers lay in his ‘pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs … the martyr, the victim … the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds’. It was Orwell’s contention that Hitler had been able to generate pity, fear, awe and even love in his adoring acolytes by making his minor accomplishments look like major triumphs and by portraying his weak and defenceless political adversaries as mighty foes. By doing so he was able to depict himself as struggling against apparently insurmountable odds and by that means elicit sympathy from those who felt that they too were at odds with an unjust world.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Orwell, who went as correspondent for The Observer, was among those who saw no merit in damning a defeated people with the burden of collective guilt and shared responsibility. ‘To what extent can the simple peasants who troop to church on Sunday mornings be responsible for the horrors of Nazism?’ he asked.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“They dusted off their drawings dating from 1943 – when Speer had formed a working party to plan the modernization of Germany’s major cities in anticipation of final victory over the Allies – and submitted them as if they were new.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Ironically, the extensive destruction of Germany’s major towns and cities enabled some of the architects and urban planners who had worked for the Third Reich to rebuild post-war Germany much as Hitler and his architect Albert Speer would have wished.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“The myth of the Trümmerfrauen originated in West Berlin, where 26,000 women answered the appeal for volunteers, but in a city with half a million women of working age this amounted to just 5 per cent of the female workforce and the percentage of female volunteers in other German cities was significantly less. In the”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“course. With most of the men in POW camps, it was left largely to the women to perform this task, but among the Allies only in the British zone were women employed in clearing the rubble. The French and Americans considered it too dangerous. Many buildings were unsafe and there were also lots of unexploded shells, mines and other hazards.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“The iconic image of these so-called Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) working cheerfully among the ruins became symbolic of German resilience and helped restore pride to a defeated people, but it was a myth. These women were not all selfless volunteers as the majority were former Nazi Party members who had been forced to clear the rubble as part of their punishment.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“According to an official internal government report published in 2015, more than half of the 170 lawyers and judges employed in the West German Justice Ministry between 1949 and 1973 were found to have been former members of the Nazi Party.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Konrad Adenauer, post-war Germany’s first chancellor and an ardent anti-Nazi, called for ‘an end to this sniffing out of Nazis’ because he believed the new democratic administration needed experienced ministers regardless of their previous misdeeds. For that reason he appointed Hans Globke as his senior state secretary. Globke was the lawyer who had helped draft the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which denied German and Austrian Jews their civil rights. He was so adept at playing both sides that he had the dubious distinction of appearing for both the prosecution and the defence at Nuremberg. The report also disclosed that the German domestic intelligence service (Bfv) knowingly hired former SS and SD men who had worked for the Gestapo as surveillance experts. However, they were employed as freelancers to keep them at a respectable distance, because they were considered ‘tainted’.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“It was alleged that some diplomats had protected Nazi war criminals then hiding in Africa and South America. All this against accusations that there was substantial ‘covering up, denying and suppressing’ not only by civil servants but also by influential members of the German media, who wished to conceal the extent of their involvement with the dictatorship. An estimated 800 former Nazis were said to have been given coded warnings by the German Foreign Office not to travel to France, where they had been tried and convicted in their absence and would have risked arrest and prosecution for their wartime activities.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Named and shamed In December 2011 the main opposition party in Germany forced Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration to commission a parliamentary inquiry to investigate the political affiliations of former members of the West German government. It revealed the fact that one former premier, a chancellor and 25 cabinet ministers all had something to hide, namely that they had actively implemented Nazi policy during the Hitler years. Moreover, after the war these former Nazis had sought to cover their tracks by aligning themselves with parties which were not necessarily right-wing, nationalist or even conservative. The 85-page report became a bestseller and the furore prompted further searches into the archives held by other ministries, the police and also the West German intelligence agencies. The disclosures raised uncomfortable questions regarding the degree to which former Nazis might have influenced the post-war democratic government and its foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, which threatened to increase communist influence in East Asia, was a decisive factor in distracting the Americans from completing the denazification process and pursuing their former enemies. But denazification could not go on indefinitely because at some point the need to build the future outweighed the need to expunge the past. In May 1951 the new democratic government of West Germany passed the Law to End Denazification and in doing so closed the darkest chapter in German history.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Weeding the ex-Nazis out was not the problem but keeping them out was. Between 1945 and 1947, one third of former Nazi Party members employed in the American zone were discharged from their jobs only to be re-employed by the end of 1947.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“On 4 March 1946, the Denazification Committee estimated that they had the resources to prosecute a tenth of the cases at best.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“End of denazification The Allies also made exceptions as a matter of expediency. For example, 765 German rocket scientists and engineers, who only months before had been developing Hitler’s devastating secret weapons, were spirited away in the night to work for NASA without having to submit to the denazification process. The Russians did the same. In many cases the men’s families were also granted visas in order to mollify those who were to contribute to the space race. National security evidently took priority over all other considerations.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Austria’s citizens had welcomed Hitler back to his Heimat after the Anschluss in March 1938, but they now recast themselves as ‘the first victims’ of Nazi aggression. The Austrian authorities were accused of being too lenient with former Nazis and suspiciously negligent in accumulating evidence against alleged mass murderers.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“In a characteristic piece of English understatement, Arthur Street, a senior civil servant in the British occupation zone reported: ‘We are very much alive to the dangers inherent of too drastic a policy of denazification in industry.’ As a consequence of this reappraisal over 300 German mining officials were released from custody in the British zone and reinstated, leaving only 20 in jail.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“According to Perry Biddiscombe, author of The Denazification of Germany, the process of identifying and eliminating from public life all of the former Nazis in post-war Germany was rendered impractical because of the sheer number involved.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins