Review: Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

by Frederick Taylor

Bloomsbury Press

ISBN-10: 1608195031

ISBN-13: 978-1608195039

The sanitized story goes like this: After surrendering unconditionally in May of 1945, the German armies put down their arms, the country was occupied by the Allied forces, and the worst of the Nazi leaders were put on trial. Then Britain and the U.S. showed the Germans how to create a democratic government and, through the admirable Marshall Plan, the U.S. bankrolled an “economic miracle” for the defeated nation We victors really were jolly good-hearted. It’s a story that warm the cockles of one’s heart.

However, what really happened in Germany in 1944-46, as told in Frederick Taylor’s Exorcising Hitler, the picture that emerges is not quite so inspiring. We often forget the fury of the armies that fought their way into Germany, how enraged they were, at the years of war, but also at the stubbornness of the final resistance, with so much unnecessary blood spilled after D-Day. Then there were the revelations of the concentration camps. For the French, vengeance was the  goal after their brutal occupation by the Nazis. On the eastern front vengeance was, if possible, an even deeper driving force, all-consuming, a reflection of Hitler’s truly hideous “war of annihilation” against Russia. Spurred on by their commanders, the Soviet armies committed murder, rape and unspeakable atrocities on a vast scale along the entire trail from Stalingrad to Berlin and beyond, upon all Germans, both soldiers and civilians. Rape was hardly unknown among American and British soldiers. During the spring and summer of 1945, even after the surrender, on both eastern and western fronts, looting, robbery and rape were everyday occurrences.

The occupying powers did not come to liberate the German people or to put Germany on its feet; their clear and stated goal was punishment. All Germans, whatever their activities and attitudes under Hitler,  were going to suffer as others had suffered under them. An early American proposal known as the Morgenthau Plan recommended the total degradation of Germany, breaking the nation into pieces and reducing it to a permanent state of subsistence agriculture. By the time of the actual occupation that plan had been moderated, but its harsh spirit remained. Thousands of German industries were either shut down, destroyed, or dismantled and carted off to Russia and France as reparations. The French marched  740,000 POWs back into France for 2-3 years of forced servitude. The Soviets took hundreds of thousands of POWs back to Russia, most of whom never returned. The Americans, faced with the difficulty of caring for 5 million POWs and utterly fixed on the idea of not releasing a single war criminal, simply strung barbed wire around vast fields next to the Rhine, and left half a million prisoners to face the frosty nights, cold spring rains and disease without protection, some 50,000 of them dying. Because the Geneva Convention required that POWs be fed at the same level as one’s own troops, German POWs were given a newly invented classification, “disarmed enemy forces,” allowing rations to be kept miserably low. In the worst of the “Rhine cages” some prisoners deteriorated into skeletal figures like inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The British set up an interrogation centre at Bad Nenndorf that used Gestapo tactics, complete with thumb screws and shin screws. For civilians, hunger was used as a cudgel. One year after the end of the war the calorie allocation for Germans was less than half of what a person needs for a life of light activity. “Non-productive” adults, such as housewives and the unemployed, were issued a ration card that became known as “the death card.”

It was the Soviets who were quickest to establish democracy—Soviet-style democracy. German communist organizations provided them with ready-made political infrastructure, and as other parties were allowed to form, the Communist Party maintained dominance until finally all parties were merged into one. East Germany was born. Denazification was easy for the Soviets: since Nazism was regarded as an extreme form of capitalism, they simply killed the “class enemies,” such as industrialists and large landowners, or shipped them off to the gulag. As for lower-level Nazis, the Soviets were more tolerant than the British and Americans because, suggests Taylor, they were quite familiar with how little party membership could mean for people who joined just to advance their careers.

In the Western zones, denazification was an enormous problem, especially for the Americans, who took the hardest line. With a population in the tens of millions under their administration, they required every adult, under penalty of prison, to fill out a lengthy form about their activities during the Third Reich, with their answers subjected to cross-checks, investigations, interviews, and tribunals. It was a slow,  impossible task that slowly unraveled under the pressure of numbers, aggravated by inconsistency and incompetence. Denazification was eventually turned over to German courts, partly out of pragmatism, partly to reduce the resentment that might breed communism. But by then everyone had become so cynical about the many injustices, as well as the overall policies of collective guilt and collective punishment, that the German courts allowed the process to degenerate into corruption and farce. Another approach might have cultivated a mood of self-reflection among the Germans, but the opportunity was lost, and the Hitler generation entered a period of denial and “the sleep cure.” It took the next generation to ask probing questions about the past. Denazification was judged an enormous failure on all sides.

Did Germany need to be guided by the Western Allies in creating a functioning democracy? Probably not. Nazism was a spent force, and Germany reverted easily to the democratic system that had preceded the Third Reich. Was the Marshal Plan a major factor in driving Germany’s economic recovery? Scholars are no longer certain about that, either.

After 1945 the transition from war to peace was far more chaotic and ugly than is commonly believed. Mistakes were made, feelings ran high, few saints appeared on the stage, suffering was widespread. Exorcising Hitler shows only too clearly how, once the devils of war are set loose, they are not easily put away.