The opportunistic dimension of Soviet policy towards ex-Nazis was a function of weakness. The Communists in occupied Germany were not a strong movement—and their arrival in the baggage train of the Red Army was hardly calculated to endear them to voters. Their only political prospect, beyond brute force and electoral fraud, lay in appealing to calculated self-interest. To the east and south Communists did this by encouraging the expulsion of ethnic Germans and offering themselves as guarantor and protector for the new Polish/Slovak/Serb occupants of the Germans’ vacated farms, businesses and apartments. This was obviously not an option in Germany itself. In Austria the local Communist Party made the mistake, in elections held in late 1945, of rejecting the potentially crucial support of minor Nazis and former Party members. In doing so it doomed the prospects for Communism in post-war Austria. The lesson was not lost on Berlin. The German Communist Party (KPD) decided instead to offer its services and its protection to millions of former Nazis.
The two perspectives—doctrine and calculation—were not necessarily in conflict. Ulbricht and his colleagues certainly believed that the way to expunge Nazism from Germany was by effecting a socio-economic transformation: they were not particularly interested in individual responsibility or moral re-education. But they also understood that Nazism was not just a trick perpetrated on an innocent German proletariat. The German working class, like the German bourgeoisie, had failed in its responsibilities. But for precisely that reason it would be more, not less likely to adapt itself to Communist goals, given the right combination of stick and carrot. And in any event the authorities in eastern Germany, like those in the West, had little choice—with whom else should they run the country if not ex-Nazis?
Thus on the one hand Soviet occupation forces fired from their jobs huge numbers of ex-Nazis—520,000 by April 1948—and appointed ‘anti-Fascists’ to administrative posts in their zone of occupation. On the other hand, German Communist leaders actively encouraged former Nazis whose records were not too publicly compromised to join them. Not surprisingly, they were very successful. Ex-Nazis were only too happy to expunge their past by throwing in their lot with the victors. As party members, local administrators, informers and policemen they proved uniquely well-adapted to the needs of the Communist state.
The new system, after all, was remarkably like the one they had known before: the Communists simply took over Nazi institutions like Labor Fronts or residential block-wardens and gave them new names and new bosses. But the adaptability of ex-Nazis was also a product of their vulnerability to blackmail. The Soviet authorities were quite prepared to conspire with their former enemies in lying about the nature and extent of Nazism in eastern Germany—asserting that Germany’s capitalist and Nazi heritage was confined to the western zones and that the future German Democratic Republic was a land of workers, peasants and anti-Fascist heroes—but they also knew better and had the Nazi files to prove it, should the need arise. Black-marketeers, war profiteers and ex-Nazis of all sorts thus made excellent Communists, for they had every incentive to please.
By the early 1950s, more than half the rectors of East German institutes of higher education were former Nazi Party members, as were over 10 percent of the parliament a decade later. The newly-formed Stasi (state security agency) took over not just the role and the practices of the Nazi Gestapo but many thousands of its employees and informers. Political victims of the incoming Communist regime, often charged in a blanket manner as ‘Nazi criminals’, were arrested by ex-Nazi policemen, tried by ex-Nazi judges and guarded by ex-Nazi camp guards in Nazi-era prisons and concentration camps taken over en bloc by the new authorities.
The ease with which individuals and institutions switched from Nazism or Fascism over to Communism was not unique to East Germany, except perhaps in scale. The wartime resistance in Italy harboured quite a few ex-Fascists of various kinds, and the post-war moderation of the Italian Communist Party probably owed something to the fact that many of its potential supporters were compromised with Fascism. In post-war Hungary the Communists openly courted former members of the Fascist Arrow Cross, even going so far as to offer them support against Jews seeking the return of their property. In wartime London the Slovak Communists Vlado Clementis and Eugen Löbl were stalked by Soviet agents recruited from pre-war Czech Fascist parties, whose testimony would be used against them in their show trial a decade later.
Communists were not alone in turning a blind eye to people’s Nazi or Fascist pasts in return for post-war political services. In Austria, former Fascists were often favoured by Western authorities and allowed to work in journalism and other sensitive occupations: their association with the corporatist, authoritarian regime of pre-war Austria was neutralized by the Nazi invasion and by their altogether credible and increasingly serviceable antipathy for the Left. The Allied Military Government in the frontier zone of north-east Italy protected former Fascists and collaborators, many of them wanted by the Yugoslavs, while Western intelligence services everywhere recruited experienced and well-informed ex-Nazis—including the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie—for future use: not least against the ex-Nazis in Soviet service, whom they were well-placed to identify.
In his first official address to the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany, on September 20th 1949, Konrad Adenauer had this to say about denazification and the Nazi legacy: ‘The government of the Federal Republic, in the belief that many have subjectively atoned for a guilt that was not heavy, is determined where it appears acceptable to do so to put the past behind us.’ There is no doubt that many Germans heartily endorsed this assertion. If denazification aborted, it was because for political purposes Germans had spontaneously ‘denazified’ themselves on May 8th 1945.
And the German people were not alone. In Italy the daily newspaper of the new Christian Democrat Party put out a similar call to oblivion on the day of Hitler’s death: ‘We have the strength to forget!’, it proclaimed. ‘Forget as soon as possible!’ In the East the Communists’ strongest suit was their promise to make a revolutionary new beginning in countries where everyone had something to forget—things done to them or things they had done themselves. All over Europe there was a strong disposition to put the past away and start afresh, to follow Isocrates’ recommendation to the Athenians at the close of the Peloponnesian Wars: ‘Let us govern collectively as though nothing bad had taken place.’
This distrust of short-term memory, the search for serviceable myths of anti-Fascism—for a Germany of anti-Nazis, a France of Resisters or a Poland of victims—was the most important invisible legacy of World War Two in Europe. In its positive form it facilitated national recovery by allowing men like Marshall Tito, Charles De Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer to offer their fellow countrymen a plausible and even prideful account of themselves. Even East Germany claimed a noble point of origin, an invented tradition: the fabled and largely fabricated Communist ‘uprising’ in Buchenwald in April 1945. Such accounts allowed countries that had suffered war passively, like the Netherlands, to set aside the record of their compromises, and those whose activism had proven misguided, like Croatia, to bury it in a blurred story of competing heroisms.
Without such collective amnesia, Europe’s astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible. To be sure, much was put out of mind that would subsequently return in discomforting ways. But only much later would it become clear just how much post-war Europe rested on foundation myths that would fracture and shift with the passage of years. In the circumstances of 1945, in a continent covered with rubble, there was much to be gained by behaving as though the past was indeed dead and buried and a new age about to begin. The price paid was a certain amount of selective, collective forgetting, notably in Germany. But then, in Germany above all, there was much to forget.
III
The Rehabilitation of Europe
‘All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire
order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by
preparing the road to a new type of planned order’.
Karl Mannheim
‘The all but general opinion seems to be that capitalist methods will be
unequal to the task of reconstruction’.
Joseph Schumpeter
‘A lot of us were disappointed in the Britain that we came back to . . .
nobody could make it change overnight into the Britain we wanted’.
Mrs Winnie Whitehouse (in Paul Addison,
Now The War Is Over
)
‘The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence
of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and
of Europe as a whole’.
George C. Marshall
The sheer scale of the European calamity opened new opportunities. The war changed everything. A return to the way things had been before 1939 was out of the question almost everywhere. This was naturally the view of the young and the radical, but it was just as evident to perspicacious observers of an older generation. Charles De Gaulle, 54 years old when France was liberated and born into the conservative Catholic bourgeoisie of northern France, put the matter with characteristic precision: ‘During the catastrophe, beneath the burden of defeat, a great change had occurred in men’s minds. To many, the disaster of 1940 seemed like the failure of the ruling class and system in every realm.’
But the problems had not begun in 1940, either in France or elsewhere. Anti-Fascist resisters everywhere saw themselves in battle not just with the wartime occupiers and their local surrogates but with an entire political and social system which they held directly responsible for the disasters their countries had undergone. It was the politicians and bankers and businessmen and soldiers of the inter-war years who had brought their countries to catastrophe, who had betrayed the sacrifices of the First World War and laid the ground for the Second. These, in the words of a British pamphlet excoriating Conservative advocates of appeasement before 1940, were the ‘Guilty Men’. They, and their system, were the target of wartime plans for post-war change.
Resistance was thus everywhere implicitly revolutionary. This was inherent in its logic. To reject a society that had produced Fascism led one naturally ‘to a dream of revolution which would take off from a
tabula rasa
’ (Italo Calvino). In much of eastern Europe the slate was indeed wiped clean, as we have seen. But even in western Europe there was widespread expectation of dramatic and rapid social transformation: who, after all, would stand in its way?
Seen from the point of view of the wartime Resistance movements, post-war politics would be the continuation of their wartime struggle, a natural projection and extension of their clandestine existence. Many young men and women who came to the fore in the wartime underground had known no other form of public life: in Italy since 1924, in Germany, Austria and most of Eastern Europe since the early thirties, and throughout occupied continental Europe since 1940, normal politics were unknown. Political parties had been banned, elections rigged or abolished. To oppose the authorities, to advocate social change or even political reform, was to place your self beyond the law.
For this new generation, politics was therefore
about
resistance—resistance to authority, resistance to conventional social or economic arrangements, resistance to the past. Claude Bourdet, an activist in the French resistance and a prominent left-wing magazine editor and writer in the post-war years, captured the mood in his memoirs,
L’aventure incertaine
: ‘The Resistance’, he wrote, ‘turned us all into
contestataires
in every sense of the word, towards men as much as towards the social system.’ From resisting Fascism to resisting a post-war retreat to the errors of the thirties seemed a natural step. Out of this came the oddly optimistic mood upon which many observers remarked in the immediate aftermath of Liberation. In spite of the destitution all around—indeed, because of it—something new and better was bound to emerge. ‘None of us’ wrote the editors of the Italian review
Società
in November 1945, ‘recognizes his own past. It seems incomprehensible to us . . . Our life today is dominated by a sense of stupor and by an instinctive search for a direction. We are simply disarmed by the facts.’
The chief impediment to radical change in the aftermath of Hitler’s defeat was not the reactionaries or Fascists, who had thrown in their lot with the dictators and been swept away with them, but the legitimate governments-in-exile, most of which had sat out the war in London planning their return. They saw the local resistance organizations in their countries as a problem rather than as allies: careless youngsters who would need to be disarmed and returned to civilian life, leaving public affairs in the hands of a political class duly cleansed of collaborators and traitors. Anything less would mean anarchy—or else an indefinite occupation by Allied armies.
The wartime resistance groups, organized by 1944-45 into various political movements, were just as suspicious in return. For them, the politicians, functionaries and courtiers who had escaped the Occupation were doubly discredited: by their pre-war errors and by their subsequent absence. In France and Norway the legislators elected in 1936 were disqualified by their actions in 1940. In Belgium and the Netherlands their absence in the intervening five years had cut off the returning governments from any appreciation of local suffering and the change in public mood brought about under Nazi occupation. In central and eastern Europe, with the important exception of Czechoslovakia, the former governments were rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Red Army (though they were sometimes slow to grasp this).