Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past : The Politics of Amnesty and Integration

Of all the aspects of recovery in postwar Germany perhaps none was as critical or as complicated as the matter of dealing with Nazi criminals, and, more broadly, with the Nazi past. While on the international stage German officials spoke with contrition of their nation's burden of guilt, at home questions of responsibility and retribution were not so clear. In this masterful examination of Germany under Adenauer, Norbert Frei shows that, beginning in 1949, the West German government dramatically reversed the denazification policies of the immediate postwar period and initiated a new "Vergangenheitspolitik," or "policy for the past," which has had enormous consequences reaching into the present. Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past chronicles how amnesty laws for Nazi officials were passed unanimously and civil servants who had been dismissed in 1945 were reinstated liberally -- and how a massive popular outcry led to the release of war criminals who had been condemned by the Allies. These measures and movements represented more than just the rehabilitation of particular individuals. Frei argues that the amnesty process delegitimized the previous political expurgation administered by the Allies and, on a deeper level, served to satisfy the collective psychic needs of a society longing for a clean break with the unparalleled political and moral catastrophe it had undergone in the 1940s. Thus the era of Adenauer devolved into a scandal-ridden period of reintegration at any cost. Frei's work brilliantly and chillingly explores how the collective will of the German people, expressed through mass allegiance to new consensus-oriented democratic parties, cast off responsibility for the horrors of the war and Holocaust, effectively silencing engagement with the enormities of the Nazi past. Columbia University Press Contents 6 Foreword by Fritz Stern 8 Introduction 12 Part I. A Legislation for the Past: Parliamentary and Administrative Junctures 18 1. The Amnesty Law of 1949 22 2. The “Liquidation” of Denazification 44 3. The Rehabilitation and Pensioning of the “131ers” 58 4. The Amnesty Law of 1954 84 Part II. A Past-Political Obsession: The Problem of the War-Criminals 110 5. The War-Crimes Issue Preceding the Bonn Republic 114 6. The Politicization of the War-Criminal Question (1949-50) 138 7. The Debate Under the Sign of Rearmament (1950-51) 164 8. A “General Treaty” instead of a “General Amnesty” (1951-52) 194 9. The Windup of the War-Criminal Problem 220 Part III. Fixing Past-Political Limits: Judicial Norms and Allied Intervention 252 10. The Hedler Affair and the Establishment of Criminal-Legal Norms (1950) 254 11. The Rise and Banning of the Socialist Reich Party (1951-52) 268 12. The Naumann Affair and the Role of the Allies (1953) 294 Conclusion 320 Postscript to the American Edition 330 Acknowledgments 332 Notes 336 Sources and Literature 434 Index 478 Beginning with the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, Frei (modern history, Ruhr-U. Bochum, Germany) examines the path that German politicians took in dealing with issues of prosecution or amnesty for those who served the Nazi state. He argues that the government of Konrad Adenauer was faced with a conflict over the effort to confront the Nazi past versus the need for short-term stability of a country emerging from military occupation. He argues that the social reintegration of Nazi "fellow travelers" was both necessary and inevitable, but suggests that the form of negotiations over amnesty laws sheds light onto the political motivations of West German politicians and a collective societal wish to avoid seriously looking at the crimes of Nazi Germany. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR The German Federal Republic, depicted as an innocent swaddled baby, is handed by the Western powers to a distinctly grandfatherly Mr. Germany.