Postwar

This might seem to confirm the view that post-war Germany was suffering from a massive dose of collective amnesia; but the reality was more complex. Germans did not so much forget as selectively remember. Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and had been properly punished.

In the course of a series of amnesties, hitherto-imprisoned war criminals were steadily released back into civilian life. Meanwhile, most of the worst German war crimes—those committed in the East and in the camps— were never investigated. Although a Central Office of Land Justice Departments was set up in Stuttgart in 1956, local prosecutors studiously failed to pursue any investigations until 1963, when Bonn began to pressure them to do so—and to greater effect after 1965, when the Federal Government extended the twenty-year statute of limitations on murder.

Adenauer’s own attitude to these matters was complicated. On the one hand he clearly felt that a prudent silence was better than a provocative public recital of the truth—Germans of that generation were too morally compromised for democracy to work, except at this price. Anything else risked a right-wing revival. Unlike Schumacher, who spoke publicly and movingly of the sufferings of the Jews at German hands, or the German President Theodor Heuss, who declared at Bergen-Belsen in November 1952 that ‘Diese Scham nimmt uns niemand ab,’[98] Adenauer said very little on the subject. Indeed, he only ever spoke of Jewish victims, never of German perpetrators.

On the other hand, he acknowledged the irresistible pressure to make restitution. In September 1952 Adenauer reached agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett to pay to Jewish survivors what would amount, through the years, to over DM100 billion. In making this agreement Adenauer ran some domestic political risk: in December 1951, just 5 percent of West Germans surveyed admitted feeling ‘guilty’ towards Jews. A further 29 percent acknowledged that Germany owed some restitution to the Jewish people. The rest were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ When the restitution agreement was debated in the Bundestag on March 18th 1953, the Communists voted against, the Free Democrats abstained and both the Christian Social Union and Adenauer’s own CDU were divided, with many voting against any Wiedergutmachung (reparations). In order to get the agreement approved Adenauer depended on the votes of his Social Democratic opponents.

On more than one occasion Adenauer exploited widespread international nervousness over a possible Nazi revival in Germany to nudge West Germany’s allies in the direction he wanted them to move. If the Western Allies wanted German cooperation in European defense, he suggested, then they had better abstain from criticizing German behaviour or evoking troubled pasts. If they wanted to head off domestic backlash, then they should stand firm with Adenauer in rejecting Soviet plans for East Germany. And so forth. The Western Allies understood perfectly well what Adenauer was up to. But they too read the German opinion polls. And so they allowed him considerable leeway, accepting his insistence that only he stood between them and a far less amenable alternative, and his claim to need foreign concessions if he was to head off trouble at home. In January 1951 even Eisenhower was brought to declare that he had been wrong to conflate the Wehrmacht with the Nazis—‘the German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland.’ In a similar vein General Ridgeway, Eisenhower’s successor as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, asked Allied High Commissioners in 1953 to pardon all German officers previously convicted of war crimes on the Eastern Front.

Adenauer’s behaviour did not endear him to his interlocutors—Dean Acheson in particular rather resented Bonn’s insistence on setting conditions before agreeing to join the community of civilized nations, as though West Germany were doing the victorious Western Allies a favor. But on those rare occasions when Washington or London displayed their frustration in public, or whenever there was any suggestion that they might be talking to Moscow behind Bonn’s back, Adenauer was quick to turn the situation to political advantage—reminding German voters of the fickleness of Germany’s allies and of how he alone could be counted upon to look after the national interest.

Domestic support for German rearmament was not especially strong in the 1950s, and the creation of a new West German army, the Bundeswehr, in 1956—a mere eleven years after the defeat—did not arouse widespread enthusiasm. Even Adenauer himself had been ambivalent, insisting—with what was by his lights a modicum of sincerity—that he was responding to international pressure. One of the achievements of the Soviet-backed ‘Peace Movement’ of the early 1950s was its success in convincing many West Germans that their country could be both reunified and secure if it declared itself ‘neutral’. Over a third of adults polled in the early fifties favored a neutral, united Germany under any circumstances, and almost 50 percent wanted the Federal Republic to declare neutrality in the event of a war.

Given that the most likely trigger for a Third World War in Europe was the German situation itself, these aspirations may seem curious. But it was one of the oddities of post-war West Germany that their country’s privileged position as a de facto American protectorate was for some of its citizens as much a source of resentment as of security. And such sentiments were only strengthened when it became clear from the later fifties that a war in Germany might see the use of battlefield nuclear weapons—under the exclusive control of others.

Back in 1956 Adenauer had warned that the Federal Republic could not remain a ‘nuclear protectorate’ forever. When it became clear in the early 1960s that the Western Allies had come to terms with Moscow on this sensitive subject, and that between them they would never allow Germany access to nuclear weapons, he was furious.[99] For a brief period it seemed as though the Bonn Republic’s allegiance to Washington might be transferred to De Gaulle’s Paris, with whom it was bound by a common resentment at high-handed Anglo-American treatment and a shared suspicion that the US was wriggling free of obligations to its European clients.

Certainly, the French desire for an independent nuclear deterrent offered a tempting precedent to West Germany, one that De Gaulle skillfully exploited in his efforts to wean Bonn away from its American friends. As De Gaulle phrased it, at the same January 14th 1963 press conference where he responded ‘Non!’ to British membership in the EEC, he ‘sympathized’ with West Germany’s aspirations to nuclear status. And the following week he translated that ‘sympathy’ into a Treaty of Franco-German friendship. But the Treaty, for all its accompanying fanfare, was hollow. Adenauer’s apparent switch of loyalties was disavowed by many in his own party; later that same year his colleagues conspired to bring about his removal from power and reaffirm their loyalty to NATO. As for De Gaulle, he of all people harbored no illusions about the Germans. Six months earlier, in Hamburg, the French President had told a wildly enthusiastic crowd ‘Es lebe die Deutschfranzosiche Freundschaft! Sie Sind ein grosses Volk!’ (‘Long live Franco-German friendship! You are a great people!’); but to an aide he commented, ‘If they really were still a great people, they wouldn’t be cheering me so.’

In any event, however cool their relations, no West German leader dared break with Washington for the sake of an illusory French alternative. Nonetheless, Adenauer’s foreign policy intrigues played to an underlying mood of resentment at Germany’s unavoidable subservience to the US. In retrospect we too readily assume that the post-war Federal Republic enthusiastically welcomed everything American; that the GIs spread across central and southern Germany in these years, with their military installations, bases, convoys, movies, music, food, clothes, chewing gum and cash were universally loved and adopted by the people whose freedom they were there to secure.

The reality was more complicated. Individual American (and British) soldiers were certainly liked, for the most part. But after the initial relief at having been ‘liberated’ (sic) by the West (and not the Red Army) had worn off, other feelings surfaced. The hard post-war years of the Allied occupation contrasted unfavorably with life under the Nazis. During the Cold War some blamed America for putting Germany at the center of ‘its’ conflict with the Soviet Union and exposing the country to risk. Many conservatives, particularly in the Catholic South, attributed the rise of Hitler to the ‘secularizing’ influence of the West and argued that Germany should steer a ‘middle way’ between the triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’. And West Germany’s growing prominence on the eastern edge of the Western alliance subliminally recalled Nazi Germany’s self-assigned role as Europe’s cultural bulwark facing down the Asiatic Soviet hordes.

Moreover the Americanising of West Germany—and the omnipresence of foreign occupiers—contrasted revealingly with the sanitized Germany of popular desires, nourished in the early fifties especially on a diet of