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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.
Frei chronicles the denazification process in Adenauer's 1950s Germany. The stopping of punishment for Nazi crimes formed the crux of a policitcs of the past which, to a large degree, revoked the consequences of the previous political expurgation.
Since the end of World War II, historians and psychologists have investigated the factors that motivated Germans to become Nazis before and during the war. While most studies have focused on the high-level figures who were tried at Nuremberg, much less is known about the hundreds of SS members, party functionaries, and intelligence agents who quietly navigated the transition to postwar life and successfully assimilated into a changed society after the war ended. In A Nazi Past, German and American scholars examine the lives and careers of men like Hans Globke—who not only escaped punishment for his prominent involvement in formulating the Third Reich's anti-Semitic legislation, but also forged a successful new political career. They also consider the story of Gestapo employee Gertrud Slottke, who exhibited high productivity and ambition in sending Dutch Jews to Auschwitz but eluded trial for fifteen years. Additionally, the contributors explore how a network of Nazi spies and diplomats who recast their identities in Franco's Spain, far from the denazification proceedings in Germany. Previous studies have emphasized how former Nazis hid or downplayed their wartime affiliations and actions as they struggled to invent a new life for themselves after 1945, but this fascinating work shows that many of these individuals actively used their pasts to recast themselves in a democratic, Cold War setting. Based on extensive archival research as well as recently declassified US intelligence, A Nazi Past contributes greatly to our understanding of the postwar politics of memory.
A significant new look at the legacy of the Nazi regime, this book exposes the workings of past beliefs and political interests on how--and how differently--the two Germanys have recalled the crimes of Nazism, from the anti-Nazi emigration of the 1930s through the establishment of a day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in 1996.
Critical Acclaim for ADENAUER "A gripping narrative . . . brings to life an intriguing historical figure . . . an enthralling perspective on the processes that shaped the postwar world." --Daily Telegraph (London) "Charts the ironies of Adenauer's complicated life. This is the story of a marathon man, but it is narrated at the pace of a sprinter and with the elegance of a hurdler."--The Times (London) "Lucid and engaging. This is a well-researched and elegantly written volume which deserves a wider readership than the purely political."--The Herald (Glasgow) "A highly readable, thoroughly reliable, intelligently critical life-and-times. . . . This portrait does justice to a man who is often invoked as a prophet of a United States of Europe, but who was in truth the greatest of German patriots."--Literary Review (London) "Well-researched and admirably written . . . reveals Adenauer the man--with all his authority and strength, his persistence and endurance, and his streak of ruthlessness and political cunning."--The Independent (London) THE LAST GREAT FRENCHMAN "Knowledgeable, lucid . . . the best English biography of de Gaulle."--The New York Times Book Review "Charles Williams has matched a great subject by something near to a great book."--Daily Telegraph (London)
Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Based on careful, intensive research in primary sources, many of these essays break new ground in our understanding of a crucial and tumultuous period. The contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, offer an in-depth analysis of how the collective memory of Nazism and the Holocaust influenced, and was influenced by, politics and culture in West Germany in the 1960s. The contributions address a wide variety of issues, including prosecution for war crimes, restitution, immigration policy, health policy, reform of the police, German relations with Israel and the United States, nuclear non-proliferation, and, of course, student politics and the New Left protest movement.
The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 was an event nearly unprecedented in history. Only the fall of the Roman Empire fifteen hundred years earlier compares to the destruction visited on Germany. The country's cities lay in ruins, its economic base devastated. The German people stood at the brink of starvation, millions of them still in POW camps. This was the starting point as the Allies set out to build a humane, democratic nation on the ruins of the vanquished Nazi state-arguably the most monstrous regime the world has ever seen. In Exorcising Hitler, master historian Frederick Taylor tells the story of Germany's Year Zero and what came next. He describes the bitter endgame of war, the murderous Nazi resistance, the vast displacement of people in Central and Eastern Europe, and the nascent cold war struggle between Soviet and Western occupiers. The occupation was a tale of rivalries, cynical realpolitik, and blunders, but also of heroism, ingenuity, and determination-not least that of the German people, who shook off the nightmare of Nazism and rebuilt their battered country. Weaving together accounts of occupiers and Germans, high and low alike Exorcising Hitler is a tour de force of both scholarship and storytelling, the first comprehensive account of this critical episode in modern history.
Broken glass, twisted beams, piles of debris--these are the early memories of the children who grew up amidst the ruins of the Third Reich. More than five decades later, German youth inhabit manicured suburbs and stroll along prosperous pedestrian malls. Shattered Past is a bold reconsideration of the perplexing pattern of Germany's twentieth-century history. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer explore the staggering gap between the country's role in the terrors of war and its subsequent success as a democracy. They argue that the collapse of Communism, national reunification, and the postmodern shift call for a new reading of the country's turbulent development, one that no longer suggests continuity but rupture and conflict. Comprising original essays, the book begins by reexamining the nationalist, socialist, and liberal master narratives that have dominated the presentation of German history but are now losing their hold. Treated next are major issues of recent debate that suggest how new kinds of German history might be written: annihilationist warfare, complicity with dictatorship, the taming of power, the impact of migration, the struggle over national identity, redefinitions of womanhood, and the development of consumption as well as popular culture. The concluding chapters reflect on the country's gradual transition from chaos to civility. This penetrating study will spark a fresh debate about the meaning of the German past during the last century. There is no single master narrative, no Weltgeist, to be discovered. But there is a fascinating story to be told in many different ways.
"Nazi Germany's defeat in May 1945 commenced a decade-long allied effort to democratize the former Reich. The United States simultaneously began sheltering scientists, industrialists, and military officers complicit in Nazi crimes. What explained this conflict between the spirit and practice of denazification? Did U.S. Cold War anticommunism simply replace antifascism in the postwar period? Did Americans favor rightists over leftists in a quest to restore "order" in Europe?" "In this groundbreaking study, Deborah Kisatsky shows that opportunity, not order, galvanized U.S. foreign policy, and that American dealings with the European Right were more complex than has been presumed. U.S. leaders cooperated with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to achieve shared Atlanticist goals. And the United States co-opted nationalistic fighters into a secret stay-behind net of the Bund Deutscher Jugend-Technischer Dienst. But allied leaders jointly worked to contain such vocal neutralist-nationalists as the ex-Nazi Otto Strasser. Cooperation, co-optation, and containment of French and Italian, as of German, rightists advanced American hegemony in Europe. These strategies extended techniques of social control perfected within the United States and synthesized domestic and international systems of power in the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.
In the early years of the Atlantic Alliance no bilateral relationship was more important than that between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the United States. Even so the West German-American alliance was taxing for both sides during much of the first two decades of the Cold War. Ultimately despite frequent signiicant challenges to the alliance from with out and within the two allies managed to achieve a positive and productive relationship and Eisenhower and Adenaver explains how they did so. In both capitals the top foreign policy makers were deeply involved in the conduct of what they viewed as a vital bilateral alliance with both President Dwight Eisenhower and Chancellor Korirad Adenauer taking the lead in his own government. For the Americans a rearmed FRG tightly bound to the West was the bedrock of any European security policy that could contain the Soviet Union for the long term. For the West German government their relationship with the United States was the bedrock of rehabilitation and indeed survival as an independent country. In this book their alliance is closely analyzed to offer a new understanding of the West German-American relationship during the Cold War. Book jacket.