Recasting West German Elites : Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse Between Nazism and Democracy, 1945-1955 [1 ed.] 9781789204162, 9781571812711

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Recasting West German Elites

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Monographs in German History Volume 1

Osthandel and Ostpolitik: German Foreign Trade Policies in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer Mark Spaulding Volume 2

A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reform and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany Rebecca Boehling Volume 3

From Recovery to Catastrophe: Municipal Stabilization and Political Crisis in Weimar Germany Ben Lieberman Volume 4

Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in ‘Red’ Saxony Christian W. Szejnmann Volume 5

Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States 1789–1870 Andreas Fahrmeir Volume 6

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Poems in Steel: National Socialism and the Politics of Inventing from Weimar to Bonn Kees Gispen Volume 7

“Aryanisation” in Hamburg Frank Bajohr Volume 8

The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform in Weimar Germany Marjorie Lamberti Volume 9

The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966 Ronald J. Granieri Volume 10

Church Leaders in The Third Reich:The Struggle of Confessional Lutherans Against Nazism Lowell Green Volume 11

Recasting West German Elites: Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse between Nazism and Democracy, 1945-1955 Michael Hayse

Recasting West German Elites : Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse Between Nazism and

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RECASTING WEST GERMAN ELITES Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse between Nazism and Democracy, 1945-1955

Copyright © 2003. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Michael R. Hayse

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Recasting West German Elites : Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse Between Nazism and

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Published in 2003 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2003 Michael R. Hayse All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hayse, Michael R. Recasting West German elites : higher civil servants, business leaders, and physicians in Hesse between Nazism and democracy, 1945-1955 / Michael R. Hayse. p. cm. --(Monographs in German history ; v. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57181-271-7 (alk. paper) 1. Elite (Social sciences)--Germany--Hesse--History. 2. Hesse (Germany)--Politics and government--1945I. Title. II. Series. HN458.H4H397 2003 305.5'2'094341--dc21

2002043663

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

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CONTENTS

List of Charts and Tables

vi

Abbreviations

vii

Acknowledgments

x

Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Complicity and Disenchantment by 1945

15

Chapter 2: Compositional Change and Continuity, 1945-1955

54

Chapter 3: Legal Restructuring and Professional Reorganization

87

Chapter 4: Denazification and its Effects, 1945-1955

140

Chapter 5: Recasting Personal and Occupational World Views

209

Conclusion

249

Bibliography

255

Index

282

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LIST OF CHARTS AND TABLES

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Chart 1.1 Chart 1.2

NSDAP Joiners by Social Class, 1933-1944 Representation of Elite Occupations among NSDAP Joiners, 1933-1945 Chart 2.1 Board Members of Frankfurt Common-Stock Companies (AG), 1953 Chart 2.2 Continuity of Practicing Physicians in Darmstadt, 1934-1956 Chart 4.1 Denazification in Hesse as of 1 January 1954 Table 4.2 Followers among High Civil Servants in Hessian administration, 1 December 1948 Table 4.3 Top Civil Servants in the Administration of Hessen, 1947-1956 Table 4.4 Civil Servants in the Bizonal Administration, 30 April 1949 Table 4.5 Denazification Classification of the Leadership of Chambers of Industry and Trade in Hessen, 1947-1956. Table 4.6 Long-Term Effects of Denazification on Hessian Chambers of Industry and Trade and Darmstadt Business Leaders Table 4.7 Denazification of Physicians in Darmstadt, 1949-1956 Table 4.8 University of Marburg Medical Faculty and the Spruchkammer Table 4.9 Denazification of University of Marburg Medical Faculty, 1950-1956 Chart 4.10 Inmates held in Darmstadt Internment and Labor Camp, 1948 –

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23 24 58 59 158 170 171 172

176

177 180 182 183 186

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ABBREVIATIONS

ÄK ÄM APSR Az. BBG BDI BDC CDU

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DAF DGB DBB DP FDP Ffm FRG GDR GG GVBl HÄBl HHStA-W HStA-D HStA-M HQ IHK IHK Ffm JCS L&S MdB

Ärztekammer (Chamber of Physicians) Ärztliche Mitteilungen American Political Science Review Aktenzeichen (file number, usually of Hessian Spruchkammer case) Bundesbeamtengesetz (Federal Civil Service Law), 1953 Federation of German Industry Berlin Document Center Christlich-Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) Deutsche Arbeiter-Front (German Workers’ Front) Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (German Trade Union League) Deutscher Beamtenbund (German Civil Servants’ League) Deutsche Partei (German Party) Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party) Frankfurt am Main Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Grundgesetz (Basic Law), the West German constitution Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt für Großhessen Hessisches Ärzteblatt Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Wiesbaden Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Darmstadt Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Marburg Headquarters Industrie- und Handelskammer (Chamber of Industry and Trade) Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a. M. Archives [U.S.] Joint Chiefs of Staff Liason and Security Office (of OMGH or OMGUS) Mitglied des Bundestags (Member of the Bundestag) –

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Abbreviations

MfpB/MmfpB MG NS NSDAP OMGH OMGUS ÖTV PHD RÄO RB

SBZ SED

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SJ-BRD SK SMAD SPD StA-Ffm StadtA-D StadtA-M StadtA-Wbn USFET VjZ VWG

Minister/Ministerium für politische Befreiung (Minister/Ministry for Political Liberation) Military government National Socialist Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) Office of Military Government in Hessen (a regional division of OMGUS). Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.) Gewerkschaft Öffentliche Dienste, Transport und Verkehr Public Health Division, Office of Military Government in Hessen Reichsärzteordnung (Reich Physicians’ Law), 1935 Regierungsbezirk (administrative region, of which there were three in Greater Hessen: Kassel, Wiesbaden, and Darmstadt Sowjetische Besatzungszone (Soviet Zone of Occupation) Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) Statistisches Jahrbuch der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Spruchkammer Soviet Military Administration in Germany Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) Stadtarchiv Frankfurt a.M. Stadtarchiv Darmstadt Stadtarchiv Marburg Stadtarchiv Wiesbaden United States Forces, European Theater Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte Vereinigtes Wirtschaftsgebiet (United Economic Administration, predecessor to the West German federal government)

–

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For Sunka

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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T

his book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many people and institutions. Konrad Jarausch offered his keen insight and critical eye, as well as the model of his own work on the (un)free professions. Gerhard L. Weinberg and Terry MacIntosh helped to frame and expand the project when it began as a dissertation topic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and suggested detailed revisions for its transformation into a manuscript. Larry Eugene Jones provided invaluable suggestions on archival sources in the early stages of research, while Rebecca Boehling, Lisa Heinemann, Diethelm Prowe, and Volker Berghahn pointed out many interpretive improvements in comments on chapters or conference papers. Dr. Marie-Luise Recker at the University of Frankfurt and the participants in her seminar on contemporary German history listened patiently to, and commented on, the first tentative results of my statistical work on denazification. Among the many archivists who deserve much more than special mention here are Dr. Eichler at the Main State Archives of Hessen in Wiesbaden and Frau Wöhrmann at the library and archives of the Frankfurt Chamber of Industry and Trade. The staff at the U. S. National Records Center in Suitland and College Park, Maryland worked diligently to meet my every request. The highly professional staff at the Federal German Archives in Koblenz can only be described as paragons of their craft. The German Academic Exchange Service generously funded both an initial pre-dissertation visit to German archives and a year’s research in Germany. In addition, grants from the history department at the University of North Carolina and from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey enabled me to conduct research at the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC., while further support from the Richard Stockton College allowed me to devote summer months to final revisions and follow-up research. In Germany, Anna and Peter Busse, who first introduced me to the RhineMain region, provided a base of operations as well as friendship. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my parents, who fostered my interest in Europe, and accepted my choice of a career in history over one in law. Eva and Dieter –

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Acknowledgments

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Simon of Hamburg were constant inspirations, embodying as they do the best of German traits and attitudes. At every stage of this project, Sunka Simon has offered encouragement and suggestions for improvement. Of course, any errors and omissions in this study are entirely my own responsibility, and in no way those of the myriad friends and colleagues who have offered a helping hand.

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INTRODUCTION

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he twelve years of the Third Reich continue to cast a long and dark shadow over Germany. Understandably, given the nature of the crimes committed, the Nazi era serves as a prism through which virtually every major development in contemporary Germany can, and often is, viewed. Thus, xenophobic nationalist movements that garner even minimal support, like the Republikaner party and the German People’s Union (DVU) elicit much more hand wringing than even higher electoral results for the National Front in France. Bundeswehr participation in post-Cold War NATO military actions in the Balkans raised more eyebrows than Dutch or even Hungarian support.1 German reluctance to support an American attack on Iraq in 2003 stems more from collective lessons from the Third Reich and World War II than from anti-Americanism. Aside from the merits of these specific issues, the recurrent debates indicate a sustained popular uncertainty about the persistence of German susceptibility to Nazism. As an American exchange student in West Germany and West Berlin in the early 1980s, I was puzzled by a curious paradox, one that pitted my understanding of German history against my personal experience. On the one hand, my study of the recent German past had prepared me to expect rigid anti-democratic social structures. What’s more, my research into the immediate postwar period strongly indicated that denazification and other progressive postwar reforms had failed, allowing Nazis to resume key posts in government, the judiciary, industry, and other spheres. In striking contrast, however, my actual experience demonstrated that West German democracy was not only alive and well, but that the range of attitudes and political engagement in the West German public sphere compared favorably to American center-right conformity and political apathy. Despite recurrent surges of anti-democratic fringe movements, including the neo-Nazis and skinheads whose visibility and violence flared up after unification in 1991, democracy is strongly imbedded in contemporary Germany. The successful democratization of West Germany, reinforced by its extension to the former German Democratic Republic, is one of the key developments that divides the twentieth-century history of Europe into two eras: the first characterized by turmoil and war up to Notes for this section begin on page 12.

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Introduction

1945, and the era of relative stability and peace after 1945. How can this paradox be explained? What caused the shift in political culture, especially among German elites? The Federal Republic of Germany, conceived as a provisional state in the tense atmosphere of the early Cold War, quickly established itself as a formidable democracy. By the mid 1950s, domestic and foreign observers proclaimed with justified conviction that “Bonn is not Weimar.” 2 Neither was Bonn Berlin. Critics who claimed to detect the seeds of the revival of Nazism were repeatedly proved wrong.3 Extremist right-wing agitation and overt anti-Semitism, while never fully absent from the postwar German Republic, remained a fringe phenomenon. When West Germany gained full sovereignty in 1955, soon followed by rearmament, most indicators confirmed that German politics and culture had changed markedly when compared to the preceding decades. However, the ghost of the past was never far from the surface, leading to an often unspoken uneasiness about the staying power of Germany’s new liberal culture. As one study suggested, “Bonn is not Weimar, but Weimar has haunted Bonn and will likely haunt Berlin as well.”4 Subsequent events only reinforced the conviction that the transformation evident in the early Federal Republic was more than a mirage born of wishful thinking. West Germany’s constitutional order weathered numerous crises, including economic recession, right-wing and left-wing terrorism, political scandals, and elected officials’ attempts to abuse their constitutional powers. Perhaps the most important indicator of the sustainability of German democracy has been the country’s ability to withstand the severe political, economic, and cultural strains of reunification since 1990. The FRG’s staying power has drawn on a strong citizen commitment to the new order. The vehement post-unification debate over moving the seat of government to Berlin vividly demonstrated most West Germans’ attachment to their system of government. At the same time, the terms of the discussion revealed a lingering uneasiness, both in Germany and abroad, concerning the Federal Republic’s relationship to Germany’s recent past. Clearly, the assessment of the degree of continuity and discontinuity between the Federal Republic and the Nazi regime remains problematic and unresolved. Like so many other aspects of German history, the continuity debate is intertwined with present-day politics. While some, especially conservatives, downplay links between the Federal Republic and the pre-1945 era, others, notably left-leaning critics, have overemphasized continuities. Common sense suggests—and the historical record confirms—the complex coexistence of breaks and continuities. Despite the many lines of continuity that bound West Germany to the country’s recent past, by the late 1950s, politics, social structure, and popular attitudes differed much more from 1945 than anyone could reasonably have expected or hoped at the end of the war. How profound was this change in the political culture of West German elites, and what caused it? This is the question that this book seeks to answer. –

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Introduction

The transformation was more than superficial. Certainly the geographical division of the country, political restructuring, and the Federal Republic’s diplomatic marriage to the West significantly impacted German politics and culture; these developments served as motors of change, as many observers have rightly observed.5 Demographic and social changes have also been cited as partial explanations for the astoundingly rapid entrenchment of democratic political culture, as have the effects of total war and Germany’s unambiguous military defeat.6 “Americanization,” or Western hegemony over German politics, economics, and culture, played an equally important role.7 Paradoxically, while many cite the influence exerted by the United States after 1945, most simultaneously characterize Allied social-change programs implemented during the postwar occupation, including denazification, industrial dismantling, decartelization, and reeducation, as qualified failures.8 By contrast, pundits continue to tout the persuasive power of the economic miracle as a critical mechanism that transformed German loyalties.9 As one observer has pointed out:

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Without the FRG’s economic miracle, or Wirtschaftswunder, coupled with the wider economic recovery of Western Europe in which millions of Germans and Europeans enjoyed substantial increases in their standards of living following the ravages of depression and war, the Bonn Republic might have suffered the consequences of economic turmoil that had contributed to the fall of the Weimar Republic.10

A widespread dissenting view, emanating predominantly, but by no means exclusively, from the left, maintains that the lines of continuity between the Federal Republic and its predecessors outweigh the breaks with the past. They point out that West German elites resisted most reforms, whether advocated by the Western Allies (above all the Americans and the British) or progressive Germans. With the failure of reforms, West German elites succeeded in reestablishing traditions that were far from democratic. These included the elitist three-track civil service, economic and political corporatism (with or without the prefix “neo-”), big business dominated by powerful Ruhr industrialists, and an educational system that minimized social mobility.11 In the same vein, Germans evaded an honest confrontation with their past, and continued to harbor disturbing authoritarian attitudes and traits.12 More extreme critics argue that a “restoration” of the pre-fascist socioeconomic order took place after 1945. Playing down the importance of the changes mentioned above, they contend that the capitalist economic system, with its attendant political and elite interest group structures, constitutes a common thread that binds the Federal Republic to the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. 13 As evidence of continuity, they cite the many leading figures in the Federal Republic who occupied the same or similar posts in the Third Reich. A Cold War Eastern European variant often descended to the level of vulgar propaganda. 14 –

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Introduction

The collapse of communist systems in Eastern Europe relegated the belief in a West German “restoration” to the sidelines, but has by no means eliminated it. The reappearance of former National Socialists among the elite of the Federal Republic forms a central theme for some non-Marxists as well. Widely read journalistic authors, among them Bernt Engelmann, Kurt Pritzkoleit, and Günter Wallraff have popularized the belief that “the empire collapsed, but the rich remained.”15 Hans Globke, Konrad Adenauer’s State Secretary and confidant, who, as an interior ministry official during the Third Reich, authored a gloss of the infamous 1935 Nuremberg race laws that spelled out their practical legal implications, was perhaps the most controversial individual.16 Kurt Kiesinger, Chancellor from 1966 to 1969 had been a member of the NSDAP, a fact that was a highly charged political issue that raised questions of historical continuity between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic.17 Hans Martin Schleyer, Daimler Benz chairman in the 1970s and head of the West German Diet of Industrial and Trade, who was assassinated by the Red Army Faction in 1977, had been an SS officer. Another former SS officer, Karl Haedenkamp, went on to lead the West German medical association until his death in 1956.18 Not surprisingly, myriad biographical continuities like these have called into question West Germany’s postwar “conversion.” The historian Hermann Lübbe questions the meaning of the escalation of accusations, beginning in the late 1960s, that the early Federal Republic was repressive; Lübbe sees these claims as generationally and politically motivated attempts to delegitimize the Federal Republic. By creating a myth of missed chances, the early Federal Republic’s accusers portrayed it as the reconstruction of an authoritarian, nationalist, and potentially aggressive Germany. Working from this premise, the new generation could simultaneously increase its own power and legitimization by setting itself up as true Vergangenheitsbewältiger (confronters of the past).19 In contrast, Lübbe, seconded by Hermann Graml, discerns an active rejection of National Socialism and its premises in the first two decades of the Federal Republic. The relative silence for which the generation of the sixties took their parents to task, they claim, was necessary in order to integrate the largest possible proportion of the population into the new, democratic society. Those who argue that a far more exhaustive Aufarbeitung (working through) indeed took place also claim to seek the legitimization of a true democratic culture, something akin to Habermas’s celebrated constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus), a dedication to the fundamental political order.20 Both views revolve around the issue of how West Germans confronted their past in the first decade following World War II. The continuity of elite composition, institutions, and attitudes is at the core of the broader debate over West Germany’s relationship to its recent past. Why did elite groups that had never warmed to the Weimar Republic, contributed to its demise, and even participated in the worst aspects of the –

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Introduction

Third Reich, rally so quickly around the new democratic order, the Federal Republic? How solid was their conversion? This study attempts to analyze the “recasting” of West German elites as members and supporters of pluralist constitutional democracy. Specifically, it seeks to determine the extent to which the mechanisms of dealing with the past succeeded in implanting a dedication to a new, non-authoritarian, and democratic culture among the West German elite. The term “elites” raises problems of definition. For the purposes of this study, “elites” will include individuals who exert a disproportionate influence over society. Membership in this “social elite” is most commonly conferred by affiliation to definable occupational groups. Not only the top leaders of politics, intellectual life, or other select occupations, but nearly every member of some occupations can be counted among the elite, since they largely shape the attitudes and actions of their professional colleagues as well as non-professionals who follow their lead.21 Neither political leverage nor economic clout alone adequately confers power in a modern industrial society.22 Not even the Nazi cult of the leadership principle succeeded in centralizing power in the hands of a few individuals, despite claims to the contrary.23 As society has become increasingly complex, power has diffused, and the spectrum of “leaders” must expand accordingly. Interest groups play an important role in forming policy; they also exploit their role as transmission belts to modify or block political decisions made at the top or center. In addition to political clout, social elites set the tone in cultural and social matters. This study does not purport to analyze in detail all West German elites; instead, it focuses mainly on higher civil servants, business leaders, and physicians. The choice of these groups may appear unorthodox; many readers will undoubtedly regret the exclusion of important leadership sectors. Where, one might ask, are the leaders of political parties?24 Can free professionals such as physicians really be counted as elites rather than as representatives of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum)? I have chosen these three groups precisely because they represent a broad array of influential occupations, and because I am interested in social rather than political elites. The former include the propertied elite (entrepreneurs), free professions (physicians), and the administrative elite (high civil servants). They adequately illustrate the diffusion of power inherent in the concept of “social elites” and in modern societies. Another consideration, one that is unique to Germany, contributed to the selection of these three groups. Among social elites, higher civil servants, businessmen, and physicians deserve special attention because each of them contributed in special ways to the failure of the first German democracy and to the rise of National Socialism. In many cases, one or the other set of elites has been accused of being more complicitous than the historical record actually justifies. Recent scholarship has corrected many such misperceptions within the academic community of historians, although these revisions have –

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Introduction

rarely percolated down significantly to the general public. The most prominent issue in this regard has been the charge that big business bankrolled the NSDAP’s electoral campaigns in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The reality is much less dramatic.25 Like physicians and higher civil servants, business leaders collaborated with National Socialism to an inordinate degree, and their active support and acquiescence was instrumental in maintaining the Nazis in power until the bitter end. However, they were far from being fanatical, unanimous backers of National Socialism.26 A few technical clarifications are in order, since “entrepreneurs,” higher civil servants, and physicians are all vague terms. “Businessmen,” “business leaders,” and “entrepreneurs” will be used interchangeably throughout the study, and will include both the owners and top managers of sizable firms. Those connected with public stock companies (mainly executives, non- union members of management councils, and members of oversight boards) as well as large privately-held enterprises will be considered, whereas banks, insurance companies and corporations with less than 100 employees will generally be excluded.27 Exceptions will be made for small businessmen, bankers, and insurance executives in so far as they hold policy making position in the Chambers of Trade and Commerce or trade organizations (Verbände).28 Due to the hierarchical structure of the civil service, one might falsely assume that the line between higher civil servants and those in lower categories would be easy to draw; however, the arcane rules and distinctions within the German civil service, combined with the almost mystical special social position of German Beamte is difficult for non-Germans to grasp fully. “Elite” civil servants can be identified in two ways that do not always correspond. The first and most obvious distinction is the nominal approach. Official salary tables classify all Beamte as higher (höhere), upper (gehobener), mid-level (mittlerer), or lower (einfacher). Unlike civil servants at lower grades, higher civil servants hold an advanced academic (i.e. university) degree, traditionally in law. This distinguishes them socially from other civil servants, who are usually considered middle-class white-collar workers. Whenever possible, this study relies on this definition. However, a functional approach is often more useful, especially when dictated by the available published or archival sources. In official German parlance, the term “leading civil servants and employees” (leitende Beamte und Angestellte) distinguishes those who hold real positions of responsibility, as division heads (Abteilungsleiter) or higher, from “higher civil servants,” who may have a high status but little practical power. In some instances, with an increasing tendency after 1949, public servants in powerful administrative positions were not tenured civil servants at all, but salaried “employees” at pay grades comparable to higher civil servants. In still other cases, such as discussions of legal provisions, it is necessary to speak of the civil service as a whole, of which higher civil servants are but the smallest component. –

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Introduction

Physicians present fewer definitional problems. Unless otherwise specified, “doctors” and “physicians” will be used interchangeably. The focus will be on practicing medical doctors rather than on chiropractors, or “healers” (Heilpraktiker). Likewise, dentists are generally excluded, although in the German context, dentistry is considered a branch of medicine. Psychiatrists receive very little special attention here, despite the recent spate of literature on their activities in the Third Reich. Psychiatry was nevertheless one of the most nazified branches of medicine, and heavily involved in the “euthanasia” and sterilization programs. Psychiatrists’ high degree of complicity is hardly surprising, considering that they staffed the Reich’s psychiatric hospitals. These institutions housed, and ultimately betrayed, many of their patients by turning them over to sterilization and “euthanasia” programs. Limiting the focus geographically to greater Hesse and temporally from 1945 to 1955 permits a more detailed analysis of crucial aspects of the postwar elite experience. These restrictions are neither arbitrary nor absolute. Hesse’s postwar history is intricately tied to exogenous developments. Decisions at the American-zone level or in Bonn, for example, were often of great importance for Hesse’s elites. Furthermore, the “recasting” of the elite neither began suddenly in 1945 nor ended in 1955.29 Rather, it has been a constant but uneven evolution, which peaked in the wake of the world-shattering dislocations of World War II. When appropriate, therefore, I will consider events beyond the framework set by these limits. What is now the state of Hesse was an artificial construct of the American occupying forces, based on advice given by Germans within the civil service, in academia, and in exile.30 It comprises the former territory of Hesse-Nassau (around Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, and the northern governmental district centered in Kassel) and the geographically divided Duchy of Hesse, whose capital was Darmstadt, but included a large enclave north of Frankfurt. Whereas Hesse-Nassau had been incorporated into Prussia after 1866, the Duchy of Hesse maintained administrative independence, first as a grand duchy, and then from 1918 to 1933 as the Volksstaat Hesse (which included Rhine-Hesse and other areas west of the Rhine that were ceded to the French zone of occupation and later consolidated into the state of Rhineland-Palatinate). A study of postwar changes in Hesse has special value. Hesse is not only geographically more central than the well-researched states of North-Rhine Westphalia and Bavaria, but also politically distinct. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) dominated all of Hesse’s governing coalitions from 1946 into the 1980s, although at times it formed grand coalitions with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).31 Despite the parliamentary dominance of the SPD, the CDU drew many voters, and in general continued to close in on the Socialists at the polls. The demographic composition of the state helps to explain the political balance. Hesse is less dominated by urban areas than the populous northern state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and less –

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decidedly rural than Bavaria, Schleswig Holstein, and Baden-Württemberg (The city-states of Bremen, Hamburg, and the former enclave of West Berlin are special cases altogether). In fact, Hesse’s population density is nearer the West German average than any other Land, with the exception of BadenWürttemberg.32 The denominational make-up of Hesse is more Protestant than West Germany as a whole, yet it is still closer to the average than most other Länder. While a majority of Hessians are Protestant (64.3 percent in 1950), Catholics comprise a considerable minority (32.2 percent).33 No major historical study of denazification, reconstruction, or specific professions to date has focused on Hesse.34 The best study of denazification in the American zone, Lutz Niethammer’s Die Mitläuferfabrik, examines Bavaria.35 While many of Niethammer’s conclusions are valid for the other states of the American zone, the strong influence of conservative Bavarian politics, indeed the right’s successful instrumentalization of the denazification process to further its own ends, differs significantly from the Hessian experience, as will be explained in chapter four. It is regrettable that Niethammer’s application to consult the Hessian denazification records was denied in the early 1980s, since this precluded an explicit comparison between the denazification process in these two notably different Länder.36 The development of the civil service in Hesse has also received less attention than that in either Bavaria or the British zone. This can largely be explained by the relatively early reinstatement of traditional privileges and organization under British and Bavarian auspices. It is true that government administration and personnel policies in the British zone foreshadowed the restoration of traditional civil service structures in other regions in the 1950s. But the delay, most conspicuous in Hamburg and Hesse, carried with it important consequences. Many influential Germans supported American attempts to reform the professional civil service and helped to carry them out. This fact is sometimes overlooked by those who base their conclusions on the somewhat anomalous experiences in Bavaria, where resistance to American-inspired reforms was rooted in a stronger allegiance to “traditional” structures.37 Owing largely to continuous SPD political leadership, Hesse retained the American-inspired independent Landespersonalamt, or personnel office. This significantly affected hiring practices in the critical years of the occupation and young Federal Republic. Hesse’s early receptivity to American reform ideas for the civil service finds a parallel in its relative openness to reforms in the sphere of public education, which James Tent has documented.38 Most works that investigate the industrial elite, business organizations, and related topics, even those that claim to study the entire Federal Republic, deal primarily, if not exclusively, with the powerful economic landscape of the Ruhr.39 While it is true that heavy industry often set the tone and program for industry as a whole, coal and steel gradually lost much of their dominance in the ever diversifying economy of West Germany.40 Indeed, the –

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economic region stretching from Darmstadt to Kassel, with the financial capital of Frankfurt and the light industrial sprawl around Mainz and Wiesbaden,41 mirrors an important and often neglected component of West Germany’s changing economy than the now structurally troubled Ruhr. The results of this study bear out the hypothesis that limited changes were possible and sometimes successful in personnel, institutional structure, and professional ethos, occassionally even supported by regional elites in spite of their attachment to traditional trappings. Most of the resistance that reformers encountered amounted to attempts to maintain structures that had existed prior to 1933. With a few exceptions, legal and ideological innovations emanating from the National Socialist era found few if any defenders. In short, Hesse offers an opportunity to view developments which can then be applied to West Germany as a whole, based in part on the state’s demographic similarity to the rest of the country. For other issues, Hesse can be seen as a meaningful exception to generalizations established in previous historical accounts. Whereas limiting this study to Hesse represents an attempt to narrow the focus in order to achieve greater depth, selecting the period from 1945 to 1955 is intended to broaden the scope normally accorded to works in this period. Most researchers who have analyzed the effects of the occupation and postwar developments on the Federal Republic focus on the years of military occupation, 1945 to 1949. Women’s history and the now established “history of everyday life” in Germany have contributed to a reconsideration of the periodization of the mid-twentieth century. Both have stressed the overriding continuity of experience for individuals between the beginning of the war in 1939 and the end of the military occupation in 1949 (or the currency reform of 1948). While this periodization has its strong merits, an explanation of the success of the Federal Republic must concentrate more heavily on the postwar years. Monographs that take a longer-term view or assess the early years of the Federal Republic might look at the so-called “Adenauer era,” from 1949 to 1963, but these are often political histories that underplay the importance of the four years under Allied rule that preceded the founding of a federal government. Christoph Kleßmann’s work is a notable and exemplary exception, as he sees the years from 1945 to 1955 as formative.42 Similarly, Hermann-Josef Rupieper considers both the direct occupation and the first phase of the High Commission (1949-1952), when the Federal Republic regained partial sovereignty.43 Most of the groundwork for the political, social, and economic development of the early Federal Republic was in place by 1955. The Gründerjahre were at an approximate end, as symbolized by West Germany’s new sovereignty; the next watershed, the student revolts and the social-liberal reform years of 1968 through1974, lay more than a decade in the future. In a more concrete way, the return of many “old elites” to positions of influence in the new state had reached its peak before 1955. Interest group structures, while still evolving, had consol–

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idated to the point that the distribution of political and economic power was relatively clear.44 In short, the postwar recasting had passed its zenith and given way to the more or less continuous development of a legitimate West German state and society. The years 1948 and 1949 indeed mark a tidal change in German history, yet the implications of the change can only be understood by assessing both the preceding and succeeding developments in light of each other. This study therefore traces the changes in elite groups beyond the years of occupation and uncertainty and well into the period of reconstruction, growth, and stabilization. The continuities between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic are most evident in the undeniable continuity of the German people. The inhabitants of West Germany were not reborn or replaced between 1945 and 1949, but only slowly began to replace themselves in the ineluctable demographic march of births and deaths. Even now, almost sixty years after total German defeat, a small minority of Germans have not benefited from what former Chancellor Helmut Kohl rather inappropriately touted as “the grace of a late birth.” Today, the exchange of those wielding actual power is nearly complete: only a tiny proportion of those whom we might call the “functional elite” belonged to the same group prior to 1945. In this study, an attempt will be made to assess the importance of such demographic changes in the elite’s recasting against other factors that left them substantially changed, such as organizational restructuring and ideological reorientation. The fall of the communist government of the German Democratic Republic in 1989, and that country’s absorption into the Federal Republic raise questions to which an analysis of early postwar West Germany offers insights, if not solutions. While acknowledging that the transformation of a Central European police state into a pluralistic democracy cannot be achieved through identical measures in different eras, the largely successful recasting of the West German elite indicates that some methods are more likely than others to attain positive results. Some of these insights have already been taken to heart. For example, the miserably counter-productive early attempts of the Western Allies to impose their policy of “collective guilt” on post-fascist Germany has been studiously avoided in the new German states. Some of the most vexing problems in the integration of Eastern Germany into the Federal Republican culture similarly find their counterparts in the immediate postwar period, albeit within a different political and international context. One question has been how to deal with the numerous individuals who were members of the established elite, as well as the police apparatus and the ubiquitous Stasi (State Security Police), which was responsible for the GDR’s most serious abuses. As in post-Nazi Germany, the sheer proportion of compromised individuals made a case-by-case review difficult if not impossible. As many as one out of every fifteen adult East Germans worked for the Stasi in either an official or an unofficial capac–

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ity. A debate continues about whether to expose, perhaps even to prosecute, these people, or whether to punish only the major figures (the “elite” in a narrow sense). Many decisions were made in the rush of the immediate crises of 1989 and 1990. Already most large-scale social-change programs are no longer feasible. This, too, calls to mind the years following the war. Given that many of the elites associated with the Stasi will maintain or regain their positions in the new Länder, what other mechanisms might transform them into reliable citizens of the Federal Republic? Perhaps a look at post1945 “recasting” will offer clues as well as a comparison, keeping in mind that even the worst crimes committed in the name of the East German system cannot be closely compared with those of the Third Reich. Models of totalitarianism that seek to link the two constructs under a single generalized idea distort the fundamental differences that separate them. Nevertheless both societies reveal some similar structures and legacies. Before considering the postwar “recasting” of the higher civil service, business leadership, and medical profession, it is essential to understand their situation at the moment of Germany’s defeat in 1945. The first chapter assesses their experience in the Third Reich. In addition to laying out the legal, organizational, and demographic innovations of the Third Reich, it considers the development of elite attitudes toward National Socialism. Chapter two portrays broad changes in the social composition of the occupations, with special focus on the effects of their postwar expansion and the influx of refugees. The tension between reform impulses and conservative resistance in the legal and organizational framework is the subject of the third chapter. The struggle between reformers and traditionalists highlights the attitudes and self-conceptions that circulated within the three elite occupations. The following chapter deals with yet another potential arena of fundamental change: the attempt to bring about a personnel change through political purge—denazification—and the fostering of an alternative elite. Looking at the long-term effects of denazification, chapter four also weighs the extent and significance of renazification once controls were lifted in the late 1940s. Finally, chapter five considers changes in elite attitudes. In particular, it considers how high civil servants, business leaders, or physicians came to terms with their role in the Third Reich. Did they distance themselves from that past, or did they, as often suggested, run the danger of repeating the past by not learning from it? Had they become, in essence, fairweather democrats, with little commitment? This last issue lies at the heart of the debate over the balance between continuity and change.

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Notes 1. F. Kempe, Father/Land (Bloomington, 1999), 97-131, esp. 109-17; A. Markovits and S. Reich, “The Contemporary Power of memory: The Dilemmas for German Foreign policy,” In The Postwar Transformation of Germany, ed. J. S. Brady et al. (Ann Arbor, 1999), 5. 2. F.R. Allemann, Bonn ist nicht Weimar (Cologne, 1956). 3. T.H. Tetens, The New Germany and the Old Nazis (New York, 1961). 4. B. Crawford, J.S. Brady, and S.E. Wiliarty, eds. The Post-war Transformation of Germany: Democracy, Prosperity, and Nationhood (Ann Arbor, 1999), 5. 5. H. Wallenberg, Report on Democratic Institutions in Germany (Westport, CT, 1956) is a good critical survey, although Wallenberg’s exaggerated anti-communism reflects the period in which he writes. Wallenberg, editor of the American-operated Die Neue Zeitung from 1946 to 1953, concludes that democracy was strong despite the challenges it continued to face. 6. See J. Kocka, “1945: Neubeginn oder Restauration,” in Wendepunkte deutscher Geschichte, 1848-1945, ed. C. Stern and H.A. Winkler (Frankfurt a. M., 1979), 141-68. 7. See V. Berghahn, The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1975 (Cambridge, 1986), 4-13. R. Willett’s essays in The Americanization of Germany, 1945-1949 (London and New York, 1989) demonstrate America’s early influence on popular culture. 8. See C. Fitzgibbon, Denazification (London, 1969); also L. Niethammer, Die Mitläuferfabrik. Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns (Berlin, 1982); and H. Graml, “Die verdrängte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus,” Zäsuren nach 1945: Essays zur Periodisierung der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte, ed. M. Broszat (Munich, 1990), 169-83. A less pessimistic portrayal of educational reform efforts in J. Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany (Chicago, 1982). 9. Ch. Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung. Deutsche Geschichte 1945-1955 (Göttingen, 1982), 226; the economic miracle’s contribution to stabilizing the political culture of the Federal Republic is acknowledged in the semi-official publication Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte. Ideen, Kräfte, Entscheidungen von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Presse- und Informationszentrum des Deutschen Bundestages (Bonn, n.d.), 398. 10. R.H. Ginsberg, “Germany: Into the Stream of Democracy,” Establishing Democracies, ed. Mary Ellen Fischer (Boulder, 1996), 88. 11. R. Wassermann, “Das perfekte Comeback im Beamtentum und Justiz,” in “Von der Hoffnung aller Deutschen.” Wie die BRD entstand 1945 bis 1949, ed. J. Wollenberg (Cologne, 1991), 196-219; E. Schmidt, Die verhinderte Neuordnung 1945-1952. Zur Auseinandersetzung um die Demokratisierung der Wirtschaft in den westlichen Besatzungszonen und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 4th ed. (Frankfurt a.M., 1973); O.H. von der Gablentz, Die versäumte Reform: Zur Kritik der westdeutschen Politik (Köln and Opladen, 1960); Tent, Mission. 12. Many American journalists remained skeptical of Germany’s conversion to democracy, a fact documented by N. Frei, “Die deutsche Wiedergutmachungspolitik gegenüber Israel im Urteil der öffentlichen Meinung der USA,” in Wiedergutmachungspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. L. Herbst and C. Goschler (Munich, 1989), 209-24. Frei again broaches this subject in “‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ or ‘Renazification’? The American Perspective on Germany’s Confrontation with the Nazi Past in the Early Years of the Adenauer Era,” in America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945-1955, ed. M. Ermarth (Providence, 1993), 47-59. See also J. Dornberg, Schizophrenic Germany (New York, 1961). 13. The best synthesis of this genre is E.-U. Huster, et al., Determinanten der westdeutschen Restauration 1945-1949 (Frankfurt a.M., 1972). In the crude East German variant, K. Gossweiler, Großbanken, Industriemonopole, Staat. Ökonomie und Politik des staatsmonopolistischen Kapitalismus in Deutschland, 1914-32 (Berlin [East], 1971). 14. The argument that both structural and personnel continuities between proto-fascist capitalist-bourgeois democracy and the postwar order were the main characteristics of society in the Federal Republic, with reference to the relevant literature up to the time, in R. –

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

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21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

Kühnl, “Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Faschismus in BRD und DDR,” in BRD-DDR: Systemvergleich (Frankfurt a.M., 1971), 248-71; also O. Kappelt, Braunbuch der DDR. Nazis in der DDR (Berlin [East], 1981). This is the title of a book by one of West Germany’s leading popular historians, B. Engelmann, Das Reich zerfiel, die Reichen blieben (Hamburg, 1972). A more scholarly approach is K. Pritzkoleit, Die neuen Herren: Die Mächtigen in Staat und Wirtschaft (Vienna, 1955); Pritzkoleit, Wem gehört Deutschland? Eine Chronik von Besitz und Macht (Vienna, 1957). Globke, who retained his post until Adenauer resigned in 1963, was a constant object of criticism leveled at Adenauer’s leadership. For a critical yet sympathetic account, see Th. Eschenburg, “Globke,” Zur politischen Praxis in der Bundesrepublik, Bd. 2. Kritische Betrachtungen 1961-1965 (Munich, 1966). The issue was not whether Kiesinger had come to reject National Socialism. Rather, his NSDAP affiliations forced many Germans to confront just how recent the Nazi past was. See H.A. Turner, Jr., The Two Germanies since 1945 (New Haven, 1987), 91. W. Wuttke-Groneberg, ed. Medizin im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Arbeitsbuch (Wurmlingen, 1980), 6, 377-84; see also his biography by the medical association’s journal, which conveniently overlooks the unsavory aspects of Haedenkamp’s past: Ärztliche Mitteilungen/ Deutsches Ärzteblatt 39 (1954); self-serving selective memory is also indicated by Haedenkamp’s absence in post-1945 editions of Wer ist Wer (the German Who’s Who), 1948, 1951, and 1955, although his biographical information takes up nearly a full column of the 1935 edition. H. Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im Deutschen Nachkriegsbewußtsein,” Historische Zeitschrift 236:3 (1983): 579-99; H. Rudolph, Die verpaßten Chancen. Die vergessene Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Hamburg, 1979), cited by Lübbe, 594. J. Habermas, “Über den doppelten Boden des demokratischen Rechtsstaates,” in Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt a.M., 1987), 18-23. For a valuable contextualization and critique of Habermas’ “post-conventional identity,” of Verfassungspatriotismus, see Ch.S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, 1987), 151-56 and 213, esp. fn. 71. S. F. Nadel, “The Concept of Social Elites,” International Social Science Bulletin (1956): 413-24. This view corresponds to the “pluralist” school of thought in sociology. For a summary of its major tenets and proponents, see E. Etzioni-Halevi, Bureaucracy and Democracy: A Political Dilemma (London, 1983). M. Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundations and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (London and New York, 1981). L.J. Edinger, “Continuity and Change in the background of German Decision-Makers” Western Political Quarterly (1961): 17-36; Edinger, “Post-Totalitarian Leadership Elites in the Federal Republic,” American Political Science Review 54 (1960): 58-82. H.A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York, 1985). J. Caplan, Government Without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar Germany and Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1988); also M. Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill, 1989). The publishers of Die Großunternehmen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, which compiles information on big businesses, discuss the difficulties of discerning between “big business” and medium or small enterprises (e.g. preface to the 1953 volume). The term “entrepreneur” (Unternehmer) has traditionally denoted the owner of a business. Over the past century, however, the advance of new legal forms and corporate structures have combined to reduce the classic entrepreneur to a rarity. Professional managers now often wield more power over operations than owners. Using “entrepreneur” interchangeably with “business person” acknowledges the reality of dissolving functional boundaries. The political and social attitudes of managers and business owners were found to coincide in a survey study conducted in the late 1950s. H. Moore and G. Kleinig, “Das soziale Selbstbild der

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28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Gesellschaftsschichten in Deutschland,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (1960): 89-119. This contrasts with other common criteria used to distinguish the business or “big business” elite. A good discussion of the problems and methods of categorization based on amount of capital or joint-stock status can be found in Turner, German Big Business, xv-xxi. For instance, the Hessian chambers of industry and commerce reassumed the legal status of public law corporations in 1957, following the earlier example of their counterparts in North-Rhine Westphalia, which reattained this status as early as 1949. See also W.-A. Kropat, Hesse in der Stunde Null, 1945-47. Politik, Wirtschaft und Bildungswesen in Dokumenten (Wiesbaden, 1979), 19-21; also the proposal for the Union of HesseDarmstadt and Hesse-Nassau by Dr. E. Ziehen, at the request of Walter Hüsken, Ffm, 4 July 1945, NARA 260, OMGUS OMGH 460. Ziehen taught at the Frankfurt Normal School. The proposal was supported by a number of leading personalities listed in a cover letter. Hesse’s prominent political commentator (and former concentration camp inmate), Eugen Kogon, cites the influence of Heidelberg law professor Gerhard Anschütz, a commentator of the Weimar constitution, and the civilian advisor to the American military government, Walter Dorn, professor of history in Ohio. Kogon, “Wiederaufbau und Neuanfang nach 1945,” in Geschichte Hesses, ed. Uwe Schultz (Stuttgart, 1983), 249-50. Datenbuch zur Geschichte des deutschen Bundestages 1949-1982, compiled by P. Schindler (Baden-Baden: Presse- und Informationsamt des Deutschen Bundestages, 1989), 45-54. According to the 1950 census, the population density for Hesse was 205/Km2 in 1950, compared to 195/Km2 in the Federal Republic (excluding West Berlin) and 180/Km2 in Baden-Württemberg. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1956. Protestants constituted 51 percent , and Catholics 45 percent , of the West German population in 1951. Statistisches Jahrbuch 1956 Kropat’s Hesse in der Stunde Null is an admirable work that draws mainly on material from Hesse’s Main state archives in Wiesbaden, which Kropat directs. While helpful, it is more a collection of documents within a descriptive framework than an interpretive study. Niethammer, Die Mitläuferfabrik. Note in the card file of the Interior Ministry records, HHStA-W 503. See Niethammer, “Zum Verhältnis von Reform und Rekonstruktion in der US-Zone am Beispiel der Neuordnung des öffentlichen Dienstes,” VjZ (1973): 177-88. Tent, Mission. This is the case for studies on Verbände, IHK, single companies such as Thyssen, or branches such as the steel and coal syndicates of the lower Rhine, in Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf, and Duisburg. P. Katzenstein, “Industry and Politics in a Changing West Germany,” in Katzenstein, ed. Industry and Politics in West Germany: Toward the Third Republic (Ithaca, 1989), 18-25. Although Mainz is in Rhineland-Palatinate, it is closely integrated into the economic region dominated by Frankfurt. Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung. H.-J. Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie: Der amerikanische Beitrag (Opladen, 1993). Th. Eschenburg, Herrschaft der Verbände? (Stuttgart, 1958).

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Chapter 1

COMPLICITY AND DISENCHANTMENT BY 1945

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he apparent evaporation of German nationalism and militarism astonished Allied military forces arriving on German territory beginning in late 1944. Army manuals and briefings had prepared them to expect confrontations with armed “werewolf” partisans and unrepentant, combative Nazis.1 The widely held belief that Germans were aggressive and militaristic helped spawn the short-lived Morgenthau Plan that was designed to repastoralize central Europe, and permeated early directives to the occupying armies.2 Fifty years of peace in Europe, a non-belligerent Federal Republic, and “velvet” unification in 1990 have largely undermined, but not exorcised, the belief in an innate and dangerous German “national character” that was still very much alive in 1945. The fear of German revanchism was more than an irrational myth. It arose from the experiences of the interwar period and the tenacious resistance of the Wehrmacht even after German defeat became inevitable. A majority of Germans had, after all, supported Hitler and the National Socialists from 1933 to the end of the war. Large segments of the population had actively helped implement, and even more had quietly accepted, Nazi abuses. Even well into the 1950s, a large minority of West Germans agreed with the statement that “National Socialism is a good idea, badly carried out.”3 Elites were disproportionately implicated in the Nazi seizure of power and in the regime’s subsequent abuses. Higher civil servants, doctors, and businessmen supported the Nazi system of terror in unique ways, and a look at each highlights their occupation-specific roles. However, occupational membership was not destiny. Even tight-knit professional cliques displayed considerable heterogeneity. Just as there were despicable criminals like Josef Mengele among German physicians, there were also men and women like the anti-fascist physician Walter Seitz, whose nom de guerre became the code name for the underground resistance group “Onkel Emil,” which protected Jews and the politically persecuted, often smuggling them out of Germany.4 Notes for this section begin on page 47.

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Most fell somewhere between these two extremes. Alexander Mitscherlich estimates, for instance, that roughly 350 of the 90,000 practicing physicians in Germany committed medical crimes. “This remains a considerable number,” Mitscherlich wrote, “especially when one recalls the extent of the crimes. But it was only a tiny proportion of the entire medical community, roughly one three-hundredth. But is that, after all, more comforting: every three-hundredth physician a criminal?”5 This rough statistic refers primarily to the heavily incriminated individuals who conducted inhumane medical experiments on concentration-camp prisoners. As we now know, many others executed human beings due to their racial or mental health category or “selected” individuals for immediate execution on the rail sidings of death camps. Mitscherlich’s statistic omits those whose activities inhabited the legal and ethical “gray area” encompassing physicians who reported their patients’ physical and mental abnormalities to the hereditary courts, as required by Nazi-era law. Higher civil servants and businessmen in the Third Reich could be assigned to similar categories: a small number who committed heinous acts, a smaller proportion of active resistors, and an overwhelming majority that falls within the spectrum between those poles. The fact that individuals’ attitudes and actions often changed drastically over time complicates these distinctions still further. Many elites who opposed the Nazis late in the regime had earlier made common cause with them, just as many pre-1933 critics of National Socialism were won over by the late 1930s.6

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Types of Complicity To what degree was each of these three occupational groups implicated in the Third Reich? The assessment of their transformation after World War II hinges on this often contentious question. Each has been credited with aiding and abetting National Socialism. Current research supports the argument that they were all essential to the Nazi rise to power, the longevity of the regime, or both. None of them, however, was solely responsible. Even taken together, higher civil servants, physicians, and business leaders did not bring about the National Socialist state. The social elite alone, much less individual occupations, could not have installed and kept the Nazis in power without broad backing from other strata. The NSDAP drew on support from almost every social category, including blue-collar workers and Catholics, the two groups most resistant to National Socialism.7 Over the past decades, historians have researched the twelve years of Nazi rule more than any other period in German history. Much of this literature aims to sort out and define the causes of the Nazi rise to power, the regime’s tenacity, and the preconditions for atrocities, especially the Holocaust. Within these contexts, many researchers have investigated particular groups, including influential occupations such as the civil service, –

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business, and medicine. The focus of attention has shifted with time. The relationship between the economic elite and Nazism received considerable attention shortly after the war and into the mid 1950s, with a noticeable revival of interest in the late 1960s. Research into the role of the civil service intensified in the late 1950s, and even more throughout the 1960s. Aside from isolated studies, historians tended to overlook the relationship between the medical profession and Nazism until well into the 1970s. In the 1980s, the medical profession moved to the center of the research agenda.8 Rather than present the entire rich historiography of the Third Reich, this chapter highlights specific types of interaction between each occupation and National Socialism. This interplay not only changed elite groups in myriad ways, but also left civil servants, business leaders, and physicians with dark legacies by 1945. Higher civil servants rushed to join the NSDAP in 1933. Hans Mommsen has convincingly demonstrated that most civil servants welcomed the demise of the Weimar Republic and supported the Gleichschaltung of the administrative apparatus as the harbinger of social renewal. In demonstrating how murky the distinctions between the state administration and the Nazi Party became, Jane Caplan’s work complements Mommsen’s.9 Civil servants, especially those who survived in office until 1945, were to a great extent willing cogs in the Nazi state machinery, which ran efficiently, if not in lock step as was once assumed.10 Municipal, county, state, and national administrators played an important role in implementing Nazi ideas and policies. Their role in the Holocaust is but the most glaring example: civil servants identified, arrested, processed, and transported the victims; they also looked on or assisted as their colleagues, superiors as well as subordinates, were dismissed, harassed, arrested, or impoverished. Higher civil servants carry a heavier burden of responsibility than their subordinates, since they were in a stronger position to resist or avoid compliance. Because they historically played a larger role in formulating and interpreting laws and policies than their counterparts in other Western European countries or in the United States, senior civil servants even devised many quintessentially Nazi programs. Thus, it is difficult to accept the argument that higher civil servants were “just carrying out orders” from higher authorities, as some individuals successfully claimed before Allied and German denazification courts in the postwar period.11 German business leaders, especially in “big business,” have often been portrayed as co-conspirators in Hitler’s rise to power. In an overly simplistic manner, East German scholarship depicted fascism, including National Socialism, as an especially virulent form of “monopoly capitalism.” Some western accounts also overstate the connection between “big business” and the rise of the Third Reich. Others on the political left charge that big business secured Hitler’s electoral gains in the early 1930s by financing the party, making him salonfähig (respectable) in genteel circles, and otherwise –

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contributed to hoisting him to the Chancellorship.12 Many of these claims are exaggerated, resting on faulty premises. We now know, for instance, that the NSDAP relied financially more on admission fees at party rallies than on wealthy industrial contributors, and that very few big businessmen favored the NSDAP over other parties before 1932.13 IG Farben, for example, long the paragon of supposedly pro-Nazi businesses, contributed overwhelmingly to the DDP, the DVP, and the Center Party in the late Weimar period.14 As their preferred nationalist-conservative parties dwindled, however, more and more business leaders accepted the NSDAP as the only viable anti-Marxist alternative. Many of them continued to view the Party’s lower-middle class populism with disdain. Thus business leaders became important supporters of the Nazi movement, but only late and with some reluctance. The evidence supports the claim that business leaders welcomed Nazi actions once they came to power, but with important reservations. Most importantly, they generally acquiesced in, or even abetted the post-January 1933 persecution of communists and socialists, the smashing of the free trade unions, and the revival of the economy based on widespread coercion. Entrepreneurs assisted Nazi persecution as long as it served their interests. Many spied on and denounced employees, knowingly permitted Gestapo and SD agents to infiltrate their work places, drew on the slave labor of POWs, people from occupied territories, and concentration camp inmates. The most publicized of these actions is certainly IG Farben’s use of slave labor from the Auschwitz camp to build a gargantuan chemical complex in occupied Poland.15 Many entrepreneurs supported Nazi racial policies, often using them deliberately to eliminate competitors or to assist them in the appropriation of Jewish property (“aryanization”).16 Entrepreneurs also produced the weapons that prolonged the war and contributed to Hitler’s near victory. Rather than supporting National Socialism out of conviction, however, business leaders often accommodated themselves to changing circumstances, and proved willing to use the new order to their advantage. Even the exceptional “righteous Gentile,” Oskar Schindler, who ultimately prevented the murder of more than a thousand Jews, at first welcomed the opportunity to profit from the “aryanization” of a Jewish factory and the Wehrmacht’s demand for enamel-coated kitchenware.17 Even the British Marxist historian, Tim Mason, has argued that the German business community did not significantly influence policy in the Third Reich, which instead followed a “primacy of politics.”18 Of the three target groups, physicians sympathized with National Socialism more ardently than perhaps any other free profession. Like other members of the educated middle class, or Bildungsbürgertum, physicians supported the National Socialists in disproportionately high numbers.19 Falling incomes and declining social status radicalized them. In addition, they often found National Socialist racial theories appealing, as these were based largely on biologism and “racial hygiene” theories prevalent in the medical community. –

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Physicians were at the forefront of the “scientific” racial theories that formed an important pillar of Nazi ideology.20 The leading medical societies voluntarily dissolved, purged, or restructured themselves, thereby assisting in the then-exalted Gleichschaltung of their profession.21 Finally, medical professionals were more deeply involved in the worst atrocities of that regime than any other occupational group. Physicians weeded out the weak, handicapped, and ailing members of society for the massive forced sterilization and “euthanasia” projects. The Hadamar facility in present day Hesse, just north of Limburg, was one of the most notorious institutions in which medicalized mass killing with injections and gas took place. It was at Hadamar that the medical staff celebrated the murder of their ten thousandth victim with champagne.22 The “euthanasia” project was a direct precursor to the extermination camps, in which doctors also played an essential role, providing a veneer of “science” and “medicine” to mass murder.23 Only a portion of each elite group actually participated in the various forms of complicity described above, although it is impossible to establish precise numbers. In order to understand elite attitudes after the regime’s demise, the complexities of elite experience during the Third Reich must be explored. The following sections attempt to gauge more precisely the breadth and depth of National Socialism’s appeal within each group. Moreover, the ebb and flow of elites’ commitment to National Socialist ideology and policy over time illustrates that the political loyalties of the civil service, business leaders, and physicians were never static or predetermined. Just as occupational elites’ support for the Nazi Party had increased during the Weimar Republic in response to perceived crises, so their allegiances in a one-Party dictatorship changed in response to changing circumstances.

Elites and Nazism: Electoral Support and NSDAP Membership The Nazi movement would have remained a fringe phenomenon had Hitler not received a rapidly increasing proportion of the votes following the 1928 Reichstag elections. It was this support at the polls that paved the way for his appointment as Chancellor by President Hindenburg. The Nazi Party’s electoral success transcended class and social boundaries.24 While elites remained fairly insignificant as a proportion of the electorate, their influence at the local, regional, and national level renders their party loyalties more decisive than the statistics suggest.25 Voting behavior provides one indicator of political loyalties in the late Weimar period. The aggregate nature of electoral statistics and lack of modern exit polling hamper attempts to specify precisely which occupational groups voted for whom during the Weimar Republic. Advanced quantitative tools, especially multivariate regression analysis, have recently enabled researchers to deduce the voting behavior of some social groups with high –

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probability, albeit only for broad social categories.26 The available evidence suggests that members of all three target groups voted for the NSDAP in greater proportions than the electorate as a whole by 1932. Statistical studies have repeatedly confirmed that protest votes account for most of the NSDAP’s burgeoning support in the mid 1920s and the late Weimar years. Thomas Childers maintains that civil servants were one of the three critical groups which offered the NSDAP “crisis-related support,” along with middleclass pensioners and white-collar employees.27 After 1930, the NSDAP capitalized on civil service discontent and social malaise following Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s deflationary reduction of state salaries and pensions.28 Big businessmen followed the pattern of defection to the National Socialists at the polls, albeit for different reasons. As the effectiveness of their otherwise preferred nationalist parties ebbed, more and more business leaders turned to the NSDAP as a last bastion against communist and socialist inroads. Although it is difficult to isolate physicians statistically as an electoral group, free professionals responded to the growing threat of proletarianization with a shift toward more radical right-wing politics. The NSDAP garnered its highest share of the vote in freely contested national elections in the March 1932 Reichstag elections, becoming the largest party with 37.3 percent. Richard Hamilton has aptly commented that “five Germans out of eight steadfastly resisted the blandishments of Hitler and his party.”29 Despite some pockets of devoted supporters, many Nazi voters were conditional supporters. Thomas Childers claims that “[i]f the party’s support was a mile wide, it was at critical points an inch deep.”30 The shallowness of support for the National Socialists has implications for elites’ shifting attitudes during the Third Reich. The evidence suggests that only a minority of civil servants, doctors, and businessmen cast their ballots for the NSDAP, although by 1932 they did so in higher proportions than the general public. Because their loyalties were often pragmatic rather than ideological, specific political and economic developments were more likely to alter those loyalties. Inferences from the Nazi party’s electoral support end with the last free elections in November 1932, before Hitler’s assumption of the Chancellorship. For the years after 1933, NSDAP membership provides the best available indicator of elites’ relationship to the Nazi movement. Party membership offers a more precise approach to measuring elite affinity toward National Socialism than voting behavior. However, analysis of party membership has its own shortcomings. First, NSDAP membership indicates an altogether different type of support than electoral patronage. The decision to join any political organization, let alone one as extreme as the Nazi movement, requires a higher degree of conviction than casting a ballot. Moreover, the significance of Nazi Party membership changes with time. Michael Kater divides the party into three sociologically distinct periods. He characterizes the party’s members from its founding in 1919 to the beer-hall putsch of 1923 as young, lower-middle class, and Bavarian. During its sec–

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ond phase, from 1925 to 1931, the NSDAP made inroads into the middle-toupper-middle class while still remaining predominantly lower-middle class and youthful. Party propaganda during this second phase aimed at winning over workers and elites, but had only limited success. In the final phase, from 1932 until the end of the war, the age of members climbed and the uppermiddle class shifted more decisively to the NSDAP, without, however, overcoming the predominance of the lower-middle class.31 Both the denazification courts of the early postwar years and historians distinguish (as did the Nazi leadership) between early joiners, or “old fighters,” and the masses who flocked to the party after Hitler came to power. The “old fighters,” are generally considered to have most ardently shared the National Socialist vision.32 The Germans who joined when membership was broadly opened in May 1933, by contrast, earned the sarcastic nickname “March casualties” (Märzgefallene) due to their hasty and mass conversion.33 Many, if not most, were opportunists who hoped a party card would open doors for professional, social, and economic advancement. In addition, some opponents of the NSDAP signed up in the expectation that membership would provide a measure of protection against persecution. Still others were cajoled or forced into joining. In a common scenario, colleagues or superiors indicated that membership in the NSDAP or one of its affiliated organizations, such as the SA or SS, was a prerequisite to continued employment, a raise, or professional advancement. Carl D., a manager of a Hessian wholesale business and a future officer of a West German business association, claimed that he had joined the SS in 1934 only after repeatedly being reminded that his political independence (Parteilosigkeit) was a liability; colleagues impressed upon him that his position on the board of trustees of a bank and the viability of his own business were at stake.34 Most elite groups were underrepresented or only slightly overrepresented in the NSDAP before the onset of the depression and the disintegration of the nationalist DNVP and liberal DVP.35 Senior civil servants were underrepresented in the Nazi party before 1929. This resulted not only from an elitist aversion to the plebeian character of the party and civil servants’ self-conception as a non-partisan caste, but also from laws that ostensibly barred many of them from joining radical parties, especially in Prussia.36 The early standoffishness of high civil servants contrasts markedly with the behavior of lower and mid-level civil servants, who were overrepresented at this early juncture.37 Nevertheless, high civil servants steadily increased their proportion in the NSDAP over the course of the 1920s. By 1930, they were overrepresented.38 Business leaders similarly remained aloof from the Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations, although a few prominent converts such as Fritz Thyssen and entrepreneurs of the “Keppler circle” committed themselves to Hitler’s movement before 1933. Some, like Emil Helfferich, a Hamburg shipping magnate involved in the Keppler circle, often made no secret of their –

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support for the NSDAP, but did not join until late in 1932 or even after Hitler became Chancellor.39 Most influential industrialists of the Weimar Republic, however, remained loyal to the DNVP or the DVP until these parties’ electoral support, and with it their Reichstag representation, dried up. Faced with this crisis, some industrial leaders cast about for alternatives, and decided to throw their support to forming a coalition with the NSDAP in order to harness their mass backing.40 Whatever their parliamentary schemes, H. A. Turner is correct in refuting the myth that big business supported National Socialism as such, preferring instead nationalist conservatives like Franz von Papen. 41 This picture changes considerably when one casts an eye below the powerful industrialists and organizational leaders, such as Krupp, Thyssen, and Reusch. The entrepreneurs who joined the NSDAP in the early years were more likely to come from small and mediumsized towns than from the commercial centers of Hamburg and the Ruhr valley. They were more often captains of light industry and medium-sized commercial establishments than of steel or chemical giants.42 Of the three elite occupations under discussion here, only physicians made up a larger proportion of early NSDAP members than they did of the Reich population. The explanation that there were more proletarianized doctors than other elite professionals accounts only partly for their political proclivities.43 Their presence was especially evident before Hitler’s 1923 putsch, and fell off somewhat in the middle period, owing largely to apprehension about “Hitler’s diatribes against the upper bourgeoisie.”44 Elites’ eagerness to join the NSDAP declined markedly after 1933. The following graph, based on representative samples compiled by Michael Kater, indicates the comparative proportions of three broad social groups as joiners of the NSDAP.45 Points with a value above 1.0 indicate that a group is overrepresented among new joiners, while points below the line indicate underrepresentation. Chart 1.1 illustrates that elites as a whole were significantly overrepresented among new members of the NSDAP, but that the proportion of elites among NSDAP joiners fell throughout the Third Reich, in sharp contrast to the behavior of other social groups. Whereas in 1933 elites were represented among Nazi joiners more than four times their proportion in the population as a whole, they were slightly underrepresented after 1942. This chart should not gloss over the crucial fact that, in raw numbers, the lower-middle and lower classes overwhelmed elites in the Nazi Party even in 1933. It would be helpful to compare the elite’s representation in the NSDAP to their proportion in other Weimar parties, although common sense suggests that social elites were more prone than other social strata to join almost any party, with the exception of working-class parties. Chart 1.2 indicates the proportions of specific elite occupational categories joining the NSDAP during the Third Reich. It illustrates that a lower proportion of high civil servants than entrepreneurs or academic professionals –

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Percentage among NSDAP joiners compared to percentage in Reich

Chart 1.1 NSDAP joiners by social class, compared to proportion of German population, 1933-1944

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Source: Michael Kater, The Nazi Party (1983), Tables 1 and 7, pp. 241 and 253. The concept of this type of graph to display representation in the NSDAP in proportion to the German population also stems from Kater, p. 270-71.

joined the NSDAP, although they were all overrepresented. The high proportion of high civil servants who joined in 1933 (more than five times their proportion in the population!) followed the lifting of the official ban on party membership for Prussian civil servants in July 1932. Some used the occasion to follow their political convictions. Others joined the Party in order to enhance their job security.46 Hans Mommsen is surely correct in pointing out that the civil servants’ virtual storming of Party offices after 30 January 1933 cannot be attributed solely to external pressure or wooing from the party; clearly many were sympathizers who held back from joining until the ban was lifted.47 Higher civil servants’ subsequent behavior can only be described as volatile. By 1938, before the outbreak of the war, they were underrepresented among new members, but the NSDAP found new recruits among them in the following years.48 In fact, large numbers of civil servants stayed away from the party in spite of attempts by Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and high party officials to get them to join.49 Senior civil servants’ reluctance to join is highlighted when one recalls that lower and middle civil servants joined in greater proportions than their superiors. However, as Jane Caplan has pointed out, “the number of sympathizers [among the senior civil service] is less important than their quality and standing.”50 Nazi gains among civil servants resulted more from the limited new appointment of alte Kämpfer in lower and middle tracks. –

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Proportion among NSDAP joiners compared to proportion in population

Chart 1.2 Representation of elite occupations among NSDAP joiners, 1933-1944

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Source: Michael Kater, The Nazi Party (1983), Tables 1 and 7, pp. 241 and 253.

Kater attributes the sudden drop in new joiners in 1938 to their disappointment over the administrative arbitrariness of the Nazi’s first years in power as well as over legislation passed in 1937 which significantly abridged their traditional rights.51 To make matters worse, their real incomes continued to deteriorate. Beamte, with the important exception of the highest officials in the Reich administration, had lost roughly one-fourth of their salary in outright cuts as a result of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s economizing measures of 1930/31. During the first four years of the National Socialist regime, the rising cost of living further ate away at civil servants’ real incomes by fourteen to sixteen percent.52 Another explanation for the decline in newly tendered applications was frustration over Nazi interference into administrative affairs. Most high civil servants continued to believe they should remain above politics, and consequently resented intrusions by the NSDAP. The frequent post-1945 claim that higher civil servants were impressed into the NSDAP is largely a self-serving myth. At the same time, Nazis leaders dangled the careerist carrot before ambitious high civil servants. Faced with flagging party enlistment among the higher ranks, Interior Minister Frick drafted a decree that would have required active participation in a branch of the NSDAP, such as the Nazi People’s Welfare Organization (NSV), the SA or the SS. This decree was never issued, due to the intervention of Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess. By March 1939, Hess proved more –

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amenable. He informed Frick that, in the future, Party membership was a prerequisite for promoting the highest-paid civil servants. The resistance of individual divisions effectively blocked the implementation of these instructions, but their articulation illustrates the increasing frustration of the NSDAP leadership.53 Business leaders are consistently overrepresented, with peak years for joining in 1933 and 1939, which Kater equates with “climaxes of satisfaction with the regime.” Unlike high civil servants, they exhibited no strong tendency to stay away from the party at any time. Clearly, Hitler’s reassurances that the Nazis would not alter the capitalist structure of the economy overcame one of the main reservations they had about the “socialist” aspects of National Socialism. In the first eighteen months of rule, the Nazis smashed the free trade unions and swept away agitation for nationalization and socialization. Kater further attributes the 1939 peak to initial satisfaction with the opportunities for financial gain that the Nazi regime provided business leaders: job creation measures, the rearmament program, and aryanization.54 Academic professionals joined less frequently at first, partly compensating for their high proportion among “old fighters.” Physicians, however, were more likely to sign up than were other professionals (including engineers, architects, and dentists). In fact, more doctors joined the party than perhaps any other professional group after 1933.55 Estimates of the total proportion of German doctors who signed on with the NSDAP vary from thirty-nine percent to fifty percent.56 Counting veterinarians and dentists with physicians, Michael Kater estimates that, “from 1925 to 1944 there were almost three times as many doctors […] in the party as in the population of the Reich.” Medical doctors comprised one-fifth of all academic professionals who were new to the party in 1935, and more than one-third four years later, in 1939.57 In a re-evaluation of Kater’s primary data, Konrad Jarausch points out that veterinarians, foresters, and judges were even more overrepresented than physicians. He and Kater agree that age played a significant role among all joiners, with those in their twenties and early thirties most likely to be among joiners.58 Physicians’ income from the public insurance system was falling, and contributed to an overall decline in income before 1933. Even those doctors who fared relatively well feared attempts to institute a fully socialized medical system, favored by many SPD and KPD politicians and left-leaning colleagues.59 Among the many factors that influenced elite occupational groups’ support of the Nazi Party, none was more important than material security. Both physicians and civil servants feared their falling income and status even more than big businessmen in the late Weimar Republic. Both lent the party their votes and their membership to greater degrees than either entrepreneurs or managers before 1933. As with other occupations, the purges of Jews and political opponents initially eased the employment squeeze for the unmolested majority, especially in medicine and medium-sized business, –

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where the Jewish minority was more significant. But due to the poor and deteriorating social and economic position of Beamte, the numbers of applicants declined. Between 1928 and 1938, students registering in the law faculties, the preferred course of study for aspiring high civil servants, fell to less than one-third of the 1928 peak (22,000 to 6,237), and was less than oneeighth in the war years 1941 and 1943.60 The bureaucracy burgeoned to record proportions under the Nazis, but the explosion of the state administration was fed by a fourfold increase of non-tenured civil service employees (Angestellte), compared to less than a doubling of Beamte between 1933 and 1942. Most of the newly-installed civil servants were “old fighters” rather than post-1933 joiners. Despite the expansion of positions and decline of applicants, civil servants’ salaries did not keep up with those of other academic careers. While chancellery officials received special bonuses in 1935, 1937, and 1943, these were not accompanied by raises for other officials.61 Interior Ministry proposals in 1938 and 1939 to raise civil service salaries were undercut by the shifting priorities engendered by the outbreak of war. The worsening undersupply of civil servants brought with it few tangible material gains. Physicians and entrepreneurs fared better than higher civil servants after 1933. The Nazi years brought with them a rapid contraction of the supply of physicians in Germany, as Jews, socialists, and others were forced out. For the remaining doctors, a contraction in numbers meant an expansion in income. This reversed the trend of the Weimar years, when the number of physicians per capita shot up from prewar levels of roughly 50 per 100,000 population to 60 in 1921, 70 by 1926, and almost 80 by 1930. The perceived overcrowding was even greater in the cities.62 The post-1933 shrinkage of the supply of doctors, coupled with the economic recovery, brought with it the expected rise in income for those who remained. Tax reports indicate that the average annual income of German doctors bottomed out at 9,300 marks in 1933, and rose considerably, reaching 15,000 marks in 1938.63 Businesses profited from the revival of the domestic economy. Public investment designed to prepare the country for war, and then the war itself, compensated for the decline in external trade. Economic improvements largely explain entrepreneurs’ and physicians’ higher levels of party entries after 1933. Yet they fail to provide a complete explanation. For that, less tangible factors need to be weighed. By 1945, a considerable number of high civil servants, entrepreneurs, and physicians had joined or actively supported Nazi organizations. American military government officers were at a loss as to how to deal with the situation. Differentiating between the committed activists and the mass of opportunists was too arduous and time consuming to be feasible amid the myriad difficulties of governing war-ravaged Germany. The immediate solution was to assume that higher Party or occupational status signaled greater guilt. While some untainted individuals with leadership ability or experience could –

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be found for many top jobs, exclusion of Nazis often created personnel crises in areas where expertise was a primary requirement of the occupation. Military government officials found it necessary to grant exceptions in the interests of more effective administration. Claims of expertise were not merely a ploy to slip former Nazis through the denazification process. The politically impeccable Dr. von Drigalski, a prominent leader of Hesse’s postwar physicians’ organizations, found it impossible to staff hospitals in Kurhessen because “the almost complete nazification of the medical profession” eliminated many potential candidates.64 The high degree of Nazi members in all three occupations was complicated by the nearly complete reorganization that had taken place among elite occupational associations.

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The Nazification of Professional Organizations Physicians, civil servants, and entrepreneurs all participated in the bourgeois proliferation of occupational and leisure organizations that had sprouted up since the late nineteenth century. By 1933, these professions were not only united by a handful of powerful national umbrella organizations (Spitzenverbände, or peak-organizations), but also splintered into a plethora of hierarchically, politically, and specialty-defined Vereine (associations), Bünde (leagues), Gemeinschaften (societies), and Kammern (chambers).65 National Socialists adeptly exploited this Vereinsmeierei (“clubbishness”) for their own ends. Party activists infiltrated some existing professional organizations or won national conservatives over to the völkisch cause. They also established new, overtly Nazi associations, leagues, and clubs for nearly every elite occupation, popular avocation, or cultural pursuit. In addition to sports and leisure clubs, such as the National Socialist Aviation Corps and the National Socialist Motor Corps, they founded National Socialist occupational groups. The triple purpose of such organizations was to gather together like-minded colleagues, pursue political ends within their constituencies, and draft Nazi policies in preparation for electoral campaigns and for the day when Hitler would attain leadership.66 After the National Socialist takeover, the once independent occupational interest groups were subsumed into the vast overlapping networks of the Nazi State. Some dissolved themselves, others willingly attached themselves to larger Nazi organizations as subordinate offices. Still others were forcibly disbanded. Only a few of the once staunchly independent groups remained structurally more or less intact by declaring allegiance to the new order. Whatever the individual case, leaders who were not stripped of their decision-making positions found that life in the Third Reich required them to compromise their autonomy in order to survive professionally. The Gleichschaltung of occupational organizations proceeded rapidly, and was essentially complete by 1935. It required the active support of many prominent –

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elites, but also met with resistance of many others who did not wish to abandon their independence. The manager of one business association, who joined the SS in 1934 and the NSDAP in 1937, later claimed to have openly resisted its infiltration by National Socialists. Several colleagues corroborate his portrayal of events.67 The nazification of professional networks pleased many elites, but also left many others apprehensive or alienated. To the extent that the nazified associations represented the interests of their constituents, they could win strong support in the following years. However, when they functioned mainly as instruments of state interference in professional prerogatives, they could also engender considerable antipathy. At the end of World War II, the role of most elite occupational associations stood in doubt. Because they had failed elite occupational groups in many ways, the removal of the Nazi-era leadership was seldom mourned. At the same time, high civil servants, business elites, and physicians needed effective interest groups to protect them from what they rightly feared could be an even further erosion of their interests. Consequently, these occupations sought guarantees of their independence and “traditional” rights, above all corporatist decision-making autonomy. As military government directives permitted, and sometimes earlier, they set about to recreate or reinvigorate associations that, in their view, the National Socialists had hijacked or eliminated. In order to legitimize those associations, they not surprisingly drew on pre-1933 associational structures. A brief overview of often confusing alphabet soup of organizations is therefore necessary if one wishes to understand post-1945 developments. In the Weimar Republic, Beamte had perhaps the most extensive associational network of any occupational group. As public employees, they were not allowed to strike, but they exerted their interests in many other ways. More than 900 civil service associations existed, almost all affiliated with one of five peak organizations, each with its own political character. The foremost of these, the democratic-republican League of German Beamte (Deutscher Beamtenbund, DBB), boasted around a million members. This league was followed by the social-democratic Comprehensive League of German Beamte (Allgemeiner Deutscher Beamtenbund), and the conservative-elitist Reich League of Higher Civil Servants (Reichsbund der höheren Beamten, RhB), which represented only senior civil servants. The catholic Zentrum-dominated Comprehensive Federation of German Beamte and State Civil Service Leagues (Gesamtverband deutscher Beamten- und Staatsangestelltenverbände) and the leftliberal Civil Servants’ Division of the Trade Union Ring (Gewerkschaftsring, Beamtenabteilung), were less significant.68 The RhB demonstrated its ambivalence toward the Weimar Republic during the Kapp Putsch of 1920 by refusing to comply with the general strike that the Government had called for as an act of resistance. Many historians have cited this lack of action as an indication of higher civil servants’ basic antipathy toward the Republican institutions.69 Jane Caplan, however, points –

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out that the government did not pressure higher civil servants to strike, but rather “instructed them to remain at their posts while refusing to cooperate with the putschists.”70 In other words, while conservative in outlook and certainly not well disposed toward the new Republic, they did resist the coup in a limited way, although more out of a preference for orderly processes than a dedication to democracy. The National Socialist German Students’ League (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), founded in 1926, served as a primary incubator of Nazi senior civil servants. In 1928, party zealots in the legal profession created the National Socialist League of German Jurists (Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Juristen), for lawyers, judges, and academically-trained higher civil servants; only ten percent of all members (only 700 at the end of 1932) were senior government officials in December 1930, compared to over half who were lawyers.71 In addition, the special civil service department of the NSDAP agitated under the leadership of Jakob Sprenger, who went on to become the Gauleiter of Hesse in 1933.72 Their efforts were geared toward maintaining good relations with the existing DBB while infiltrating the large umbrella organization, the DBB, but with only limited success.73 Gleichschaltung swiftly curtailed civil servants’ occupational autonomy in 1933 and 1934.74 Two main professional groups were established toward the end 1933, the NSDAP’s Main Civil Service Office (Hauptamt für Beamte, HfB) and the Reich League of German Civil Servants (Reichsbund der deutschen Beamten, RDB). For the most part, however, the existing organizations threw their loyalties to Hitler in the spring, censoring themselves and stifling internal dissent. The RDB and the HfB never achieved the overweaning dominance over the profession exercised by the comparable Reich Physicians’ League in its sphere. After 1934, both Nazi-affiliated associations lost power in the internal political jockeying that characterized the Third Reich, and were dissolved in 1943.75 As it turned out, the real center of authority in civil service questions was the interior ministry, headed by Wilhelm Frick until 1943, and by Heinrich Himmler thereafter.76 Their authority suffered from unremitting interference from Party leaders, especially the Deputies of the Führer, Rudolf Hess, and Martin Borman.77 By 1945, the civil service associations that remained had been so thoroughly compromised that no amount of purging or reforms could transform them into viable lobbying organizations. Elite state administrators therefore turned to the imperfect models of the republican past to advance their interests. German business, especially big business, was also highly organized during the Weimar Republic. Through strong regional and national organizations, business leaders were able to influence politics as well as regulate competition. At the primary level, heavy industry was highly cartelized. Steel conglomerates like United Steel Works were vertically and horizontally coordinated. IG Farben, the mammoth, diversified chemical and pharmaceutical cartel, is the best known example. In other economic sectors, –

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branch-specific associations, or Verbände, regulated competition, fixing market shares, excluded newcomers, and informed their members about political and economic developments. These Verbände in turn came together under umbrella organizations, dominated by the heavy steel, coal, and chemical giants. The most powerful was the Reich Federation of German Industry (Reichsverband der deutschen Industrie, RDI).78 The more explicitly political Federation of German Employers’ Associations operated during the Weimar Republic as a partner of the RDI, aiming primarily to counter the growing power of trade unions.79 The Chambers of Industry and Commerce (Industrie- und Handelskammern) served a unique function. Formed in the late nineteenth century, their role was circumscribed by law, and membership was obligatory for all registered businesses. As public-law bodies (Körperschaften des öffentlichen Rechts), they were formally independent, but their higher managers were salaried civil servants paid by the state. They were obligated to carry out certain public functions, such as providing expert council to the government, maintaining business registries, and running the stock exchange. They also offered advice and information to businesses, and lobbied the government on their behalf.80 Representatives of these regional chambers maintained a private, and nominally voluntary, Federation of German Chambers of Industry and Trade (Industrie- und Handelstag, DIHT) at the national level, which wielded considerable influence and cooperated with the government in drafting policy and legislation. National Socialist leaders proceeded more cautiously in synchronizing the economic organizations of big business than with the comparable institutions of the medical and civil service communities. Like their counterparts in other occupational spheres, business associations pledged their support for the new government in the spring of 1933. Also similar was the Nazi press’s continued criticism of the institutions, and big business in general, as “liberalistic, Jew-infested, capitalistic, and reactionary.”81 As with civil servants, the NSDAP established no independent entrepreneurs’ association until shortly before the seizure of power, but relied instead on a special section within the party, headed by Otto Wagener, later succeeded by Wilhelm Keppler. They created two new organizations in the mid 1930s: the Organization of Trade and Economy (Handels- und Wirtschaftsorganisation) and the Reich Economics Chamber (Reichswirtschaftskammer). The latter brought all existing trade-specific associations under its control, rechristening them as Reich groups (Reichsgruppen) after extensive reorganization throughout 1933 and 1934.82 The timing and nature of business’s synchronization differs markedly from that experienced by either physicians or civil servants. The RDI was left intact only until late 1933. The regional Chambers of Industry and Trade at first continued to function as they had in previous years, with the added burden of passing on and enforcing National Socialist laws and decrees, such as –

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the “aryanization” of Jewish businesses, and measures aimed at advancing the autarky of the German economy. Their partial resistance to the regime’s interference spurred the creation of more hierarchically organized Gau Economic Chambers, capped by a central Reich Economic Chamber.83 The Gau Economic Chambers represented a hybrid of old and new; they drew personnel largely from the preexisting 111 Chambers of Industry and Trade and 71 Chambers of Handicraft. The old chambers were legally dissolved in 1942, and new jurisdictional boundaries were drawn for the merely 41 Gau Economic Chambers. 84 Interference in individual enterprises remained limited compared to that in civil service and the health professions until the pressures of war with the Soviet Union sparked a fundamental change. This was first symbolized by the creation in 1940 of the efficient Organisation Todt, named after its first chief, Fritz Todt, and headed after 1942 by the young and dynamic Albert Speer. Its purpose was to streamline the production and delivery of war materiel, but its broad powers enabled it to intrude into decision-making within individual plants.85 One of the most irksome developments from the perspective of business leaders was their loss of control over the labor supply. While it is true that many establishments brutally exploited the slave laborers drawn from occupied territories or from concentration camps, many accepted these workers reluctantly. Some maneuvered to retain or regain a German work force. In some cases, they complained about and even tried to circumvent the mistreatment and undernourishment of their involuntary laborers, mainly because they recognized the negative effect of such inhumane treatment on labor quality and productivity. The foremost pre-Nazi medical association, the Hartmannbund, and its affiliated organization, the League of German Physicians’ Associations (Deutscher Ärztevereinsbund), were only gradually dissolved after 1933. Nazicontrolled establishments took over their functions in stages, eventually eliminating them 1936. By contrast, the regional physicians’ chambers (Ärztekammern), public-law bodies like the Chambers of Industry and Trade, were not stripped of their powers, but placed under the direct and binding purview of a new, centralized Reich Physicians’ Chamber (Reichsärztekammer, RÄK) in 1936.86 This chamber was in fact a front for National Socialist control of the profession, not the type of self-regulated interest-group that physicians had advocated for decades.87 The Nazi fifth column in the medical profession was the National Socialist Physicians’ League (Nationalsozialistischer Ärztebund, NSÄB), founded at the Nuremberg Party rally in 1929.88 The NSÄB, led by “old fighter,” Dr. Gerhard Wagner, orchestrated the complete synchronization of the medical profession.89 After assuming the NSÄB leadership in 1932, Wagner worked tirelessly to unify medical practice throughout the country. He drew on the revolutionary fervor of the first months of Nazi rule to break down the traditional regional health care organizations’ prerogatives. The Association of –

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German Health-Insurance Physicians (Kassenärztliche Vereinigung Deutschlands, KVD), established in 1933, quickly absorbed the thousands of regional and local public insurance funds throughout the country. The KVD purged politically and racially undesirable doctors from insurance lists and expropriated the assets of the defunct Hartmannbund in 1936.90 The Reich Physicians’ Ordinance (Reichsärzteordnung, RÄO) of December 1935, which Wagner helped to draft, centralized German medicine for the first time in its history. Among other requirements, it compelled all practicing physicians to join the RÄK. The thorough reorganization of the medical profession by 1936 surpassed anything that civil servants or entrepreneurs experienced. Using the powers of his many offices and titles, Wagner ordered doctors to report on mentally and physically handicapped patients in preparation for forced sterilization and euthanasia programs. He required them to attend medical extension seminars, which offered indoctrination courses in racial biology. But even this apparently streamlined and hierarchical bureaucracy faced constant competition from other sectors. One reason for the creation of the RÄK to augment the KVD was that the latter overlapped with the jurisdiction of Robert Ley’s Ministry of Labor. When Wagner died in 1939, his rival, Dr. Leonardo Conti, acquired his offices, as well as the additional title of Reich Health Leader. Later, under the pressures of war, Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, gained the upper hand over Conti and was appointed as the Führer’s plenipotentiary in all matters of German health, thereby duplicating and superceding many of Conti’s responsibilities.91 The fate of elite occupational organizations reflected both the support that Hitler found among them before 1933 and the sources of the elite’s growing dissatisfaction with many aspects of National Socialist reality thereafter. Vocal activists established National Socialist bridgeheads within each profession before 1933. Working from these bases, committed National Socialists within the occupations themselves propagandized for their cause and recruited new members until the Nazi takeover in 1933. Significantly, however, most civil servants, business leaders, and physicians remained loyal to the existing representational associations until their dissolution. Furthermore, while most occupational interest groups surrendered more or less willingly to Gleichschaltung, they were often less than enthusiastic. Without the Nazi assumption of power, it is doubtful that National Socialism would have taken over from within.92 However, the rapid expansion of Nazi influence within traditional organizations, as well as the proliferation of explicitly National Socialist professional organizations such as the NSÄB and the NSDAP Beamtenabteilung, suggests significant and expanding elite support, at least until the outbreak of the war. Despite their reservations about the Nazi movement during the Weimar Republic, elites turned increasingly toward cooperation with Hitler out of antagonism toward the faltering parliamentary institutions, declining econ–

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omy, and perceived professional crises. Many welcomed Hitler’s takeover as the beginning of national renewal. In keeping with the hopes they placed in the new order, most non-socialist organizations declared their loyalty to Hitler’s government. At the same time, they often abhorred the brutality and illegality of many measures, such as the Röhm putsch of 1934. Above all, professionals came to resent the smashing of the occupational organizations they had fought so hard and long to create and empower. The disappearance of the Hartmannbund, for example, and the creation of the Reich Physicians’ Chamber, left doctors with no effective lobbying organization; the new national chamber dictated rather than represented. Entrepreneurs witnessed a similar trend beginning with the Four-Year Plan in 1936, and especially following the creation of the Gau Economic Chambers. Higher civil servants continued to serve the state, and found a relatively effective advocate in the career administrator and National Socialist, Wilhelm Frick. But they, too, lost their organizational voice. The evaporation of interest-group activity on their behalf was noticed, missed, and became a sore point that they wished to assuage after the collapse of Nazism. This led some occupational elites to press for significant reform after 1945, but the overwhelming, conservative majority preferred to return to what became, with the experiments and chaos of the Nazi revolution and the war fresh in their minds, the relative golden age of the years before 1933. The Weimar experience, in other words, came to be remembered in a more positive light, as a flawed but corrigible model. In their eyes, it was frequently not their professional organizations that went awry, but the crisis-prone Weimar democracy that Hitler and his minions supposedly had taken by ruse and force, and their professional institutions with it.

The Legal Legacy of the Third Reich Laws and decrees promulgated during the Third Reich left multiple legacies for elite occupations. This is particularly true for those laws that stayed on the books until after the creation of the Federal Republic, such as the German Civil Service Code (Deutsches Beamtengesetz, DBG) of 1937. Even stripping them of their explicitly Nazi provisions, some legal innovations of the Hitler era remained. Some laws that altered the organization or composition of elite occupational groups are discussed above. Still others created programs that physicians, civil servants, and business leaders were supposed to carry out. Because they tell us so much about what went wrong in the professions, we should not discount the legal developments under the Nazis even if the regime’s leaders often acted illegally. Civil service legislation concentrated on redirecting the loyalties of civil servants while reaffirming “traditional” structures. As employees of the state, civil servants were more directly affected by legislation than were physicians –

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and the business elite. Immediately after assuming power on 30 January 1933, Hitler instituted a series of “immediate measures,” decrees which required no special laws or powers.93 These filled the gap until the proclamation of more comprehensive legislation. Two major civil service laws during the Third Reich epitomized the tension between professional civil servants’ hopes and increasing frustrations. The main objective of the April 1933 “Law to Restore a Professional Civil Service” was to purge political and racial undesirables from the ranks.94 Perhaps more important, although less frequently noted, the 1933 law increased the power of the central authorities, above all Wilhelm Frick’s Interior Ministry, and opened the way for those authorities to circumvent otherwise sacrosanct rules on tenure.95 The German Civil Service Law of 1937, by contrast, was the first comprehensive revision since 1873 of the framework legislation for the civil service. Drawing heavily on both the ideas and the terminology of the 1873 law, it codified admissions requirements, structure, procedures, systems of remuneration, and disciplinary principles for the civil service. While several clauses of the DBG were clearly National Socialist innovations, the law effectively reaffirmed the traditional three-track system, hierarchy, and administrative independence that had come to characterize the German bureaucracy. Tellingly, it went a long way toward affirming the authority of Frick’s interior ministry against encroachments by the NSDAP, especially by the Führer’s deputy.96 Nevertheless, it did codify specific circumstances that would permit circumvention of the official hierarchy, a staple of the hallowed Prussian administrative model. The clearest breach of bureaucratic discipline was to permit Nazi civil servants to inform the NSDAP if they perceived a threat to the interests of the Party. This merely legitimized existing practices that bedeviled higher civil servants, but it also set a potentially dangerous precedent. While trying to affirm traditional hierarchies and independence from political interference was a major goal of most senior administrative officials, both Nazi laws in fact undermined it. The NSDAP failed to deliver on its pledge to stop the “politicization of the civil service” which had won it many converts in the high civil service. Political patronage increased rather than decreased. Professional-minded high civil servants resented, but largely absorbed, upstart Party loyalists who rose through the ranks without the proper qualifications. In response to traditionalists’ resistance, NSDAP leaders increasingly circumvented the bureaucracy altogether, especially in newly annexed areas of the Reich. This in turn further alienated high administrators. The result was more or less of a standoff between an only slightly flexible traditional civil service and the National Socialists’ Party Chancellery.97 The Nazi regime instituted fewer legal controls over the business community than it did over medicine and the civil service. The most evident example of the relative freedom left to business leaders is the almost com–

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plete lack of nationalization and socialization aside from racially and politically motivated expropriation. Even the “aryanization” of the economy proceeded largely without explicit decrees; Jewish entrepreneurs usually sold their businesses “voluntarily,” in preparation for emigration or because blatant anti-Semitism, consumer boycotts, vandalism, or threats of violence made their businesses untenable.98 The lack of nationalization did not indicate the state’s ideological commitment to private property. Hitler was willing to have the public sector assume the tasks of production and distribution if need be. Planks in early party platforms, eventually dropped, called for the nationalization of cartels, banks, and large corporations. Nevertheless, the regime maintained a hands-off approach to big business as long as industry and trade met the regime’s demands. The carrot of profit was accompanied by the stick of potential confiscation. Hitler’s frustration with private enterprise’s fulfillment of the Four-Year Plan led him to remark in 1937: “If private enterprise does not carry through the Four-Year Plan, the State will assume full control of business.”99 The founding of the state-owned steel-producing Reichswerke Hermann Goering two months earlier, in spite of entrepreneurial objections, lent added urgency to the threat.100 Some early legislation offered business leaders what they had hoped for from the new government. A labor decree of 1934 gave employers near total authority to set wages and working conditions. While decisions had to be approved by regional trustees of labor, the replacement of free trade unions by Robert Ley’s German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) had eliminated the collective bargaining check on the powers of the bosses.101 The DAF, however, could also meddle in internal business affairs, demanding dues, interfering in hiring decisions, or policing the political atmosphere. Clearly, business leaders still had trouble guarding against challenges to their authority as the Herr im Hause. Other decrees reduced entrepreneurs’ decision-making elbow room. Autarky and the even more drastic economic isolation caused by the war dismayed internationally-oriented business leaders in the chemical, electrical, and steel industries.102 With the Four-Year Plan, the state set goals and directions for businesses, circumventing the profit and incentive systems that German business leaders held almost as dear as their British and American counterparts. Even producers in the non-military industries were affected by the accelerated rearmament drive initiated by the Four-Year Plan: the major investments necessary in large, urban heavy industries reduced the capital available for fostering smaller, rural, supposedly “organic” enterprises that Nazi ideology officially favored.103 Entrepreneurs and managers, welcoming the economic recovery and enforced, owner-dominated authoritarianism, balked at the growing levels of party intrusion into their domain. When Albert Speer’s Ministry for War Production pressed greater regimentation of the industrial economy beginning in 1942, some business leaders saw in it the onset of socialist planning.104 Legal innovations in the practice of medi–

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cine were more comprehensive. They made physicians accomplices in the worst Nazi atrocities. Aside from the laws purging the profession of Jews and political outcasts, and beyond the organizational regimentation of the profession, new laws required that doctors preside over the racial purification of the German “body.” The first major law that drew physicians into this racial scheme was the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring in July 1933. It required physicians, hospitals and mental health institutions to register patients suffering from genetically transmitted ailments with a newly-established Hereditary Health Court. This was followed two years later by the infamous Nuremberg race laws of 1935. The Blood Protection Law of the same year required everyone to obtain a certificate of health, including family health history, before marriage. 105 These racial hygiene laws transformed doctors into accomplices of the most ambitious and murderous eugenics program in human history. Disregarding or stretching the medical profession’s fundamental principle of doctor/patient privilege, thousands of physicians complied with the compulsory registration of their patients.106 The hereditary health boards, in turn, traded medical information with health and welfare offices, the judiciary, judicial branches, and the police. Even NSDAP offices, insurance companies, and the “central criminal-biological bureau” had access. Some eugenics laws spelled out the consequences of physicians’ breach of ethics: the hereditary health courts could order the forcible sterilization of incurable carriers of “defective genetic material.” Few appeals were successful.107 Physicians also carried out these sterilizations, which totaled as many as 400,000 by 1945.108 The far more radical “euthanasia” program, which began in 1939, was shrouded in greater secrecy, and involved a smaller number of physicians. An entire twilight bureaucracy was established, with headquarters in Berlin. Medical examiners, all physicians, reviewed individual cases in assemblyline fashion, marking supposedly serious cases for death without once meeting the patients. The patients were then shuffled among several mental health institutions, some established solely for the purpose, until they finally arrived at one of several killing centers. There they were lethally injected, starved, or gassed. The physicians in charge spent most of their time fabricating mendacious but plausible causes of death. 109 As word leaked out, opposition, primarily from the Catholic clergy, but also from some conscientious medical practitioners, caused Hitler to discontinue the official “euthanasia” program within two years, but it ground on unofficially until—and in some cases even beyond—Germany’s capitulation.110 The euthanasia program served as a practical model for the later “final solution of the Jewish question”; euthanasia personnel as well as methods were applied in the transportation, execution techniques, and cover-up of the death camp system.111 For the most part, the advancing Allies in 1944 and 1945 annulled the laws and decrees that ordered forced sterilization. Officially sanctioned –

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euthanasia had been discontinued during the war, but the strict ban on abortion for “Aryan” Germans, a less lethal plank in the biologist program, outlasted the regime. The ban on most abortions instituted by the Nazis mainly strengthened the enforcement of §218, the Weimar-era abortion law. By 1939, physicians performing unauthorized abortions could receive the death penalty.112 Neither the Allies nor the German medical community considered the abortion ban to be National Socialist in character, although more recent scholarship draws an unequivocal connection.113 Higher civil servants, business leaders, and physicians all experienced a transformation of their legal environment during the Third Reich that rivaled the restructuring of their interest group organizations. In many ways, Naziera legislation seemed to meet their needs. The regime’s rhetoric affirmed crucial principles, such as the three-track civil service, private ownership of big business, and the self-regulation of the medical profession. Reality and later laws, however, ate away at these chimerical victories. The politicization of the civil service, and the circumvention of administrative procedural hierarchies increased rather than abated in practice. Business leaders’ decisionmaking latitude decreased, especially after the Germany faced its first major setbacks in the war in the winter of 1942/43. Physicians, who gained uniform standards for practicing throughout the Reich, were also required to violate the doctor/patient relationship, often becoming witting accomplices to state-sanctioned murder. In the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s collapse, legal continuity varied by occupation. Compared to business and the administration, more of the explicitly “Nazi” legislation pertaining to medicine was annulled.

Personnel Composition of Elite Occupations Several historians have debated whether the Third Reich constituted a Nazi social revolution, a key component of which is the exchange of incumbent elites with upstart cadres from the ranks of National Socialism.114 The Nazi movement was, however, less successful than one might expect in replacing the old elite with its own. In the course of twelve years, NSDAP members permeated the medical community, the civil service, and the business world. Many were (or at least had been) convinced and dedicated adherents, but many more were opportunists, fellow travelers, and occasionally silent opponents. By almost any measure, the replacement of pre-1933 elites by convinced National Socialists succeeded most among physicians and civil servants, in that order. Prior to 1933, Nazi propagandists singled out the civil service for purges. With characteristic hyperbole and exaggeration, they charged that republican governments had diluted the civil service with “political” Beamte. Weimar reformers often found that the academic qualifications necessary for entry –

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into the senior civil service (a legal degree and administrative training) blocked the rapid advancement of new elites.115 The political leadership of the Weimar Republic shied away from altering the traditional three-track system and its concomitant educational qualifications for higher posts. Hoping to placate civil servants, they thereby renounced actions that would have enabled a thorough exchange of personnel on political grounds. The most notable and lasting change that the Weimar Republic brought to the senior civil service was reduced domination by the nobility. During the Third Reich, the importance of the nobility continued to decline.116 The advancement of women in the higher ranks was not nearly as dramatic. In spite of the Weimar constitution’s commitment to the equality of women, “no more than fifty women [rose to positions] in senior public-service posts.” This sluggish progress was even reversed after 1924, when many married women were forcibly retired.117 The Nazi regime excluded women from the civil service more vigorously. By 1945, no women remained in the highest political offices, and only a few tenured, single women remained in tenured senior posts. The National Socialists, by contrast, made great strides in loading the civil service with Party members. However, the permanent effect of their personnel policies on the high civil service was more limited than it might seem on the surface. One avenue open to the regime was to exploit the rapid burgeoning of the German bureaucracy under Hitler, but in fact the real increase took place among non-tenured employees rather than among more secure Beamte. A review of the effects within the Frankfurt city administration of 1936 and 1937 decrees granting tenure to “old fighters” who had only nontenured positions revealed that not a single one entered the senior or elevated (gehobene) grades.118 The same obstacles that had frustrated Weimar’s reformers also bedeviled the National Socialists. Since most “old fighters” lacked the requisite qualifications, relatively few established themselves in the higher echelons of the civil service.119 The Law on the Professional Civil Service had little effect in breaking down the traditional structure and educational qualifications. Hans Mommsen has pointed out that to the extent that the effects of the [Law on the Professional Civil Service] can be summarized, they lead to the conclusion that the structure of the civil service as a whole was hardly changed. […] A meaningful shake-up occurred in the senior ranks, but even this was limited.120

The implementation of the 1933 law took a smaller toll than might be expected. The Papen government, beginning 20 July 1932, had already begun to reverse Republican gains before Hitler came to power.121 The 1933 law led to the dismissal of a further one to two percent of all Reich and Prussian civil servants under its political and racial purge clauses; among the 1,663 senior officials of the Prussian Interior administration, the rate was 12.5 percent, reflecting the stricter application of the law in the upper –

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ranks.122 One department of the Reich finance administration experienced eighty cases of removal for political and racial reasons, and a further 1,222 nominally administrative layoffs; perhaps the overwhelming majority of the latter were at root political, even though the means for dismissal were not overtly so.123 The war strained and altered the composition of the high civil service. National Socialist leaders used the manpower needs of the military to their advantage. They deliberately spared party officials in the civil service from conscription and filled vacant positions with loyal NSDAP members.124 Beyond that, the administration of newly annexed and occupied territories required German civil servants, but even these were drawn mainly from the existing bureaucracy. As in other elite professions, civil servants were spread so thin that the very functioning of some offices was threatened.125 Unfortunately, there is a dearth of information on the compositional changes within the business community. Circumstantial evidence, however, indicates that this occupational group underwent a great deal less reshuffling than either physicians or civil servants. The state and party interfered less in personnel questions in the business sector than it did in the civil service. While the state wielded considerable power over establishments that profited from public expenditure, especially armaments manufacturers, the licensing of business enterprises was less tightly regulated than, for example, medicine. The exclusion of Jews represented a significant alteration of the German business community, since Jews were overrepresented in many branches such as in banking and the wholesale trade. Beyond that, however, the regime did not interfere in personnel decisions as much as in other sectors of German society. Party officials did pressure bigger corporations to demonstrate Nazi party members in high positions. The response was frequently blatant tokenism: a number of board members would sign up with the party or an affiliated organization.126 In this way, and by retiring or removing politically unacceptable individuals, they could demonstrate their loyalty and fend off attempts to bring in staunch party members from outside. The board of directors at the Opel factory in Rüsselsheim, near Frankfurt, chose both options, although relations with Gauleiter Jakob Sprenger remained strained.127 Doctors were replaced in large proportions, owing largely to the relatively large proportion of Jews removed in the course of purges. Compared to business and the civil service, Jews constituted a much larger minority of physicians in 1933. The emigration, exclusion, and murder of Jewish-German doctors was the single most dramatic change in the profession’s composition between 1933 and 1945.128 Paradoxically, the war caused a shortage of quality medical care in Germany at the same time that the numbers of physicians reached unprecedented proportions. There were almost 80,000 doctors in 1944, compared with 48,000 in 1931, but 32,000 of the wartime figure were at the military fronts. At the same time, doctors belonging to insurance panels fell from a ratio of one per 1,344 Germans in 1934 to one per 2,543 by –

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mid 1943.129 War casualties also took a higher toll on the medical elite than on the other groups under consideration. At the same time, the composition of the German community of physicians changed in other ways that the Nazis had not foreseen. For instance, the number of women medical students skyrocketed as they replaced males at the universities. The proportion of women among German physicians increased from six percent in 1932 to almost ten percent at the outbreak of the war. By 1942, nearly thirteen percent of German physicians were women. Most women doctors were in dependent positions, unlike the mass of German doctors who owned their own practices.130 The indirect and unintentional boost that the National Socialist regime gave female physicians assumed startling dimensions in the universities, where one-third of all medical students were women in 1944, compared to only one-fifth in 1932.131 In addition, the average age of German physicians climbed dramatically due to the loss of youthful males at the fronts and in the universities, and as older physicians were called on to return to the profession to offset the civilian shortage of medical care during the war years. New physicians who entered the profession during the Third Reich were heavily indoctrinated with a Nazified curriculum that stressed biologism, racial genetics, racial hygiene, and other forms of bogus science. Important contributions of Jewish scientists were ignored, falsely refuted, or unjustly attributed to others. Beyond that, students received an increasingly poor grounding in their field at the universities, as curricula were pared down and examinations eased in order to enable young men to combine their studies with military service.132 The relative compositional changes among senior civil servants, business leaders and physicians presaged occupationally divergent problems for the postwar period. Exclusion of NSDAP members meant greater losses of personnel in the medical profession and in government administration. The advancement of women physicians was considerable, but among civil servants the Third Reich virtually eliminated the scanty progress of the Weimar Republic. Female entrepreneurs had emerged more de facto than de jure, as women inherited the enterprises of their fallen or absent husbands. The return of the soldiers after the war was almost certain to bring with it a clash with the interests of those women who had become accustomed to their new, more independent roles. Finally, the question of how the long-term social and demographic consequences of the war would affect the future recruitment of the elite remained open.

Ideology The ideological affinities between dominant sectors of the German medical community, economic leaders, and the civil service with National Socialism –

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are impossible to discern with precision. First, there is no clear consensus about what National Socialist ideology was. Second, these ideas do not always compare neatly to the issues that most concerned the elite occupational groups themselves. For instance, National Socialist theorists offered conflicting ideas about the economic system they supported; until Hitler publicly reassured them in the late 1920s, conservative elites recoiled at the Nazi’s earlier denunciations of free enterprise. Even later, many remained wary about the Party’s radical wing. Third, the occupational elite groups of civil servants, business leaders, and physicians are ideal constructs. Fundamental beliefs were widely shared by many members of the group, but large minorities challenged the dominant supporting ideology. Historical generalizations gloss over minority views. In cases where such views took on the dimensions of a serious challenge to the dominant ideology, their importance will be discussed. We must disentangle ideology from policy. Ideology is an internally consistent body of ideas that seeks to explain the world. It reflects, among other things, the self-conception, needs, and aspirations of its adherents. Policy, by contrast, is more utilitarian. Ideology is but one of many factors that shape policy and actions. It is now widely accepted that a more or less coherent system of beliefs based on the concepts of race and space framed the entire Nazi enterprise. 133 This extreme Social Darwinism posits that humankind consists of numerous races that compete with one another for domination of a finite amount of territory. “Superior” races eventually displace “inferior” ones, and their strength varies proportionally with their internal “purity.” Beginning with these assumptions, National Socialists derived their insistence on the isolation (later extermination) of minority groups and genetically “defective” individuals as well as their belief in the inevitable purifying power of war with Germany’s neighbors, and domination of the East. This world view says little about National Socialist beliefs concerning the civil service, economics, or the free professions. However, it was these specific programs that most affected the occupational elites under study here. Physicians in particular identified with Nazi programs of socio-biology. Like their counterparts in other western countries, German medical theorists contributed to eugenic doctrines. The medical discourse in which eugenicists couched their ideas strongly appealed to physicians. Human genetics and its activist socialDarwinist counterpart, eugenics, had attained a certain respectability by 1932. Numerous racial hygiene and eugenics societies were established throughout Germany, paralleling developments in other countries, especially England and the United States. The institutional reflection of the acceptance of racial biology was the founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin in 1927.134 Many human geneticists and eugenicists of the 1920s and 1930s disagreed with the segregationist-nationalist arguments of racial hygienists. Eugen Fischer, the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, claimed up to 1933 –

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that racial mixing could be beneficial and should not be restricted. He was eventually drummed out of the Institute by the National Socialists in the summer of 1933.135 Social hygiene, which differed from Nazi-style racial hygiene, espoused the improvement of society by less coercive medicalized means, such as public health programs and voluntary birth control, including sterilization and abortion. But at their root, probably most doctors held that the treatment of the people as a whole could improve the society’s “collective health,” and that racial genetics was an important key to treating the society. Some physicians’ acceptance of these premises ultimately left them susceptible to the Nazis, who emphasized medicine and race. It did not, however, preclude disagreements over specific programs and interpretations. The debate over Lamarckian genetics, which stressed the inheritance of traits conditioned by the environment, and Mendelian genetics, which posits that the environment does not alter genetic material, was at heart a political quarrel. Socialists, and most prominently Stalin’s Soviet Union (the story of Lysenko is well known) preferred Lamarckian genetics, because it left room for biological improvement by changing their environment. Right-wing theorists supported the Mendelian version, because it shored up their belief that inheritance predestined classes for their lot in life. Although we now accept Mendel’s theories as more accurate than Lamarck’s, both camps chose “their” views for ideological rather than “objective” reasons. Despite its close association with Nazi racial biology, Mendelian genetics dominated the post-1945 scientific scene in Germany as elsewhere. However, this does not signal a refusal of the German medical community to renounce National Socialist tenets. Mendel never implied that genetic traits carry an inherent value. Racist theorists injected the belief that some genetically-transmitted traits were “superior” and others “inferior.” Combined with the political will and the glorification of brutality, these ideas ended in forced sterilization, racial segregation laws, “euthanasia,” and the Holocaust. This digression concerning biological theories helps to explain how supposedly value-neutral scientific beliefs co-mingled in the German context of the 1930s with conservative beliefs common among many elite groups. Perverted genetic “science” became the ideological and psychological justification for murder. This is most apparent in the death camp system, where both SS and inmate physicians underwent a process that Robert Lifton calls “doubling” to conduct racial killing without questioning the moral correctness of those actions.136 Social Darwinism, which appealed not only to physicians, meshed with prevalent amorphous beliefs among the elite. Large segments of all three elite groups shared anti-Semitic prejudices that played a central role in National Socialist ideology. Hitler’s socio-biological beliefs, while more extreme and systematic than traditional religious anti-Semitism, tapped the less radical strains as well.137 The activation of otherwise latent anti-Semitism combined with the resentment of Jews’ dis–

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proportionate representation in many elite occupations, above all in business and medicine. The mix proved explosive, as evidenced by the antiSemitic tone voiced in the nazified post-1933 professional literature, which was often more vehement than the public media.138 Individual higher civil servants, business leaders, and physicians often agreed with the abstract vision of racial purification as a social corrective while acknowledging the accomplishments and honor of some Jewish acquaintances and public figures.139 Many elites, confronted with their own adherence to National Socialism after 1945, could truthfully claim that they maintained good relations with Jewish neighbors or colleagues, and on occasion even offered them some protection; however, this did not necessarily establish that they were not anti-Semites.140 The most decisive defining ideological tenet of all three groups was their view of their role in society. Civil servants, businessmen, and physicians all masked their own material and psychological self-interest with an occupational ideology that inflated the importance of their own contribution to society. Civil servants conceived of themselves as impartial servants of the state. Business owners and executives claimed that their production was the motor that drove German power. Medical professionals often referred to their altruistic motives and high ethical standards, when in fact they sought to regulate competition and maintain the highest possible income.141 There was nothing inherently National Socialist in any of these self-images; they had developed steadily since the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the National Socialists were able to harness the sympathies of some elites by playing on these elite self-conceptions. At the same time, the Nazi regime frequently alienated critical elite individuals when they questioned or attacked elitist self-images. For example, the leaders of the Deutscher Industrie- und Handelstag fought “a two-front war” with the Nazi Economics Ministry and the rural Landwirtschaftskammern from 1933 to 1936 that was steeped in the Nazi vocabulary of service to the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community), but which amounted to entrepreneurial lobbying.142 Higher civil servants conceived of themselves as impartial administrators in the service of the state, which existed for the good of the body politic. As with the other groups, their sincere belief in their non-partisanship was at its core little more than a myth. As Berndt Wunder has said, “the German civil service was never even slightly politically neutral.”143 When the contrast between myth and reality became too blatant, the reaction was generally to decry the politicization of their profession. Such was the case in the Weimar Republic, when conservatives and National Socialists alike denounced the increase in political appointments. The ideological belief in political neutrality could be used as a weapon against outside interference. Both the Brüning-Papen cuts in the civil service grades and the non-racial clauses of Hitler’s Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service provided for the removal of those who could not claim proper educational degrees and –

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training. 144 The very title of the 1933 law implies that a formerly pristine institution had been compromised, and needed “restoration.” The actual purges, however, affected mainly democratic and leftist parvenus. The National Socialist regime did not reinforce the Beamtentum’s air of neutrality, but politicized it to an unprecedented degree. Rapid advancement in all ranks of the civil service in the Third Reich presupposed Nazi party affiliation. Moreover, the Civil Service Law of 1937 codified Nazi party oversight (although not outright control) over personnel policy, contradicting the ideology-reaffirming seniority system. Perhaps most worrisome to civil servants was the degradation of traditional benefits of permanent tenure and generous state pensions. In the explosively expanding administrative apparatus of the 1930s and early 1940s, the quantitative strength of the contractual Angestellte “threatened not to erode but to engulf both the ‘traditional’ institution and its members’ material status.”145 Due mainly to their realization that the Nazi years had not restored but in many ways lowered their status and occupational security, many questioned the system’s benefits. In an appeal to Hitler drafted in 1941, Hans Pfundtner wrote openly of the “sense of betrayal allegedly felt by civil servants at their treatment since 1933.”146 After the war, the ideology of professionalism remained intact; elite groups classified their own failings as Nazi intrusions. A high priority for civil servants was to regain lost ground. American plans to eliminate most traditional rights and privileges were certain to evoke renewed insistence on non-partisanship in the civil service. Industrial leaders’ main objective during the Third Reich remained the same as it had been during the Weimar Republic: to maintain the principle and the practice of private property and their own decision-making independence. Henry A. Turner has argued that most big businessmen carried little ideological baggage aside from a commitment to private property and private enterprise. They shared an abhorrence of socialism in all forms and a strong aversion to government regulation of economic activity as well as expanded welfare measures that necessitated increased taxes.148

For the most part, they succeeded in upholding the notion of private capitalism.148 In numerous ways, however, business leaders, like physicians and civil servants, lost their freedom of action under the Nazis. IG Farben, whose leaders held divergent views about National Socialism, found that the regime’s overriding concern with winning the war clashed with their own aim of insuring their domination of the market and maintaining their longterm profit.149 Managers of dynamic, export-oriented industries unsuccessfully opposed the strict trading restrictions necessitated by the autarky program. John Gillingham has documented how business leaders in Ruhr coal enterprises frequently flaunted the regime’s wishes and even contributed to the late wartime coal shortage.150 Their elitist, conservative outlook clashed with wartime labor policy as well. Managers bristled at the –

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centralized allocation of labor imposed by the state in the 1930s. The drop in the proportions of entrepreneurs entering the party paralleled their increasing dissatisfaction with the regime. Perhaps the two most prominent early Nazi enthusiasts from the business sector, Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen, resigned their posts in the 1930s. The increasing economic unorthodoxy of the regime, symbolized by Goering’s appointment to head the Four-Year Plan, moved Schacht to step down as Economics Minister in 1937. Fritz Thyssen voiced his opposition to Hitler’s decision to invade Poland in 1939, and fled to Switzerland fearing the consequences of his defiance.151 Clearly, Hitler’s interests and those of the business community steadily diverged throughout the Third Reich. As a result, business leaders’ ideology led them away from National Socialism just as it had originally led them to it. Large groups of high civil servants, business leaders, and physicians found that their interests and beliefs converged with elements of the National Socialist program in the early 1930s. At the same time, the ideologies that motivated them were not at root National Socialist. This is a far cry from arguing that any of the three elite groups under discussion harbored explicitly democratic or left-liberal sentiments. Instead, much evidence indicates that their sympathies normally lay closer to the rightist, but not fascist, programs of the DNVP or DVP. Their dedication, as well as the more transient conversion of the majority, was facilitated by the convergence between rightist and Nazi programs. However, when these parties seemed incapable of responding effectively to the crises of the late 1920s and early 1930s, they defected to the more radical NSDAP. In other words, their support for the NSDAP was highly opportunistic and consequently transient, lasting as long as professional and party interests converged. The NSDAP leadership was aware of these affinities. They derived many of their early policies and decrees from the Nationalist program, and even from elite interest groups. Some of the radical early decrees of the National Socialists were devised by individuals who had only recently found their way to the party out of expediency. For example, Hans Pfundtner, who had switched to the NSDAP from the DNVP, suggested radical decrees to weed out undesirables from the Beamtentum even prior to the proclamation of the Law on the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. One can blame those professionals who welcomed [National Socialist] “solutions” as shortsighted, an affliction that was epidemic at the time, or call the Nazis opportunistic. But to think of all of the professional groups as going over enthusiastically to the Nazis is a distortion of the historical record so far.152

The distinction between a convergence of interest between the majority of elite professionals and convinced National Socialists helps to explain how fluid and conditional Hitler’s elite support was. Indeed, that support fell off in the course of twelve years of Nazi rule. A few individual elites who had –

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previously welcomed the national revival of 1933 took the extreme step of joining the opposition, as for instance the attempted coup d’état of 20 July 1944. Most, however, carried their dissatisfaction more passively. In 1945, this large section of the administrative, economic, and medical communities faced the ruins of the Reich with a damaged, but largely intact professional ideology. National Socialism had failed to live up to the expectations that so many had vested in it by challenging some of their basic tenets.

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Conclusion The record, when closely examined, indicates that there was considerable early support for the National Socialists among Germany’s higher civil servants, economic leaders, and physicians. Big businessmen, while they acquiesced as long as their interests corresponded to those of the Nazis, were more reluctant to commit themselves in any binding manner than the other two groups. All three occupational groups, taken as a whole, exhibited similar tendencies in their electoral activities, party membership, and ideological support for the regime. After 1933, the support waned significantly, if unevenly, until the end of the war. However, there were significant numbers of early and dedicated Nazis among physicians, high civil servants, and businessmen who maintained their loyalties until the end. One causal dynamic that conditioned both their support and later disaffection was the dialectic between ideology and practice. Elites were attracted not only to Hitler’s nationalistic, anti-Marxist, and anti-Semitic rhetoric, but also to the Party’s apparent concern with their occupational complaints. To the extent that the regime failed to carry through on their particular interests, their commitment waned. Senior civil servants were doubly disappointed, since their real incomes often declined at the same time that “rational” administration disintegrated and their ability to form, interpret, and implement policy declined. Business leaders benefited from the elimination of the trade unions, but the over-regulation in the later stages of the war soured their attitudes toward the regime. Self-regulation metamorphosed into state control in the form of the Gau Economic Chambers and state-owned enterprises, such as the Hermann-Goering-Werke. Although physicians prospered materially, they faced substantial erosion of their professional freedoms. The self-regulation that they had fought for so furiously in previous decades was practically annulled. No rhetoric could effectively negate their experience in the Third Reich. As a result, many quietly questioned or rejected National Socialist government even before the regime collapsed in the face of advancing Allied armies. By the summer of 1945, when the military occupation began in earnest, only a minority identified strongly with National Socialism, even though few formally left the NSDAP. Three major questions still remained: How to deal with those individuals who had not lost –

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their faith in fascism; how to atone for the transgressions committed during the Third Reich; and, of overriding importance, what direction would the elite occupations, and Germany, go in the future.

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Notes 1. D. Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949 (New York, 1985), 2-7; S.K. Padover, Experiment in Germany: The Story of an American Intelligence Officer (New York, 1946), 353. 2. C. Eisenberg, “U. S. Policy in Postwar Germany: The Conservative Restoration,” Science and Society 46 (1982): 24-38; J.F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York, 1947), 181-83. 3. Anna J. Merritt and Richard Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys, 1945-1949 (Urbana, 1970), 32-35. 4. B. Bromberger, H. Mausbach, and K.D. Thomann, Medizin, Faschismus und Widerstand (Frankfurt a. M., 1990), 288-92. 5. A. Mitscherlich and F. Mielke, eds. Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit: Dokumente des Nürnberger Ärzteprozeßes (Frankfurt, 1949), 13. 6. M. Broszat, “A Social and Historical Typology of the German Resistance to Hitler,” in Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, ed. D. Clay Large (Cambridge, 1991), 25-33, esp. 31. 7. M. Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of its Members and Leaders, 1919-1945 (Cambridge, 1983), tables 1 and 2 of the appendix (no page numbers); R.F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, 1982), 386-90;, 386-90; Th. Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933 (Chapel Hill, 1983), 185-88, 253-57. Childers’ more rigorous tanalysis makes the crucial distinction between industrial workers and handicraft workers. The former were more resistant to Nazi appeals. Hamilton, 386-90; and Childers, 265-66. 8. Kater, Doctors under Hitler (1989); R.J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, 1986); Bromberger, Mausbach, and Thomann, Medizin, Faschismus und Widerstand (1990); R.N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, 1988); Medizin im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Munich, 1988); Medizin im Dritten Reich, ed. J. Bleker and N. Jachertz (Cologne, 1989); G. Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Goering Institute (New York, 1985); G. Aly et al., Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore, 1994). 9. Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1966), 29; J. Caplan, Government Without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar Germany and Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1988). 10. Broszat, The Hitler State; E. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler’s Power (Princeton, 1969). 11. A. Rückerl, Die Strafverfolgung von NS-Verbrechen 1945-1978 (Karlsruhe, 1979), 81-85. 12. See, for example, J. Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (New York, 1978). Other example are cited in P. Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, 1987), xiii, fn 8. 13. A. Barkai, Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy (New Haven, 1990), 10-11. Despite the furor over the dubious scholarship in the first edition of his work (published in 1981), the main thesis of David Abraham’s significantly revised study is nuanced and corre-

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14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

sponds with studies by other historians. He argues that a large portion of dynamic entrepreneurs [Abraham’s term] came to believe that cooperation with Hitler was the only viable way out of the late Weimar crisis. Thus many of them came to Hitler not out of deep ideological commitment, but for want of a more palatable alternative. D. Abraham, Politics and Big Business: The Demise of the Weimar Republic, 2nd ed. (New York, 1986). Although one of Abraham’s staunchest critics, H.A. Turner shares Abraham’s conclusions about the pre1932 business attitudes toward the NSDAP, albeit with crucial differences in detail and timing. Turner, German Big Business, 55-56, 115-24. Turner, German Big Business, 23-24. On the decision to build this complex, which the IG Farben’s leaders accepted somewhat reluctantly, considering it a bad investment, see Hayes, Industry and Ideology, 346-69. Some examples from Hesse are described after 1945 in HHStA-W 507/1381. Many others in A. Barkai, “Die deutschen Unternehmer und die Judenpolitik im ‘Dritten Reich’,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 227-47 The case of NSDAP member Oskar Schindler illustrates the difficulty of neatly distinguishing between the regime’s opponents and its supporters. What made him unique was less his revulsion at the inhumanity of Nazi genocide than his willingness to take personal risks to avert it within the limits of his ability. T. Mason, “Der Primat der Politik,” Das Argument 41 (1966): 484, 200. See the following sections on NSDAP membership, composition, and ideology. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, passim, esp. 285-89. Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 21-23. E. Klee, “Euthanasie im NS-Staat” (Frankfurt a. M., 1983), 440. Lifton The Nazi Doctors, 14-18. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler, 386-90; Childers, The Nazi Voter, 265-66. The German National Statistical Office in 1934 categorized less than three percent of the population as elites, compared to nearly forty-three percent lower-middle class and fiftyfive percent lower class. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 1934 (Berlin, 1934). The problematic class criteria used by the German bureaucracy are discussed in Michael Kater, The Nazi Party, 5-14, and Table 1 (no page no.). Few analyses narrow their categories beyond the upper-middle class, industrial workers, etc. Childers, Nazi Voter, methodological appendix, 271-78. Childers, Nazi Voter, 168-69; 240-42. J. Caplan, “Speaking the Right Language: The Nazi Party and the Civil Service Vote in the Weimar Republic,” in The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919-1933, ed. Th. Childers (Totowa, NJ, 1986), 192-198. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler, 41. Childers, The Nazi Voter, 268-69. M. Kater, “Sozialer Wandel in der NSDAP im Zuge der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung,” in W. Schieder, ed. Faschismus als soziale Bewegung: Deutschland und Italien im Vergleich (Hamburg, 1976), 51-53. M.H. Kater, “Hitler’s Early Doctors: Nazi Physicians in Pre-Depression Germany,” JMH (1987): 25. By the summer of 1933, when a moratorium on new memberships was declared, a full two-thirds of the NSDAP consisted of Märzgefallene. Kater, “Sozialer Wandel,” 43. HHStA-W 520/SK Oberlahn, Az. 795/46. “Underrepresentation” means that the percentage of NSDAP members who were, for example, physicians, was lower than the proportion of the general population who were physicians. H. Mommsen, “Beamtentum und demokratischer Verfassungsstaat,” in Die politische Treuepflicht. Rechtsquellen, ed. E. Brandt (Karlsruhe, 1976), 24; Caplan, “Speaking the Right Language,” 198; also J. Caplan, “ ‘The Imaginary Universality of Particular Interests:’ The ‘Tradition’ of the Civil Service in German History,” Social History 4 (1979): 299-317. –

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37. Kater, “Sozialer Wandel,” 29-30. 38. Kater, The Nazi Party, 48-49. 39. H.A. Turner, German Big Business. See also E. Helfferich, 1932-1946 Tatsachen. Ein Beitrag zur Wahrheitsfindung (Oldenburg, 1968). 40. This is the main thesis of D. Abraham’s The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, which conforms with other assessments and has not been refuted in spite of the justified methodological criticism of the first edition. Even the revised edition, it should be noted, does not satisfy some critics. Peter Hayes, “History in an Off-Key: David Abraham’s Second Collapse,” Business History Review 61 (1987): 452-72. Turner claims that these maneuvers were conducted by a small of number business leaders who had little real influence. Turner, German Big Business, 303-4. 41. Turner, German Big Business, 349-54. 42. Kater, The Nazi Party, 44-45. 43. This is one cause suggested by Kater, “Sozialer Wandel,” 30. 44. Kater, The Nazi Party, 47. 45. Kater’s criteria for assigning specific occupational groups to each category in Kater, The Nazi Party, 2-16. According to Kater’s method, physicians, higher civil servants, and big businessmen fall into the category “elite.” 46. See Mommsen, Beamtentum, 56-57 for more precise statistics of the proportions of Nazis among civil servants; also Kater, The Nazi Party, 106-7; and Caplan, “Speaking the Right Language,” 198. 47. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 29; Kater, “Sozialer Wandel,” 29. 48. Kater, The Nazi Party, 107. 49. Caplan claims that “the NSDAP made no great efforts to recruit or to welcome high-ranking civil servants into the party,” in contrast to more strenuous recruiting campaigns among lower and mid-level servants. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration: The Reich Interior Ministry and the German Civil Service, 1933-1943,” The Historical Journal 20, no. 3 (1977): 713. 50. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 713. 51. Kater, The Nazi Party, 106-7. 52. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 726-27. 53. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 74, 82. 54. Kater, The Nazi Party, 100. 55. Kater, “Medizin und Mediziner,” 311. An informative re-evaluation of Kater’s raw datain K. Jarausch, The Unfree Professions, 100-02. 56. Ch.E. McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalization. Modern Learned Professions and their Organizations from the Early Nineteenth to the Hitler Era (New York, 1991), 225. For specific estimates, see Kater, “Medizin und Mediziner,” 311; Kater, The Nazi Party, 112 (45 percent); G. Lilienthal, “Der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Ärztebund (1929-1943/45): Der Weg zur Gleichschaltung und Führung der deutschen Ärzteschaft,” in Ärzte im Nationalsozialismus, ed. F. Kudlein (Cologne, 1985), 116-17. 57. Kater, The Nazi Party, 110-12. 58. Jarausch, The Unfree Professions, 101-02; Kater, The Nazi Party, 140-48. 59. Kater, The Nazi Party, 67-68. 60. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 729, fn. 56. 61. Caplan, “Civil Service Support for National Socialism,” in The Führer State: Myth and Reality. Studies on the Structure and Politics of the Third Reich, ed. G. Hirschfeld and L. Kettenacker. (Stuttgart,1981): 186-89. 62. This overcrowding is relative; countries such as Britain and the United States had much higher ratios than Germany, while France’s was slightly lower. McClelland, 180-81. Statistics from Prinzig, Handbuch, 634. 63. Wuttke-Groneberg, ed. Medizin im Nationalsozialismus, 347; cited in McClelland, 347.

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64. HQ, Military Government, Regierungsbezirk Kassel, Weekly Summary Report, 16 July 1945, 9, NA, RG 260, Office of the Military Government (U.S.), [hereafter referred to as OMGUS] OMGH Box 567. At this time, von Drigalski was head of the civilian Public Health Department of Kurhessen, since Greater Hesse had not yet been established. 65. Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, go so far as to assert that the blossoming of middle-class societies is evidence of the actual triumph of the middle class in a “silent revolution” within Wilhelmine Germany. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1984). 66. The leisure associations and other auxiliary organizations such as the National Socialist People’s Welfare (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, NSV) are discussed in the context of denazification (Chapter 4). Their importance is usually overlooked, and the literature on them is insufficient. 67. Such statements, made before denazification tribunals in order to exonerate Nazi Party members, were certainly often exaggerated or even false, but this account appears at least plausible. Spruchkammer file of C.D., HHStA-W 520/SK Oberlahn, az. 795/46. 68. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 711, fn. 7. 69. Jarausch, The Unfree Professions, 51. 70. Caplan, Government Without Administration, 34-36. 71. Jarausch, The Unfree Professions, 97, 102; Caplan, Government Without Administration, 116. 72. Sprenger’s roots and center of power were Frankfurt am Main. Caplan, Government Without Administration, 112, 191-92. 73. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 712. 74. Caplan, “Civil Service Support,” 180-81. 75. Caplan attributes this to the ineptitude of Sprenger’s successor, Herrmann Neef. Caplan, Government Without Administration, 191-92. 76. Caplan, Government Without Administration, 318. 77. Caplan, Government Without Administration, esp. 261-64. 78. Soon after it was founded in 1919, the RDI brought together 26 trade groups, in turn consisting of 400 Reich associations and cartels, 58 regional and 70 local associations, more than 1000 individual firms, and the 70 chambers of industry and commerce. Der Weg zum industriellen Spitzenverband (Darmstadt, 1956), 125-26; also cited in G. Braunthal, The Federation of German Industry in Politics (Ithaca, 1965), 9. 79. The Federation of German Employers’ Associations was founded in 1913, earlier than the RDI. Braunthal, The Federation of German Industry, 8. 80. D. Prowe, “Im Sturmzentrum: Die Industrie- und Handelskammern 1945 bis 1949,” in Zur Politik und Wirksamkeit des DIHT und der IHKn 1861 bis 1949, ed. K. van Eyll (Stuttgart, 1987), 91-122, esp. 100-4; also O. Nathan, The Nazi Economic System: Germany’s Mobilization for War (Durham, NC, 1944), 13-14. 81. Cited in Braunthal, The Federation of German Industry, 18. 82. H.A. Winkler, “Unternehmerverbände zwischen Ständeideologie und Nationalsozialismus,” VjZ 17.4 (1969): 341-71. 83. A. Barkai, Das Wirtschaftssystem des Nationalsozialismus. Der historische und ideologische Hintergrund 1933-1936 (Cologne, 1977); Nathan, 19-23. 84. W.A. Boelcke, Die Deutsche Wirtschaft 1930-1945: Interna des Reichswirtschaftsministeriums (Düsseldorf, 1983), 275-80. 85. Boelcke, Die Deutsche Wirtschaft, 239. 86. Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 20-22. 87. McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalization, 223. 88. Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 19-20. 89. M. Kater, “The Nazi Physicians’ League of 1929. Causes and Consequences,” in The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919-1933, ed. Th. Childers (Totowa, NJ, 1986), 147-81. 90. Most of the above information comes from Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 19-24; On the practical application of laws and procedures excluding Jews and political opponents as expe–

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91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

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102. 103. 104.

105. 106.

107. 108.

109.

110.

111.

rienced in the Hessian city of Wiesbaden, see D. Blank, “Die ‘Ausschaltung’ jüdischer Ärzte und Zahnärzte in Wiesbaden durch den Nationalsozialismus” (Dissertation, Joh. Gutenberg Univ. Mainz, 1984). The polyocracy of the Hitler state is illustrated by the fact that Wagner relied on the Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess for protection, while Conti depended mainly on Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, and Brandt on his close relationship with Hitler. See P. Zunke, “Der erste Reichsärzteführer Dr. med. Gerhard Wagner” (Med. Diss., Universität Kiel, 1972), esp. 118-23. McClelland, 218. McClelland’s argument is too apologetic, but not completely off the mark. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 29-30. RGBl 1933 I, 175; Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 719-22; the background and the implementation of this law are discussed in detail in Mommsen, Beamtentum, 39-61. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 720-21. Among the clearest National Socialist provisions were employment restrictions based on race, the absence of any direct mention of civil servants’ rights vis-a-vis the state, and some limited provisions for civil servants to inform the NSDAP of matters considered damaging to the party, thereby circumventing official channels. Caplan, Government Without Administration, 174-83. See also Mommsen, Beamtentum, Chapters 6 and 8; Broszat, The Hitler State, 253. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 119-21. The case of the chemical manufacturers, the brothers S. and their Rival G. in Hesse illustrates this form of “aryanization.” HHStA-W 501/SK Wildungen; HHStA-W 507. A. Simpson, “The Struggle for Control of the German Economy,” JMH 31 (1959): 42. Hayes, Industry and Ideology, 169; also J. Gillingham, Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe (London, 1985), 501, 51. See Hayes, Industry and Ideology, 120. For a more detailed discussion of the Arbeitsordnungsgesetz (Law on the Organization of Labor), T. Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the “National Community” (Providence, 1993), 107-19. L.P. Lochner, Tycoons and Tyrant: German Industry from Hitler to Adenauer (Chicago, 1954), 188-200. A. Schweitzer, Big Business in the Third Reich (Bloomington, 1964), 218-20. P. Erker, Einleitung: Industrie-Eliten im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Erker and T. Pierenkemper, Deutsche Unternehmer zwischen Kriegswirtschaft und Wiederaufbau (Munich, 1999), 4-7.On the increase in production, G.L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 1994), 478-79, 755. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 96-97, 102-4. In 1934 alone, there were at least 65,000 applications for sterilization, of which 45,00050,000 were approved. R. Winau, “Sterilisation, Euthanasie, Selektion,” in Ärzte im Nationalsozialismus, ed. F. Kudlein (Cologne, 1985), 199. U. Sierck and N. Radtke, Die Wohltätermafia. Vom Erbgesundheitsgericht zur Humangenetischen Beratung (Frankfurt a. M., 1989), 20-21. Ich klage an! Tatsachen- und Erlebnisberichte der “Euthanasie”-Geschädigten und Zwangssterilisierten, ed. Bund der ‘Euthanasie’-Geschädigten und Zwangssterilisierten, K. Nowak und M. Heß (Detmold, 1989), 2; also Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 237. A meticulous treatment of the “euthanasia” program in G. Aly, “Medicine against the Useless,” in Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene, G. Aly, P. Chroust, and Ch. Pross (Baltimore, 1994), 22-98; see also Winau, “Sterilisation, Euthanasie, Selektion,” 202. On the rare but important resistance by medical practitioners to “euthanasia,” Aly, “Medicine against the Useless,” 33-34. The official “euthanasia” program took about 70,000 lives by 1941, when it was discontinued. Winau, “Sterilisation, Euthanasie, Selektion,” 204. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 207. –

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112. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 121-23. 113. L. Pine, Nazi Family Policy. 114. D. Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939 (New York, 1980); L. Edinger, “Continuity and Change in the Background of German DecisionMakers,” 17-36. 115. B. Wunder, Die Rekrutierung der Beamtenschaft in Deutschland. Eine historische Betrachtung (Constance, 1979), 21-23. 116. Noble holders of top “political” posts in the Prussian civil service (Oberpräsidenten, Regierungspräsidenten, Landräte, and Polizeipräsidenten) fell from 315 in 1916 to a mere 89 in 1930, while bourgeois in the same positions increased from 264 to 401. Caplan, Government Without Administration, 46-47. 117. Caplan, Government Without Administration, 47. 118. “Überführung von alten Kämpfern der NSDAP in das Beamtenverhältnis” 1936-1937, Stadtarchiv Frankfurt/M, 111/53. 119. Problems encountered in the wake of the BBG are discussed in Mommsen, Beamtentum, 107. 120. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 59. 121. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 30, 53-55. 122. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 720; Mommsen, Beamtentum, 39-61; also Caplan, Government Without Administration, pp144-46. 123. Caplan, “The Politics of Administration,” 721. Cites material in BA R 2/22539-22547. 124. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 89. 125. Caplan, Government Without Administration, 305-7. 126. Almost all of IG Farben’s leaders who were members of the party (about a third of the total) did not join until 1933 or later. Slightly more (ca. 37 percent) of the leading Ruhr industrialists joined by the end of 1933. Hayes, Industry and Ideology, 100-03. 127. Depositions relating to the denazification hearing of one member of the board in HHStAW 501/830. 128. Two studies document the fate of Jewish physicians in Hesse. One, a doctoral dissertation from the medical school of the University of Mainz, follows the process of exclusion in the spa town of Wiesbaden. D. Blank, Die ‘Ausschaltung’; the other provides information, including many archival sources, transcribed documents, interviews with survivors, and analysis for the area in and around Frankfurt. Drexler, Ärztliches Schicksal. 129. Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 12. 130. Kater, “Medizin and Mediziner,” 317-18. Also cited in McClelland, 224-25; Michael Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 89, 98-100. 131. McClelland, 183; Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 98-99. 132. Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 150-56, 173-76. 133. A good summary of Hitler’s own ideology in Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1972). 134. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 39. 135. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 40. 136. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, esp. 418-19. Lifton applies this device to, among others, Dr. Josef Mengele, 378-79. 137. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 482-83. 138. For example, see the analysis of Dagmar Blank, “‘Ausschaltung’,” 80. 139. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 434, 438-39. 140. See Chapter Four on denazification. 141. McClelland, 235. 142. P. Hüttenberger, “Interessenvertretung und Lobbyismus im Dritten Reich,” in Der Führerstaat: Mythos und Realität, ed. G. Hirschfeld and L. Kettenacker (Stuttgart, 1981), 444-50. 143. Wunder, Rekrutierung, 19. 144. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 50. –

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145. 146. 147. 148.

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149. 150. 151. 152.

Caplan, “Civil Service Support,” 188-89. This draft was never sent. Caplan, “Civil Service Support,” 189. Turner, German Big Business, 21. Erker, 4; I. Liesebach, Der Wandel der Führungsschicht der deutschen Industrie von 1918 bis 1945 (Hanover, 1956), 76-81. See Hayes, Industry and Ideology. Gillingham, Industry and Politics in the Third Reich, 113-15. Lochner, Tycoons and Tyrant, 230-32. McClelland, 219.

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Chapter 2

COMPOSITIONAL CHANGE AND CONTINUITY, 1945-1955

Everything is in motion: people, goods, beliefs, values — Elisabeth Pfeil, Der Flüchtling. Gestalt einer Zeitwende (1948).

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Not since the Thirty Years’ War had Germans undergone demographic turmoil comparable to that of the 1940s. Elite occupations suffered from the resulting turmoil as much as any other social group. The war drastically reduced the number of Hesse’s established higher civil servants, businessmen, and doctors. Not only did many die at the front or in bombing raids, but university enrollment dwindled as young men were drafted into the war effort, constricting new recruitment. All told, the war cost between five and a half and nine million German lives.1 However, the arrival of over twelve million refugees and expellees after 1945 more than offset wartime casualties.2 Newly arrived doctors, businessmen, and civil servants sought to establish themselves in Hesse, but their ultimate impact differed somewhat by occupational group. This chapter explores how the demographic disruptions of death, migration, and the growth of elite occupations altered the composition of Hesse’s higher civil service, business community, and medical profession.

The Postwar Growth and Continuity of Elite Occupations Exactly how many Hessians lost their lives during the war and the occupation remains unclear. The censuses of 1939 and 1946 neatly straddle the war years, but the lack of a reliable count in 1944 or 1945 makes it impossible to filter out the effect of the East-to-West migration across the green frontier before the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945.3 As a result, official statistics gloss over wartime casualties, creating the impression that the population on the territory of postwar Hesse grew continuously from 3.48 Notes for this section begin on page 77.

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million in 1939 to 3.97 million in 1946 and 4.32 million in 1950. By the mid 1950s, one-third more people inhabited the same space compared to before the war. More than any other factor, over a million newcomers, most of them German refugees and expellees, account for Hesse’s dramatic population increase. The so-called expellees, especially from the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia, dwarfed other categories of newcomers. Moreover, the fresh arrivals were augmented beginning in 1947 by the resettlement of other expellees from overburdened areas like Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria.4 Newcomers were distributed unevenly throughout Hesse. Individual counties (Stadt- und Landkreise) reported population increases ranging from 16 percent (Offenbach) to 58 percent (Hofgeismar) between 1939 and 1946.5 One of the most dramatic changes in the composition of the elite was a negative legacy of the Third Reich. The destruction of the Jewish community affected the make-up of the medical and business elite deeply, but was statistically less significant in the higher civil service. The emigration, exclusion, and murder of Jewish-German physicians beginning in the 1930s accounts for most of physicians’ overall losses. In 1933, ten percent of all German physicians were Jews, but in 1945 there were virtually none practicing outside refugee camps.6 The decimation of Jews in the medical community proved permanent; most of the survivors had emigrated and never returned.7 In the spa town of Wiesbaden, for example, Jews had comprised nearly half of all physicians, only a handful of whom came back after the war.8 Out of eight Jewish employees the Nazis had removed from the medical school at Giessen’s university (four professors, three assisting physicians, and a technical assistant), only the psychiatrist Alfred Storch survived into the postwar period. Rather than return, he chose to remain in Switzerland.9 Outside Berlin, Jews had represented a smaller but still considerable proportion of Germany’s business community and were barely represented in the administrative civil service. Although they were not particularly prominent in German heavy industry before 1933, many Jews held leading positions in the banking, trade, and textile branches.10 The decimation of Jewish business leaders was severe; Frankfurt’s mayor, Walter Leiske, noted with regret in 1958 that “the bloodletting that Frankfurt experienced as a result of the loss of its Jewish fellow citizens could not yet be reversed.”11 Of the prominent Jewish entrepreneurs who survived by emigrating, however, a handful returned to Hesse after the war. For example, Richard Merton, the head of the Metallgesellschaft AG, one of Frankfurt’s largest industrial enterprises, reassumed his pre-Nazi position. His return was facilitated by influential non-Jewish members of the business community, such as Alfred Petersen, president of the Frankfurt Chamber of Industry and Trade, who, alongside the city’s mayor, lobbied the Hessian military government for a special visa.12 Merton soon ranked among West Germany’s most influential entrepreneurs.13 Most Jewish business leaders had less success than Merton. Programs to return “aryanized” property made little headway; financial com–

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pensation became a more common form of atonement than restitution.14 Whatever the reasons and benefits for this preference, it solidified the virtual disappearance of Jews in the postwar business leadership. Neither Hesse’s civil servant organizations nor its medical association intervened in a similar manner to reattract Jewish émigré colleagues. There had been relatively few Jews in the higher echelons of the civil service to begin with; Jews represented less than two percent of Prussia’s administrative higher civil servants, and considerably less in the Reich, non-Prussian states, and municipal administrations.15 Their proportion in the higher civil service of the Reich and Länder as a whole was less than two percent.16 In Frankfurt, where Jews represented more than six percent of the population in the 1920s, there was but a single Jew in the upper ranks of the municipal administration, namely the unpaid Stadtrat responsible for culture, Max F. Michel.17 One way to illustrate the degree of discontinuity in personnel across the divide of 1945 is to show the proportions of prewar elites who retained their positions into the postwar period. It is this analytical framework which dominates historical discussions regarding continuity and discontinuity. Observers who lament a “restoration” in the Federal Republic focus heavily on the survival and return of large numbers of individuals who reattained positions of responsibility in the postwar decade. Civil servants, for example, poured back into federal, state, and local administrations after 1950, propelled by federal laws based on article 131 of the Basic Law, West Germany’s constitution, which effectively declared that the dismissals resulting from denazification violated civil servants’ tenure rights.18 The rehabilitation of prominent businessmen of the Nazi era, such as Friedrich Flick, Willy Messerschmidt, and Alfried Krupp served as evidence of “business as usual.”19 Recent literature on medicine in the Third Reich has also pointed to the unbroken, sometimes prominent careers of former members of the NSDAP, SA, and SS.20 Less frequently investigated is the overall continuity of these professions. Is it conceivable that the demographic upheaval of the war and the occupation interfered with the power of old elites, or at least reduced their importance? The continuity of higher civil servants in greater Hesse is difficult to establish, owing to their extreme mobility in the early postwar period and this researcher’s lack of access to relevant personnel files. High civil servants’ mobility stemmed not only from the massive influx of refugee civil servants employed by the Land according to quota regulations, but also because Hesse itself was a construct of the occupation era. Wiesbaden, the new state capital, replaced Darmstadt (former capital of the Duchy of Hesse), Kassel (former Prussian provincial capital of Hesse-Nassau), and Frankfurt (nominally autonomous Prussian city until 1933) as the main seat of government. The reorganization caused the shuffling and reshuffling of administrative responsibilities, and consequently of administrators.21 Because the Land administration employed by far the largest portion of higher (höhere) and –

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Compositional Change and Continuity, 1945-1955

high (gehobene) civil servants after 1945, this reorganization affected them more than lower grades.22 The collapse of the German government and the first waves of denazification contributed to the migration of civil servants in ways that are difficult to reconstruct. Personnel files for Hesse’s postwar civil servants remain closed to researchers.23 Denazification records, which are available, provide information about previous employment, but could not be found in sufficient numbers to support reliable generalizations. 24 As a result, clear lines of continuity are difficult to establish except on an individual basis. Unquestionably, many high administrators were removed from their positions in the course of denazification. However, a considerable number returned in the early 1950s, when federal laws guaranteed reinstatement of traditional civil service tenure for all but the worst offenders (see Chapter 4). An adequate gauge of overall continuity (that is, irrespective of political taint) must await the opening of proper sources. The sources on business leaders are more useful. Looking at some of the most powerful companies based in Hesse, a high degree of exchange among the economic elite is discernible. A sample of Hesse’s three top industrial centers (Frankfurt, Darmstadt, and Kassel) shows that a majority of postwar business leaders had not held similar positions in the same region before World War II. Cross-referencing information from the Handbuch der Großunternehmer (Handbook of Large Business Leaders), which lists the biggest companies by city, with the Who’s Who of the economic elite, Leitende Männer der Wirtschaft (Leading men [sic] of the Economy), offers a revealing if imperfect glimpse at aggregate local continuity.25 In the three sample cities, less than half of the business leaders listed in 1953 had been business leaders in the same region in 1941 or 1944.26 Only a handful of the total 1953 sample of 623 could be shown to have held comparable positions in other regions, although their pasts usually remained a mystery. In all probability, the arrival of new entrepreneurs in Frankfurt, Darmstadt, and Kassel can be explained by a combination of 1) the startup of new businesses, 2) the arrival of refugee and other migrant business people, and 3) the growth of existing enterprises beyond the threshold required for inclusion in the directory.27 The last category includes many who were not technically new to the area. Not surprisingly, continuity between 1953 and 1941 was greater for the owners of family firms than for large publicly-traded enterprises, but still less than half of the total sample. The discontinuity on the boards of directors and supervisory boards of Frankfurt’s largest publicly-traded companies (Aktiengesellschaften, or AG) illustrates some of the complexities of the exchange within the business elite. Chart 2.1 indicates a high degree of discontinuity. The 1953 Handbuch der Großunternehmen (Handbook of Major Enterprises) provided the dates when members of the boards of publicly-traded companies first rose to their position.28 By charting these data in four-year intervals, we see that 119 out of a total 181 board members, or sixty-five percent, had attained their seats since the end of the war. Less than a quarter had risen to that post during the Third –

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Reich, and roughly a tenth during the Weimar Republic. The discontinuity is less dramatic on the boards of directors. Because they are involved in the day to day management and operation of the enterprises, familiarity and technical expertise play a greater role, thus contributing to greater continuity. An indeterminable number had served on the boards of other companies before their elevation in the sample cases. If those other companies were either too small to be listed in the Handbuch der Großunternehmen or located outside the sample regions, this calculation overlooks their functional continuity. To compensate for this, board members of firms founded after 1945 are excluded from the sample, as they would otherwise all appear as new board members after 1945. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to explain the discrepancy through statistical distortion or source bias alone. The rapid postwar exchange in individual firms’ top management revealed by the chart shows that the prewar leadership was not simply carried over en masse after Germany’s defeat.29

1949-52

1945-48

1941-44

1937-40

1933-36

1929-32

1925-28

1191-24

1900-18

Number (n)

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Chart 2.1 Board Members of Frankfurt Common-Stock Companies (AG), 1953 by first year on board

Source: Calculations based on information in Handbuch der Großunternehmer (Darmstadt: Hoppenstedt), 1953. Note: Source base includes all large common-stock companies that provide dates of members’ first election to the boards. Banks, insurance companies, and state-operated enterprises are excluded from sample. This information is unavailable for about one-third of Aktiengesellschaften (AGs) listed in the Handbuch. In addition companies that do list dates for some members (included here), do not provide them for five directors and seven supervisors. However, the question of continuity does not appear to have concerned companies. AGs founded after 1945 are also excluded, since this would exaggerate discontinuity on the boards. Betriebsrat members are not counted, since they represent workers rather than business leaders. –

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Municipal address books provide a clue to the continuity of free practicing physicians.30 Using these sources, continuity tables were constructed for the cities of Darmstadt, Fulda, Kassel, and Wiesbaden. In the spa town of Wiesbaden, two-thirds of the physicians listed in the 1938 address book reappear after 1945.31 Similarly, in Darmstadt, Fulda, and Kassel, between sixty (Kassel) and eighty-three percent of physicians practicing before or during the war could be found practicing in the same municipalities thereafter.32 Due to attrition and migration, however, only about half were still present by 1955. The Darmstadt example is representative (See Chart 2.2, below). From this perspective, local continuity seems high. Due to the influx of newcomer physicians and the arrival of young physicians, prewar practitioners generally made up less than half of the postwar Ärzteschaft. By the mid 1950s, merely one quarter of physicians in Darmstadt, Fulda, and Wiesbaden had practiced there before the war.33 As in the case of company board members, many if not most “new” physicians had practiced elsewhere before the war. But again, the high levels of discontinuity cannot be attributed solely to methodological bias. Furthermore, the dilution of the established local elite was in itself a major development that warrants closer scrutiny.

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Chart 2.2 Continuity of Practicing Physicians in Darmstadt, 1934-1956 (in percent)

1934 1937 1941 1949 1952 1954

1934

1937

1941

1949

1952

1954

1956

n=109 100

n=94 80.7 100

n=95 65.1 79.8 100

n=146 43.1 52.1 64.2 100

n=169 42.0 51.1 60.0 81.9 100

n=188 39.5 47.9 55.8 76.4 94.1 100

n=211 35.8 42.6 50.5 70.8 85.8 90.5

Source: Adreßbücher der Stadt Darmstadt, 1934, 1937, 1941, 1949, 1952, 1954, 1956; for verification and clarification of individual identities, StA-D Einwohnermelderegister der Stadt Darmstadt. Explanation: This table shows the percentage of physicians who appeared in any two given editions of the Darmstadt address book. For example, of the 94 doctors listed in the 1937 edition (left-hand index), 51.1 percent were still practicing there in 1952, and only 42.6 percent in 1956. Note the growth of total physicians from less than 100 during the war to over 200 by 1956.

More than any other factor, the expansion of the civil service, the entrepreneurial class, and the medical profession contributed to the dilution of the indigenous elite. The civil service grew during this period at a slower pace than either physicians or Unternehmer. The West German administrative civil service as a whole (Bund, Länder, and municipalities combined) grew about 19 percent between 1950 and 1955, a considerable expansion, but one roughly equivalent to the proportion of refugees in West Germany. It continued to grow by about fifteen percent every five years.34 The available statistics suggest that Hesse’s higher civil service expanded even faster than the –

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lower levels of the Beamtenschaft, averaging five percent annually in the mid 1950s.35 The number of higher (höhere) civil servants employed by Land Hesse more than doubled between 1948 and 1955 (3,861 to 8100). The high (gehobene) civil service grade expanded slightly faster, while middle and lower levels increased only slightly, and even decreased after 1955. The number of entrepreneurs also increased, as evidenced by the rapidly expanding listings for Hesse in the published reference guide Handbuch der Großunternehmen. The Handbuch’s editors maintained constant standards for inclusion in the work, a combination of base capitalization and number of employees.36 Whereas 37 companies were listed for Darmstadt in 1953, 57 appeared in 1956. Frankfurt’s entrepreneurial growth was even more dramatic. Overall, the proportion of West Germans who declared themselves “independent entrepreneurs” (selbstständige Unternehmer) remained almost constant between 1939 and 1955.37 However, this glosses over the considerable growth of the managerial class, and the proportional rise of medium and large firms compared to small enterprises. It is difficult to exaggerate the explosive growth of the medical profession in postwar West Germany. The number of freely practicing physicians in Darmstadt and Fulda more than doubled between 1939 and 1955, and came close to doubling in Wiesbaden. Less than half of all freely practicing physicians in Hesse’s major cities in 1949 or 1950 had been practicing there before the war. The growth rates for practicing physicians were phenomenal. The military government reported that the number of physicians in Hesse grew from 2,666 in February 1946 to 6,310 in August 1950, a 137 percent increase in just four and a half years!38 The remarkable increase in the number of Hesse’s practicing physicians continued into the mid 1950s, exceeding the population growth (roughly 25 percent) by many times.

The Integration of Newcomer Elites The first and largest source of the growth of the elite professions was the influx of German refugees. Qualified physicians, entrepreneurs, and higher civil servants, some with relatively clean political records, quickly established themselves in Hesse. Refugee elites who had been more deeply involved in National Socialism had more difficulty gaining a professional foothold before 1948, but also generally found a niche as denazification receded in importance in the shadow of the Cold War. The Nazi regime had accelerated the education and approbation of physicians to supply their multiple military fronts with medical personnel.39 Similarly, the Third Reich witnessed a modest expansion of the higher civil service, as the state took on more and more responsibilities.40 While returning soldiers rarely found themselves in a position to establish their own businesses during the first postwar years, the economic expansion of the “Korea boom,” the early –

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1950s export-driven growth tied to the Korean War, opened up a variety of opportunities for would-be entrepreneurs. Finally, Western German universities accredited a new generation of young physicians in the 1940s and 1950s. All of these factors, however, pale in significance compared to the effect of newcomers on elites. The mushrooming supply of elites and would-be elites did not immediately translate into a significantly expanded community of successful elites. As the permanence of Germany’s territorial losses became clear, the integration of newcomers became a high priority of local, Land, and later federal governments. Leaders of civil servant associations, economic organizations, and medical chambers all stressed the importance of refugee assimilation. Quota systems and proportional guidelines spurred the integration of refugees. Quotas gave refugee civil servants and businesses an edge in overcoming numerous hurdles that stood between them and a long-term career in their new environment. Government-backed loans provided many newcomer entrepreneurs and physicians the opportunity to invest in recouping capital and equipment they had been forced to abandon at their point of origin.41 The Darmstadt region’s Physicians’ Chamber dealt with the problem by permitting young doctors to serve their practical internships at any hospital, not just at specially designated teaching hospitals. The Chambers also supported the creation of paid and voluntary assistant physician positions at the bottom echelons of the medical profession.42 These decisions paved the way for the expansion of the ranks of Hesse’s physicians into the late 1950s and served to integrate young refugee physicians rapidly. General economic conditions had a greater impact on the plight of “elites” among the refugees. The economic bottleneck of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a much more powerful barrier than political considerations to the integration of refugees and late-returning prisoners of war. The currency reform of 1948 dashed some of the progress that newcomers had already made. In fact, the currency reform hit most refugees much harder than it did native Germans.43 Conversely, the economic miracle of the 1950s did more to make room for the newcomers than any specific refugee integration program devised by the government or professional organizations. Many established members of all three professions saw their own interests at odds with the integration of the newcomers. Before the June 1948 currency reform, Germany’s war-torn economy showed few signs of recovery. In this atmosphere, the influx of refugees and returning soldiers glutted an already crowded field. As a result, some established local elites viewed the often impoverished, desperate, and politically underrepresented newcomers as a threat to their incomes and professional prestige. In different ways and to different degrees, existing elites used their control of gatekeeper institutions to limit the success of the refugees in Hesse. Civil servants were a special case; quotas ensured that a large proportion of refugee civil servants took up posts as higher civil servants in Hesse in the postwar years. –

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By 1957, 5.6 percent of refugees were employed as Beamte, although 7.7 percent had worked as civil servants before the war. This was a much better showing than refugees who had formerly been economically independent; of these, merely a third remained independent. Refugee business leaders faced few formal hurdles, but found themselves lacking the capital, tools, or networks necessary to re-establish themselves in their new home, and many slipped into poverty. The enactment of Minister-President Christian Stock’s so-called “Hesse-Plan” in 1947 offered low-interest credit to some small and medium refugee entrepreneurs, but left the majority bitter about the lack of substantial material help. Although the early programs to support the integration of newcomer enterprises were only a small step compared to the magnitude of the problem, Hesse’s SPD government boasted of a few noteworthy successes in integrating refugee enterprises, such as the formerly Czechoslovakian glass works and textile enterprises.44 As late as 1949, entrepreneurs and refugee commissar Peter Paul Nahm warned of a growing radicalization of refugees if the state did not soon offer considerable credit.45 Refugee physicians complained more bitterly than the other two occupational groups that established elites prevented their integration. The wartime dearth of civilian doctors tilted the other way as doctors flooded into civilian practice after the war. As newcomers, refugees could rarely rely on their reputations or on the support of acquaintances in Hesse to establish themselves. Thus their admission to the public health insurance system often meant the difference between economic survival and proletarianization. Young, recently licensed doctors who returned from the war, such as the active Dr. Goldbach of the Marburger Bund pointed out: “No doctor can exist today if he has not been granted the right to treat members of the compulsory insurance companies, since 2/3 or 3/4 of the population belong to such mandatory insurance funds.”46 The admission of physicians to the insurance panel system outpaced even the rapid general population growth, so that the ratio of panel physicians to the number of insured remained higher than the target of one physician per six hundred insured. Because we now know that the influx of refugees ultimately helped to drive the miracle of Germany’s postwar economy, the real burden and dangers that the newcomers posed to the economy and society is often forgotten. When Hesse’s leaders grasped the extent and permanence of the refugee crisis, they began to voice fears that the newcomers would radically transform the region’s social structure and destabilize its economy and politics. Especially in the first months, the expellees consisted of more elderly, women, and children than they did of working-age men.47 Despite the other problems that these early migrants created, they put relatively little pressure on the indigenous elite occupations, since doctors, entrepreneurs, and high civil servants were underrepresented among them. By 1947, however, American military government statisticians noted that age and gender proportions –

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were in many respects more balanced in the refugee population than they were for native Hessians. Given the largely agricultural base of the areas from which the initial refugees emanated, the social structure of the succeeding waves of refugees was “fairly urban and commercial.”48 Numerous practical obstacles hindered newcomer physicians, entrepreneurs, and higher civil servants from reestablishing themselves in their former occupations. The administrative chaos and material deprivation in defeated Germany caused many of the difficulties. To begin with, the military government and the German administration channeled refugees primarily to less damaged rural communities, where opportunities for doctors, businessmen, and especially higher civil servants were rare or nonexistent.49 Businessmen and physicians both required physical facilities to conduct their careers, but housing was one of the scarcest of all commodities in bombedout, overpopulated Hesse. Sudeten Germans in the rural county of Waldeck complained that the lack of housing repeatedly foiled plans to develop productive enterprises.50 Money and barter goods were also in short supply for expellees, who had usually taken only what they could carry. Elite refugees from the Soviet occupation zone were generally not as rapidly or forcibly uprooted; because they could beat a more orderly and voluntary retreat, they were often able to transfer machinery and plans, or to bring familiar, trained managerial personnel with them. Enterprises that depended on specific local natural resources, on the other hand, were never in a position to relocate.51 Finally, military government’s stipulation that those whose denazification decisions were still pending could not work in positions of responsibility hit refugees harder than it did native Hessians. Both the lack of documentation and blatant discrimination often seriously delayed their cases.52 Many lucky refugees who brought money with them and “organized” adequate shelter discovered that personal connections counted more than cash—and the refugees were strangers. Some of Hesse’s successful refugees highlight the crucial role played by mutual support among refugees. Werner Hilpert arrived in Frankfurt in the summer of 1945 along with other future members of Hesse’s early postwar government, most notably Hermann Brill, the longtime SPD Head of the Hessian Staatskanzlei. He bore excellent credentials, having not only served as a financial trustee (Wirtschaftstreuhänder) in Leipzig, but also proving himself as an opponent of the National Socialists. A leader of the Center party and the Catholic Action movement, he had been sent to Buchenwald at the outbreak of the war, where he remained until liberated by the Americans in 1945. On the recommendation of fellow Buchenwald inmate (and devoted Hessian) Eugen Kogon, Hilpert was appointed to head the Frankfurt Chamber of Industry and Trade in the spring of 1946. 53 As chief manager of the Frankfurt Chamber at a time when the state and municipal administrations were in disarray, he organized support in Hesse for the transfer of key businessmen from Leipzig to Frankfurt. He was instrumental in transplanting branches of Leipzig’s massive book indus–

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try to the metropolis on the Main.54 He also intervened on behalf of Walter Leiske, who had served in Leipzig’s city administration under the anti-Nazi mayor Carl Goerdeler. Leiske sought employment in Hesse in order to migrate out of the Soviet zone. Hilpert’s introductions bore fruit: Leiske replaced Hilpert as manager of the Frankfurt Chamber of Industry and Trade when the latter became minister of Finance in 1947. In 1948, Leiske became Frankfurt’s Bürgermeister.55 Most newcomer elites, of course, lacked the personal connections necessary for such a smooth transition. Refugee organizations, once established in 1946 and 1947, represented a powerful network into which they could plug, either complementing or substituting for personal patronage. Refugee organizations intervened to support legislation aimed at specific occupations. Refugee civil servants and physicians had the most organizational leverage. Although there were no prominent refugee organizations specifically geared toward the interests of higher civil servants, there were influential associations with member organizations in Hesse which represented newcomer civil servants as a whole. The League of Refugee Beamte within the German Civil Servants’ League successfully lobbied alongside other groups in favor of preferential hiring for refugee civil servants as the federal government was being assembled in 1948 and 1949.56 Occupation-specific organizations could serve humanitarian as well as political functions. In a single issue of the nationwide organ of the Federal Physicians’ Chamber (Bundesärztekammer), Ärztliche Mitteilungen, four separate groups requested information about other displaced physicians in announcements: one for “Physicians from the Wartheland,” one for “Wartime Expellee Physicians in Lower Saxony,” yet another for “East Prussian Physicians,” and finally for “Sudeten German Physicians in Bavaria and Hesse.” To give a voice to the particular concerns of refugee physicians, a group in Lower Saxony also founded the “Interest Group for Refugee Physicians within the Central Association of Expellee Germans.”57 Before the passage of central West German legislation, the individual Länder undertook their own measures to accelerate the integration of refugees and expellees. Above all, they feared that failure to come to terms with the widespread hardship of the refugees could exacerbate their discontent and permanently alienate them from the fledgling democratic political system.58 Hesse’s Director for Refugee Affairs, Dr. Peter Paul Nahm, never tired of invoking the specter of “a wave of radicalization” that would ensue if the government did not quickly ease the plight of the newcomers.59 The Americans, too, worried that the expellees could form the nucleus of German revanchism.60 Refugees in turn deflected these fears by suggesting that the danger was Communism: “A world before whose gates Communism stands should be cognizant of the dangers inherent in such a development.”61 Ian Connor has demonstrated that Bavarian officials made little or no distinction between the threat of right and left radicalism among refugees, –

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although in fact newcomer radicals were almost always on the right of the political spectrum.62 As the Land with the highest concentration of newcomers, Schleswig-Holstein passed the farthest-reaching quota system for the preferential hiring of refugees in 1948.63 At first, Hesse’s new government ordered the creation of local and regional organizations simply to receive and care for the refugees. Working with other Länder in the Länderrat, Hesse then established a Land bureaucracy in March 1947 whose work was geared toward permanently integrating, rather than simply caring for, the refugees. The Refugee Office, under the Ministry for Labor and Welfare, tried simultaneously to deal with policy problems, initiate and draft appropriate state legislation, and serve the needs of individual refugees.64 After 1947, the office was headed by a dedicated career civil servant from Mainz, Dr. Peter Paul Nahm, a CDU member and early opponent of the Nazis.65 He approached his task with the conviction that, despite his political allegiances, “[t]here are things that I believe to be above politics [….] For me, the refugee question is not an arena for partisan considerations.”66 The office often encountered the stiff resistance of entrenched interests, especially from officials hoping to avoid additional burdens on their local economy. To overcome such obstacles, Nahm relied heavily on the support of the U.S. military government. He even tendered his resignation in 1949 when the Allies withdrew from direct involvement in refugee affairs. Nahm claimed that, in addition to the problems caused by the liquidity crisis of 1948/49, when governments adopted austerity measures in the wake of the currency reform, the loss of American involvement threatened the continuation of his office’s work.67 The move, which the newspapers described as an ultimatum, won Nahm’s office declarations of support from Hesse’s leading politicians. Nahm withdrew his resignation and the Refugee Office continued to operate with a greater level of political commitment.68 Hesse, and later the federal government in Bonn, applied quota rules to ensure the swift and fair integration of newcomer elites. Some of the rules aimed at helping all newcomers. For example, housing offices received orders that refugees were to receive available rooms at least proportionate to their number in the city or county. Denazification courts were ordered to hear the cases of refugees in proportions equal to their presence in the population, even if this meant cutting corners, such as the customary verification of information with the authorities in their towns of origin. Denazification jury panels had to include newcomers when the cases of refugees were under consideration.69 Other quotas applied to specific occupations, such as the rule that refugees be admitted to practice in a particular Hessian town or county or to the all-important panel insurance system according to their proportions in the population. Other rules and programs aimed at alleviating the special obstacles posed by the newcomer’s sudden and devastating poverty. The denazification Spruchkammern tribunals were ordered to consider –

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the financial and employment situation of newcomer followers when setting fines. However, these policies were only as effective as the ministry’s ability to communicate them. Refugee commissioner Nahm mentioned several examples where the tribunals seemed to be unaware of the regulations.70 In general, Hesse successfully integrated its new citizens by 1960. The unexpectedly fast disappearance of the refugee problem contributed to an exaggeration of the success of refugee integration in postwar public memory. The spate of publications and analyses dealing with newcomer integration all but dried up in the 1950s and 1960s.71 The achievements of the few individuals who made it to the highest ranks of Hesse’s medical community, business, and civil service should not hide the fact that formerly elite refugees as a whole suffered from a considerable loss of social status. The proportion of self-employed refugees, which includes both entrepreneurs and freely-practicing physicians, sank considerably. Many of the formerly self-employed became dependent employees and workers, and not even the overall increase of the self-employed in the 1950s returned them to the occupational independence of the prewar years.72 The previous discussion has focused on common problems that newcomer elites faced. A portrayal of the particular experiences of civil servants, business leaders, and physicians will help illustrate the individual problems, strategies, and degrees of success in their integration. The state proved to be a very forthcoming employer to refugees throughout West Germany, and Hesse was no exception. Hesse’s civil service employed many newcomer elites. One in four (24.2 percent) of Hesse’s administrative Beamte, and more than a fifth (21.3 percent) of higher civil servants in 1958 were German refugees. Another tenth were late-returning prisoners of war (4.3percent) or disabled veterans (5.2 percent).73 Hesse did not match the programs in Schleswig-Holstein, where by 1950 expellees accounted for nearly a third of all Beamte, and a fourth of all higher civil servants, but Hesse also had fewer refugees overall.74 The ability of the state to accommodate newcomer civil servants had been halting at first. The governments in both Wiesbaden and Bonn found themselves unable to rehire many former civil servants simply because budget limitations dictated austerity. Guidelines established in 1947 and 1948 required that refugees be given preferential consideration for open positions, but budget-trimming measures eliminated the state’s ability to accommodate significant numbers of applicants.75 As the economic crisis eased, the state’s reluctance to make room for the reinstatement of former state employees from other regions also let up. The high concentration of refugees at all levels of the civil service increased in the 1950s due to generous provisions of the Basic Law. Article 33 of the constitution stated bluntly that “the laws regarding the civil service are to be regulated according to the traditional principles of the career civil service” (die hergebrachten Grundsätze des Berufsbeamtentums).76 Furthermore, Article 131 of West Germany’s constitution guaranteed that a future federal –

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law would spell out the rights of the civil servants removed from office after Germany’s capitulation on 8May 1945. The result was the broadly restorative “Law for the Regulation of the Legal Status of Persons falling under Article 131 of the Basic Law.” Issued in 1951, two years after the adoption of the Basic Law, it stipulated that both the federal and Land administrations would make every effort to reinstate civil servants who had not been placed in the highest denazification categories. Numerous amendments and administrative orders created an elaborate quota system aimed at fulfillment of the law.77 Newcomer Beamte fared well within this legal framework. By the mid 1950s, there was a greater proportion of Beamte among employed newcomers than among non-newcomers. Entrepreneurs faced their own particular problems, but had certain advantages as well. Their greatest practical hurdle was a lack of capital. The shortage economy prior to the June 1948 currency reform enabled a number of refugee enterprises to turn a profit from undercapitalized, makeshift facilities. Refugees established as many as 11 percent of all new enterprises in the Kassel region and more than 13 percent in the Darmstadt region in the spring of 1947.78 Throughout Hesse, refugees founded 347 manufacturing industries by mid 1947, over two-thirds of them in the textile branch.79 Despite its positive overall effect on the economy, the currency reform devastated the weak newcomer enterprises that had sprouted up since 1945. The resuscitated monetary economy enabled native industries to produce directly for the market, and swiftly eliminated barter and black-market headaches, while it frequently caused refugee enterprises’ liquidity to dry up. Their inefficiency left them unable to compete adequately with the higher quality goods and services emanating from better-equipped and geographically better-situated native industries.80 The only hope for these marginalized refugee entrepreneurs lay in the extension of credit, for which few refugees could offer collateral. The immanent danger of massive business failures in the wake of the currency reform was a major impetus for the passage of the Soforthilfegesetz (Immediate Assistance Act) in 1949 and the Lastenausgleich (Law on the Equalization of Burdens) in 1952. The federal government shored up refugee capital with capital transfers under the Soforthilfegesetz and over a billion Marks of credit by 1955.81 The Soforthilfegesetz levied a 2 to 3 percent tax on long-term property and redistributed the resulting six billion Deutsche Mark as monthly compensation payments to bombing victims and refugees. This measure was intended as a stopgap solution until the passage of the Lastenausgleich. The latter gradually brought relief to many refugees who could keep their businesses afloat until 1952, when the program began. The Lastenausgleich sought to assist those Germans who had lost the most during the war. It required households that had emerged relatively unscathed to pay the equivalent of up to one-half of their property value as assessed on the day of the –

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1948 currency reform. Besides the regular payments, the fund made both reconstruction and employment loans to help businesses.82 In order to effect this massive transfer of wealth without unduly upsetting the social or economic order, payments to the special Lastenausgleich fund were spread out from 1954 to 1979. By the end of 1954, the plan had directly paid nearly three billion DM, mostly to newcomers.83 One-tenth of these Lastenausgleich payments went to recipients in Hesse. Beneficiaries received a total of 113.9 billion DM by 1979. To the refugee organizations, however, the program was “too little, too late.” They resented the delays and the rejection of earlier proposals. One such idea, the Homburger Plan, had proposed a Lastenausgleich to accompany the currency reform and would have enabled more refugee entrepreneurs to stabilize their capital base at the critical early stage, but it never got off the drawing board. Because refugee enterprises received little financial help before 1952, indigenous businesses were able to “fill in the gaps in the West German economy in which there once would have been room for the creation of independent refugee livelihoods.”84 As an interest group, newcomer entrepreneurs were less organized than physicians or civil servants. Their relative lack of organization partly explains why broad support was not forthcoming before 1949. Discussions within the Hesse administration as well as the American military government, nevertheless, indicate that administrators placed a growing emphasis on their integration. In their view, the expansion of newcomer economic activity promised to create employment for Hessians, especially the mostly unemployed refugees themselves. Moreover, functioning refugee business served to attract productive forces to local areas and shore up the economy and infrastructure, unlike the refugee camps, which many native Hessians considered centers of squalor, hopelessness, and crime. Ultimately, refugee entrepreneurs were successful at establishing themselves next to indigenous business leaders more because of the special subsidies and tax abatements extended to them by the state than due to academic qualifications (physicians) or interest-group lobbying (civil servants). Simultaneously taking stock and pressing for continued subsidy of newcomer enterprises in 1955, refugee groups painted a mixed picture of the integration of refugee business leaders. For the most part, they maintained, newcomer enterprises had remained “on the periphery of economic activity.”85 Friedrich Edding, a contemporary scholar who devoted much of his research to analyzing the refugee situation, noted that their businesses were smaller and weaker than native industries by 1955. The problem was in fact so bad for some, he concluded, that no reasonable public assistance could make them financially sound.86 Newcomer businessmen continued to demand subsidies to correct the unfair distribution of war-related burdens and halt their decline into a second class of Germans. In spite of the obstacles, Frankfurt’s mayor, Walter Leiske, a newcomer himself, claimed that the refugees had gained a strong foothold in Hesse’s business leadership.87 –

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Indeed, an early study concluded that entrepreneurs and merchants had been somewhat successful at staying in their chosen profession.88 Compared to physicians and higher civil servants, however, their success rate was not particularly heartening. Newcomer physicians were the most successful of the three groups at reestablishing themselves in Hesse, but even they found integration a slow and difficult process. A study commissioned by the 52nd German Medical Convention in 1949 gives a clue to the degree of integration of newcomer physicians in West Germany. About half of the estimated total of newcomer physicians responded to a questionnaire distributed with the Physicians’ Chamber’s monthly journal. The poll illustrated the existential importance for newcomer doctors of admission to the insurance system. Nearly twelve percent of the 3,369 respondents were still waiting for admission to the insurance funds, and an equal number were no longer professionally active. Of the active and integrated refugee physicians, almost two-thirds belonged to the panel insurance system, with a large minority gaining admittance to the system only after resettlement. Panel doctors were all but guaranteed an income. Without the network of acquaintances, survival as a Privatarzt, or non-panel physician, was precarious; physicians who accepted only private patients had to rely solely on their superior reputations or on referrals. Just as Hesse’s Physicians’ Chamber used the insurance fund as an exclusionary device during the lean years up to 1948, the more prosperous 1950s enabled them to utilize admission as an integrative tool. Working together with representatives of the medical lobby, the Hessian Labor and Welfare Minister decreed that all newcomer physicians who had permanently settled in Hesse and had been members of the insurance panel fund before the war were automatically admitted to panel practice.89 This was not yet a complete solution; panel physicians had to await openings in a particular area before they could actually set up practice, and open positions sometimes filled up before refugee physicians could respond. To solve the new problem, the interior ministry increased the required period between the advertisement and assignment of open slots.90 The 1953 Federal Expellee Law (Bundesvertriebenengesetz) went further, guaranteeing admission for all newcomer physicians, oral physicians (Zahnärzte), and dentists (Dentisten) who had assumed residence in the FRG prior to 1953. It applied even to those not admitted prior to 1939, and would remain in effect until newcomer physicians achieved parity with natives in the territory of the Federal Republic.90

Newcomers, Overcrowding, and the Fear of Displacement An often forgotten barrier that the newcomers encountered was the discrimination of the native population. In some areas, like the Ruhr, the widespread dislocation of the native population by the war (bombing, unemployment, –

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etc.) instilled many with a sense of solidarity based on mutual uprootedness. The natives of other areas, above all relatively intact rural communities, resented the outsiders. Many local West Germans regarded the newcomers as dirty, lazy, and untrustworthy. While stereotypes of Sudeten Germans were generally less hostile than those held about Eastern Germans, they still took their toll on newcomer elites.91 Some of the discrimination that the newcomers faced was subtle but effective. The bottleneck caused by their special treatment in the denazification process serves as a case in point. Refugees frequently complained that local elites deliberately used denazification to delay or prevent the reestablishment of doctors or business leaders in their new communities. They claimed that the tribunals dragged their feet in processing their cases, thus taking advantage of the stipulation that they could work only as common laborers in the interim.92 The sheer volume and repetition of policies, statements, orders, and complaints aimed at integrating newcomers suggests that local administrators did not consistently give preference to newcomers. For example, instructions to grant refugee physicians preferential admission to the panel insurance fund had to be reiterated several times between 1947 and 1949.93 The repetition of these policies suggests that they were not being implemented to the satisfaction of Hesse’s military government and civilian leaders. Tellingly, such complaints faded away in the course of the early 1950s. Just as economic self-interest lay at the core of discrimination against refugees, the dramatic dissipation of the postwar economic crisis led to a reduction of protests about open resistance to the integration of newcomers. As the economy and the consequent demand for government administration, industrial production, and medical services spiraled to unexpected heights in the 1950s, competition with newcomers gave way to acceptance and even active recruitment. Civil servants’ experience was unique in several regards. First of all, the state was their immediate employer as well as their most important ally. As an employer, both Hesse’s government and the federal administration needed and tried to limit the rights of former civil servants in several ways; one of the most compelling reasons was to avoid the Weimar governments’ dependence on a largely disloyal civil service. Political considerations and self-interest (many politicians were high civil servants on leave), nevertheless, led the state to side with former civil servants’ fight for re-instatement. Another characteristic that set the experience of refugee civil servants apart from newcomer entrepreneurs and physicians was they shared a goal with their indigenous counterparts: the Allies, and above all the Americans, had purged a huge proportion of established higher civil servants in their campaign to denazify and reform the civil service. The excluded civil servants claimed a right to reinstatement based on their special and virtually unalterable relationship to the state, which theoretically began when they were sworn in as Beamte. Civil servants who had retained their positions, more–

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over, feared a loss of status if American reformers successfully did away with Germany’s traditional three-track civil service (Beamte, employees, and manual laborers) Consequently, refugee civil servants shared a common cause with both the large number of indigenous civil servants seeking re-instatement and employed civil servants who hoped to uphold their exalted position. The Basic Law’s recognition of the “traditional principles of Germany’s professional civil service” and the laws based on article 131 marked the success of their common efforts. The result of preferential hiring programs for both refugees and for politically displaced civil servants worked in favor of integration. In the space of a decade, refugees had assumed one out of five higher civil service positions, well above their proportion of the population. Before 1950, newcomer businessmen complained bitterly of the hardships created by over-regulation and licensing requirements, but local elite resistance was limited. Some refugees indeed voiced their frustration that local chambers of industry and trade placed regulatory obstacles in their path. However, the licensing requirements for new businesses were transferred from the chambers of industry and trade to the state bureaucracy in 1946.94 The state’s intervention on behalf of refugee enterprises outweighed any evidence of resistance by indigenous business leaders. The Regierungspräsident of the Kassel Region intervened on behalf of the refugee business leaders to relax the formalities of licensing both before and after the currency reform.95 Shortly after the currency reform of 1948, licensing requirements were dropped for most industries; entrepreneurs only needed to register their companies and demonstrate that their ownership and management did not harbor serious political offenders.96 Newcomers’ common inability to document their political history delayed professional integration to some degree, but this was a general refugee problem, not an instrument in the hands of their native competitors.97 By the 1950s, regulatory obstacles for business leaders were less of a problem than maintaining liquidity and high productivity in an increasingly competitive market. Peter Waldmann cites the economic miracle as one of the two chief reasons why the expellees so rapidly assimilated in the 1950s, after several years of competition with the native population of the FRG. The other reason was the mass of federal and state legislation of the early 1950s, especially the Soforthilfegesetz, the Lastenausgleich, and Umsiedlungsgesetze, as well as re-training and housing programs.98 Of all the groups, refugee physicians experienced the greatest and most persistent obstruction from indigenous elites. The local medical establishment not only worried about the competition that refugee doctors brought to Hesse, but also that the refugees could undermine the very conditions that defined their importance as a free profession. Hesse’s medical association found it difficult to keep track of who was practicing medicine, and where. To alleviate what they viewed as an unacceptable situation, a newly established state office for medical licenses in Wiesbaden ordered a one-time registration of all medical personnel in Hesse during the first two months of 1948.99 –

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At least some municipal areas, such as Darmstadt, kept abreast of the fluctuating numbers of physicians by keeping their own lists.100 Dr. Carl Oelemann, president of the Land Physicians’ Chamber, admitted in a report to military government in 1947 that the medical association had established special committees to allocate physicians and limit competition. The committee’s ultimate task, legally sanctioned by the 1937 Reich Physicians’ Law, was to maintain the stature of the medical profession. He argued that allowing physicians to set up shop where they wished would result in an overconcentration in “choice areas.” This, in turn, might foster “business-like means of propaganda,” which he equated with “infamous […] professional conduct”.101 In other words, he feared a rise in competitive advertising that would lower the occupation’s status as a free profession. He conceded that regulation of the settlement of physicians would have to be abandoned down the road, but was necessary in the interim. He maintained that the chambers and panel admissions boards gave preference to “displaced and expelled doctors,” followed [!] by those formerly “persecuted for political and racial reasons.”102 As with civil servants, however, the oversupply of physicians became so great that numerical or proportional limitations effectively blocked new admissions, whether for refugees or natives. The newcomers could least afford to wait. Numerous refugee and expellee physicians in Hesse felt that they were receiving the opposite of preferential treatment. In January 1949, the U.S. military government directed that professionally qualified physicians and dentists could open their practices freely in Hesse.103 However, the ratio rule continued to restrict newcomers’ admission to the all-important insurance panels. A refugee doctor in the small north Hessian town of Hünfeld asked the Americans to intervene on his behalf, claiming: The freedom to establish a practice where one chooses, which has been forced through by the American military government, will remain a mere half-measure until every licensed physician is given the right to participate in every insurance fund.104

Complaints of chicanery obstructing refugee doctors’ access to the funds drifted into the Military Government’s public health division in 1949, once expellees and refugees discovered that simple admission as doctors did not translate into sufficient income.105 One doctor was particularly galled by the fact that he had long been an insurance fund physician in Bräz, now administered by Poland, but could not gain admission as a Kassenarzt in Hesse.106 The same was true for the urologist Dr. Hans Junker, whom the Americans had helped move to Wiesbaden from Berlin’s Soviet sector. Dr. Junker, who had been an insurance fund physician for twenty-five years before moving to Hesse, chose to treat insured patients for free, but suspected that other doctors in his position turned them away.107 Yet another doctor went on to describe the “old boy network” behind Wiesbaden’s insurance panel: a com–

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mittee of “experts,” chaired by the panel’s long-time president, admitted new physicians to the fund based on “urgent need” in a specific area. Most of the experts were respected and established local doctors, who could argue against new admissions to prevent new competition for their publicly insured patients. He pleaded with an American military government officer “to reform these scandalous conditions and to smash this undemocratic system” [i.e. Wiesbaden’s insurance panel].108 Such complaints spurred the Land government to form a review commission to determine whether the panel’s activities amounted to an infringement on freedom of trade.109 Leaders in all three occupational groups tried to cope with overcrowding by discriminating against women. The personnel office of the unified economic area of the American and British zones, the precursor of the Federal government, sought to apply similar rules to the employment of female civil servants, based on related laws of 1932, 1933, and 1937.110 When the question was raised again in the tripartite economic area, all agreed that the 1933 and 1942 provisions had been annulled as National Socialist legislation, but the 1932 measure found its defenders.111 Female Beamte employed by the state of Hesse, however, were protected by the state “law for the regulation of civil servants and employees” of 25 November 1946. Article Three of the law stipulated that “all special regulations against female civil servants are voided.”112 The deletion of previous provisions limiting the employment of married women established a new legal environment, but could not eradicate gender discrimination any more than similar provisions did at the federal level. At the beginning of 1955, by far the most women in federal administrative positions worked as mid level civil servants (28,697) than in either the lowest (366) or the highest (88) level. And the majority of women employed by federal administrative offices were non-tenured employees (46,477) rather than tenured Beamtinnen (29,980).113 Nevertheless, by 1958, 12 percent of Hesse’s higher civil servants were women. This compared favorably with the federal civil service, where only one-tenth of all höhere Beamte in 1961 were women.114 A much smaller percentage held important managerial posts. Of the 158 higher Beamte who worked as section heads or higher in Hesse’s state administration between 1950 and 1956, only four were women, a mere 2.5 percent!115 By contrast, fifty-seven percent of Hesse’s public employees at the lowest grade were women.116 The difference leads to the conclusion that women faced an informal though porous barrier when their level of responsibility was determined within a hierarchical structure. Academic training was a necessary prerequisite to a career in the high civil service, but unlike a medical degree, a law degree did not entitle its holder to employment. The distribution of high functional positions was controlled by men of the old school at the top of the administrative pyramid. In the absence of integrative legislation like that for the refugees, women only slowly increased their representation in the higher civil service. –

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Many business women assumed leadership positions through inheritance and tenacity. Frequently they were the widows (and less often the daughters) of businessmen who had died. One source makes the common claim that most of the postwar business women attained their positions when their husbands died during the war. At the same time, it states that the proportion of women among all entrepreneurs increased from 6.8 percent in 1939 to only 7.6 percent in 1950, hardly a startling expansion.117 In a study of women who owned or managed large enterprises in the mid 1960s, Heinz Hartmann concludes that only a small percentage took over the firms during the war, and only twofifths before the 1948 currency reform.118 He contends that the Unternehmerin had “arrived” as an identifiable type in the public consciousness in the course of the 1950s rather than earlier.119 Nevertheless, women did not establish themselves in the higher echelons of the business community any more than they did in the other elite occupations: of the 60,000 entrepreneurs with academic titles listed in the reference catalog Leitende Männer der deutschen Wirtschaft in the mid 1960s, not even one percent were women.120 In Darmstadt’s largest enterprises in 1953 (as listed in Handbuch der Großunternehmer), nearly three percent of all leadership positions are women.121 Some female physicians suddenly found that their permission to practice in a given area was withheld or even revoked if they were married and their husbands were employed. In late 1945, a refugee neurologist in Darmstadt complained that the local physicians’ chamber was threatening to revoke her permission to practice simply because she was married, although she and her husband were among the few physicians in that city who had never joined the NSDAP.122 In a policy statement to military government, President Oelemann stated that the Hessian Physicians’ Chamber would only admit married women physicians to panel practice “if their practising [sic] is required to support their families.”123 The Land government had already abandoned such policies for civil servants. Of the three elite occupations, there were more women physicians in 1961 (17 percent) than high civil servants (10 percent) or independent entrepreneurs (8 percent). These proportions were higher than in the early 1950s, but they did not begin to approach women’s thirty-three percent share of the working population.124 The varying degrees of success experienced by women in the different elite occupations can be attributed mainly to occupation-specific avenues of recruitment. In the medical profession, the university degree represented the main qualifying criterion. Women had attained admission to the universities at the end of the nineteenth century, and their proportions increased steadily thereafter. Discrimination continued to relegate women to “feminine” specialties like pediatrics and limited their access to prestigious positions as professors hospital administrators, and surgeons, but they had established their basic right to practice. Physicians also turned to another tried and true method of alleviating the perceived overcrowding in their field; where possible, they sought to limit the –

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number of young Germans receiving the necessary credentials for employment. Here medical professionals had a distinct advantage, since they had a strong grip on the one universal requirement for medical practice: professional certification. While physicians in Hesse differed on the question of whether the state should “radically block the admission to the study of medicine,” since they associated absolute quotas with a “planned economy,” they agreed to less extreme measures aimed at discouraging many German youths from a career in medicine.125

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The Effect of Newcomers on Elite Continuity The contradictory arguments concerning the number of politically tainted newcomers have not yet been resolved. Sudeten Germans in Hesse, who resented the denazification tribunals even more than native Hessians, claimed that the Czechoslovak authorities had detained “activists of all kinds” and sentenced them to many years’ imprisonment. Thousands of others had been summarily executed or beaten to death by mobs, they claimed. Asking that pre-Spruchkammer occupational restrictions be lifted to compensate for their own suffering, they argued that “it would be better to have to retract two licenses out of one hundred rather than condemn ninety-eight innocents to months of idleness.”126 The prevailing opinion among many natives, however, was that Sudeten Germans and Hungarian Germans, the largest groups among Hesse’s newcomers, were more radical and nationalistic than the indigenous population.127 Since native Hessians had more influence in setting denazification standards and procedures, the regulations and rules reflected their own suspicions about the newcomers. The Landrat’s office in Giessen tended to avoid rehabilitating newcomers based on their denazification questionnaires (Fragebogen and later Meldebogen), since there was “no way to check their answers for veracity.”128 The so-called Christmas Amnesty, which General Clay announced in December 1946, proved especially magnanimous toward refugees. It stipulated that Germans with little or no income or property, as well as disabled individuals, need not face denazification tribunals if neither their automatic classification nor other incriminating material placed them potentially in a high denazification category (see Chapter 4). In cases where “followers” among the refugees were spared the denazification process, the amnesty brought a type of compensatory justice; the monetary fines were often a serious burden for native followers who had escaped the war relatively unscathed, but they could mean absolute ruin for refugees who had already lost nearly everything.129 For those who found no relief in the Christmas Amnesty, the authorities tried to solve the problem of missing political documentation in two ways. On the one hand, the Spruchkammer requested data on organizational memberships from the mounting records in the Berlin –

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Document Center.130 On the other hand, the ministry of political information began to request a statement of political background for refugees from local refugee committees, which better understood the peculiar plight of their constituents than did the local Hessian “political committees” of politically reliable local inhabitants.131 The potential for abuse by the refugee committees is evident, and examples abound that refugees were frequently more interested in looking after their own than in uncovering the truth about a refugee’s past political transgressions. Moreover, the chair of the denazification tribunal in Kassel noted that the law of 3 March did not legally require officials in other zones or countries to provide information on individuals being denazified in Hesse. He pointed out that the more tainted Nazis would also be most likely to have left those other areas in order to escape denunciation by those familiar with their Nazi-era records.132 In the tangle of regulations, laws, policies, loopholes, and jurisdictional strife, persistent individuals with the patronage of key individuals could establish themselves regardless of technical restrictions. The businessman H. Z., a refugee from the Soviet zone, turned to Werner Hilpert, at the time acting governor of Greater Hesse, for a promise of employment to speed up his denazification tribunal.133 However, newcomers could not always turn the administrative chaos and their own geographical mobility to their advantage. One civil servant held as a prisoner of war until 1950, applied for reinstatement in Hesse’s administration, claiming that his tenured civil servant status had never been severed. Because he had spent the four and a half years since the war in a POW camp, the military government had never officially fired him, although he had joined the NSDAP and the SA in 1932. Hesse’s interior ministry countered with several arguments, citing regulations, and extenuating circumstances that precluded his reinstatement. Some of the arguments were legally dubious, but upheld the spirit of denazification in the civil service. For instance, the ministry argued that the American military government would have annulled Sch.’s employment based on his status as an “old fighter.” Here, in other words, was an individual who had altogether avoided formal denazification but nevertheless found himself excluded from a position in the higher civil service.134 The influx of refugees and expellees, and the return in the 1950s of many who had been excluded for political reasons during the early occupation, affected the composition of the elite in indirect but significant ways. For example, the overcrowding caused by the restitutional demands of older, experienced doctors, entrepreneurs, and civil servants restricted the entry of young Nachwuchs. Alfred Petersen of the Chambers of Industry and Trade recognized this fact, and often pointed the problem out to his colleagues. The federal interior minister in Bonn decided to assess the extent of the problem; in 1952, he asked the individual Länder to check if the poor prospects for aspiring civil servants led otherwise qualified youth to turn to other occupations.135 After consulting with his subordinates, Joachim Oppenheimer in –

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Hesse’s interior ministry, replied that, indeed, the civil service was gripped by “a strong over-aging.” However, rather than blaming the so-called “131ers,” he attributed it to the higher pay that able young people could expect from private-sector employment.136 A similar situation existed in municipal administrations, according to the Hessischer Gemeindetag,137 and the Hessischer Städtetag believed that the quickly multiplying hiring requirements, i.e. article 131 and refugee quotas, were just as responsible as the salary gap.138 The aging of the professions continued beyond 1955, setting the stage for the generational conflict that marked the second half of the 1960s. Ten years after the war, the composition of Hesse’s medical profession, business leadership, and higher civil service had changed drastically in some ways, but remained remarkably similar in others. The combination of warrelated demographic disruptions led to a high degree of discontinuity among the elite. Whereas generally between one-half and two-thirds of prewar members of these occupations reappeared after 1945, the indigenous elite groups were swamped by individuals who were new to Hesse’s elite. By 1955, the majority were new, either to Hesse, to these occupations, or both. The rapid dilution of the indigenous elite was primarily a function of the unprecedented growth of the elite occupations. This, in turn, followed partly from Hesse’s overall population growth, especially the influx of refugees, and partly from West Germany’s general economic expansion. Much of the historical literature on the West German elites has focused on the political continuity as represented by individuals and institutions. The effect of larger demographic shifts, however, proved to be of greater significance.

Notes 1. The lower casualty figure is cited by H. Sperling, “Deutsche Bevölkerungsbilanz des 2. Weltkrieges,” Wirtschaft und Statistik, NF (1956): 493. Arriving at seven million is K.D.Erdmann, Das Ende des Reiches und die Neubildung deutscher Staaten (Munich, 1980), 364. A similar total is broken down in more detail in 10 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung (Wiesbaden, 1959), 31-32. The higher number, which includes 4 million non-military casualties, is from M.K. Sorge, The Other Price of Hitler’s War: German Military and Civilian Losses Resulting from World War II (New York, 1986), xviii. 2. Erdmann, 124, 365. The American military government distinguished between expellees, evacuees, and infiltrees, all of whom were subsumed under the term “refugees.” Expellees, the largest category, were Germans forced out of other European areas based on the Potsdam accords. In addition, the Nazis had “evacuated” almost ten million Germans out of the cities and into the German countryside during the war. Infiltrees were Germans who entered Hesse illegally from other zones. See Report, “The Refugee Problem in Hessen” (restricted), June 1947, OMGH ICD Box 67. German law placed refugees in the following –

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3.

4.

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

categories: Flüchtlinge (refugees) from the German Democratic Republic, Heimatvertriebene (homeland expellees) who had lived in the eastern territories before 1937, and Vertriebene (expellees) who lived in the eastern territories in 1939). P. Lüttinger, “Der Mythos der schnellen Integration. Eine empirische Untersuchung der Integration der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis 1971” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 15:1 (1986): 20-36. The demographic upheaval in Western Germany was compounded by the presence of eight to ten million displaced persons (DPs). Evacuees and DPs had little direct effect on the occupational groups discussed here, but they contributed to the general confusion of the postwar years. Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung, 39-44. In this text, both groups are collectively referred to as newcomers, roughly comparable to the contemporary German term Neubürger (new citizen). For stylistic reasons, the vaguer term refugees is used almost interchangeably with newcomers. L. Niethammer, “Flucht ins Konventionelle? Einige Randglossen zu Forschungsproblemen der deutschen Nachkriegsmigration,” in Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte, ed. R. Schulze et al. (Hildesheim, 1987), 318-19. On the regional equalization of the refugee burden in western Germany, see F. Edding, Die wirtschaftliche Eingliederung der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge in Schleswig-Holstein (Berlin, 1955), 16-23; On the tendency of Sudeten Germans to relocate to Hesse and Bavaria, while those from the East settled mainly in the North, E. Pfeil, “Regionale Sesshaftmachung,” in Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland. Ihre Eingliederung und Ihr Einfluß auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistesleben, ed. E. Lemberg and F. Edding, vol. 1 (Kiel, 1959), 455501; also P. Waldmann, “Die Eingliederung der ostdeutschen Vertriebenen in die westdeutsche Gesellschaft” in Vorgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Zwischen Kapitulation und Grundgesetz, ed. J. Becker et al. (Munich, 1979), 167. The 1946 numbers include evacuees who had not yet returned to their home cities. Only Offenbach’s population grew less than 20 percent. The population of 7 counties grew between 20 and 29 percent (Bergstraße, Dieburg, Groß-Gerau, Hanau-Land, Limburg, Rheingaukreis, and Wetzlar); 11 counties grew between 30 and 39 percent (Darmstadt, Erbach, Friedberg, Eschwege, Fulda-Land, Kassel-Land, Dillkreis, Gelnhausen, Maintaunus, Oberlahnkreis, Obertaunuskreis); 16 counties between 40 and 49 percent (Alsfeld, Büdingen, Giessen-Land, Lauterbach, Frankenberg, Hersfeld, Hünfeld, Marburg-Land, Rotenburg, Waldeck, Witzenhausen, Ziegenhain, Biedenkopf, Schlüchtern, Untertaunuskreis, Usingen); and 4 counties 50 or more percent (Fritzlar-Homberg, Hofgeismar, Melsungen, Wolfhagen). Report from Dr. Peter Paul Nahm, Experte der Staatskanzlei für Flüchtlingswesen, to Knappstein, Ministerium für politische Befreiung, 10 Jan. 1947, HHStA-W 501/89. Since 5 to 10 percent of German Jews had already emigrated in reaction to the worsening situation after 1932, 10.8 percent is probably a low figure. M. Richarz, “Einleitung,” Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland, Vol. 3: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte 1918-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1982), 24. There is little evidence to support an official FRG publication’s claim in 1959 that “a particular crisis of the early postwar years, the absence of Jewish physicians, has been nearly eliminated due to a considerable reimmigration (Rückwanderung) and in part due to new arrivals.” 10 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 676. Blank, “Die Ausschaltung jüdischer Ärzte”. H. Jakobi et al. Aeskulap und Hakenkreuz. Zur Geschichte der Medizinischen Fakultät in Gießen zwischen 1933 und 1945” (Frankfurt a. M., 1989), 53-57. The authors do not mention the fate of the four non-professors. See S. Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question” (Princeton, 1984), 10-12 and 227. Also Statistik des Deutschen Reiches, vol. 455 (1933), vol. 470 (1937), and vol. 552 (1942). German statistical offices usually lump most physicians and business leaders together with other elite occupations under the category independents (Selbstständige), but they provide a special category for Beamte. Of the 61 percent of German Jews employed before 1933 in –

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11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

trade and commerce, more than half were self-employed, mostly in the retail business. D. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge, 1980), 12-15. W. Leiske, in Vorträge und Aussprachen anlässlich der Jahresversammlung von der 150-JahreFeier der Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a. M. (Frankfurt, 1958), 38. Oberbürgermeister Blaum to the Chief of American Mil. Gov. for Greater Hesse, Attn. Col. Newman, through Col. Phelps, MG Ffm, 30 Apr. 1946, OMGH Box 464. Also Letter from Petersen, Mitglied des Vorstandes der Metallgesellschaft AG to Hesse’s Minister of Culture, Dr. Schramm, 7 May 1946, HHStA-W 502-3992. Pritzkoleit singles Merton out as a prime example of the intertwining of offices and honors in the business, society, and politics in the mid 1950s. Pritzkoleit, Die neuen Herren, 189-91. See documents in HHStA-W 507/1381 and in the folder “Prüfungsausschüsse für Arisierungsfrage bei den Industrie- und Handelskammern,” IHK Ffm, box XIII 4,2. Also letter from Hilpert to Barsch, Hessisches Ministerium für Wirtschaft und Verkehr, 12 April 1946, IHK Ffm, folder Wirtschaftsministerium 1.3.46-31.12.46. The treatment of Jewish claims in the post-Nazi years deserves more investigation in the light of the more recent post-reunification insistence on the principle of “restitution before compensation” for refugees from the GDR. However, strict legal limitations on personal information in Germany (Datenschutz) make such projects difficult at best. F. Bajohr, ‘Aryanization’ in Hamburg (New York, 2002 [orig. German 1997]), 7, 9. E.G. Lowenthal, “Die Juden im öffentlichen Leben,” in Entscheidungsjahr 1932, ed. Werner E. Mosse (Tübingen, 1965), 52-57. Richarz calculates that Jews comprised only 1.3 percent of Prussia’s higher civil service in 1925. Richarz, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland, Vol. 3, 67, fn. 23. E. Bennathan, “Die demographische und wirtschaftliche Struktur der Juden,” in Entscheidungsjahr 1932, ed. W.E. Mosse (Tübingen, 1965), 104-5. Due to Nazi policies of emigration, deportation, and genocide, the number of Jews in Germany fell from 550,000 before Hitler to 25,000 in the Federal Republic. Lowenthal, “Die Juden,” 57. Lowenthal uses the problematic hereditary definition, which is considerably larger than the number of self-identified Jews, but which is used in most statistics for Germany between the world wars. Lowenthal, 51-53. Although Berlin had by far the largest Jewish population in the Reich in 1925 (172,672), Frankfurt’s Jews (29,385) represented a larger percentage of the municipal population (6.3 percent, compared to 4.3 percent in Berlin). M. Richarz, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland, 17. Th. Eschenburg presents a classic restoration scenario in “Der bürokratische Rückhalt,” in Die Zweite Republik. 25 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland—eine Bilanz, ed. R. Löwenthal and H.-P. Schwarz (Stuttgart, 1974), 89-90. The quote is the title of a chapter that argues that West German business had not been significantly purged or restructured. J. Dornberg, Schizophrenic Germany, 159-68. Ch. Pross, “Introduction,” in Cleansing the Fatherland, Götz Aly et al. (Baltimore, 1994), 7. The complexities of the drawn-out Verwaltungsreform in Hesse are discussed in a speech by Ludwig Bergsträsser, the Regierungspräsident in Darmstadt, HStA-D, H1, Reg-Gr. 2, Liste 21, 19/3V. Land Hessen employed more than twice the number of higher civil servants in 1948 than municipalities, the bizonal administration, public-law bodies, and state-owned services (railraod and post office) combined. The main reason cited is the need to protect individuals’ privacy. If the current rules remain in force, general research access will be granted only after 110 years. If dates of birth or death are known, access may be granted earlier (110 years after a person’s birth, or 30 years after death). In order to locate denazification files, it is necessary to establish where an individual was “denazified”; this is especially difficult for Hesse’s Beamte who usually moved to Wiesbaden from elsewhere (i.e. after denazification). Other complications also hindered a statistical analysis. –

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25. The Handbuch der Großunternehmen (hereafter HGU) appeared in 1941, 1944, 1953, and then biannually beginning in 1955. It lists data on the largest firms, including members of the Supervisory and Directory Boards, dates the company was founded, and size of work force. Leitende Männer der Wirtschaft (hereafter LMW) appeared in 1951, 1953, and 1955. It provides biographical sketches of a partly objectively-, partly self-selected sample of leading economic figures. 26. The sample of 623 individuals, drawn from listings in the 1953 HGU consists of all owners and members of the board (directors and supervisors), but excludes managers (Prokuristen and Geschäftsführer). Dates of first membership to the board were often provided. The list of cases was checked against the first two editions of HGU (1941 and 1944). Less than 10 percent of the compiled names appeared in LMW, from which additional information was drawn. The Darmstadt sample (138 cases) was also compared with the residence record in Darmstadt city archives (StA-D, Einwohnermeldekartei), resulting in crucial information on another two dozen cases (esp. birth date, date of arrival in Darmstadt). Denazification tribunal files, if they could be located, served as an additional source of information for the Darmstadt sample. 27. Among the distortions in the sources is the method of establishing the significance of a company. The changing criteria (size of capitalization, number of employees, etc.) led to more than a doubling in the number of HGU entries between 1943 and 1953. Also, the fact that the first and second editions appeared during the war suggests that some local entrepreneurs might simply have been away at war (although it appears that most were still listed if their absence was considered temporary). Finally, the HGU does not provide address or date of birth, thus complicating the task of finding additional information through other sources. 28. New members of Boards of Directors were generally elected by incumbents to fill vacancies. Term limits are rare. Supervisory Board members are chosen by major investors, and frequently represent major banks. They are usually recruited from the banking, business, insurance, and political communities, but they occasionally include other prominent personalities. 29. It is worth pointing out that some gaps in board membership were noted in the HGU or were revealed by other sources. Gaps were usually during all or part of the Third Reich, and less frequently during the occupation. 30. The Hessian Chamber of Physicians and Kassenärztliche Vereinigung would not permit access to registration files even for an anonymous statistical study. Given this unfortunate restriction, address books provided a wealth of information for Hesse’s cities. However, they overlook most small towns and rural areas. 31. In other words, they were listed in one or all of the address books of 1948, 1950, 1953, or 1955. 32. Because address books were usually not published for the war years or prior to the postwar currency reform, address books offer little or no information about the status of individual doctors during the early occupation. 33. These statistics exaggerate discontinuity because they register migration as discontinuity. This is only true in the qualified sense that the local elites’ dominance was diminished. 34. These numbers exclude all employees of the postal service, the rail service, elected bodies and their staffs, the police, and education. W. Brandes, F. Buttler, et al. Der Staat als Arbeitgeber: Daten zum öffentlichen Dienst in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt a. M., 1990), 44. The official West German statistical journal states that the administrative service increased 14 percent between 1949 and 1954. SJ-BRD 1955, 117. 35. This figure refers only to administrative civil servants (Verwaltungsbeamten) and excludes the administrations of towns with a population under 1000. Der Personalstand der öffentlichen Verwaltung in Hessen, Stand: 2. Oktober 1958, Beiträge zur Statistik Hessens, Nr. 114 (Wiesbaden, Aug. 1959), 23. On cuts in the civil service following the currency reform, as later increases in the Marburg district, one of Hesse’s three regional administrative cen–

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

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49.

50.

ters, see report from E.A. Knoblauch, District level civilian intelligence officer, Marburg L&S, to Director of OMGH (Attn: Chief, Intelligence Division), OMGH 1125. Included in the HGU listings beginning in 1953 were all companies with a capitalization of 500,000 DM or more. If this information was unavailable, the number of employees, total sales, and importance for export business determined inclusion. M. Janowitz, “Soziale Schichtung und Mobilität in Westdeutschland,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 10 (1958): 6-7. Table 2.10 gives increases at shorter intervals. Kater, Doctors under Hitler. See Chapter 1. Despite credits, refugee businesses faced difficulties in meeting their payments when the currency reform of 1948 caused a liquidity crisis. Innenministerieller Ausschuß für Flüchtlingskredite to Hesse Economics ministry, Hilpert and Koch, 28 Apr. 1949, HHStA-W 503/949; also George Vadney, OMGH L&S, Sub-office Untertaunus, to Dir. OMGH (Attn: Dir. Of Intelligence), 31 Aug. 1949, OMGH Box 461. Ärzteschaft Darmstadt, Rundschreiben Nr. 14, 2 Sept. 1946, 2-3, HHStA-W 502/1467. R. Schulze, “Growing Discontent: Relations between Native and Refugee Populations in a Rural District in Western Germany after the Second World War,” German History 7 (1989): 346. A typical refugee businessman’s complaint from Dip.-Kaufmann Martin Schneider, Korbach, to Peter Paul Nahm, Landesflüchtlingsamt, 18 May 1949, HHStA-W 503/949. The Military Government was also impressed with the relocation project and followed its progress. OMGH Weekly Summary no. 84, 15-21 May 1947, 10, OMGH box 65. Letter from Nahm, Landesamt für Flüchtlinge, to the Minister for Labor and Welfare, Wiesbaden, 29 March 1949; open letter from Dipl.-Kfm. Martin Schneider, to LandesFlüchtlingsamt, Minister für Arbeit und Wohlfahrt (Wbn), Korbach, 18 May 1949; also report from the inter-ministerial committee on credit to Ministers Hilpert, Koch, and Arndgen, 28 April 1949, HHStA-W 503/949. OMGH Marburg District L&S to Director, OMGH, Attn: Chief of Intelligence, 11 March 1949, OMGH PHD 996. The earliest expellee transport arriving in Hesse brought 1200 individuals, including approximately 200 children, 400 (mostly elderly) men, and 600 women. Weekly Summary, MG for Land Hessen (Darmstadt), 2nd MG Regiment, 13-19 Feb. 1945, 1, OMGH box 62. Unfortunately, there are few reliable statistics for the earliest, and also the most concentrated, wave of refugees, namely those who fled in front of the Red Army’s advance and up to the Potsdam Conference. Lutz Niethammer, “Flucht ins Konventionelle,” 318-29. Dr. Konrad Thiess, Die Ausgewiesenen: Deutschlands Schicksalsfrage, ed. CDU (Stuttgart, 1946), 12-13. Found in HHStA-W 501/459. Thiess claims that 18 percent of the refugees in 1946 worked in the civil service, 12.5 percent in trade and transportation, and 34.2 percent in industry and handicrafts. A 1947 MG report described the following occupational distribution for Hessian refugees: 25percent agricultural and forestry, 30 percent industry and craftsmanship, 30 percent trade and communications, and 15 percent professions. Report, “The Refugee Problem in Hessen,” June 1947, 34, OMGH box 67. The population increases by size of communities reflects the results of the refugee distribution policies. By 1946, Hessian communities of less than 2,000 experienced a 41.5 percent population increase, while cities larger than 100,000 lost a quarter of their population compared to 1939. Edding recognized the contradictory effects of the refugee flood on the economy at an early date. F. Edding, Die Flüchtlinge als Belastung und Antrieb der westdeutschen Wirtschaft (Kiel, 1952). W. Abelshauser similarly notes that “While laborers were amply available, they were not located in areas in which they were needed in the medium term.” Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945-1980 (Frankfurt a. M., 1983), 23. Bericht über die Versammlung der Gemeinde-Vertrauensleute der Neubürger im Kreise Waldeck, 16 Jan. 1947, HHStA-W 502/916. –

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51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

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58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65.

Edding, Die Flüchtlinge als Belastung und Antrieb, 36-37. Abelshauser points out that the Soviet Zone (and later the GDR) functioned as a filter for refugees. More refugees settled in the Eastern Zone than in the West, but in the East they tended to be considerably older and more infirm. The engineers, physicians, and university professors were all very highly overrepresented among Germany’s East-to-West Umsiedler after 1952. W. Abelshauser, “Der Lastenausgleich und die Eingliederung der Vertriebene in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte,” in Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte ed. R. Schulze, et al. (Hildesheim, 1987), 235. Letter from Oskar Müller (Minister für Arbeit und Wohlfahrt) to Gottfried Bender (Minister für politische Befreiung), 4 Jan. 1947, HHStA-W 501/89. More in Chapter Four. E. Kogon, Ein politischer Publizist in Hessen. Essays, Aufsätze und Reden zwischen 1946 und 1982, ed. H. Habicht (Frankfurt a. M., 1982), 17. The IHK also helped bring tobacco, chemicals, and fur processing industries to the Frankfurt area. W. Leiske, (Oberbürgermeister of Frankfurt a. M.), “Schlüssel zum wirtschaftlichen Erfolg,” in F. Lerner, Frankfurt am Main und seine Wirtschaft: Wiederaufbau seit 1945 (Frankfurt a. M., 1958), 8-9. Hilpert became Hesse’s minister of Finance in 1947, and a representative to the first German Bundestag (CDU) in 1949. Refugees like the businessman H. Z. apparently knew that Hilpert might help them gain a foothold in Hesse; they frequently wrote letters asking for assistance. Letter from H. Z. to Hilpert, 29 June 1946, HHStA-W 502/3992. Werner Hilpert to Dr. Müller (Minister für Wirtschaft und Verkehr, 8 Aug. 1946, HHStA-W 502/3991. See also Erich Achterberg, Die Industrie und Handelskammer Frankfurt am Main 1908-1958 (Frankfurt a. M.: IHK Ffm, 1960), 128. Verband der Flüchtlingsbeamte im Deutschen Beamtenbund, “Denkschrift der ostvertriebenen Beamten,” March 1949; also Letter from Dr. Krohn, Beamtenschutzbund, to Vorsitzenden des Verwaltungsrates Dr. Pünder, Frankfurt a. M. 27 June 1948, BA-Ko Z11/247. Ärztliche Mitteilungen (hereafter ÄM) 34:4 (1 July 1949): 86. Similar announcements abounded, e.g. “Pommerische Ärzte,” ÄM 34:2 (1 June 1949): 41. Most asked for any information regarding the fate and, if applicable, the address of refugee doctors falling in the appropriate category. Speech/Report [n.d., no author], “Radikalismus der Flüchtlinge? Probleme und Lösung der Flüchtlingsnot,” HHStA-W 502/1602. See also H. Grieser, Die ausgebliebene Radikalisierung. Zur Sozialgeschichte der Kieler Flüchtlingslager im Spannungsfeld von sozialdemokratischer Landespolitik und Stadtverwaltung 1945-1950 (Wiesbaden, 1980). For example, Nahm to Minister for Labor and Welfare, 29 Mar. 1949, HHStA-W 503/949. Waldmann, “Eingliederung,” 169. Cited from “Die Gewerblichen Vertriebenen- und Flüchtlingsbetriebe,” 1955, HHStA-W 507/4255. I. Connor, “The Bavarian Government and the Refugee Problem 1945-1950,” European History Quarterly 16:2 (1986): 131-54. A 1949 federal law also helped Schleswig-Holstein deal with its refugee problem by requiring other Länder to take many of its refugees. Friedrich Edding, Die Wirtschaftliche Eingliederung, 9-12, 26-30. The Landesamt für Flüchtlinge deutscher Staatsangehörigkeit (Neubürger) was established by Article 104, Paragraph 2 of the 1946 Hessian constitution. To assist Nahm, representatives from key Land ministries were appointed to an advisory commission charged with coordinating diverse state policies to integrate refugees. In addition, a Commissar for Refugee Affairs, who received orders from the Refugee Office, was assigned to each of the three government districts (Kassel, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt). HHStA-W 502/916. In 1947, the Refugee Commission was headed by the Minister of Labor and Welfare. Nahm served as one of two deputy chiefs. Much of the background information here is drawn from the insightful but unattributed report “The Refugee Problem in Hesse,” June 1947, OMGH box 67. –

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66. Letter from Peter Paul Nahm (Staatsbeauftragter für das Flüchtlingswesen) to State Secretary Dr. Hermann Brill, 3 Dec. 1946, HHStA-W 502/916. 67. Letter from Nahm to Minister for Labor and Welfare, 30 April 1949, HHStA-W 503/949. 68. Newspaper clippings, esp. Wiesbadener Kurier 4.5.1949, 5.5.1949, in HHStA-W 502/916. 69. Erlaß über die Entnazifizierung der Flüchtlinge (Ausgewiesene), HHStA-W 501/89. Also OMGH Weekly Report, 30 June 1947, OMGH box 1128. 70. Letter from Nahm to Min.Dir. Dr. Knappstein, MmfpB, 13 Feb. 1947, HHStA-W 501/89. 71. The avalanche of studies was more or less capped by the nearly comprehensive three-volume collection edited by Lemberg and Edding, Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland. Ihre Eingliederung und Ihr Einfluß auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistesleben (Kiel, 1959). Many refugee organizations continued to insist on the return of former Germany territories. The success mentioned here refers to their material and occupational integration into West Germany, not their identity as West Germans, which developed more gradually if at all. 72. Also Edding, Wirtschaftliche Eingliederung, 50; Edding, Die Flüchtlinge als Belastung und Antrieb, 21. 73. Most of the refugees among higher civil servants were expellees (1,341), distantly followed by GDR Umsiedler (331) and evacuees (144). Der Personalstand der öffentlichen Verwaltung in Hessen, Stand: 2. Oktober 1958, 50. The Bizonal administration, with its high proportion of higher civil servants, had an even higher proportions of refugees, well over 20 percent in most departments. “Übersicht über die bei den Verwaltungen und Dienststellen des Vereinigten Wirtschaftsgebiet beschäftigten Flüchtlinge,” Ffm, 8 Mar. 1949, BA-Ko Z11/281. 74. Edding, Wirtschaftliche Eingliederung, 53. 75. The most important solutions included pensioning as many civil servants as possible, and a freeze on new hires. Virtually all positions that opened up were filled by returning civil servants, and in the 1950s by the so-called 131ers. 76. Grundgesetz, Article 33, paragraph 5. 77. Gesetz zur Regelung der Rechtsverhältnisse der unter Artikel 131 des Grundgesetzes fallenden Personen vom 11. Mai 1951, BGBl I, Nr. 22, 1951, 307-22. The concepts that underlay this legislation will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 3. For a summary, see U. Wengst, Beamtentum zwischen Reform und Tradition: Beamtengesetzgebung in der Gründungsphase der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1948-1953 (Düsseldorf, 1988). 78. The numbers given by military government, were 398 refugee-led business starts of a total 3,672 in the Kassel Regierungsbezirk since the end of the war (11 percent) and 277 of 2,073 new starts in the Darmstadt region (13.4 percent). OMGH weekly MG summary no. 84, 1521 May 1947, OMGH box 65. 79. Textile and clothing industry starts were followed by wood products (34), glassware (20), stone and clay products (15), and steel and metals (10). Report, “The Refugee Problem in Hesse,” June 1947, 34, OMGH box 67. 80. See “Die Gewerblichen Vertriebenen- und Flüchtlingsbetriebe” [pamphlet], 1955, HHStAW 507/4255. 81. “Die Gewerblichen Vertriebenen- und Flüchtlingsbetriebe,” 1955, HHStA-W 507/4255. 82. 10 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 62-63. 83. Abelshauser, “Lastenausgleich,” 231-34; Lastenausgleich compensation payments went to late-returning POWs and victims of wartime bombings as well as to newcomers. SJ-BRD 1955, 388. 84. “Die Gewerblichen Vertriebenen- und Flüchtlingsbetriebe,” 1955, HHStA-W 507/4255. 85. “Die Gewerblichen Vertriebenen- und Flüchtlingsbetriebe,” 1955, HHStA-W 5074255. 86. Edding, Wirtschaftliche Eingliederung, 81-82; 87. Leiske’s remarks in his forward to Lerner’s Frankfurt am Main und seine Wirtschaft, 20. 88. Reichling and Betz (1949), 19, cited by Waldmann, “Eingliederung,” 179. 89. Verordnung, GVBl (7. Feb. 1950): 31. See also Halbmonatsbericht der Hauptabteilung II des Hessischen Ministeriums des Innern, Nr. 3/51, Wiesbaden, 7 Feb. 1951, 2, HHStA-W 503/ 522a. –

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90. “Kassenzulassung von Flüchtlings-Ärzten,” HÄBl 14:3 (March 1953): 69. 91. A valuable contribution to the description of the tensions between natives and German “outsiders” is R. Schulze, “Growing Discontent: Relations between Native and Refugee Populations in a Rural District in Western Germany after the Second World War,” German History 7(1989): 332-49. The rural communities where most refugees were first quartered were traditionally the most hostile to outsiders. Prejudice and xenophobia existed not only between locals and expellees, but also (albeit to a lesser degree) between urbanites and rural inhabitants, as was evident from the tensions between wartime evacuees and their rural patrons. Erich Kästner offers an entertaining account of his experiences as a Berliner in Bavaria and Tyrolia at the close of the war in Notabene 45. Ein Tagebuch (Frankfurt a. M., 1965). 92. Bericht über die Versammlung der Gemeinde-Vertrauensleute der Neubürger im Kreise Waldeck, 16 Jan. 1947, HHStA-W 502/916. 93. The policy of Hesse’s Physicians’ Chamber is explained by its president, Dr. Oelemann, in a reply to MG, 8 July 1947; Hesse’s Minister President Stock gave specific instructions and MG issued directives to the same effect. Summary of Public Health Activities in Land Hesse for January 1949, 2. Feb. 1949, OMGH PHD box 1053. 94. It should be noted that the American military government transferred business licensing and oversight from the chambers for their own ideological reasons rather than as a measure to help refugee entrepreneurs. See Chapter 3. 95. Letter from RP Kassel, Abt. Wirtschaft und Finanzen, to IHK Kassel and Fulda, 12 Feb. 1948; Letter from Hessisches Staatsministerium, Minister für Wirtschaft und Verkehr, to Regierungspräsidenten in Darmstadt, Kassel, and Wiesbaden, 30 July 1948, HStA-M 180 (Marburg)/4145. 96. The owners, board members, and top management had to be free of individuals whom the German denazification tribunals had classified as more than a follower (Mitläufer, Group 4). Companies with large proportions of Mitläufer, however, were not uncommon. See chapter 4 on denazification. 97. Report, “The Refugee Problem in Hesse,” June 1947, OMGH box 67. See above. 98. Waldmann, 183. 99. They attributed the inadequacy of existing registries entirely to the influx of expellees and refugees. Bekanntmachung, Hessischer Minister des Innern, Abt. IIf, 28 Nov. 1947, HStAM 180 (Marburg)/3612. 100. Verzeichnis der in Stadt- und Landkreis Darmstadt niedergelassenen Ärzte, stand 1. Dez. 1947, HStA-D 4a02. 101. Oelemann, Landesärztekammer Hessen, Reply to inquiries concerning licensing, admission, and settlement of physicians in Germany, Frankfurt a. M., 8 July 1947 OMGH PHD box 998. 102. Oelemann, Landesärztekammer Hessen, Reply to inquiries concerning licensing, admission, and settlement of physicians in Germany, Frankfurt a. M., 8 July 1947 OMGH PHD box 998. 103. Notification from Dale Noble, Director of the medical section of PHD to Dr. med. Heinz Stroh, Bischofsheim, 12 Sept. 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. 104. Dr. Albin Pohl an L&S Hünfeld, 5 May 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. 105. The rash of letters in late spring from doctors complaining about the insurance panel restrictions might have been a response to an inquiry led by Col. Moseley of the PHD in Wiesbaden. That would explain why they were mostly addressed directly to Moseley and came at the same time. Dr. Rüttgers of Frankfurt referred to “your [Moseley’s] efforts concerning the freedom of medical treatment by physicians […]”. Dr. med. Werner Rüttgers, Ffm, to OMGUS, Attn: Lt. Col. Moseley, Wiesbaden, 7 June 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. See also dozens of letters on the same themes in this box. 106. Dr. med. Otto Dittmann, prkt. Arzt, to MG Fulda, Langenbieber am Rhön, 13 May 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. Table 2.16, however, indicates that only about a tenth of refugee –

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107. 108. 109.

110. 111.

112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119.

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120.

121. 122.

123.

124.

125.

physicians in western Germany still awaited admission to the panel insurance system in late 1949. Dr. med. Hans Junker, Facharzt für Harn-, Blasen,- und Nierenleiden, Wiesbaden, to Mr. Crohnthal, MG Wiesbaden, 20 May 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. Dr. Hans Grillmacher, Arzt, Erbach i.Rh., to Col. Moseley, Wiesbaden, 15 June 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. “Hessen beschränkte Zahl der Kassenärzte. Landeskommission untersucht Verstösse gegen Gewerbefreiheit,” Die Neue Zeitung (8 May 1950). Materials also found in HHStA-W 502/1467, but the results of the investigation remain unclear. Letter from Verwaltung für Verkehr des VWG and den Exekutivrat des VWG, Personalamt, Frankfurt a. M., 31 Jan. 1948, BA-Ko Z11/113. See correspondence in BA-Ko Z11/113. The technical expert from the postal administration, Kinsberger, argued that the 1932 law, unlike the 1933 and 1942 successors, contradicts the democratic principles concerning the equal rights of women and men. Copy of Letter from Kinsberger, Abt. IIIG the Personnel Office of the Vereinigtes Wirtschaftsgebiet. §3.1 of Gesetz über die Rechtsstellung der Beamten und Angestellten im öffentlichen Dienste des Landes Groß-Hessen, GVBl 1946, Nr. 30/31, 205. Unfortunately, this statistical summary does not make comparisons to the civil service as a whole. Allgemeiner Beamtenschutzbund e.V., Rundschreiben des Bundesgeschäftsstelle Nr. 1/55, 29 Jan. 1955, 4. Der Personalstand der öffentlichen Verwaltung in Hessen, Stand: 2. Oktober 1958, 18. Statistics are based on complete listings in the Taschenbuch für Verwaltungsbeamte, vols. 6165 (1950/51, 1952, 1953, 1954/55, 1956/57). Der Personalstand der öffentlichen Verwaltung in Hessen, Stand: 2. Oktober 1958, 18 10 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 619-20. Three-fifths of female entrepreneurs were single, mostly widowed, and a large proportion had taken over a husband’s or a relative’s position. H. Hartmann, Die Unternehmerin. Selbstverständnis und soziale Rolle (Köln-Opladen, 1968), 17-18. He also claims that business women increased in absolute terms by as much as 77 percent between 1950 and 1961. Hartmann, Die Unternehmerin, 13-15. H. Hartmann and H. Wienold, Universität und Unternehmer (Gütersloh, 1967), 79. A further indication of the stratified integration of women is that Wolfgang Zapf only includes a single woman among the 318 top managers of Germany’s 50 biggest enterprises in the early 1960s. W. Zapf, “Die deutschen Manager” in Beiträge zur Analyse der deutschen Oberschicht, ed. W. Zapf (Munich, 1965), 139, fn. 9. Also cited in B. Biermann, Die soziale Struktur der Unternehmerschaft (Stuttgart, 1971), 72. Leadership position includes members of Boards of Directors or Supervisory Boards as well as managing directors or owners. A marginal notation indicates that she was appointed to a position in Giessen at the beginning of 1946. Dr. med. Felicitas Wittrin (refugee from Dresden) to MG Darmstadt, 17 Nov. 1945. The discriminatory policy against married women, however, was apparently in effect one and a half years later, when Oelemann wrote his letter. Oelemann, Landesärztekammer Hessen, Reply to inquiries concerning licensing, admission, and settlement of physicians in Germany, Frankfurt a. M., 8 July 1947 OMGH PHD box 998. Statistisches Bundesamt, ed. Volks- und Berufszählung vom 6. Juni 1961, H. 13: Erwerbspersonen in beruflicher Gliederung. Fachserie A: Bevölkerung und Kultur (Stuttgart, 1968), 256ff. Cited in Biermann, Die soziale Struktur der Unternehmerschaft, 66. For the proportions of women in elite occupations in the early 1950s, see 10 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 619-20. Such measures were a major subject at the main meeting of the Marburger Bund in 1950. See “Marburger Bund: Vereinigung angestellter Ärzte, Landesvereinigung Hessen. Bericht über die Hauptversammlung am 21,1.50 in Bad Nauheim,” HÄBl 11:2 (Feb. 1950): 39-40. –

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126. For example, Bericht über die Versammlung der Gemeinde-Vertrauensleute der Neubürger im Kreise Waldeck, 16 Jan. 1947, HHStA-W 502/916. See Report, The Refugee Problem In Hessen, June 1947, OMGH box 67. 127. Dr. Nahm, Hesse’s main refugee consultant, explained to MG intelligence officers that these groups “had been conditioned by their traditional status as members of a minority to a high degree of Reich-consciousness [….] with an inclination toward radicalism,” although the more educated expellees were more moderate. OMGH ICD Intelligence Branch, Weekly Political Intelligence and Opinion Review, No. 30, 10 Dec. 1946, OMGH box 67. 128. Weekly Summary, MG for Land Hessen (Darmstadt), 2nd Regt., 27 Feb-5 March 1946, 1, OMGH box 62. 129. See unsigned note, probably from a Landrat, to the MmfpB, 6. March 1947. 130. They requested background checks for most individuals called before the Spruchkammer, not just refugees. Although Oskar Müller, the labor minister, suggested that the amnesties be expanded to cover even more newcomers, there is no indication that his recommendation was acted on. Letter from Müller to Bender (MfpB), 4 Jan. 1947, HHStA-W 501/89. 131. OMGH weekly summary, 30 June 1947, OMGH box 1128. 132. SK Kassel-Stadt I, Vorsitzender H. to the MfpB, 15 May 1946, HHStA-W 501/1282. 133. While it is unclear from the letter what political baggage H. Z. was carrying, he wrote that his lawyer believed he would be exonerated by the tribunal in Bavarian Aschaffenburg (He viewed Aschaffenburg as a station between the Soviet zone and Hesse). Letter from Dipl.Kaufmann Dr. H. Z. to Hilpert, 29 June 1946. 134. See correspondence between Sch. and the Interior Ministry, Abt. Ib-8a-cz./Ku., May 1950, HHStA-W 503/505. Report, “The Refugee Problem in Hessen” (restricted), June 1947, OMGH ICD Box 67. 135. In particular, he wanted to know if their was a shortage of capable young aspirants. Bundesminister des Innern to all Land interior ministers, personnel offices, and finance offices, Bonn, 9 July 1952. HHStA-W 503/3299. 136. Internal memo, MdI, dept. VI 3 02, signed Oppenheimer to Abt. Ic, HHStA-W 503/3299. 137. Hessischer Gemeindetag, Geschäftsstelle, signed Muntzke to Hessischen Minister des Innern, 17 Dec. 1952, HHStA-W 503/3299. 138. They elaborate these restrictions to mean § 131 GG. Hessischer Städtetag, Geschäftsstelle, signed Dr. Reinert, Stadtrat) to Hessian Minister of the Interior, Ffm, 15 Dec. 1952, HHStAW 503/3299.

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Chapter 3

LEGAL RESTRUCTURING AND PROFESSIONAL REORGANIZATION

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If a high civil servant, a manufacturer, and a physician were somehow transported from the Germany of 1925 to the Federal Republic of 1955, the changes would shock them. The cities would be more crowded, with more motorized traffic, but wider avenues would lessen the effect. Many buildings, punctuated by ruins and empty lots left from the war, would seem more angular and modern. The businessman and the physician would have to cope with the inevitable technological innovations in their fields. In their occupations, however, they would discern few fundamental legal and organizational changes. The civil servant would immediately recognize his position at the top of the three-tier hierarchy, as well as the benefits of lifetime tenure, and expansive social and retirement benefits. The manufacturer might be taken aback by labor representatives voting on a supervisory board, but business, as it were, would be business. His company’s simultaneous membership in three organizations would mirror memberships during the 1920s: a branch-specific league for political lobbying, an employers’ association as a counterweight to organized labor, and the local Chamber of Industry and Trade to register important transactions, mediate with government regulators, or provide crucial information. Given the tremendous emphasis that the Western Allies, especially Americans, placed on reforming German laws and institutions, this apparent continuity is surprising. Many Britons, Americans, and even Germans who pushed for postwar reforms were understandably dismayed by the limited results. Dissatisfied reformers contributed to the widespread belief that opportunities for fundamental socio-political transformation had been squandered; not only had the Allies abandoned reform, but Germans proved unrepentant for the sins of their recent past.1 The failure of those reform attempts generated a strong sentiment among the reform-minded that AmerNotes for this section begin on page 128. Recasting West German Elites : Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse Between Nazism and

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icans and conservative German elites had conspired and colluded to betray a nascent revolution. In fact, no radical restructuring had ever been likely in western occupation zones. This sense of conspiratorial betrayal deserves some elaboration, since it continues to influence the scathing assessment of postwar reform attempts. Beginning in the 1960s, neo-Marxist analyses attributed the failure of structural reform not merely to the Cold War, but specifically to a convergence of American and West German elites’ interests in maintaining the capitalist order. With the collusion of the Americans, who hoped to extend open markets, German elites were able to weather a potentially revolutionary crisis. American military government leaders sided with entrepreneurs against worker codetermination, and vetoed a clause in Hesse’s constitution that would have permitted the socialization of large enterprises.2 The result, in this view, was a “non-restorative restoration”: “There was no reconstruction of capitalism in Germany because it had never disappeared to begin with.” The laws and occupational organizations that emerged in West Germany at once facilitated and strengthened the dominance of the old elite.3 More recent research has explained the reemergence of preexisting legal structures and organizations as a return to familiar, conflict-reducing interest group arbitration during a period of uncertainty. This “capitalist crisis response” drew on established German traditions; Germans had often favored methods of interest group mediation of conflict in economic and political affairs. Corporatism was adapted as an answer to new postwar circumstances.4 Seen as instruments of elite group representation, the restoration of powerful interest groups served at least a quasi-democratic function.5 However, according to Ralf Dahrendorf’s classic analysis, German neo-corporatism undermined effective democracy by glossing over conflict. Rather than open debate, interest group mediation moved debate out of public view.6 In the West German case, the main lobbying groups, or Verbände, and especially the peak organizations to which they belong, wield considerable power. They amplify the power of the elite to influence politics. As early as 1955, some feared that they threatened to hijack the young republic and establish a “rule of the Verbände.”7 This chapter assesses the postwar development of the legal and organizational framework within which high civil servants, business leaders, and physicians navigated. Particular attention is given to two questions. First, did the laws that affected each of the elite occupations set limits, or institutionalize reforms, that represented a departure from the past? More important in terms of current debates, did the successful elite resistance to organizational change amount to a birth defect in the Federal Republic—or were traditional structures compatible with democracy? In order to adequately appraise the fate of institutional reforms, it is helpful to understand the political realities out of which they emerged.

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Reconstruction of Government from the Bottom Up Postwar German institutions were rebuilt from the bottom up. The collapse of German civil and military institutions left a gaping power vacuum in the spring of 1945. Communication and coordination were severed, while important institutions simply ceased to function. Local political leaders often fled, committed suicide, or went underground before Allied troops arrived. In some towns and cities, anti-fascist groups seized the local administration, while Allied occupation troops took control in others after combat units secured them militarily. The main policy directives for American occupation forces (Joint Chiefs of Staff 1067, or JCS 1067) aimed to “prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the peace of the world.” This goal was to be achieved through the apprehension of war criminals, industrial disarmament, and demilitarization.8 However, local commanders as well as General Lucius D. Clay, the Deputy Military Governor under Eisenhower, realized the need to restore order first; they repaired bridges, cleared rubble, and reestablished electricity, water, and sewage systems.9 They usually relied on the existing municipal bureaucracy, which had not disappeared, although it was frequently in disarray. At the head of the local administrations, military government commanders placed handpicked mayors and county magistrates. By the end of the year, elected officials replaced these appointed local leaders.10 Provisional civilian administrations focused at first primarily on the pressing problems of feeding the population, restoring infrastructure, and carrying out American denazification decrees. At Clay’s insistence, local elections were held throughout the American zone by early 1946. Regional administrations were reconstituted after local institutions. Proclamation Number 2 of the American military government announced the creation of Greater Hesse on 19 September 1945. This Land was a new construction, patched together from portions of Prussia, HesseNassau, the Duchy of Hesse, and Frankfurt. The capital, Wiesbaden, moved the center of regional civilian administration away from the older seats of Marburg, Darmstadt, and Frankfurt.11 Following the recommendation of the Ohio history professor and civilian advisor to the military government in Frankfurt, Walter L. Dorn, the military government appointed Heidelberg professor Karl Geiler as Minister President. The Americans formed a committee of representatives of the four licensed parties to advise Geiler, who had no formal political affiliations.12 It took some time before an orderly Land administration grew out of what the military government created had on paper, however. Adolf Arndt, who participated in the process, pointed out that unlike the other Länder of the American Zone, Hesse could not build on an existing tradition; for its central administration, it could not even draw on the remnants of a civil service, an institutional apparatus, or existing buildings, but instead on less than nothing, namely, a chaos, out of which, in twelve months the beginnings of a state had been created.13 –

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A Land constitutional assembly, consisting of representatives of the four nascent licensed parties, prepared a state constitution that was accepted by referendum on December 1, 1946, concurrent with the first elections to the state parliament (Landtag).14 Minister President Christian Stock (SPD) announced the cabinet of the first elected government in Hesse on 6 January 1947, which an American analyst in the Land military government described as “clearly a solution of the middle”. In addition to the Minister President, four ministers belonged to the SPD, and four to the CDU.15 Although bizonal executive assemblies began cooperating on economic policies in 1946, joined by the French in 1948, the Federal Republic’s Basic Law was not ratified by all West German Länder until May 1949. The first Bundestag elections were held in August of the same year.16 Civil servants, entrepreneurs, and physicians fell into varying degrees of disarray along with the political and administrative leadership. Clearly the slate was not wiped clean—the Stunde Null (zero hour) was a founding myth based more on superficial impressions and wishful thinking than on reality. The existing laws and structures that pertained to each of these occupational groups were frequently interrupted, or at least disrupted, but not replaced entirely. The gradual rebuilding of German civilian administration strengthened the occupational groups’ power to resist reforms. This was especially true for the civil service. Already in the summer of 1945, a military government chronicler noted that It has become evident that radical organizational changes in the Regierungsbezirk [provincial] administration are necessary. The prevailing “Beamter” spirit, with its attending [sic] red tape, and the influence exerted by certain industrial and clerical circles must be eradicated.17

Because the orderly administration of occupied Germany required trained civil servants, the basic structure of the Beamtentum remained largely intact before an elected government was established, even in cases where personnel were replaced to a considerable degree.18 The survival of the administrative apparatus called to mind the adage coined under similar circumstances of bureaucratic continuity after World War I: Verfassungsrecht vergeht, Verwaltungsrecht besteht (constitutional law comes and goes, but administrative law lives on).19 Like the government, occupational organizations rebuilt themselves first at the local, then at the regional level. American military government deliberately permitted the emergence of regional and later federal organizations only after local groups had the chance to establish themselves. This policy aimed to strengthen the decentralization of German public life in accordance with JCS 1067.20 Each group experienced some continuity at the local level, followed by a reconstruction of regional and supra-regional networks. Chambers of Industry and Trade continued to operate locally. Sometimes, as in Frankfurt, they temporarily assumed many of the responsibilities of –

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the defunct municipal administration. Civil servants, of course, were dependent on the gradual expansion of German civilian administration. They were permitted no official occupational associations until 1947. Regional Physicians’ Chambers nominally continued to administer the health care system in Hesse, although laws with a racial or militaristic intent were suspended. The Reich Physicians’ Chamber disintegrated, in effect returning the German chamber system to its pre-1933 condition.21 Bizonal communication in the medical field all but disappeared for one and a half years. Professor Wilhelm von Drigalski, the head of public health in Hesse’s Interior Ministry, could hardly conceal his surprise when a high representative of medical affairs in the British zone finally contacted him in October 1946 to suggest bizonal cooperation in fighting communicable diseases such as tuberculosis.22 The devolution of civilian authority and interest group representation to the local, then regional levels helped shift the long-term balance of power away from Western Germany’s political center. The architects of West Germany’s Basic Law confirmed the reversal of the National Socialist centralization of political power. The federal system that emerged was more balanced than either Otto von Bismarck’s Reich or the Weimar Republic. To begin with, the Allies dissolved the state of Prussia in 1945, breaking up into a number of new and smaller states what remained after they assigned large areas of it to Russia and Poland. As a result, West Germany was spared the domination by one state that had plagued the German empire. Many commentators have detected a growing centralization in the Federal Republic since 1949, as the federal government usurped many jurisdictions originally assigned to the Länder. However, both Länder and municipalities have simultaneously retained strong discretion over the implementation of federal law. Overall, the West German administration, which of course constitutes the main structure within which civil servants work, “has become fundamentally different” than that which preceded it.23 The occupation forces immediately nullified overtly National Socialist laws and institutions. However, the process of winnowing and reversing National Socialist legislation from acceptable legislation was particularly tedious.24 The Americans and their allies not only found it difficult to reform Germany’s legal corpus; they also complicated the task by issuing competing, often contradictory military government (or Allied Control Council) decrees, laws, and requirements. The military government insisted on the primacy of military government laws over German civil law when the two clashed. However, the frequent reiteration of the supremacy of military government law suggests that German bureaucrats often continued to prefer familiar German codes in practice.25 At the same time, German administrators relied heavily on the military government to interpret and explain American directives. If not codified into German law, the effect of occupation-era orders could dissipate as American oversight receded. –

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Control Council Law No. 2, promulgated in October 1945, formally liquidated a long list of National Socialist organizations that had already effectively ceased to exist. In addition to the NSDAP and its main affiliated organizations, the order outlawed the National Socialist League of German Beamte, the Reich Physicians’ League, and the Main Offices for the People’s Health and Civil Servants. The law affected economic associations only in its ban of the German Labor Front (DAF), which employers had never favored anyhow, although they had frequently used the institution to their advantage.26 Advancing Allied troops had outlawed most economic organizations earlier, in accordance with the high priority given to destroying anything even remotely resembling cartels. In August 1945, a special U.S. military government decree suspended all economic associations with the exception of the Chambers of Industry and Trade.27 Two months later, they permitted the (re-)establishment of economic associations, but only for horizontal associations at the local level. All new associations required a license from the military government.28 The reconstruction of what was hoped would be decentralized interest groups had begun. Beneath the question of the pace and extent of reconstruction of legal and institutional frameworks lurks the broader issue of the extent of elite interestgroups’ influence on political decision-making. Neo-corporatism had established itself as the dominant economic paradigm in postwar West Germany by the early 1950s. Civil service leagues, business associations, and physicians’ organizations took up their constituents’ causes in Wiesbaden and Bonn. In the state and the Federal capitals, they found governments willing and even eager to involve them in the formulation of laws and policy. The growing access of these interest groups prompted the political commentator Theodor Eschenburg to pose the question of whether associations had usurped the government’s decision-making power in a provocative and widely discussed book, The Rule of Associations?29 Eschenburg concluded that the elected government still kept associations in check while involving them more and more in policy formulation, but he did raise the informed public’s awareness and concern about the growing power of organized special interests. Not only had the influence of individual associations risen; disparate occupational organizations commonly banded together to present a united front that was often politically overpowering. Civil servants’ organizations, led by the League of German Civil Servants, lobbied hard and with great success to shape the federal laws that defined their rights and privileges.30 The peak organizations of the economic associations not only drew on personal relationships with the political elite, but also on their ability to finance political parties.31 In one exemplary case, all of the major groups representing the medical field agreed in 1952 to exert concerted pressure to influence the drafting of a law designed to regulate physicians’ access to the insurance funds.32 Of special importance for the legal recasting of postwar Germany were the Land and federal constitutions. The 1946 Hessian constitution has drawn a –

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considerable amount of attention because its drafters originally included a “socialization” clause whose enactment General Clay blocked. The clause would have enabled, but not required, the nationalization of key large industries, as called for by most political parties at the time.33 What is often overlooked, however, are reformist elements of the Land constitution, as well as the safeguards it established against would-be right radicals. The constitution prohibited “the misuse of economic liberty, especially with the purpose of creating monopolistic and political power.” It also emphasized individual equality and civil rights and exempted these provisions from future amendment.34 Like Hesse’s founding document, the Federal constitution, or “Basic Law” (Grundgesetz), while at heart a modification of the Weimar constitution, can also be read as an attempt to prevent a recurrence of the Weimar Republic’s ills, and the consequent rise of Nazism.35 Thus, for example, it reiterates the fundamental human rights guaranteed in the Weimar Republic, but emphasizes them by stating them as the first nineteen articles rather than as an appendage, as in Weimar’s constitution. In another departure from the Weimar precedent, the Basic Law makes it difficult for the legislature to alter these amendments and prohibits changes affecting their spirit.36 Constitutional regulations, like laws, are only meaningful if the citizens respect and abide by them. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of a regime that came to power legally and carried out many of its brutal policies within the framework of the Weimar constitution, the additional safeguards of Bonn’s Basic Law should not be underestimated. The German historian Thomas Ellwein maintains that, “the Basic Law rather quickly became an identitygenerating symbol in the Federal Republic.”37 The elite occupational groups discussed here demonstrated their acceptance of the Basic law as a functional, binding pillar of a legitimate Rechtsstaat (state of laws) by couching many of their self-interested arguments in constitutional terms (see Chapter 5). A group of physicians justified their call for the weakening of the physicians’ chambers by portraying the chamber’s mandatory membership requirements and power to regulate the establishment of practices as incompatible with the constitutional guarantee that all citizens are equal before the law.38 Similarly, the Chambers of Industry and Trade appealed to the court to settle the lingering issue of their legal relationship to the National Socialist Gau Economic Chambers.39 Both sides of the contentious codetermination struggle, industry and labor, sought support for their positions at the high court, and respected that body’s rulings even when the outcome displeased them.40

Legal Limitations Despite numerous reform impulses, the legal framework within which higher civil servants, entrepreneurs, and physicians operated did not change radi–

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cally between 1945 and the late 1950s. Military government edicts erased the most characteristic Nazi laws from the books early in the occupation. A single order abrogated nine laws, including the Nuremberg race laws, Hitler youth service laws, and others establishing the Nazi dictatorship. Courts were forbidden to interpret law according to National Socialist guidelines or precepts.41 Until a legitimate and stable federal government took root in West Germany and passed new comprehensive legislation, all three occupational groups continued to operate upon the foundation of Nazi-era legislation that had been cleansed of its National Socialist components. In most cases, these laws had been, at their core, compromise legislation that had met longstanding professional demands as well as the interests of the National Socialist leadership (see Chapter 1). The 1937 Civil Service Code remained in force until replaced by the 1953 Federal Civil Service Law. This revision, at first applicable only to federal civil servants, was made binding on the Länder in 1957.42 Businesses, while not governed by any sweeping central law, continued to rely on existing regulations governing organization and incorporation, to the extent that these were not temporarily superseded by Allied decrees or Hesse’s constitutional ban on cartels, such as Law No. 56 on the “Prohibition of Excessive Concentration of German Economic Power.” In 1957, the Bundestag enacted a major federal anti-cartel law of its own, the “Law against Restraint of Trade,” furthering the “Americanization” of West German business and reversing a twentieth-century German trend toward state-sanctioned concentration.43 Physicians continued to rely on the 1935 Reich Physicians’ Law (RÄO). New laws and revisions of existing laws were passed either by the SPD-dominated Hessian Landtag or by the Bundestag, which the Christian Democrats controlled along with their coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP) and the German Party (DP).44 The changes that they instituted reflect in large measure their perceptions of the misdeeds of the elite occupations during the Third Reich.

Higher Civil Servants Attempts to alter civil service laws in Hesse, and more generally in West Germany, emanated primarily from the American military government. Unlike many other Allied programs, the American position on civil service reform remained fairly constant.45 Their goal was to establish a civil service in which hiring and promotion would be “based on the merit principle and scientific methods.” A main thrust of American civil servant reforms was to eliminate the special status and privileges of the German Beamte. In order to promote objective, non-political decisions about hiring, promotion, and discipline, the reformers also created administratively independent civil service personnel offices, modeled after British and American civil service commissions. Equally important from the American standpoint was the elimination of the –

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traditional division of the civil service into three tracks (Beamte, salaried employees, and workers). This would have dealt a heavy blow to the exalted status of higher civil servants.46 German policy makers, many of them long-time civil servants with impeccable anti-Nazi credentials, generally did not share the American view that the three-tier, strictly hierarchical civil service bred authoritarianism, nor that it had facilitated the rise of the Third Reich. On the contrary, they lauded the efficiency, professionalism, and “objectivity” of the traditional civil service. Most agreed with a Hessian tax official, who noted in the fall of 1945 that “[t]he overwhelming majority of the old Hessian Beamtentum had no inner commitment to the Hitler regime, thanks to its healthy structure and its superior Beamten-ethos.”47 The problems that higher Beamte themselves perceived in the civil service was the supposed demoralization that had set in among high civil servants as a result of the Nazi leadership’s circumvention of, and partisan intervention in, the state bureaucracy during the Third Reich.48 In other words, they located the prime evil of National Socialism in its subversion of orderly governmental practices and of the Rechtsstaat (rule of law). From this premise they drew the logically consistent (and self-serving) conclusion that orderly, objective administration, a minimum of “political” interference, and the civil service’s sworn allegiance to the democratic system would suffice to prevent a recurrence of fascism (see also Chapter 5 for a more thorough discussion).49 Their comfort with administrative hierarchy, discipline, and order had been strengthened as a reaction to interference from the National Socialists. What the Germans considered orderly procedure, the Americans sometimes understood as authoritarian intransigence. More than once, military government administrators complained that higher civil servants were trying to prevent lower-level Beamte from communicating directly with American officers, but the Germans’ insisted on respect for the bureaucratic chain of command.50 At a time when the government had collapsed, the image of an administration staffed by efficient non-partisan Beamte had enormous appeal. In the self-serving rhetoric of the high civil service, the public bureaucratic administration, rather than a definable state entity, became for many the “carrier of the idea of the state” (Träger des Staatsgedankens).51 The chances for far-reaching civil service reform seemed stronger in Hesse than other American-zone Länder. Greater Hesse was an amalgam of regions with different administrative traditions. While both parts of Hesse had relied on a three-tier civil service, Prussia’s administration had left local and regional officials more administrative autonomy. Combining parts of Prussia with the Duchy of Hesse necessitated an administrative reform to create a unified system of government throughout the newly created state. Furthermore, the Social Democrats who dominated Hesse’s governing coalitions were more receptive to civil service reforms than were conservative state governments, especially during the first two years of American occu–

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pation. Consequently, Hesse represents an interesting case against which to compare developments in Bavaria, northern Germany, or at the federal level, which were dominated by conservatives. In a speech to a conference on the civil service in the American zone, Minister President Geiler, an independent, acknowledged that previous civil service laws “had not proven themselves” in every aspect. A moderate without party affiliation, Geiler praised the new American zone regulations, particularly the personnel offices, as a substantial improvement. The personnel offices, he believed, would ensure a technically qualified civil service corps “under the democratic control of the participating state authorities, representative bodies, and the civil service associations.”52 The Social Democrats at first even called for reducing, if not entirely eliminating, the differences between Beamte and non-tenured employees (Angestellte). Various developments tempered the SPD’s policy on this point. Above all, the Soviet military administration’s extreme intervention into the soviet-zone civil service served as a cautionary model.53 Moreover, the desire to overcome civil servant reluctance to the idea of a single, large trade union had an effect on the large trade union wing of the SPD. Vocal support for reducing Beamte to regular employees would have undermined negotiations.54 American military government officers in Hesse, however, insisted that the Angestellte/Beamte distinction be eliminated altogether, an even more radical approach.55 Adolf Arndt personifies the SPD-functionary-Beamte mixture of anti-Nazi, policy reformer, and traditionalist. The National Socialists had dismissed him from his position as a judge in Berlin due to friction that dated back to his rulings during the Weimar Republic. He then worked as a private tax auditor for the duration of the Third Reich. After 1945, he committed himself to social democracy in large measure because of the party’s principled resistance to National Socialism. He favored socialization of key industries and curbing the influence of economic associations. As a top official in postwar Hesse’s Ministry of Justice, he helped draft the state constitution.56 Both his legal training and his experience as a high civil servant disposed him to look unfavorably on undermining what he viewed as the proud achievements and continuing potential of the Beamtentum, even as he pressed for more radical reforms in other spheres. Hesse’s constitution made civil servants’ loyalty to the democratic system a condition of employment. Along with the 1946 Law for the Regulation of Civil Servants and State Employees of Greater Hesse, however, it recreated most of the structural architecture of Weimar’s civil service, borrowing in part from the 1937 Civil Service Code. The civil service would retain three separate tracks. Nevertheless, it went further than any other Land in harmonizing the legal status of Beamte and public-sector employees. Employees would receive the same, or similar benefits, especially pensions, as their tenured counterparts. But Article 135 deviated from other American-zone constitutions by eliminating the nominal distinction between employees (Angestellte) –

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and Beamte. This measure later hindered the supra-regional standardization of civil service law.57 Other states were unwilling to go as far as Hesse.58 The major trade unions for public sector workers, the DGB and the public-employee specific ÖTV were both closely allied with the SPD. They, too, favored eliminating the differences between civil servants and employees. However, rather than lower Beamte to the status of white-collar workers, they advocated raising non-tenured employees to the position of Beamte, with all attendant perks and privileges:

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As is commonly known, Military Government Law No. 15 has eliminated the three-track system in the administration for those in the administration of the former Bizonal Economic Area, including for those serving in the postal and railroad authorities. As evident in our proposed amendments to the draft of the Hessian Civil Service Law, we, too, strive for the implementation of an identical measure for Hesse’s civil service by eliminating the current non-tenured employee and transferring him to the Beamten-relationship.59

In part, the union members’ economic self-interest motivated them to support a broader application of MG Law No. 15; bestowing the rights and privileges of Beamte on salaried state employees meant endowing them with virtual lifetime tenure and excellent retirement benefits. Not surprisingly, the unions first pressed this issue in Hesse, where “their” party, the SPD, called the shots. The economic motivation was even more apparent in the similar request of Council of States (Länderrat) employees to apply Law No. 15 to raise Angestellte to Beamte. As Hesse’s representative to the Länderrat noted, it was particularly questionable “whether it is justifiable for the Länderrat to create permanent positions at a time when the end of that body’s activity can already be seen.”60 SPD leaders’ willingness to reduce the differences between state employees and civil servants in Hesse ran against the policy of other Länder in the American zone and even more strongly against British zone practice. The differences resurfaced every time that leaders tried to devise unified policies on the civil service within zones or at higher levels. In a Bizonal meeting of experts to discuss civil service policy, Hesse’s representative reported that a notable gap existed not only between American expectations of a future civil service law and the views of the Land representatives, but also between the latter and the practice in Hesse. Fiscal considerations played a key role. To rebut American proposals, bizonal representatives pointed to the salary inflation that had resulted from conflating employees and civil service in Hesse. The Hessian representative, on the other hand, believed that the real difference between the civil servant’s and employee’s duties, rights, and loyalty to the state continued to diminish irrespective of formal legal differences.61 The 1946 Law for the Regulation of Civil Servants and Employees in Public Service in Hesse incorporated some of the reform ideas of the American military government and socialist German politicians.62 It instituted the prin–

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ciple of performance and ability rather than formal criteria in hiring and advancement. It established an administratively independent personnel office championed by the American military government. It also expressly annulled all existing restrictions against female civil servants, and forbade personnel decisions based on religion, party preference (as long as the party was democratic), social class, or gender.63 By countering the gender-discriminatory clauses of the BBG, Hesse served as a model in later discussions about the same issue at the bizonal level.64 It also stood in marked contrast to the more reactionary, procrastinating approach of Bavarian officials in the question of civil service reform.65 In an attempt to break the Juristenmonopol (literally, “monopoly of lawyers”), formal educational qualifications could no longer serve as a mandatory prerequisite to higher civil service, except in the case of judicial officials. The abrogation of all previous provisions limiting the employment of married women (e.g., Articles 63 and 64 of the 1937 Civil Service Code), while important, did not lead to gender equality in Hesse’s civil service any more than similar provisions did at the federal level. Nevertheless, a few women did rise to the upper ranks of Hesse’s civil service. In other structural questions, however, the 1946 law embraced German traditions more than American reform ideas. The first important legal continuity was the traditional three-track civil service. This was an important victory for higher civil servants because it helped shore up their status in German society as well as their public policy-making influence.66 Significantly, however, there was no declaration that the division into separate tracks was inviolable. The military government had ordered the omission.67 Instead, it simply spelled out the different roles and responsibilities of Beamte and employees, glossing over the fact that the issue was at the center of debates between the American occupation authorities and the German civilian government. The law also contained no provisions barring Beamte from engaging actively in politics, as the Americans preferred. The omission grew out of the strongly held views of the SPD and KPD members, who argued that the attempts to create an apolitical civil service would relegate them to secondclass citizenship. In this question, the CDU sided with the Americans, and favored provisions that would require government employees to be put on leave if seeking or holding political office.68 While the legal status of Hesse’s Beamte was being codified, others were preparing for the harmonization of administrative practices in the constituent parts of Greater Hesse. The final report stressed that there were two preconditions for successful reform. First, a territorial reform would need to create counties and administrative districts of comparable sizes, eliminating “dwarf communities” and incorporating many suburban districts into the larger cities. Second, a legal reform would create standard institutions and procedures for cities, towns, and counties.69 The report’s authors noted that the legal changes needed to standardize the administration provided the –

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opportunity to democratize it as well. The committees, they urged, should remain administratively independent and self-governing. To achieve this end, they should considerably expand the reliance on popular elections to choose leading political civil servants, especially mayors (Bürgermeister) and high officials in representative community bodies (Gemeindevertretungen). Such a system departed from the experience not only during the Third Reich, but also in the former Duchy of Hesse, where mayors were appointed from above.70 The plan met with some resistance from regional administrators, who argued that the personnel decimation created by ongoing denazification made it virtually impossible even to consider carrying out a work-intensive restructuring of the bureaucracy.71 Although the administrative restructuring was implemented only gradually, it did provide greater latitude to reshuffle the offices among tenured higher civil servants. What steps did Hesse’s civil service take to insure against a future abandonment of democracy or the uncritical implementation of unethical policies? The administrative reform commission specifically recommended including in a Land Administrative Law a clause requiring civil servants to adhere to the law rather than their superiors if the two conflicted. This would eliminate the oft-heard defense of the Third Reich’s civil servants that orders from above absolved subordinates from accountability. The wording of the proposed clause left no doubt that the measure should serve to avert future complicity with a German dictatorship: “Administrative orders that fall outside the law [are] invalid, and administrative orders which derive from a supra-legal emergency (übergesetzlichen Notstand) are forbidden and may not be carried out.”72 As the likelihood of the creation of a separate West German state grew, the struggle over civil service reform moved to the bizonal council. The Americans hoped to enshrine some reforms before their powers of intervention lapsed with the 1949 Occupation Statute. They pressed the members of the bizonal council, which was widely understood as the nucleus of the future federal administration, to enact appropriate legislation and procedures. However, the leaders of the conservative parties, which held the majority in the council, were the staunchest defenders of the traditional German civil service. Hoping to postpone final settlement of the matter, they sought to delay a final decision by proposing further study and discussion. They also attempted to reassure the increasingly insistent Americans that reform would indeed be enacted, but more time was needed. Some representatives even bet an American diplomatic liaison officer a case of champagne that reform legislation would be enacted within six months of the expiration of the Occupation statute. They lost the bet.73 The debate over civil service reform in the western occupation zones was roiled especially by the Soviet Military Administration’s unilateral decision to annul the 1937 Civil Service Law on the grounds that it was “fascist” in –

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nature. While much of the de facto structure of the Eastern-Zone civil service remained intact, the Soviet measure seemed to signal a radical reform that was in line with much American thinking on the issue.74 In early 1949, the American military government attempted to create a fait accompli by issuing Military Government Law No. 15, which was intended as a model civil service law. Law No. 15 incorporated all of the main tenets the military government had advocated since 1945: elimination of the distinction between Beamte and employees; the incompatibility of partisan political activity and civil service employment; and an independent personnel office. However, rather than encourage German civil service reformers, the American resort to a unilateral decree alienated them.75 With the creation of a Federal Republic, the debate over the civil service shifted to Bonn, the new federal capital. Rather than resolving the conflict, the two clauses of the Basic Law that dealt with the civil service launched its most divisive phase. The first, Article 33, proclaimed that “the traditional principles of the Berufsbeamtentum” would guide future laws concerning the civil service.76 The second, Article 131, explicitly left the final regulation of the rights of civil servants for future federal legislation. In effect, it postponed the decision of how to deal with the myriad civil servants removed in the wake of denazification and territorial loss. Both articles were deliberate compromises, designed to avert an escalation of the clash with the Americans as well as between the major German parties over this highly contentious issue. However, by broadly guaranteeing the “traditional rights of the professional civil service,” but not defining them, the constitutional provisions intensified the lobbying over the future structure of the civil service. The British and French representatives of the Allied Control Council joined the Americans in insisting on the applicability of Law No. 15, but the federal government dragged its feet in implementing it. One illustrative aspect of the Allied reform provisions was the creation of an independent personnel office. The British and French assumed that the model personnel office of the trizonal administration would be taken over, more or less intact, by the new federal government. Conservatives in the federal government worried, however, that transferring the reform-minded trizonal personnel office would bolster the Allies’ reform measures at the federal level. A compromise worked out in the interior ministry envisioned a personnel office headed by a commission of ministerial Beamte, including high civil servants of the Interior ministry.77 This arrangement assumed that high ministerial civil servants would respect established customs and shun serious reforms. The civil service working group in the DGB also weighed in with detailed proposals to establish a personnel office more in line with American concepts.78 The advocates of tradition used the delay to keep the influence of the trizonal personnel office to a minimum, until in 1953 the federal parliament finally dissolved it altogether and transferred its responsibilities to the Interior Ministry.79 Henceforth the Minister of the Interior, a –

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political appointee usually drawn from the higher civil service, exercised ultimate authority in personnel questions. Germany’s conservative higher civil service had averted yet another American reform initiative. Another arena of conflict was the definition of what, exactly, the “traditional principles” of the professional civil service were. Beginning in 1949, the federal government, dominated by the CDU, successfully asserted that the term mandated broad continuity, both structurally and in personnel questions. Although the Federal Constitutional Court rejected that view with a ruling that “[a]ll civil servant contracts were annulled on 8 May 1945” [the date of German capitulation], the ruling came too late to hinder or reverse the return of former civil servants back into both the Land and federal civil service.80 The virtual lifetime job security included among the traditional privileges of civil servants guaranteed that thousands of civil servants who had been dismissed since 1945 for political reasons earned a right to reinstatement, even if the details were left to be articulated in subsequent legislation (see Chapter 4). By the mid 1950s, the judicial and political struggle over the definition had reached some general conclusions, all of which worked against the reformist programs of the mid 1940s. “Traditional” principles turned out to be primarily those secured in the Weimar constitution of 1918/19, such as the three-track system, lifetime employment, legally regulated pay, self-policing disciplinary organs, freedom from direct political pressure, and freedom of expression. Hesse’s civil service policies, which had partly leveled the differences between Beamte and other state workers, diverged from the constitutionally mandated norm more than any other Land; consequently, the state had to adapt its regulations to the “traditional” principles in the course of the early 1950s, as court decisions clarified what those principles were.81 Backed by a liberal interpretation of an initially contentious legal question, the federal government supported many civil servants’ claims that they deserved reinstatement despite their removal by either the Allied occupation authorities or German denazification tribunals. The debate hinged on the theoretical question of whether the Land and federal governments were the legal descendants of the Third Reich. While this might appear to be a minor legal detail, the careers of tens of thousands of civil servants hinged on it. If the Federal Republic was the legal heir of the Reich, then the FRG also inherited the tenure relationship with civil servants employed before 8 May 1945, the date of German capitulation. Two years after the constitution had foreshadowed a legal resolution of the civil service question, the Bundestag passed the “Law to Regulate the Legal Status of Persons Falling under Article 131 of the Basic Law.”82 This law’s convoluted title belies its actual significance in guaranteeing a high degree of continuity in the West German Civil Service. The 1951 law proceeded from the civil service clauses of the Federal Republic’s Basic Law. With the exception of severely incriminated former National Socialists, –

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civil servants who were still in their positions on the day of Germany’s capitulation were reinvested with their traditional right of tenure. Those who had been removed in the course of denazification thus had a legal right to reinstatement in comparable positions. It applied not only to the federal civil service, but was also binding on the Länder and municipalities.83 Of all the postwar legislation regarding civil servants, the 1951 law stands out as the most important, but not because it established new fundamental principles; those had been created by the provisions of the Basic Law. Rather, it marked the practical end of the struggle to interpret those earlier principles.84 The consequences of the law’s interpretation—the return of politically compromised civil servants at all levels—is discussed in more detail in the following chapter. Following the Law to Regulate Article 131 and its endorsement by the federal courts, the Federal Civil Servants’ Code (Bundesbeamtengesetz, BBG) of 1953 seemed anticlimactic. The BBG replaced the Nazi-era Reichsbeamtengesetz of 1937. In many respects, the new code reiterated the stipulations of the earlier law.85 The BBG had suffered long delays, as interest groups competed over the future structure of the civil service.86 The Basic Law and associated federal legislation also explicitly recognized other customs not mentioned in Hesse’s 1946 constitution. These included the Beamte’s special responsibility to the state, which restricted the right to strike, as well as the Beamte’s monopoly in carrying out official functions.87 The retention of the traditional structure of the civil service, coupled with the legal provisions that facilitated the rehabilitation of many politically tainted Beamte, has frequently been cited as prime evidence of a postwar “restoration.” However, few Germans, perhaps least of all individuals trained and experienced in Germany’s high civil service, believed that the Berufsbeamtentum had caused or significantly facilitated the atrocities of the National Socialist state. Rather, many believed, the civil service’s shortcomings were located in their lack of allegiance to the democratic system before 1933, as well as National Socialist political and racial purges, which had compromised the “objectivity” of the institution and its members. The oath that civil servants were forced to swear to the Führer beginning in 1934 symbolized the civil servant’s corruption with political partisanship. Consequently, postwar policy makers sought reforms that would prevent a recurrence of National Socialism’s subversion of the institution. The first order of business was to require the civil servant’s loyalty to the new democratic system. The same laws that restored the professional threetrack civil service made individuals’ support for democracy a prerequisite of employment. Several passages in Hesse’s 1946 Law for the Regulation of Civil Servants require that civil servants actively uphold the basic democratic order. It stipulated that all public servants are required to work actively to strengthen and deepen democratic thought and government, both professionally and privately, according to their abilities.88 –

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Federal legislation carried similar provisions. The requirement that Beamte profess their faith in the democratic order both professionally and privately, which was written into a 1950 Federal Personnel Code (Bundespersonalgesetz), aimed to compensate for insufficient denazification. The 1953 BBG went even further, and specified the expectation of active support of “the basic democratic order.” Adenauer’s government had pressed for this broader requirement, and the SPD went along, expressing the desire to avoid Weimar’s problems.89 Hans Mommsen has pointed out that these loyalty clauses resembled, more than anything else, the precedent of the National Socialists’ required oath, even if the object of the oath became the democratic system rather than a demagogue.90

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Entrepreneurs Like higher civil servants, business leaders also built on familiar legal foundations during the postwar period. The most fundamental “restoration” in the economy was the return to oligopolistic free enterprise and a minimum of public ownership of the means of production. The “social market economy” that characterized the early Federal Republic seemed to defy both economic logic and political realities in the early postwar years. In fact, the liberal economy that gradually took shape, beginning with the 1948 currency reform, resembled the American model of oligarchic competition much more than the protectionist, highly organized interwar German system.91 West Germany’s postwar economy differed from that of the interwar period in its “scarcity of cartels, and near absence of marketing associations.”92 As early as 1954, an American commentator noted that the Federal Republic’s achievements went a long way toward convergence with the American system: West Germany has established one of the soundest currencies, smashed trade barriers as fast as circumstances permitted, re-established German credit abroad, and brought not only the Deutsche Mark but all West European currency measurably closer to convertibility. Intentionally, it has eliminated all important controls of prices, wages, and materials, and owing to an anti-cartel law imposed by the occupying powers (mainly at the insistence of the U. S.), it has for the first time in history enjoyed a measure of the benefits of competition.93

The incongruence of expectations and actual developments was one of the main reasons that West Germany’s economic recovery appeared miraculous. In 1945 and 1946, even otherwise conservative parties took a dim view of big business and large landholding, as reflected in their early party programs. Commentators have frequently pointed out that early Christian Democratic Union party programs called for state ownership of utilities and large industries.94 With the German economy in a shambles and years of state economic controls behind them, few believed even that the 1948 currency –

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reform would allow the state to relax its grip on daily economic life rapidly through price controls and rationing. After the currency reform, the public, the political opposition, and labor unions urged Erhard to return to coercive state measures to slow inflation. This pressure did not fully ease until 1950.95 Had the Allies, above all the Americans, led by General Clay, not blocked early attempts to socialize key industries, both the Länder and the federal government might well have appropriated them or required equal labor participation in management decisions (codetermination), as SPD legislators in Hesse and Württemberg-Baden attempted.96 However, before the onset of the Cold War, political currents in the United States, Britain, and France seemed to point more toward Allied sympathy for state engagement in economic affairs. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party ousted Winston Churchill’s conservatives in 1945, and initiated a postwar wave of nationalization. In the U. S. administration and military government, a strong contingent of New Deal Democrats favored the deconcentration of large German enterprises as well as the dissolution of trusts and cartels.97 Some even viewed socialization of key industries as a worthwhile objective. The early impetus to reform the German economy by breaking up cartels, monopolies, and powerful concentrations of wealth in Germany came not only from the Allies, but also from a broad array of German politicians and neo-liberal economic leaders. A 1945 editorial in the Darmstädter Echo, the city’s main newspaper, advocated state ownership of utilities and enterprises owned or abandoned by Nazi activists.98 In view of the devastation and the fear of chaos and decline, even the article’s calls for a “planned economy” could expect some popular sympathy, although such ideas had drifted beyond the pale by the early 1950s. The abstract goal that most key actors agreed upon was that the German economy needed to be “democratized,” but there was less consensus on what that goal implied concretely. As Adolf Arndt pointed out: Like all concepts in the past twenty years, the term “economic democracy” has suffered the fate of being used, consciously or unconsciously, with the most varied meanings; it was after all a characteristic of National Socialism to exchange terms and to invert their meaning. Similarly, economic democracy is today understood to mean, on the one hand, that democracy should be both political and economic, that is to say, that democratic politics should determine not only the state, but also the economy, such that the economy is subservient to the democratic state. On the other hand, it is understood to mean that the economy must be “democratic,” that is, that it needs self-regulation.99

Arndt categorically rejected the latter view, arguing that permitting businesses to regulate themselves actually undermines real economic democracy. Since Arndt was the foremost drafter of Hesse’s postwar constitution, it comes as little surprise that the document incorporated elements of a “mixed” economy, one that functioned mostly according to free market principles but with strong state and labor intervention into large primary indus–

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tries, such as utilities and steel.100 Hesse’s SPD, which governed with an absolute majority under Minister President Georg August Zinn in the first half of the 1960s, accommodated itself to the apparently successful “social market economy,” rather than following the stricter neo-Marxist ideas espoused by the trade unionist Viktor Agartz.101 The Basic Law was more silent than Hesse’s constitution as to what economic system should prevail in the Federal Republic. However, it laid out some of the basic prerequisites to a free market system among its fundamental rights, including personal liberty, freedom of assembly, occupational freedom, private property, and inheritance. At the same time, article 14 provided for expropriation for “the public weal” as long as the state compensated owners, and article 15 permitted, but by no means advocated, the socialization of property and “the means of production.”102 Adenauer’s conservative coalition maintained that the constitution mandated the social market economy, a view that the Federal Constitutional court explicitly rejected in 1954.103 By that time, however, the social market economy had legitimated itself as the main engine of the seemingly relentless economic miracle. The social market economy contained within it elements of the American free market model, but with a stronger emphasis on state intervention to protect both businesses and the consumer. In Hesse, Americans and Germans frequently clashed over what laws and policies promoted economic freedom and protection. Americans predominantly understood “freedom” in this context as the absence of state regulation. Germans, by contrast, tended for historical reasons to accept a greater interventionist role of the state, so long as the state did not interfere in the day-to-day operations of individual firms. While they recognized the roots of their differences, American reformers in the military government expended a great deal of energy trying to impose American-style deregulation of the German economy in Hesse. Sometimes controversy surrounding minor issues illustrated a basic rift in economic world views. During the drafting of the Hesse’s “Law Concerning Occupational Freedom,” a tug-of-war ensued in which American officers sought to strike individual professions from a long list of exceptions to the freedom from state licensing requirements. The Germans, on the other hand, satisfied with the protections afforded by these faint remnants of the European guild system, defended each entry. In the end, such occupations as swimming instructors, meat inspectors, coroners, stock brokers, orthopedic cobblers, and chimney sweeps were stricken from the list. State licensing was, however, still required for food handlers, physicians, stock brokers, and numerous other callings. The idea that bakers or chimney sweeps would no longer need state certification shocked many Germans.104 After the Americans withdrew from direct interference in such details, Wiesbaden’s administrators reinstated licensing requirements for pawn brokers, scrap metal dealers, and detectives, among others.105 While this controversy did not con–

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cern the overall direction of the economy, it reveals the differences between American and German conceptions of economic “freedom.” The different assumptions and world views, in turn, fed into more fundamental debates about deconcentration, decartelization, and macroeconomic organization. The Federal Republic’s economic system took shape and earned its legitimacy during the years between the establishment of limited sovereignty in 1949 and the mid 1950s. The two main alternatives to a free market, central planning on the one hand, or a return to the intertwined and highly “organized” cartel system on the other, both lost their mass appeal. Undoubtedly, some socialists continued to espouse more state control and ownership of industry, just as some industrialists fought legislation that would outlaw cartel-like activities, such as allocating markets and territories, or setting prices. But in the main, limited reforms helped to liberalize Germany’s traditionally closed, monopolistic economy. Some of the elements of the “recast” system were the decline of market-controlling cartels and the accommodation between labor and the business leadership. The decartelization program initiated by the victorious Allies after the war had only limited effect. The Americans began to retreat on these issues even before the war ended.106 The April 1945 policy directive JCS 1067 unambiguously mandated the American military government to

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prohibit all cartels or other private business arrangements and cartel-like organizations including those of a public or quasi-public character, such as the Wirtschaftsgruppen providing for the regulation of marketing conditions, including production, prices, exclusive exchange of technical information and processes, and allocation of sales territories.107

On paper, at least, this decree nullified all cartel arrangements in the American zone. In practice, serious divisions existed within the military government itself over decartelization and dismantling. The American occupation forces brought with them to Germany some of their divisive domestic controversies. Anti-trust activists held sway within the decartelization branch, but executives from large American firms dominated the economics division. The economic advisor to General Clay, William Draper, symbolized the latter for many. He argued, with some success, for a relaxation of punitive dismantling and deconcentration.108 When JCS 1779 replaced the older directive two years later, it reworded, but generally reaffirmed, the American cartel policy: Pending agreement among the occupying powers you will in your zone prohibit all cartels and cartel-like organizations, and effect a dispersion of ownership and control of German industry through the dissolution of such combines, mergers, holding companies and interlocking directorates which represent an actual or potential restraint of trade or may dominate or substantially influence the policies of governmental agencies.109

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In contrast to the written confirmation of the earlier cartel policy, a retreat was evident at the level of implementation, as the business-oriented Economics Division of OMGUS outmaneuvered the zealous New Deal trustbusters in the Decartelization Branch of the Finance Division.110 In addition to the pro-big business attitudes that increasingly prevailed in the military government and the State Department, powerful German economic leaders resisted as well, seconded by German trade unions.111 At the same time, business leaders’ resistance to what they viewed as the “atomization” of the German economy was not synonymous with a return to the days when most German producers belonged to powerful, market-controlling cartels and trusts. Even a close associate of some of the country’s leading heavy industrialists, the FDP’s Franz Blücher, acknowledged that interwar-style cartels represented “the bourgeois betrayal of liberalism.”112 Decartelization and deconcentration posed less of a threat to Hesse’s enterprises than to the huge steel and coal syndicates of the Ruhr valley. Because the large Opel automobile factory in Rüsselsheim near Frankfurt returned to General Motors, which had acquired a controlling interest in it during the final years of the Weimar Republic, it was safe from either dismantling or division into smaller units. However, the massive chemical cartel IG Farben, the company that faced the most scrutiny and the heaviest sanctions after the war, had its headquarters in the Hessian town of Höchst, across the Main river from the Opel factory, confiscated; the complex became the headquarters of General Eisenhower’s Supreme Allied Command, and later of General Clay’s American military government. Partly due to the international perception of IG Farben as the paradigm of Germany’s rapacious cartels, and partly due to IG Farben’s complicity in the Auschwitz death camp system, the Allies singled out the cartel for special scrutiny and punishment.113 Farben’s fate duly illustrates the degree of the retreat on decartelization policy. Rather than dividing the cartel’s immense holdings into dozens of units as originally planned, the breakaway remnants decreased in number and grew in size with the passage of time.114 By 1952, Farben’s western holdings were broken into only four successor companies: Höchst, BASF, Bayer, and Casella.115 Both Höchst and Casella (the smallest of the four units) were based in Hesse: Höchst in the town of the same name and Casella in Frankfurt. Allied efforts to institutionalize competition in Germany also focused on the banking system. Banks had long played a more activist role in German business than in America. In Germany, bankers sat on nearly all major company’s supervisory boards, and served as conduits of information and strategic cooperation between large enterprises. Berlin lost its place to Frankfurt as the nation’s banking capital due to the former’s precarious political and geographic position. American efforts to break the power of the three main banks that remained in the Western zones (Dresdner Bank, Deutsche Bank, and Commerzbank) by creating stronger regional banks in the –

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Länder and up to ninety smaller banks foundered, with the Bonn government providing legal cover in 1952 for a return to the status quo ante.116 While this study excludes the banking system per se, the fact that the banks’ seats in corporate board rooms continued to serve as powerful networking bonds for Germany’s corporations makes the continuity in the organization of the German financial system an important element of continuity in corporate culture and structure. Despite the modest results of the American military government’s decartelization and deconcentration programs, competition-enhancing regulations akin to the American model gradually became part of the legal framework of the Federal Republic. For Erhard, the social market economy meant, above all else, removing barriers to free competition. This entailed lifting state economic controls, but also ensuring that businesses themselves did not impede the free play of productive forces. The culmination of the anti-trust movement in the Federal Republic was the “Law against Restraint of Competition,” which the Bundestag finally passed in 1957 over the objections of business interest groups. This act not only prohibited cartels and market-dominating concentrations that act to restrict free trade, but also subjected pending mergers of large companies to the prior approval of a Federal Competition Office.117 It did not halt the trend toward greater concentration of industry, but rather limited it.118 Contrary to some interpretations, movement toward an acceptance of greater competition could be discerned even before the passage of the 1957 antitrust law. Most businesses whose ties had been partially or completely severed did not reconcentrate; this was especially true of the IG Farben successors, who actively competed with one another in the 1950s and beyond.119 In 1954, the American business magazine Forbes cited the example of Joseph Neckermann, a 42-year-old, rags-to-riches mail order businessman from Frankfurt, who made his fortune by underselling his competitors’ arranged and artificially high prices. In the process, he shook deeply held notions in the business community and supported efforts to replace Allied anti-cartel regulations with a more effective German version.120 Top economic leaders, above all BDI president Fritz Berg, loudly lobbied in favor of competition-stifling arrangements, but the “Americanization” of Germany’s economic framework took an ever greater hold. Empirical studies have documented a convergence between American and German economic indicators between 1945 and 1970, such as proportion of public to private ownership and the balance between large and small corporations, with Germany coming to resemble the United States rather than vice versa.121 Even the industries and industrialists of the Ruhr developed “from a mythical area to a place like many others in modern industrial societies around the world.”122 Another important area of change for West German entrepreneurs was their relationship to organized labor. Whereas military government policy aimed to reestablish labor protections that had existed prior to 1933, Article –

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37 of the 1946 Hessian constitution mandated a system of labor codetermination in all enterprises. American military government officers followed the drafting of this legislation with both interest and apprehension, pressuring the constitutional committee to strike it from the document. When instead the Hessians adopted the constitution without changes in the codetermination clause, General Clay annulled it using his discretionary powers.123 Despite the blocking of Article 37, trade unions established themselves in postwar Western Germany as the legitimate representatives of labor. In this sense, at least, the corporatist idea that had served as an alternative to “modern” labor relations and as a pillar of the National Socialists’ social engineering vision faded. During World War I and the Weimar Republic, trade unions had won an accepted place at the table and legal protections besides, but they did not dispel the rightist-corporatist hope of an “organic” solidarity between workers and entrepreneurs in individual branches, or Stände.124 After 1945, the trade union movement emerged more unified than ever, with the federation of socialist, Christian, and particularist unions into the powerful DGB. They found the entrepreneurial world ready to accept them, if grudgingly, within limits, and upon threat of labor protest. The organizational and material gains of the postwar union movement outstripped those in most other industrialized countries by the mid 1950s, and included worker codetermination in steel and coal industries and in other enterprises that employed more than one thousand individuals.125 In 1952, the Factory Constitution Law established employee-elected works councils in all medium and large enterprises. Due in large part to these considerable early gains, the German business world experienced fewer strikes in the postwar years than any other major European country. Animosity remained between labor and management, but the will to compromise as well as the mechanisms to engineer such compromise, defused the labor tension common in earlier decades. Entrepreneurs preferred to avoid the issue of individual complicity. The business community also did little to safeguard against a repetition of businesses’ abuses. The most common abuse had been the use and mistreatment of slave labor. Of course, the war and racial policies that had fed the slave labor system in the Third Reich disappeared, eliminating the use of forced labor as an option. Nevertheless, many entrepreneurs who had drawn on slave labor almost had to account for their treatment of these captive laborers during their denazification hearings. Walter Struve has shown that excessive cruelty during the war years did sometimes result in stiff penalties after 1945, but rarely barred the responsible business leaders from reestablishing themselves in the Second Republic.126 As in the case of the other two elite groups, entrepreneurs acted according to a self-serving collective understanding of what had gone wrong during the Third Reich. Business owners and managers frequently justified their abuse of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and other nationalities with the remark that the wartime labor shortage and the insistence of the Nazi leaders forced them to use foreign –

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labor. Many also cited numerous examples of their fair treatment of forced laborers, not infrequently supported with affidavits by the former foreign workers themselves.127 There is some evidence that Germans developed a new sensitivity to the issue after 1945. In 1947, a Cologne lawyer brought suit in state court against Hesse’s denazification minister, members of Hesse’s parliament, and business leaders who employed Germans interned under the provisions of the Law for Liberation from National Socialism. Citing international law, the lawyer claimed that the Ministry for Liberation was forcing internees to work for little or no compensation against their will. The businesses involved paid the unacceptably low wages directly into an escrow account controlled by the Ministry for Liberation.128 The challenge led the ministry to review labor conditions in the camp, and to ensure that work performed was voluntary and appropriately compensated.129 With the foundation of the Federal Republic, the Basic Law expressly forbade forced labor, except that imposed on individuals “deprived of their liberty in a court of law.”130 While it can be argued that many concentration camp inmates during the Third Reich had been convicted of “crimes,” at least such a provision recognized the nature of the abuse of the millions forced into labor camps.

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Physicians Although physicians generally defended the legal framework that they had inherited from Weimar and the Third Reich, the elimination of expressly National Socialist law affected them more than it did business or the civil service. This was a natural consequence of the fact that the Nazis’ most distinctive legal innovations had aimed at creating a “biocracy” that the medical community was supposed to administer and enforce. The military government suspended a series of post-1933 laws aimed at implementing racial and “eugenic” ideas, some of which were widespread in Europe and the United States, and others that were specifically National Socialist.131 The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases and the Nuremberg laws were the most egregious of this type.132 Moreover, constitutional and other legal guarantees provided new safeguards against the most disturbing transgressions of Nazi medicine: the human experiments conducted without the subjects’ consent, and the much larger program of “euthanasia.” The first article of the Basic Law declares not only that “human dignity is inviolable,” but also requires the state to respect and defend it. The second article guarantees the rights to life and freedom from physical injury. Furthermore, personal freedoms of action and movement can only be limited by law. In the postwar context, these basic rights aimed to prevent the recurrence of a police state based on arbitrary terror. As a consequence, they outlawed the detention or injury of individuals without specific legal sanctions.133 –

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The implications of these constitutional protections are visible in the 1953 federal Law for Combating Sexually Transmitted Diseases.134 This law aroused a measure of controversy while it was being drafted and discussed in the Bundestag, since it required physicians to report the carriers of sexually transmitted diseases as well as their sexual partners in many instances. Of interest, however, is a special provision prohibiting “medical procedures associated with considerable risks for the life or health of the patient” (§17, Para. 2). The clear intent is to rule out the possibility of the misuse of the law’s mandate for using state coercion to fight disease as a justification for anything resembling the National Socialist forced sterilization program. By contrast, the 1946 Hessian Decree for Combating Venereal Diseases, drafted amid a near epidemic in the immediate postwar upheaval, provided for forced treatment and criminalized the knowledgeable transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.135 The federal law that superseded it was indeed more lax, but far from “enlightened.” It still provided for the use of force, including imprisonment, against uncooperative, “promiscuous,” or vagrant individuals infected with sexually transmitted diseases. The conservative medical establishment that supported the inclusion of mandatory reporting and state coercion in the interest of “social hygiene” did not associate such measures with National Socialism. Admittedly, mandatory reporting requirements had gradually eroded the principle of physician/patient confidentiality since World War I.136 The National Socialist innovation had been to require registration of the physically or mentally infirm in preparation for the “euthanasia” program, or along racial lines for the exclusion of “foreign elements” from the “German body.” Despite the continued reporting of physically or mentally handicapped for a brief time, the specific Nazi requirements died out or were annulled. Some of Hesse’s physicians directly criticized the continued reporting of premature births and stillbirths to the medical bureaucracy, identifying the appropriate legal requirements, couched in the Law for Hereditary Health, as Nazi law, and therefore unacceptable.137 Although legislatures strengthened legal protections against medical abuses after 1945, they did not make the corrections retroactive. Forced sterilization on medical grounds was never classified as a form of National Socialist persecution, and neither the victims nor their dependents received compensation. The restitution that the Federal Republic began to pay to victims of racial and political persecution in the 1950s excluded victims of “biological” persecution. The failure to recognize forced sterilization as persecution and consequently to compensate them for their suffering at the hands of the German government has been cited as a refusal to acknowledge the “euthanasia” and sterilization programs as inherently criminal.138 Because the Nazi sterilization and euthanasia programs relied heavily on the participation of practicing physicians to inform on their patients, the question of patient confidentiality received special attention after the war. One measure of prophylactic reform was the strengthening of legal guaran–

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tees against state infringement on doctor/patient confidentiality. Medical journals discussed the issue rather extensively, and physicians leaned clearly toward stricter observance of the Schweigepflicht, or confidentiality obligation.139 As in other countries this principle was tested most severely in efforts to stamp out communicable diseases. The 1935 RÄO provided for medical secrets to be divulged if the “common sense of the people demanded it”; this clause provided the legal foundation for mandatory “eugenic” notifications.140 Most wartime orders that constituted egregious violations of confidentiality were eliminated along with the Nazi regime. An exception was the Nazi-era rule that required physicians to report individuals with hereditary illnesses, which American officials and other German administrations adjudged to be a non-Nazi provision. Unlike the other American-zone Länder, Hesse’s interior ministry nonetheless refused to enforce it.141 No new protections of the doctor/patient privilege were instituted as protection against potential violations of medical ethics. However, a review of professional journals indicates that a renewed emphasis on applying existing principles of confidentiality took hold. Some physicians used the principle to protect themselves rather than their patients; they refused to permit civilian government or military government investigators to search patient files for cases of “euthanasia” or forced sterilization. The head of the Heath Department in Heppenheim near Darmstadt, for instance, refused denazification officials open access to the chambers’ records on forced sterilizations, citing doctor/patient confidentiality. He suggested two possible avenues around the confidentially rule: the tribunal could either send a list of specific questions, which the Health Department would themselves investigate and answer, or the tribunal could appoint a physician to investigate the charges. The tribunal prosecutor remarked that they would then have to send an American physician, since German doctors were “unreliable”. Denying that he was covering up evidence needed in a criminal investigation, the official pointed out that even the National Socialist Reichsärzteführer (Gerhard Wagner) had upheld in 1937 the physicians’ recourse to the confidentiality rule. The official failed to mention that the Reich physicians’ leadership had abandoned such ethical reservations during the war.142 The medical establishment succeeded in blocking the broad opening of medical files for the investigation of National Socialist crimes. In this way, they circumvented a full accounting of the complicity of individual physicians; since patients had access to their own medical files, some individual physicians had to answer for their breaches of medical ethics, but only if victims were still alive and specifically brought either civil suit or accusations before denazification tribunals. The laws regarding National Socialist “excesses” were in most cases annulled, but otherwise the legal regulation of the medical community hardly changed. The Reichsärzteordnung of 13 December 1935, which remained on the books, served as a basis for supplementary legislation in the Federal Republic of Germany. In fact, after the Federal government was –

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established, the RÄO even served to challenge earlier laws passed at the Land level whose purpose was to institute limited administrative reforms in the medical profession.143 A federal law of 1953 regulated the licensing of physicians, replacing a similar law of 17 July 1939 and its revised version of December 1942.144 The 1953 legislation aimed mainly to restore a higher level of rigor to the training of physicians, reversing the relaxation of qualifications that took place during the war.145 Why, one may ask, did it take more than eight years to replace Nazi-era legislation? In part, the medical leadership’s tactics to preserve their professional independence caused the delay. Several Länder, including Hesse, began to reexamine the laws regulating the practice of medicine after 1945. The medical lobby, however, successfully pressured the Länder to table fundamental decisions until the constitution of a federal government. A special conference of medical experts, convened in Stuttgart in 1948 to consider health regulations, concurred with a report from a Frankfurt working group on health policy that the decentralized approach had bred confusion since 1945. In particular, the working group’s report cited postwar laws designed to combat venereal disease, the regulation of physician’s accreditation, and the professional organization of physicians. In all of these areas, they argued, regional divergence threatened to create a patchwork of medical standards. The report made a special plea to the Länder not to strip the physicians’ chambers of their past responsibilities, even to those Länder, like Hesse, that had reduced the chambers to voluntary membership.146 The 1953 law met their expectations in that it enforced national standardization while recognizing the Länder as the responsible bodies for the testing and licensing of physicians. In general, the new regulations re-established the pre-1933 credentialing system. Because the National Socialist regime so rigorously applied the abortion ban codified in §218 of the civil code (at least for “Aryan” women), many associated it strongly with the Third Reich. After 1945, it remained in force, despite criticisms associated with undesired pregnancies due to rape by, or consensual liaisons with, Allied troops. The courts that upheld §218 after 1949 argued that the law was a reaction to the taking of innocent life during the Holocaust years.147 Hesse’s medical leaders tried to stem a wave of applications for abortions by insisting that they would grant such requests only in cases of rape-induced pregnancies combined with life-threatening medical complications.148 While difficult to gauge precisely, there was certainly some public support for a relaxation of the restrictive abortion law. Several thousand followed the Communist Party’s July 1946 call to demonstrate in Darmstadt in favor of abortions based on social hardship. The demonstrators protested the arrest of a doctor who had been performing abortions in violation of §218.149 Hesse’s minister of Justice and later Minister President, Georg August Zinn, maintained that his ministry had already informed the public and the judiciary that, in cases of rape, abortions should not be –

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treated as a punishable offense. However, the Allied Control Council, rather than the Land government, had rejected requests to permit abortions on social grounds.150 With the advent of a federal government controlled by the CDU and CSU in 1949, the political center renewed the strict application of §218. It was not until the 1960s women’s movement and the formation of the social-liberal coalition in Bonn that activists achieved limited reforms on the abortion issue.151 The legal framework that helped define physicians’ roles shed the racial components that had typified medicine under National Socialism. Other measures that had been adopted during the Third Reich, but which had their roots in the older conservative tradition of German medicine, remained in place. The continued application of the “denazified” Reich Physicians’ Law typifies the conservative turn away from fascist schemes and toward pre-Nazi legal concepts. In at least some instances, the return to tradition also served to reemphasize individual rights and doctor/patient confidentiality as a prophylactic against state coercion in the medical realm. These developments were not wholly incompatible with the resistance to more fundamental reform.

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Occupational Organizations The reconstitution of occupational interest groups drew on many of the same assumptions that underpinned the laws affecting the high civil service, the business elite, and the medical profession. Yet whereas the legal structure defined or limited elites, occupational associations projected their interests. Organized interest groups have wielded considerable power in modern German history. Physicians, business leaders, and higher civil servants all conform to this pattern. Corporatism—and be it a “new corporatism,” in which consensus was sought “less through the occasional approval of a mass public than through continued bargaining among organized interests”—played a crucial role in Central Europe.152 In the course of twelve years of rule, National Socialism destroyed, usurped or eroded the power of occupational associations just as it compromised individual elites. Those occupational associations that neither disbanded nor fused with National Socialist organizations experienced an increased internal authoritarianism and subservience to political dictates.153 Germany’s military defeat brought new challenges. During the critical first months after capitulation, the Allies suspended most business and civil service interest groups. The few that the occupiers considered essential to maintain order, including the regional physicians’ chambers and chambers of industry and trade, continued to operate much as they had before 1945, in some cases even expanding their authority and influence. –

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After 1945, the higher civil service, business leadership, and medical community in West Germany consciously built upon interwar corporatist structures. This has sometimes been cited as evidence of a restoration in the Federal Republic of Germany. In contrast to the West German experience, the Soviets and the SED government radically altered the legal underpinnings and associational network of elite occupations in East Germany. They eliminated traditional interest group organizations altogether. The charge of restoration in West Germany, however, inadequately describes the peculiar postwar mixture of change and continuity in West Germany’s associational network. The laws and organizations surrounding the elite were partially “recast,” as the elite refurbished old structures and incorporated minor alterations. Of particular interest is the question why higher civil servants, business leaders, and physicians insisted on rebuilding those preexisting organizational forms that had led them into—and in some cases through— the National Socialist era. It would be fair to speak of a neo-corporatist revival with post-corporatist elements in the Federal Republic of Germany. The nostalgia for the familiar was strong during the uncertain period of defeat and occupation. Nevertheless, the obvious continuities should not obscure a recognition of the reforms that took root within the occupations. Rather than using the postwar period of upheaval to push through revolutionary ideas, the decidedly non-revolutionary elites sought to rework their familiar legal and organizational world to correct what they understood to be flaws—often only minor ones—in the system. In subsequent years, elite occupations gradually revived most pre-1933 organizations, some of which had survived largely intact throughout the Hitler years. A few small new organizations sprang up as well, either to articulate the interests of special constituencies, such as refugees, or to challenge the mainstream associations. By the early 1950s, many of the newly conceived associations found themselves marginalized, and the interestgroup network of the past appeared to have rooted itself firmly in the fabric of the Federal Republic.154 The case of physicians’ organizations amply demonstrates how the Federal Republic’s neo-corporatism favored the organizational domination of entire occupations by institutions with roots in the Weimar and Nazi past. By conferring physicians’ chambers with the semi-official status of public law corporations, the political decision-makers openly promoted them as the primary articulators of physicians’ views. Moreover, public-legal status made the transfer of decision-making powers in political questions both feasible and legally defensible. As a result, they hindered the pluralistic competition for influence between “private” organizations, because it enabled the chambers to cement and expand their role, stifling potential oppositional currents.155 If an important aim of postwar reformers was to institutionalize safeguards against a recurrence of the “totalitarian” aspect of fascism, then there –

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were some successes. Although there is some latitude in its interpretation, the Basic Law’s guarantees of personal and professional freedom made it nearly impossible to force individuals to join private organizations. The only exception that the courts permitted to this principle were public law corporations, which operate as semi-governmental organs that elected governments invest with state powers. Two examples of public law corporations are the Chambers of Industry and Trade and Physicians’ Chambers.156 Even more important, the freedom of association, one of the basic constitutional tenets not subject to revision, impedes a recurrence of the Gleichschaltung of the National Socialist era. Such a streamlining and harnessing of professional organizations as transmission belts of state power would require a simultaneous dissolution of competing associations, which the Federal Republic’s constitution prevents. Upon the background of neo-corporatism, the associations came to rely increasingly on the democratic selection of officers. As the American military government authorized the licensing of associations, first locally, then at the Land level, they insisted on some basic procedural criteria. Until 1948 or 1949, organizations had to submit written by-laws and leadership lists to the occupation authorities for scrutiny. The lists provided a basis for checking the political reliability of occupational leaders, whereas the by-laws insured that organizations adhered to minimum democratic procedural standards. These included voluntary membership and the election of officers by the full membership according to the “one member, one vote” principle. For some organizations, like the physicians’ chambers, these stipulations simply reestablished procedures lost during the Third Reich.157 For others they signaled a new departure. In the Hessian Chambers of Industry and Trade, for example, direct elections replaced voting weighted according to firm and branch size and remained in place even after other aspects of the Chambers’ organization reverted to “traditional” structures. Peak associations (Spitzenverbände) at the federal level, most of which emerged in 1949, had as their members not individuals or business enterprises, but local and regional associations. Representatives of member associations chose the peak associations’ leaders, and powerful individuals and blocks could often dominate the selection process.158 The function and ultimate influence of organized interests in the Federal Republic became a central topic of public debate as well as sociological and political study during the 1950s. Many decried what they perceived as the “rule of the associations.”159 One critic concluded that the “problem” of associations lies not in their existence, nor that they strive to influence politics for their constituency’s benefit; the “actual problems” are the associations’ support at election time, including contributions to parties, and the injection of ideology into the political decision-making process.160 Others sounded a less alarmist note, claiming, as the legal scholar Thomas Ellwein agreed two decades later, that organized interest groups were necessary and –

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inevitable to articulate common interests in a modern democracy, and that the balance of competing organized interests in West Germany kept individual interests from dominating the country’s political process.161 This contrasts with the arguments of the political sociologist Eva Etzioni-Halevy, who argues somewhat too simplistically that both peak associations and semipublic business chambers undermined the democratic system by making economic elites dependent on the state, and thus sapping their political autonomy.162 As is frequently the case, the truth lay somewhere in the middle. Every modern industrial state draws on associations as conduits of common concerns. Ideally, competing groups serve to check their rivals’ influence. In the West German case, for example, the powerful economic peak organization, the League of German Industry, must compete for influence with the unified trade union, DGB. This competition, however, is not ideal. The neo-corporatist tendency for occupational interest groups to settle on specialized associations (for example, lobbying, labor negotiations, and information exchange) stifles the development of competing associations within a particular occupation. In addition, the political influence of West Germany’s peak organizations far exceeds their proportion of the citizenship. Their access, lobbying expertise, and financial strength can the skew democratic process. Ultimately, however, these are issues faced by other industrial states as well. While problematic, they are not by themselves indicative of a restoration in West Germany.

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Civil Servants The civil service achieved a higher degree of political organization in the Federal Republic than ever before in German history.163 During the latter years of the occupation and the early phase of the FRG, the Beamten-organizations, the German Civil Servants’ League, the Union of Public Servants, Transport, and Communication (ÖTV), and associations of refugee and denazified civil servants became the “pressure groups par excellence in Bonn,” successfully steering the government toward a restoration of the traditional tenured civil service.164 The Allies, above all the Americans, unintentionally spurred this development. By pressing for denazification and, more consistently, for a thorough overhaul of the traditional Beamtentum, they galvanized the civil service into presenting a common front against an external threat. The main civil service organizations competed with one another for membership more than they cooperated in their lobbying efforts. Two professional associations dominated the postwar discussion about the role and status of Beamte. The first, the DGB, wished to draw civil servants into a single union, next to blue-collar workers and salaried private-sector employees. This attempt to overcome the Weimar-era splintering of the labor movement resonated among many, but by no means a majority, of German Beamte. The –

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German Civil Servants’ League (Deutscher Beamtenbund, or DBB), by contrast, benefited from the restoration of the traditional civil service, including the return of thousands of “denazified” officials to public administration. The DGB, which originally made a strong showing among Beamte, actually declined in importance in the course of the 1950s, representing a falling proportion of all employed civil servants. At the end of 1951, the DGB represented 361,630, civil servants, or 41 percent of all employed Beamte, surpassing the DBB, which boasted only 300,000 members (34 percent). By the end of the 1950s, the relationship was reversed; the DGB claimed 470,000 civil servants among its members, compared to the DBB’s 570,000.165 The competition between these two main organizations for the loyalty of German civil servants reflects a deeper struggle over the self-conceived role of civil servants in society. Participation under the umbrella of the monolithic trade union implied a similarity between public servants and blue-collar workers. Not surprisingly, civil servants in state-owned enterprises (e.g. the energy sector) and transportation (the railroad), as well as those in subordinate tracks (lower and middle civil servants) were most heavily represented in the DGB, whereas administrative civil servants and “high” or “higher” civil servants strongly preferred the DBB.166 Each organization emphasized its own conception of the Beamte’s role in society rather than playing to the middle. The DGB called for a fundamental reform of the civil service that was anathema to tradition-bound higher civil servants. Before the Basic Law codified the revival of the “traditional principles” of the professional civil service, the DGB’s civil service organizers lobbied for “elimination of the distinction between employees (Angestellten) and Beamten,” creation of an independent personnel office for the public sector, evaluations based on performance, and equal treatment for men and women. The DGB argued that continuing reliance on the 1937 German Civil Servants’ Code risked reviving “the authoritarian essence of the Beamten-concept, which only permitted a small portion of a privileged social stratum access to the career civil service.” The result would be a “departure from the reforms of the past two years, which have begun to achieve the minimum prerequisites for a democratic reordering of the civil service.”167 Especially at this early juncture, the DGB’s conception of the Beamtentum had much in common with American reform ideas. In addition, the public employee’s union, ÖTV, played a significant role as an advocate of civil servants. It should be noted, however, that this union focused most of its energy on dealing with issues important to lower- and middle-level civil servants. The ÖTV’s influence is evidenced by their submission of drafts of legislation on important civil service issues, such as a draft on the law regulating the legal status of federal civil servants in late 1949.168 Some of the most vocal organizations representing civil servants fed on the resentments of former civil servants that the military government or the denazification tribunals had dismissed for political reasons. These reactive, largely one-issue associations, included the Civil Servants’ Protective Associ–

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ation (Beamtenschutzbund) the Association of Civil Servants and Employees of Public Administrations from the Eastern Territories and the Sudetenland (Verband der Beamten und Angestellten der öffentlichen Verwaltungen aus den Ostgebieten und dem Sudetenland, Verbaost for short), and the Central Protective League of Dismissed Civil Servants (Zentralschutzbund der verdrängten Beamten). The Civil Servants’ Protective Association was the most formidable of this type. In its founding statement of 1949, it claimed to represent public servants who had been wronged by denazification, imprisonment, or arbitrary dismissal.169 Not surprisingly, they used the restorative civil service provisions of the Basic Law, which the broader civil service associations had secured, as a springboard to demand that those removed be reinstated according to an expansive interpretation of civil servants’ constitutional guarantees.

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Business Leaders After German capitulation, business associations first had to extract themselves from the machinery of the National Socialist state. By the end of 1945, the appointed government of Hesse formally dissolved the remaining economic organization of the Third Reich that the military government had already suspended. These included the Reich and Gau Economic Chambers, Reich economic groups and subgroups, the industrial “rings” and other armament-oriented organizations, and local trade groups.170 Within a few years, however, businesses and business leaders in West Germany had achieved an extraordinary level of crisscrossing, politically powerful associations reminiscent of the Weimar years. In imitation of their interwar experience, business leaders reconstructed a three-pillared system of interest groups. The politically benign Chambers of Industry and Trade represented most registered non-handicraft businesses (beginning in 1958, all businesses were required by law to become dues-paying members). According to their own self-conception, they served as non-partisan, non-political institutions of self-representation. Employers’ associations formed the second pillar of the triad. Their special task was to represent business interests in negotiations with organized labor. Finally, businesses banded together into economic interest groups (Wirtschaftsverbände), which fought for the political and economic interests of individual branches and sectors of the economy. Enterprises often belonged to several overlapping groups, which might be organized geographically or by economic branch. Most of these smaller associations united under the banner of a federal umbrella organization. The only business associations that continued to function with little or no interruption were the Chambers of Industry and Commerce. They were among the first organizations of any kind to assume pre-1945 responsibilities. The Frankfurt Chamber, for example, temporarily filled the organizational gap after capitulation and before a functioning municipal administration –

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re-emerged.171 The chambers, of which there were twelve in greater Hesse, found themselves at the center of the debate about occupational freedom. The Americans asserted that the chambers had facilitated the Gleichschaltung of industry. To prevent similar abuses in the future, they insisted that the Chambers be reconstituted as voluntary, private organizations, rather than as semi-public institutions with mandatory membership. Furthermore, they were to be stripped of most official regulatory functions, such as registering new businesses. The Military Government essentially tried to impose the structure of the American Chambers of Commerce on the German Chambers. The American policy prevailed in Hesse until 1957, at which time the Chamber leadership realized their long-harbored wish to return to their traditional status as semi-public institutions with mandatory membership.172 Despite their failure to reattain the status and perquisites of public law bodies until 1957, the Chambers exhibited a confusing mixture of continuity and change. As constituted in Hesse and the rest of the American zone, they replaced the Gau Economic Chambers, which had previously superceded the Chambers of Industry in 1942. On the other hand, the Americans did not permit the reconstituted Chambers to operate as public law organizations, but insisted they remained voluntary private associations.173 They considered themselves, both before and after 1945, mediators between the state and business, not simply entrepreneurial lobbying groups. This role was exemplified in an October 1947 implementation order concerning the licensing of trade enterprises; the chambers of industry and trade were to recommend members for the state committee responsible for licensing businesses.174 In fact, however, they acted as a powerful lobby in business questions. Pre-1933 structures also served as the model for the renaissance of powerful employers’ associations, above all the Federation of German Employers’ Associations (Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände, or BdA). As early as 1947, employers united to form the first supra-regional umbrella associations of employers as a counterweight to the rapidly growing universal trade union, DGB, founded a year earlier. After a few organizational metamorphoses, the BdA emerged in 1949 in its postwar form. As the center of big business and therefore of large-scale labor contracts, member associations from the Ruhr dominated the politics of the BdA.175 The third pillar of business’ organizational network consisted of branch economic associations, or Wirtschaftsverbände. These interest groups reestablished themselves quickly in Hesse after the relaxation of MG restrictions on free association in 1947. In part, the rapid expansion built upon the already considerable degree of organization within specialized economic sectors in the British zone. The British permitted such associations as early as 1946.176 As a condition of the licensing process until 1949, the military government required the submission of a charter or constitution, lists of officers, and a statement of purpose. Approval was contingent upon constitutional provisions establishing basic internal democracy, especially regular –

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election of leaders by secret ballot and open voluntary membership. This system, which also applied to the Chambers of Industry and Trade, lasted until late 1949. The most powerful umbrella organization of the economic associations was the Federation of German Industry (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, or BDI). The BDI grew out of the Political-Economic Committee of Industrial Associations (1949), created by the old industrial organizer Hermann Reusch of Gutehoffnungshütte steel conglomerate in Oberhausen. It was re-christened Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie in January 1950.177 The BDI resembled in many respects the interwar Reich League of German Industry (Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie) that existed from 1919 to 1934. But unlike its predecessor, the BDI did not recognize individual firms or blanket regional groups as members, but only peak associations of entire branches. This helped to prevent individual regions from completely dominating the BDI decision making apparatus.178 The BDI earned a reputation as a center of conservative economic and political ideas, especially regarding cartel questions, although in some areas, such as its active support of European economic cooperation and understanding, it departed from past German traditions. In addition to the three types of economic organizations with specific tasks, there existed several independent groups whose main task was to promote education among the economic classes or to advocate economic philosophies. Many of these groups were small, with few if any formal connections to the large umbrella groups. The Society for Economic Policy (Wirtschaftspolitische Gesellschaft, WIPOG), based in Frankfurt, was one such group. Founded in 1947, it promoted Western-style liberal market economy, and thus favored Erhard’s approach.179

Physicians The initial months following the collapse of the Third Reich were a time of administrative limbo for physicians in Hesse. The dissolution of the central Reich Physicians’ Chamber left local chambers to fend for themselves in an uncertain atmosphere. The Allies suspended medical institutions that served the Nazi biologist vision, such as the genetic health courts and racial hygiene institutes.180 All universities closed pending further notification, removing the institution of the medical faculties, that were supremely important for the physicians’ collective status and intellectual leadership. Only the local physicians’ chambers continued to operate, but even they were uncertain of their standing and function. The individuals who rebuilt the physicians’ professional organizations were seldom inclined to experiment. During the first year of the occupation, the initiative lay with the military government. In fact, the military govern–

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ment’s public health division urged the creation of a unified physicians’ chamber for Greater Hesse in an attempt to simplify communications and policy implementation at the end of 1945, but Land-wide organizations emerged only very slowly. The first regional Hessian physicians’ meeting did not take place until August 1945, and as late as 1948 the military government was aware of only three Land-wide medical organizations.181 In keeping with American directives, the provincial chambers headquartered in Kassel, Giessen, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Marburg, and Frankfurt became subsidiaries of the Land chamber in 1946, although the chambers in Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and Darmstadt competed for primacy.182 Months later, the military government expressed its disappointment that the organization was still not actually functioning.183 As an illustration of the slow coalescence, the Hessian Physicians’ Chamber newsletter did not resume publication until 1949.184 The military government only temporarily accepted the Greater Hessian Physicians’ Chamber as a public law corporation under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior.185 From 1946 until their withdrawal from interference in such matters, American policy insisted that government agencies alone regulate and license physicians, and that membership in the chambers remain voluntary.186 Later, they tried to delegate authority over physicians to the state and demote the physicians’ chambers to private institutions along the American model. As a result, Hesse’s physicians fought a rear-guard battle to maintain or reestablish the pre-1935 semi-autonomous regional physicians’ chambers, centralized under the control of a Greater Hessian Physicians’ Chamber. The first Land-wide Ärztekammer, based on pre-1933 organizational concepts, emerged in the summer of 1946, with jurisdictional boundaries conforming to new Land borders.187 The fact that the Allied occupation forces placed a high priority on maintaining the medical care of Germans gave the medical community an advantage in resisting immediate attempts at reform.188 In an “attempt to stabilize the medical administration system which collapsed with the fall of the Nazi regime”, several leading physicians in Hesse established the Physicians’ Union (Ärzteverein) in the early summer of 1945. This organization assumed the functions and apparatus of the Gauärzteführer in Hesse, which consisted in part of collecting insurance fees and paying claims to eligible doctors.189 Despite the military government’s suggestion that the Physicians’ Union be constituted as an “executive branch of the Chamber of Doctors” in Hesse, physicians and public medical administrators recreated familiar structures at the Land level. At the end of 1945, Hesse’s Minister of Labor and Welfare notified the cabinet that the two main semi-public arms of the medical profession, the Physicians’ Chambers and the Panel Physicians’ League (Kassenärztliche Vereinigung) were being reconstituted and placed under the aegis of a Physicians’ Association (Ärzteverband), the successor to the stopgap Physicians’ Union.190 The chambers were charged with the overall –

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administration of the medical profession.191 The solution did not satisfy other aspirants to the leadership of the Hessian physicians’ chambers. The U.S. military government’s efforts to establish a free market, which accelerated in 1946 and 1947, ran afoul of the chambers’ traditional semipublic status. Although mandatory membership had only become the norm for German physicians’ chambers in the 1920s, postwar medical leaders portrayed mandatory membership as customary and insisted that they had the right to require automatic membership from all physicians.192 They denied that open competition among voluntary organizations should apply to the medical sector, since their occupation could not be considered a “free trade.”193 The Americans and many progressive Germans argued that mandatory membership ran counter to the constitutional right to free association. When the occupation authorities, working with sympathetic leaders of Hesse’s medical profession, forced through rules that placed licensing under the auspices of the government health ministry and lifted restrictions on permission to practice, the first president of Hesse’s Physicians’ Association resigned.194 Not surprisingly, a new law, issued in November 1954, brought the Hessian Physicians’ Chambers into line with most of the other Länder, with greater powers to represent and police the state’s medical practitioners.195 An equally contentious issue was the chambers’ intrusive power to restrict physicians from freely choosing where they practiced. In Germany, the physicians’ chambers assumed almost all the regulatory functions over their members, including licensing and disciplining. The effort to maintain adequate health care on the home front during the war had also brought them the power to restrict where physicians could practice. After the war, the chambers used the same regulations to avert overcrowding and potential competition between established and newcomer physicians.196 The Americans challenged this arrangement, and ordered the government and the chambers to transfer the authority to license physicians to the state administration.197 At a meeting in June 1946, representatives from the individual Physicians’ Chambers and the Ministry of the Interior’s medical division agreed in principle that the chambers could continue to grant physicians the right to practice in Hesse, as long as the Ministry of the Interior could confirm or veto an application.198 However, the physicians’ chambers soon clashed with Hesse’s “plenipotentiary for medical licenses,” a position that was established within the Interior Ministry as the ultimate authority in such matters. Dr. Oelemann, the president of the Greater Hessian chamber, accused the plenipotentiary’s very first official declaration, which stipulated future licensing procedures, of ignoring the suggestions of the physicians’ groups. He described the order as “a dictatorial administrative decree that came about with no regard for the democratic formation of opinion in the medical community.”199 The Chambers, he announced, intended to appoint replacement physicians to vacated practices, if necessary without the prior –

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approval of the plenipotentiary. It was not until January 1949 that physicians received the right to practice where they wished in Hesse.200 At the federal level, the coercive powers of the Nazi-era central physicians’ organization, the Reich Physicians’ Chamber, gave way to a federative central group, the Working Group of West German Physicians (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Westdeutschen Ärzteschaft), later called the Federal Physicians’ Chamber (Bundesärztekammer). The loose federalism of the Working Group significantly distinguished it from the Reich Physicians’ Chamber, which had exerted strong coercive power from the center. As a voluntary association of the regional chambers, the Federal Physicians’ Chamber at least nominally took its cues from compromises worked out among the regional chambers’ representatives.201 Like the leaders of the Chambers of Industry and Trade, the Federal Working Group viewed itself as above partisan politics. Consequently, leading figures in West Germany’s medical profession perceived the need for medical associations dedicated to political lobbying, an activity that the physicians’ chambers believed to clash with their main task of upholding the standards and ethics in German medicine. The Hartmann League, which had dissolved itself in 1936, reemerged, albeit as a voluntary association that never regained the prominence and clout it enjoyed during the Weimar Republic. The Hartmann League’s main task was to represent “the economic and professional interests” of all members of the medical profession throughout Western Germany.202 The profession’s preeminent lobbying group became the League of German Physicians, commonly known as the German Physicians’ Convention (Deutscher Ärztetag), that had disbanded soon after the Nazi rise to power. As the political lobbying arm of the West German medical profession, its board of directors included representatives of the major university medical faculties, the Land chapters of the Marburger Bund, and the Hartmann League.203 Other organizations emerged to represent specific medical constituencies, or concerned themselves with particular issues. Most of these were politically non-partisan, and aimed to improve the material conditions of their members. Perhaps the most vocal was the Marburger Bund, which represented the interests of institutionally-employed (i.e. hospital and laboratory) physicians. These physicians in dependent positions tended to be younger and financially less secure than their freely practicing colleagues who participated in the insurance funds. The Marburger Bund, founded in 1947 in the Hessian town of Marburg, consciously straddled the line between being a professional organization and a trade union. It collectively represented less influential individual physicians against government policies and hospital management, but it refused to support individual parties or political ideologies.204 Each western Land had its own administratively independent chapter by 1949, topped by a federal working group. Although membership remained voluntary, up to ninety percent of young, institutionally employed physicians in some Hessian towns belonged to the Marburger Bund in –

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1949.205 Like the Physicians’ Chambers, the Marburger Bund favored restricting admissions to medical school and limiting the right of newcomers to practice in overcrowded areas. The Marburger Bund went even farther than the chambers in its resistance to American policies of free licensing. As a professional interest group, it was also less reticent about pressing their demands with collective action. In 1949, they threatened a “paper strike,” during which they would refuse to fill out reports until Hesse’s government promised to expand available hospital space (and consequently hire more young physicians).206 In the 1950s, the Marburger Bund stressed the need to admit a larger proportion of Germany’s physicians to the panel insurance fund. To accomplish this, they lobbied the government to lower the legally anchored ratio of panel physicians to insured from the 1932 norm of 1 physician to 600 patients to 1:450. Reiterating arguments endorsed by the 1952 German Physicians’ Convention (Deutscher Ärztetag), they maintained that such a change would serve public health and equalize access to health care. The prevailing ratio, they noted, permitted only fifty percent of German physicians access to the insurance panels, although the insurance funds covered 80 percent of all Germans. The other half of all licensed physicians thus treated the 20 percent of the German population that was privately insured.207 When a 1954 draft revision of the law regulating the insurance funds stuck to the 1:600 ratio, the Marburger Bund called for the creation of a special-interest “Community for the Protection of German Physicians,” to coordinate the efforts of all organizations representing non-panel physicians and the rising generation of German physicians (ärztlichen Nachwuchses).208 The main medical associations, the Physicians’ Chambers, the German Physicians’ League, the Hartmann League, and the Marburger Bund worked in concert to realize common occupational interests. They met frequently to reaffirm their common goals and principles, and frequently to design common lobbying strategies as well.209 The victories they won in returning the physicians’ chambers to public law status, wresting control of licensing away from the Hesse’s American-instituted plenipotentiary for medical licensing and averting the open access of all physicians to the panel insurance funds testify to their combined influence on the political decision making process in the medical sphere. In neo-corporatist fashion, the state institutionalized the preference given to the preeminent medical associations. After lengthy discussions, they created a Land Health Council (Landesgesundheitsrat), consisting of representatives from the main physician organizations and the state health department.210 Whereas the interests and politics of the Physicians’ Chambers, the Hartmann League, and the Marburger Bund generally overlapped, The League of Free Physicians of Germany (Bund der freien Ärzte Deutschlands), also called the Union of Independent German Physicians, sought to break the power of the existing physicians’ chambers. Based in Hesse, this West –

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German association represented mostly younger physicians and refugees. In contrast to other groups, they wished to eliminate the chambers’ control of the right to practice in a certain area. They drew their strength from disgruntled doctors who were disadvantaged by the extreme surplus of physicians. While self-interest rather than political or ideological commitment motivated their members, the league’s liberal policies clashed with the corporatism of the physicians’ chambers. The former were the natural allies of the military government policy makers who sought to transfer the coercive powers of the chambers to Hesse’s state administration. In a statement of their fundamental principles, the Union of Independent Physicians maintained that, in a democracy, only the state and specified territorial bodies could perform sovereign functions and demand mandatory membership.211 Beyond welcoming the Americans’ 1949 ruling that did away with mandatory chamber membership, they believed that every physician should be admitted to the insurance funds automatically upon approbation.212 The very existence of the League of Free Physicians and other non-mainstream medical organizations, such as the Association of Socialist Physicians, indicates that there was support within the medical community for reforming the structures of professional self-regulation, even though their efforts were largely unsuccessful.

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Conclusion This consideration of some of the major legal and organizational developments that affected civil servants, entrepreneurs, and physicians in the postwar period makes clear that “recasting” took many forms. The struggle between reform and tradition that characterized the elite occupations in the decade following World War II was not between two diametrically opposed alternatives. Reformers did not speak with one voice. Nor could they sustain the necessary level of commitment and public support, let alone win over the a majority of elites, for thorough change. As Germany emerged from the shock and apathy of defeat, the narrow window of opportunity closed. Americans in the military government who sought to transform German elite institutions generally agreed on some changes, primarily aimed at molding elitist or authoritarian structures into an egalitarian meritocracy. The threetrack civil service and the monopoly of jurists were to be replaced with a more “rational” bureaucracy based on individual expertise and ability. Breaking up Germany’s huge cartels and requiring greater openness in business would unravel modern Germany’s oligopolistic and corporatist economy. By eliminating restrictions on the freedom to practice and by limiting the self-policing powers of the medical guild, physicians would become subject to reasonable competition and less dependent on authoritarian regulation from above. Far from radical, such reforms coincided with the programs –

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of some German progressives, especially Social Democrats and a minority within the elite groups themselves. Even before the Cold War shifted American energy from eradicating the roots of German authoritarianism, such reforms met with concerted resistance from German elites. Exploiting the gradual return of German sovereignty, they delayed and foiled many American-sponsored changes. The economic elite could draw on sympathy from their American counterparts, whose influence on American occupation policy grew. Some modifications wrought during the occupation remained in place, but most were foiled or else rolled back after 1949. Elite groups, in Hesse as elsewhere, gradually rebuilt their organizations according to pre-1933 blueprints. The three-track civil service, intertwined business associations, and self regulation of the economy and free professions survived. The close cooperation between the occupational associations and lobbying groups in the early Federal Republic, many bearing the same names they had before the war, set a restorative tone. By and large, tradition won out over reform. There was, therefore, some justification to the claim that the goal of transforming Germany had been “betrayed.” At the same time, the victory of tradition fell far short of a restoration. There was no discernible attempt to maintain blatantly National Socialist legislation or associations. From the point of view of many elites who resisted American or Social Democratic reforms, the traditions they wished to preserve were antithetical to Nazism. They earnestly believed that the Nazis, projected as the “other,” had destroyed, disrupted, coopted, or undermined their venerated professional institutions. The return to familiar customs reflected a desire to reestablish the influence they thought they had lost over the course of the preceding two decades. Elites and political leaders alike kept some major Nazi-era laws on the books into the Federal Republic, after pruning away distinctly fascist terminology and clauses. The German Civil Service Law and the Reich Physicians’ Law, in particular, helped them realize aspirations dating back to the Weimar Republic or the Kaiserreich. Their analysis of their historical experience sidestepped the issue of continuity with the Third Reich. It relied on the fiction that the Third Reich was an aberration, or Betriebsunfall (institutional accident). Despite considerable prodding from the occupation forces and German reformers, none of these elite occupational groups seriously believed that their traditional legal and organizational structures might have markedly contributed to the rise and perpetuation of Hitler’s Germany. Armed with this uncritical self-assessment, elites reestablished familiar patterns in an altered political climate. The structures that girded the high civil service, business, and the medical profession were not recast, but elites’ view of their role and function was. In the course of defending their traditions, elite interest groups stressed their compatibility with pluralism and democracy. They remained open to some –

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innovations, as long as these did not challenge their perceived interests. Within the associations, secret balloting by the full membership became the rule, and the growth of postwar associations from the ground up permitted Land chapters to establish themselves before central institutions emerged after 1948. This, in turn, bolstered federalism within the occupational associations. Thus, some of the main central institutions, like the Federal Physicians’ Chamber and the German Industry and Trade League remained umbrella associations of local and regional groups. This configuration hindered the emergence of centralizing, hierarchical relationships. By the early 1950s, interest group associations wielded considerable influence within the new German democracy. In neo-corporatist West Germany, the associations had access and the state was well-disposed to accommodate them. This environment threatened their interests less than had the Third Reich or the early activist phase of the occupation. In the final analysis, leaders in the higher civil service, the business community, and the medical profession successfully resisted major Allied reforms. Nevertheless, subtle but lasting alterations took hold within the framework of nostalgic revival.

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Notes 1. Between 1945 and 1948, a wave of English-language on-the-scene reports publicized the material and moral devastation of Germany. In Britain, Victor Gollancz published several such works, including In Darkest Germany (Hinsdale, 1947). An American strongly sympathetic to the Germans’ plight is H. Spring, The Road to Chaos (Winter Park, Fla., 1947). More common beginning in 1947 were works that made the “Marshall Plan argument,” that German recovery was essential to overall European reconstruction. See L. Brown, A Report on Germany (New York, 1947). When Allied reform and punishment programs were discontinued, however, numerous reports bitterly asserted that the essential goals had been betrayed: A. Kahn, Betrayal: Our Occupation of Germany (New York, 1950); Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (1978); Th. Bower, Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America, and the Purging of Nazi Germany—A Pledge Betrayed (London, 1981). A diplomat’s account of Social Democrats who lamented the failure of reforms in C.W. Thayer, The Unquiet Germans (New York, 1957), 204-22. 2. Huster et al., Determinanten der westdeutschen Restauration, 200-4. 3. Huster, et al., 70. 4. D. Prowe, “Economic Democracy in Post-World War II Germany: Corporatist Crisis Response, 1945-1948.” JMH 57:3 (1985): 451-82; also U. Nocken, “Corporatism and Pluralism in Modern German History,” in Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System, ed. D. Stegmann et al. (Bonn, 1978), 37-67. 5. Prowe, “Economic Democracy,” 453. 6. R. Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1967). See also K.D. Bracher, “Die zweite Demokratie in Deutschland—Stukuren und Probleme,” in Die Demokratie im Wandel der Gesellschaft, ed. R. Löwenthal (Berlin, 1963), 119-26. –

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7. Th. Eschenburg, Herrschaft der Verbände? 1st ed. (1955). 8. JCS 1067, Art. 5, part I, sec. 4, in U.S. Dept. of State Bulletin 13:330 (21 Oct. 1945): 596-607. 9. E. Peterson has demonstrated the preference of some American field officers for pragmatism over punitive idealism in The American Occupation of Germany (Detroit, 1977). The Army’s official historian for the occupation, Harold Zink, sounded similar themes in The United States in Germany 1944-1955 (Princeton, 1957), esp. 165-75. 10. Zink, The United States in Germany, 170-75. 11. Zink, The United States in Germany, 177. 12. E. Kogon, “Wiederaufbau und Neuanfang nach 1945,” in Die Geschichte Hessens, ed. U. Schultz (Stuttgart, 1983), 249-52. 13. A. Arndt, “Die staats- und verwaltungsrechtliche Entwicklung in Groß-Hesse,” Deutsche Rechtszeitschrift 1 (1946): 188. 14. Zinn-Stein, 10-12. 15. Information Control Branch, Political Analysis and Public Opinion Weekly Review, period ending 8 Jan. 1947, OMGH box 62. 16. For a general summary, see Turner, Germany from Partition to Unification, 33-46. 17. HQ MG Detachment E1A2, Regierungsbezirk Wiesbaden, MG Weekly summary no. 2, 22 July to 1 Aug. 1945, 1. 18. H. Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität der Institution des Berufsbeamtentums und die Rekonstruktion der Demokratie in Westdeutschland,” in G. Schwegmann, ed. Die Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums nach 1945 (Düsseldorf, 1986), 68-69. 19. This phrase has been attributed to a the German administrative law expert, Otto Mayer. Th. Ellwein, “Verfassung und Verwaltung,” in Zäsuren nach 1945, ed. M. Broszat (Munich, 1990), 47-48. 20. JCS 1067 specified that military government was “to decentralize the structure and administration of the German economy to the maximum extent possible.” 21. The structure rather than the composition had reverted; much of the compositional change in the medical community could not be reversed. See Chapters 2 and 4. 22. Wilhelm von Drigalski, “Neuregelungen in der britischen Zone,” 10 Oct. 1946, OMGH PHD box 1041. 23. Ellwein, “Verfassung und Verwaltung,” 57. 24. U.S. planners originally hoped to share the burden of legal revision with the other occupying powers using the mechanism of the Allied Control Commission. More often than not, however, the individual occupying powers went their own way. Zink, United States, 307. 25. In 1948, Hesse’s military government found it necessary to reassert the primacy of military government laws to Minister President Stock on at least three occasions: in July, November, and December. The immediate issue was Hesse’s delay in implementing military government decrees concerning business and professional associations (including MG Law No. 56). In November, Sheehan stated unequivocally that “All stipulations of German laws, decrees, orders, and proclamations are hereby annulled insofar as they conflict with any Military Government principles. This applies regardless of whether the German rules are issued at the Reich, Land, or lower political levels.” Hesse thereupon requested clarification about which German regulations conflicted with stated military principles. To this Sheehan admitted that “military government was not able to examine the German legal code in its entirety.” Rather, the Germans themselves would have to determine where conflicts existed. See OMGH Deputy Director Francis Sheehan to Stock, 27 July 1948, 19 Nov. 1948, and 14 Dec. 1948. HHStA-W 503/1272. 26. Control Council Law No. 2 and a full list of dissolved organizations can be found in B. Ruhm von Oppen, ed., Documents on Germany under Occupation 1945-1954 (London, 1955), 79-81. 27. A German translation of this order in HHStA-W 507/90. 28. R. B. Lovett, USFET HQ (“by order of General Eisenhower”), HHStA-W 507/90. 29. Eschenburg, Die Herrschaft der Verbände. –

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30. See B. Wunder, Geschichte der Bürokratie (Frankfurt a. M., 1986), 157-64. 31. G. Braunthal, “Wirtschaft und Politik: Der Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie,” Politische Vierteljahrschrift (1963): 369-85. 32. The organizations, each influential in its own right, were the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der westdeutschen Ärztekammern, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Landesstellen der kassenärztlichen Vereinigungen des Bundesgebietes, the Verband der Ärzte Deutschlands (Hartmannbund), Verband der angestellten Ärzte Deutschlands (Marburger Bund), Verband der leitenden Krankenhausärzte Deutschlands, and the Verband der niedergelassenen Nichtkassenärzte. Report on their meeting in HÄBl 13:1 (Jan. 1952): 4. 33. Boehling, A Question of Priorities, 267-70; Hesse’s Landtag, however, legislated similar measures , including broad rights of labor’s codetermination in industry. J. Backer, Winds of History: The German Years of Lucius DuBignon Clay. (New York, 1983), 258-59. 34. Translations of key provisions of Hesse’s constitution, J. Pollock and J.H. Meisel, eds., Germany under Occupation: Illustrative Materials and Documents (Ann Arbor, 1947), 148-70. 35. Alfred Grosser, Germany in Our Time: A Political History of the Postwar Years (New York, 1970), 82. Even some proponents of the restoration thesis acknowledge this intent. Huster et al., Determinanten, 168-71. 36. See Art. 79 GG and Art. 19 GG. Nevertheless, the thirty-five alterations of the Basic Law between 1949 and 1983 make it “one of the most frequently changed constitutions in the world.” Ellwein, “Verfassung und Verwaltung,” 47. Ellwein sees this as a sign of the document’s strength rather than instability. 37. Ellwein, “Verfassung und Verwaltung,” 48. 38. E. Schindler, “Der Bund und seine Probleme. Nochmals: Berufsständige Selbstverwaltung,” Ärzteblatt der Freien Ärzte Deutschlands 1:4/5 (Dec. 1949): 11. 39. “Die neuen Industrie- und Handelskammern sind nicht Rechtsnachfolgerinnen der früheren Gauwirtschaftskammern,” Der Betriebsberater, Heft 6 (1949): 108. 40. C.-Ch. Schweitzer et al., eds., Politics and Government in the Federal Republic of Germany: Basic Documents, (Leamington Spa, 1984), 112-37, 277. 41. J. Bach, Jr., America’s Germany: An Account of the Occupation (New York, 1946), 147-9. 42. Wunder, Geschichte der Bürokratie, 164. 43. M.-L. Djelic, Exporting the American Model (Oxford, 1998), 7 44. After the 1953 elections, the refugee party BHE joined the ruling coalition. 45. The American MG in Hesse spelled out their civil service reform concepts in a statement from Executive Officer Charles E. Stewart to Hesse’s Minister President, 20 June 1946, HHStA-W 502/1903. The Commander of OMGH reiterated these principles a year later. Newman to Minister President, 21 July 1947, HHStA-W 502/1904. Notably, he omitted the previous insistence that Hesse lift restrictions on promotion from one “class” of civil servant to another (e.g., from Angestellter to Beamter or from mittlerer Dienst to hoher Dienst). Later still, the British-American Bipartite Control Office issued general guidelines to the Länderrat Chairman explaining what they viewed as minimum principles for a civil service in a democratic state. Hoping that their statement would clear up misconceptions about their views, they also released it to the press. The statement was consistent with earlier American statements. Bipartite Press Release No. 453, Frankfurt, 3 Dec. 1948, HHStA-W 502/922. Wengst believes that Germans, rather than the Allies, played the decisive role in the legal developments affecting the civil service in postwar Germany. U. Wengst, Beamtentum zwischen Reform und Tradition, 13-20. However, at least in Hesse, military government records indicate a great deal of American interest in the civil service. Other researchers conclude that the Americans pressed the Germans hard on civil service reform from 1948 to 1951, at which time they lost both the interest and the institutional mechanisms to overcome German resistance. See W. Benz, “Versuche zur Reform des öffentlichen Dienstes in Deutschland, 1945-1952,” VjZ 29 (1981): 216-44. The records of Hesse’s interior ministry contain many military government inquiries, suggestions, clarifications, and orders, as

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46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

well as internal German memoranda discussing American positions on civil service laws. For example, see HHStA-W 502/922 and 502/1903. Wunder, Geschichte der Bürokratie, 154-55. R. Falck, “Das Rhein-Main-Gebiet und die Stadt Lauterbach in Hesse während des Zusammenbruches und des Einmarsches der Amerikaner im Frühjahr 1945,” Lauterbacher Sammlungen, Heft 18 (1958): 25. After the war, Falck returned to the civil service in his native Mainz, which fell under French occupation and became the capital of Rheinland-Palatinate. A perfect, if early example was a 1937 memo by Schulenburg that spoke of a “reversal of morale” within the Beamtentum. Similar concerns played a role in Frick’s resignation as Interior minister. Mommsen, Beamtentum, 37-38. Mommsen , Beamtentum, 86. The military government disagreed, and took measures to shield civil servants from disciplinary action if they assisted the Americans in collecting information. OMGH Weekly Summary, no. 85, 22-28 May 1947, 4. H. Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität der Institution des Berufsbeamtentums” (1986), 66-67. Geiler an die Konferenz für den Zivilstaatsdienst in der US.-Besatzungszone, 23. Nov. 1946, HHStA-W 502/929. Sörgel, Konsensus und Interessen, 211-212; cited by Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität der Institution des Berufsbeamtentums,” 70. U. Wengst, “Einheit oder Eigenständigkeit? Die Diskussion über die Verbandsorganisation der deutschen Beamtenschaft 1948/49,” Die Verwaltung 19 (1986), 501-18. Draft proposal for a civil service code in Hesse, signed Charles E. Stewart, 20 June 1946, HHStA-W 502/922. Arndt, who served in the bizonal administration and as a Bundestag delegate beginning 1949, supported a free market economy with social and political safeguards. See D. Gosewinkel, Adolf Arndt: Die Wiederbegründung des Rechtsstaates aus dem Geist der Sozialdemokratie, 1945-1961 (Bonn, 1991). Also Arndt, “Das Problem der Wirtschaftsdemokratie in den Verfassungsentwürfen,” Süddeutsche Juristenzeitung 1 (1946): 137-141. Memo from Hesse’s Minister of Finance to the cabinet, 15 Oct. 1947, as well as position paper from Zinn, Director of Hesse’s Personnel Office, Wiesbaden, 20. Oct. 1947, HHStAW 502/929. The American military government convened a special civil service commission meeting on 25 Nov. 1946 in an attempt to find a common zone-wide civil service policy. They discussed the new civil service codes of the three American-zone Länder. Hesse’s Minister of Justice, Zinn, served as the commission’s executive director. Richard Simmons, Chief Civil Service Officer, OMGH to Minister President, Land Hesse, 20 Nov. 1946. HHStA-W 502/1903. Following the ratification of the 1949 Basic Law, and the passage of the 1953 Federal Civil Service Law, Hesse’s civil servants lost rights to collectively bargain and strike that state law had granted them. Benz, “Versuche zur Reform,” 231. Gewerkschaft ÖTV, Beamtensekretariat, signed Brückner and Henneberg, to (Hessian) Interior Ministry, Reg.-Amtmann Wolff, 15 Nov. 1949, HHStA-W 503/500. The Public Administration Union, a regional precursor to the ÖTV, pursued similar policies during the drafting of Hesse’s 1946 civil service code, although the committee rejected them. Entwurf zu einem Gesetz über die Rechtsstellung der Beamten, Angestellten und Arbeiter im öffentlichen Dienste des Landes Hesse, vorgelegt von der Gewerkschaft für öffentliche Verwaltungen und Betriebe, Frankfurt a. M., 13. Jan. 1947, HHStA-W 503/500. Der Bevollmächtigte des Landes Hesse bei der Verwaltung des Vereinigten Wirtschaftsgebietes, to Interior Minister of Hesse, 24 June 1949. HHStA-W 503/500. Professor Rath sympathized with the views of the Städtetag representative, Dr. Loschelder, who proposed to expand the legal rights of permanent municipal employees. Land representatives fought these potentially costly ideas “emphatically, using all manner of rational and irrational arguments.” Vermerk für Min. Zinn, from Prof. Dr. Drath betr. Besprechung

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62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

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67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

über den Beamtengesetz-Entwurf des VWG am 26. Oct. 1948, Wiesbaden, 27 Oct. 1948. HHStA-W 502/922. Gesetz über die Rechtsstellung der Beamten und Angestellten im öffentlichen Dienste des Landes Groß-Hesse, GVBl 1946: 30/31, 25. Nov. 1946, 205-15. This victory for the legal equality of women in Hesse’s civil service should not be taken for granted. Six months earlier, the British military government condoned discriminatory treatment. The British decided that “under the current conditions, there are no compelling reasons to remove female civil servants simply because they are married or get married. If they are professionally productive and medically able, they should be left in their posts as long as the personnel and employment situation does not justify their general replacement by men.” (italics added), Personnel Office of the Main Reich Postal Directorate for the British Zone, to all British-Zone Reich Postal Directorates, 18 May 1946, BA Z11/113. The matter first came to a head concerning tenure for female Beamtinnen in the postal service. Whereas the main administration wished to retain the options granted by §63 BBG, the public service union ÖTV invoked Hesse’s constitution to argue that, at the least, §63 should not be automatically applied to married female civil servants, but only if they themselves applied for release from their positions. The correspondence surrounding the issue, dating mostly from the spring of 1948, in BA Z11/113. “Öffentlicher Dienst,” Deutschland unter alliierter Besatzung 1945-1949/55, ed. W. Benz (Berlin, 1999), 144. The federal constitutional guarantees of the continuity of the “traditional principles of the professional civil service” have been described in themselves as a victory for civil service lobbying groups, above all for the Gewerkschaft Deutscher Beamtenbund. Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität der Institution des Berufsbeamtentums,” 70-71. See materials in HHStA-W 502/1903 regarding the military government’s involvement in the drafting of Hesse’s civil service code. In particular, Hesse’s government demanded and received permission from the director of military government operations in Hesse, Robert Wallach, to attach to the amended civil service code a proviso stating that it was being promulgated in its current form by order of the military government. See esp. Letter from Staatskanzlei, Wiesbaden, to OMGH Civil Affairs Division, 2 Nov. 1946; and Letter from OMGH Dir. Robert Wallach to Min.-Pres. of Hesse, 9 Nov. 1946, HHStA-W 502/1903 (Copy in HHStA-W 502/1903). OMGH Weekly MG Summary no. 35 (3-9 June 1946): 2. OMGH box 64. The final report of the advisory committee on the administrative reform, Verwaltungsreform in Hesse, is available in the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt a. M. An analysis from an advocate of the administrative reform and a proven anti-Nazi is a report by the postwar Regierungspräsident of the Darmstadt Regierungsbezirk, Prof. Dr. Bergsträsser, speech on the administrative reform at a German-American discussion evening in Lich, 7 Jan. 1948, HStA-D H1, Reg-Gr. 2, Liste 21: 19/3V. Also Verwaltungsreform in Hesse, HStA-D, Reg.-Gr. 2, Liste 21, 19/3V. For example, memo on administrative reform in Hesse, Darmstadt, 23 Feb. 1947 [no sign.]. Also Memo from Min.-Rat. Hesse (Darmstadt) to Hessian Finance Minister Hilpert, 4 Feb. 1948, HStA-D H1, Reg.-Gr. 2, Liste 21 19/3V. Verwaltungsreform in Hesse, 30. Thayer, The Unquiet Germans, 37; also Benz, “Versuche zur Reform,” 225-30. “Öffentlicher Dienst,” Deutschland unter alliierter Besatzung, 141-42. Benz, “Versuche zur Reform,” 230-34. Article 33(5) Grundgesetz. Dr. Krautwig an Oberdirektor, Ministerium des Innern, 27 Sept. 1949, BA-Ko NL 5/718. Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Errichtung eines Bundespersonalamtes, with cover letter from Dr. Oppler, Abt. III, MdI, Frankfurt a. M., to Hessian Ministry of the Interior, 10 Feb. 1950, BA-Ko Z11/46.

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79. Verordnung über die Auflösung des Personalamtes der Verwaltung des Vereinigten Wirtschaftsgebietes vom 28. Juli 1953, BGBl I:45 (7 Aug. 1953): 779. 80. “Alle Beamtenverhältnisse sind am 8. Mai 1945 erloschen.” See BVerfGE 3, 58 (76ff), 1953 See R. Grawert, “Der Zusammenbruch des Staates und das Schicksal seiner Beamtenschaft im Spiegel der Nachkriegsjudikatur,” in Die Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums nach 1945, ed. G. Schwegmann (Düsseldorf, 1986), 25-46, esp. 27. 81. Allgemeiner Beamten-Kalender, ed. K. Vogt and W. Grabendorff (Hamburg, 1954), 70-73. 82. Gesetz zur Regelung der unter Artikel 131 des Grundgesetzes fallenden Personen vom 11. Mai 1951, BGBl I, Nr. 22 (13 May 1951). 83. G. Anders, Die vierte Novelle zum Gesetz zu Artikel 131 GG. (Stuttgart, 1963), esp. 6. 84. The “Law to Regulate the Legal Status of Persons Falling under Article 131 of the Basic Law” was almost immediately referred to the courts, which had to rule on its constitutionality. After several false starts, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe determined that it indeed was constitutional. “Gesetz zu Art. 131 GG ist nicht Verfassungswidrig,” Der Deutsche Beamte 4:1 (1954): 7-12. While some civil servants felt the court decision did not go far enough, it received general praise from the professional press. “Das Urteil von Karlsruhe,” Der Deutsche Beamte 4:2 (1954): 17-18. 85. Bundesbeamtengesetz of 14 July 1953, BGBl I, Nr. 36 (17. July 1953), 551-90. 86. The differing Länder conceptions were brought together in a three-person commission appointed by the Bundesrat. See deutscher Bundesrat, Wirtschaftsausschuß, to the Vertretungen der Länder, Bonn, 16. Aug. 1950. HHStA-W 503/1272. 87. Allgemeiner Beamtenkalender 1954, 70-71. 88. §9 of Gesetz über die Rechtsstellung der Beamten und Angestellten im öffentlichen Dienste des Landes Groß-Hesse, GVBl 1946: 30/31, 25. Nov. 1946, 206. 89. Wunder, Die Rekrutierung der Beamtenschaft, 24-25. 90. As Mommsen explains, the wording of the oath dictated by the 1953 and 1957 guidelines drew heavily on the 1934 oath. Furthermore, the 1937 Civil Servants’ Code, which was still in force, provided the legal justification for requiring making the oath a condition of employment. Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität der Institution des Berufsbeamtentums,” 72. 91. This is the main contention of Berghahn, Unternehmer und Politik in der Bundesrepublik. 92. W. Herrmann, “Der Wiederaufbau der Selbstverwaltung der deutschen Wirtschaft nach 1945,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmergeschichte 23:2 (1978): 89. 93. G. Burck, “The German Business Mind,” Fortune 44:5 (May 1954): 111. 94. Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung, 143-44; Kocka, “1945,” 147-49. 95. N. Balabkins, Germany under Direct Controls. Economic Aspects of Industrial Disarmament 1945-1948 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1964); also Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung, 223-25. 96. Dissenting from this interpretation is Kleßmann, who maintains that the Americans’ role in blocking socialization has been overstated. Die doppelte Staatsgründung, 111-12. 97. C. Eisenberg, “U.S. Policy in Postwar Germany,” 24-38. 98. “Unsere Wirtschaft – Wie wir sie sehen,” by L. Keil, Darmstädter Echo (28 Nov. 1945): 7. 99. A. Arndt, “Das Problem der Wirtschaftsdemokratie,” 137. 100. An English translation of key clauses of Hesse’s 1946 constitution is available in J.K. Pollock and J.H. Meisel, eds., Germany under Occupation, 148-70. 101. H. Lilge, Hesse in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1992), 34. 102. D. Karsten “Economic and Social Policy,” in Schweitzer, et al. Politics and in the Federal Republic of Germany, 261-66. 103. Karsten, 263. 104. The 1948/49 controversy has been preserved in all its pettiness in HHStA-W 503/1272. Press clippings are in the same folder. 105. Office for public safety to Abteilung IIf, 28 June 1950, HHStA-W 503/1272. 106. Eisenberg, “U.S. Policy in Postwar Germany,” 25-26. 107. JCS 1067, U.S. Dept. of State Bulletin 13:330 (21 Oct. 1945): 596-607. –

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108. W. Bührer, “Return to Normality: The United States and Ruhr Industry, 1949-1955,” in American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955 (Cambridge, 1993), 13739; Backer, Winds of History, 65-69, 218-19. 109. JCS 1779 U.S. Dept. of State Bulletin 17:421 (27 July 1947): 186-93. 110. The stateside occupations of the individuals involved suggests a reason for their affinities. The members of the Economics Division, for example, “with few exception [were] recruited from major U.S. corporations and investment banks.” Eisenberg, “U.S. Policy,” 26. See also Berghahn, Unternehmer und Politik, 84. 111. German business organizations found common cause with the trade unions in their will to retard the breakup of the large enterprises. Both sides feared that an atomized German steel industry would not be able to compete internationally. See the official report by the bizonal economic council’s administrative director, J. Semler, “Die Auswirkungen der Entflechtung der Eisen schaffenden Industrie,” 27 Oct. 1948, HHStA-W 502/1654. See also other materials in the same folder. 112. Rede des Vorsitzenden der FDP in der Britischen Zone, Franz Blücher, auf dem Parteitag des Landesverbandes Nordrhein-Westfalen auf der Hoyensyburg am 17. August 1947, mimeographed, 20, BA, Blücher Papers 155, quoted in Prowe, “Economic Democracy,” 456. 113. See the preface in P. Hayes, Industry and Ideology. For many, the IG Farben cartel came to symbolize the evils of huge, multinational corporations and cartels, as evidenced in Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid prose in Gravity’s Rainbow. 114. D. Kreikamp, “Die Entflechtung der IG Farbenindustrie AG und die Gründung der Nachfolgegesellschaften,” VjZ 25:2 (1977): 220-51. 115. P. Danek, “Zum Nürnberger Prozeß gegen die Kriegsverbrecher des IG-Farbenmonopols.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift [GDR] 12:1 (1963): 49-61. It should be noted that much of IG Farben’s physical plant was not located in the West at all, but in the Soviet Zone, Poland, and other East-Central European countries. The four successor companies represented 10.4, 19.4, 16.2, and 1.02 percent of IG Farben’s holdings, respectively. Berghahn, Unternehmer und Politik, 94. Peter Hayes discusses the fate of the Eastern holdings in a work currently in progress. For detail about Farben’s postwar reorganization, see Kreikamp, “Die Entflechtung der IG Farbenindustrie AG,” 220-51. 116. Zink, United States in Germany, 275-79. 117. The current version of this law is found in BGBl I (1980): 1761ff. An English translation of key passages in D. Carsten, “Economic and Social Policy,” Politics and Government in the Federal Republic of Germany, ed. C.-C. Schweitzer et al. (Leamington Spa, 1984), 266-68. 118. R. Robert, Konzentrationspolitik in der Bundesrepublik—Das Beispiel der Entstehung des Gesetzes gegen Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen (Berlin, 1976), 33-60. 119. See Berghahn, Unternehmer und Politik, 178. German political and economic leadership as well as the Americans favored the deconcentration of industry. Kreikamp concludes that Germans, rather than Americans, decided the ultimate form of IG Farben’s deconcentration. He attributes this to the German leadership’s conscious attempt to realize a specific politico-economic concept for West Germany. Kreikamp, “Entflechtung,” 220-21. 120. Burck, “The German Business Mind,” Fortune 44:5 (May 1954): 113-14. 121. Djelic, 1-17. 122. W. Bührer, “Return to Normality: The United States and Ruhr Industry, 1949-1955,” in American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955, ed. J. Diefendorf et al. (Cambridge, 1993), 136. 123. MG’s interest in Article 37 is documented by the volume of material they gathered throughout the drafting project. See OMGH, box 62. 124. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor, 1914-1918. 125. The main legislative engine of this development was the 1951 Codetermination Law. One year later, the factory constitution law provided for minority representation (one-third) on the boards of smaller joint-stock companies. –

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126. W. Struve, Aufstieg und Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus in einer industriellen Kleinstaat: Osterrode im Harz (Essen, 1992), 178-209. 127. Significantly, most such affidavits come from Western Europeans, although most of the laborers came from Eastern Europe. In one Hessian case, a female German employee was informed by the Gestapo that romantic relationships with a Flemish laborer were racially acceptable (although discouraged), unlike liaisons with Slavic laborers, who fell under the restrictions of the Nuremberg laws. HHStA-W 520/SK Offenbach a. M., Az Ost 4894. In another case, evidence showed that a P. L., a chemical company manager in Wiesbaden, had a good relationship with French forced laborers, but severely mistreated Russians, in one case striking a Russian woman who did not understand his [German] instructions well enough. OMGUS OMGH Box 1128. 128. Dr. R. Servatius, Rechtsanwalt (Köln) to the Public Prosecutor attached to the Landgericht Wiesbaden, “Strafanzeige wegen Sklavenarbeit,” 1947, HHStA-W 501/475. 129. HHStA-W 501/475. 130. Article 12 GG. 131. S. Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York, 1994). 132. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases was at first only suspended, not annulled. Some physicians who continued to believe that it was in keeping with international medical trends expected a new law to replace it that would maintain some of its provisions. See Dr. v. Arnim, Secretariat of the Länderrat in the American zone, to Manager (Geschäftsführer) of the denazification committee of the Länderrat, Stuttgart, 31 May 1947, HHStA-W 501/470. In the end, however, the offending provisions for forced sterilization did not return in any form. 133. To prevent the first nineteen articles from being interpreted as mere guidelines, Article 1, paragraph 3 established that they constituted unmediated applicable law, and were binding on the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. 134. Gesetz zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten vom 23. Juli 1953, BGBl I:41 (30 July 1953), 700-706. This law replaced a similar law of 1927, revised in 1940 (see §31). It also nullified state laws, including Hesse’s Decree Combating Venereal Diseases of 11 April 1946 (GVBl 1946, 101). 135. GVBl (11. April 1946), 101. 136. E. Schmidt, Brennende Fragen des Berufsgeheimnisses (Munich, 1951), esp. 14-15. 137. Unattributed article in HÄBl 12:7 (July 1951): 137-38. 138. Wuttke-Groneburg et al., Die Wohltätermafia, 25-27. Also D. Simon, “Zäsuren im Rechtsdenken,” 155-156. 139. Schmidt, Brennende Fragen, argued in 1951 that it is a central topic of medical jurisprudence. Indeed, he cites many articles for 1950 and 1951, including: K. Weiler, Bayerisches Ärzteblatt (1950): 164ff; K. Thieß, Ärztliche Mitteilungen (1950): 292ff; Berthold Müller, Südwestdeutsches Ärzteblatt (1950): 139ff; Eberhard Schmidt, Deutsche Rechtszeitschrift (1950): 172ff; Arnold Heß, Ärztliche Mitteilungen (1951): 129ff; Georg Schulz, Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift No. 8 (1951); and Neue juristische Wochenschrift (1951): 15. 140. See Kater, Doctors Under Hitler, 38-39. 141. Schmidt, Brennende Fragen, 25. 142. Dr. Koch (Darmstadt) to Oberstaatsanwalt bei dem Landgericht, 22. Oct. 1947, OMGH PHD Box 1011; on Hitler’s 1942 order to suspend doctor/patient privilege, see Kater, Doctors Under Hitler, 39. 143. K. Redeker, “Gegenwartsfragen der berufsständischen Selbstverwaltung.” Juristenzeitung (1954): 625. 144. See Bestallungsordnung für Ärzte vom 15. September 1953, BGBl I :60 (1953): 1934-1953. 145. See Kater, Doctors under Hitler, 150-56. 146. Beschlüsse der Gesundheitspolitischen Konferenz in Stuttgart am 15.10.1948, HHStA-W 502-1467; This document refers specifically to the “Denkschrift zur Frage der Zustän–

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147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153.

154.

155.

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156.

157.

158.

159. 160. 161. 162.

163. 164.

digkeit in der Gesundheitsgesetzgebung,” by the Deutsches Institut für Gesundheitspolitik (im Aufbau), Arbeitskreis Frankfurt a. M., Oct. 1948, HHStA-W 502/1467. M.A. Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (Cambridge, 1987), 26, 30. Circular letter, Ärztekammer im Reg. Bez. Wiesbaden, 18 Dec. 1945, OMGH PHD Box 989. “Entschließung,” sent to the Ministers of Hesse’s government, 19 July 1946; also press statement by Hesse’s Minister of Justice Zinn, 8 August 1946. HHStA-W 502/1467. Press statement by Hesse’s Minister of Justice Zinn, 8 August 1946. HHStA-W 502/1467. U. Frevert, Women in German History (New York, 1990), 293-95. C.S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, 1975), 9-10, 354, 386. Following Simon Reich, I prefer a broad definition of corporatism over more specific theoretical constructions that imply a static and formal system. In reality, several variations of corporatism exist in a wide and shifting continuum. Characteristic traits shared by all corporatist states, according to Reich, are 1) a skepticism of liberal markets, 2) the acceptance of the notion of central planning or coordination, 3) the willingness to resort to coercion when necessary to achieve economic goals, and 4) the willingness to discriminate between “worthy” and “unworthy” producers in the pursuit of a perceived national interest. Reich, The Fruits of Fascism: Postwar Prosperity in Historical Perspective (Ithaca, 1990), 50-53. Charles Maier argues that corporatism broke down under the centralism of the Third Reich, but in fact the role of functionally organized interest groups grew with mandatory membership and fascist anti-individualist rhetoric. A full and detailed accounting of all pertinent associations would require many volumes. I have tried instead to focus on the most important and powerful groups, some of which boast their own voluminous historiography, as well as a sampling of smaller, less mainstream organizations. The aim is to provide an overview of changes and continuities in the three groups’ organizational networks. See G. Stuby, “Berufsständige Selbstverwaltung im Ärztewesen: Priviligierung partikulärer Verbandsmacht oder unausgeschöpftes Demokratiepotential?” Demokratie und Recht 16:3 (1988): 302-16, esp. 309. An informative discussion of the legal precepts and restrictions on mandatory membership in the Federal Republic in the conclusion to H.H. Crede, “Die Vereinbarkeit der Zwangszugehörigkeit zu den Kammern mit den Grund- und Menschenrechten.” Diss., Univ. of Cologne, 1962. See also Redeker, “Gegenwartsfragen der berufsständischen Selbstverwaltung.” See the “Begründung” to the draft law regulating the medical profession in Hesse, presented by the President of Hesse’s Physician’s Chamber (Oelemann), 1946, OMGH PHD box 999. Even the democratically organized associations often suffered from low rates of active participation, which narrowed the leadership pool and enabled specific factions or organizations to extend their influence. On internal democracy in associations, as well as the lack of empirical analysis, see Th. Ellwein, “Die großen Interessenverbände und ihr Einfluß,” in Die Zweite Republik. 25 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland—Eine Bilanz (Stuttgart, 1974), 479-82. Eschenburg, Die Herrschaft der Verbände? Gablentz, Die versäumte Reform, 63. Ellwein speaks of pluralism of groups. Ellwein, “Die großen Interessenverbände,” 489-90. While her argument is really about Germany up to 1933, its implications for the BRD are clear. It is precisely the study’s failure to explain the success of postwar German democracy despite thorough liberal reform of elite structures that makes the argument unconvincing. E. Etzioni-Halevy, The Elite Connection (Cambridge, 1993), 125-33. Wengst draws heavily on the records of the DBB in his Beamtentum zwischen Reform und Tradition. W. Sörgel, Konsensus und Interessen. Eine Studie zur Entstehung des Grundgesetzes für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1941-1949 (Stuttgart, 1969), 261; cited by Wolfgang Benz, “Versuche zur Reform,” 216-45. –

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165. R. Breitling, Die Verbände in der Bundesrepublik. Ihre Arten und ihre politische Wirkungsweise (Meisenheim am Glan, 1955), 30; Gablentz, Die versäumte Reform, 64. 166. As of 31 Dec. 1951, 65 percent of the DGB’s civil servants worked in public enterprises, and only 20 percent in government administration. Breitling, Die Verbände, 31. 167. DGB flyer (n. d., n. sign., n. adddr., but probably dating from late 1949). BA/Z11/228. 168. The correspondence between the ÖTV and the Personnel Office of the Unified Economic Area (Bizonia) concerning the development of this law is found in BA/Z11/228. The head of the personnel office, Dr. Oppler, established his postwar career in the Hessian denazification ministry. 169. OMGH Denazification Section, Monthly Report for Sept. 1949, OMGH box 1128. 170. Bekanntmachung betr. Auflösung von Organisationen der gewerblichen Wirtschaft, Minister of Economics and Transportation, signed Müller, Wiesbaden, 20 Dec. 1945, HHStA-W 507/38. 171. The Frankfurt IHK continued allocating key supplies as it had before the city surrendered in late March 1945. The first U.S. military government “Fragebogen” were made available in early April. They conducted this activity from provisional rooms in Bockenheimer Straße, since an American air raid in late 1944 had badly damaged the turn-of-the-century Börse building. Achterberg, Die Industrie und Handelskammer Frankfurt am Main 19081958, 127-32. 172. American-zone chambers’ reattainment of public law status and mandatory membership for all registered businesses followed from a Federal law ostensibly designed to harmonize the chamber system throughout West Germany. The federal Gesetz zur vorläufigen Regelung der Industrie- und Handelskammern of 18 Feb. 1956, BGBl I (1956): 920, was followed by the appropriate state law, Hessisches Ausführungsgesetz zum Bundesgesetz zur Vorläufigen Regelung der Industrie- und Handelskammern of 6 Nov. 1957, GVBl 27 (9 Nov. 1957). In March 1958, Hesse’s Minister of Labor and Economics approved the Frankfurt chamber’s new by-laws, completing the return to public law status and mandatory membership. Mitteilungen der Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a. M. 7 (1 Apr. 1958): 160-62. 173. The French, by contrast, maintained public law chambers, and the British, at least at first, gave no clear directives in this question. W. Herrmann, “Die Wiederaufbau der Selbstverwaltung der deutschen Wirtschaft nach 1945,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmergeschichte 23:2 (1978): 85. 174. GVBl Land Hesse, Wiesbaden, 26 Nov 1947 (Nr. 17/18), 99. 175. Herrmann, “Wiederaufbau,” 89-90. 176. In describing the wild rush to create economic associations in West Germany in October 1946, one journalist cited numerous examples, all of which hailed from the British zone. “Neue Unternehmerverbände gegründet,” Westdeutsches Volks-Echo, 8 Oct. 1946, clipping found in BA-Ko 230/20. 177. Reusch remained president from1949 to 1972 [!] Herrmann, “Wiederaufbau,” 92. 178. Herrmann, “Wiederaufbau,” 93. 179. For a description of the views of one of its leaders, see H. Speier, From the Ashes of Disgrace: A Journal from Germany, 1945-1955 (Amherst, 1981), 139. 180. The final Allied order to disband the genetic courts throughout Germany came on 8 January 1946, but they ceased to function much earlier. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 299. In the summer of 1946, the military government discovered that the Institute for Racial Research was still “struggling on” near the town of Bebra; the matter was referred to education officials for action. OMGH Office of the Chief of Intelligence [secret], Periodic Report 12, 26 June 1946, OMGH box 68. 181. On the first meeting, in Marburg, see History of Detachment F1C2 (G-39), Marburg, Aug. 1945, OMGH box 518. The three organizations registered in November 1948 were the Land Physicians’ Chamber (Frankfurt a. M.), the German Chiropractors’ Association (Wies-

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182.

183. 184. 185.

186. 187.

188.

189. 190. 191. 192.

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193.

194. 195. 196.

197.

198. 199. 200. 201.

baden), and the German Polio Prevention Society (Weilburg/Lahn). Directory of LandWide Organizations, 10 Nov. 1948, 39. OMGH box 518. On clash of authority between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden chambers, OMGH Administrative officer Wallach to Commanding Officer, Det. E-6, 2nd MG Battalion [Frankfurt], 10 Dec. 1945, OMGH PHD box 989. OMGH also repeatedly warned the chamber in Giessen to restrict its activities to its geographical jurisdiction. Exec. Officer Stewart, OMGH PHD, to Hesse’s Ministry of the Interior, 16 July 1946, OMGH PHD box 992. OMGH to Hesse’s Interior Minister, 22 Oct. 1946, HHStA-W 502/1903. See request for a publication license, from ÄK President Oelemann to OMGH, 13 Dec. 1948. OMGH PHD box 995. Major Landin [Public Health Division], Report presented to Hesse’s Cabinet at a meeting on 13 Nov. 1945, re: “Organisation der Ärztekammer für Groß-Hesse und Niederlassungsgenehmigung praktischer Ärzte,” dated 30 Nov. 1945, OMGH PHD box 995. OMGH Monthly Report no. 48-8, Aug. 1948, 4, OMGH box 68. Representatives of the individual Hessian Physicians’ Chambers met with Interior Ministry representatives on 24 June 1946 to discuss the precise responsibilities that the Greater Hessian Physicians Chamber would assume. Translation of minutes, signed Dr. Heckert, Min.Dir in Hesse’s Interior Ministry, OMGH PHD box 1017. In planning for occupation, American strategists emphasized that the maintenance of Germany’s social insurance system as well as physicians’ chambers were necessary to avert “a complete breakdown of the health service.” Report, “Summaries of South Germany,” OMGH Box 59. Memo, Maj. John D. Winebrenner, First Med. Detach., ECA Med. Group, to Commanding Officer, 10 June 1945. NA RG 260, OMGH PHD, box 1001. Minister für Arbeit und Wohlfahrt, to Min. Pres. Geiler, 15 Dec. 1945, HHStA-W 502/1467. Winebrenner to Commanding Officer, 10 June 1945, OMGH PHD, box 1001. A. Wendelstein, “Ärztekammer, ärztliche Individualbeziehungen.” Diss, Univ. Würzburg, 1974. Stellungnahme zum Ärztekammer-Problem, used as a cover letter to the Physicians’ Chamber’s referendum of physicians concerning the status of the chambers, Frankfurt a. M., 1 June 1948, OMGH PHD box 998. Ärzteschaft Darmstadt, Rundschreiben Nr. 14, Darmstadt, (2. Sept. 1946), HHStA-W 502/1467. The 1954 Law remained the legal foundation for Hesse’s physicians’ chambers until at least the mid 1970s. Wendelstein, “Ärztekammer,” 9-10. A copy of the MG order (in English and German translation), signed Exec. Officer Charles Stewart, 25 June 1946, together with the order by Hesse’s Minister of the Interior establishing the Office of the Plenipotentiary for medical licenses, 6 July 1946, in HHStA-W 502/1467. The first Plenipotentiary was a medical bureaucrat, Ministerial Director Dr. Heckert. Oelemann, ÄK Hesse, “Reply to inquiries concerning licensing, admission, and settlement of physicians in Germany,” 8 July 1948, OMGH PHD box 998. An anonymous physician, claiming to represent “all democratically minded physicians” welcomed the military government’s anti-chamber policies, decried both the chambers’ dictatorial powers over the livelihood of individual physicians and their referendum, which required physicians to sign and stamp their ballots. Letter to Medical Div. of the U. S. Military Government, Berlin, OMGH PHD 998. Translation of minutes, signed Dr. Heckert, Min.Dir in Hesse’s Interior Ministry, OMGH PHD box 1017. Oelemann, Ärztekammer der Ärzteschaft Gross-Hesse, to Director Mosley, OMGH Public Health Branch, 12 Oct. 1946, OMGH PHD box 999. The new regulation took effect 10 January 1949. Letter from Director Dan Noble of OMGH PHD to Dr. med. Heinz Stroh, 12 Sept. 1949, OMGH PHD 996. Wendelstein, “Ärztekammer.” –

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202. Dr. F. Thieling (Hamburg), “Warum Hartmannbund?” HÄBl 11:5 (May 1950); similar arguments presented by the politically prominent physician from Darmstadt, Dr. L. Schuchardt, “Warum Hartmannbund?” HÄBl 11:1 (1950): 12. 203. The meeting that resolved to recreate the German Physicians’ Conference included leading representatives of the Central Committee of the Panel Insurance Physicians, the Working Group of the Physicians’ Chambers, the Marburger Bund, and others in Bad Nauheim (Hesse) on 3 June 1949. ÄM 34:3 (15 June 1949): 53. 204. Statement from the League to acting Military Governor of Hesse, 7 Jan. 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. 205. The Marburger Bund’s founding meeting took place in June 1947. From its inception, Dr. Heinz-Josef Goldbach of Marburg, chaired Hesse’s chapter. See OMGH, Marburg District Liaison and Security Office, Supplemental Information Report, 7 March 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. 206. OMGH, Marburg District Liaison and Security Office, Supplemental Information Report, 7 March 1949, OMGH PHD box 996. 207. “Protest der hessischen Ärzteschaft,” HÄBl 11:4 (Apr. 1950); “Kundgebung des Marburger Bundes in Wiesbaden,” HÄBl 14:4 (Apr. 1953): 91-92; also Unanimous resolution of the Marburger Bund, decided at a meeting of Land chairpersons on 16 May 1954, HÄBl 15:6 (June 1954): 146. 208. The draft was for the Bundesgesetz zur Neuregelung des Kassenrechtes. Unanimous resolution of the Marburger Bund, decided at a meeting of Land chairpersons on 16 May 1954, HÄBl 15:6 (June 1954): 146. Before the federal government assumed legal authority in such matters, physicians’ organizations tried (unsuccessfully) to influence the ration set by Hesse’s licensing regulations, which were rewritten in 1950. See “Protest der hessischen Ärzteschaft,” HÄBl 11:4 (Apr. 1950); “Kundgebung des Marburger Bundes in Wiesbaden,” HÄBl 14:4 (Apr. 1953): 91-92. 209. A meeting in June 1946 is described in “Entschließung der ärztlichen Spitzenverbände,” ÄM 34:3 (15 June 1949): 53; another on 13 Oct. 1950 is recounted in “Zusammenarbeit der ärztlichen Berufsverbände gesichert,” HÄBl 11:10 (Oct. 1950): 198. 210. The constituent meeting was scheduled for 11 Dec. 1952. Hess. MdI, Öffentliches Gesundheitswesen (signed Zinnkann), to Min. Pres. Stock, 27 Nov. 1952, HHStA-W 502/1467. 211. E. Schindler, “Der Bund und seine Probleme. Nochmals: Berufsständige Selbstverwaltung,” Ärzteblatt der Freien Ärzten Deutschlands 1:4/5 (Dec. 1949): 11. 212. Komitee der Freien Ärzte Deutschlands (Darmstadt), Mitteilungsblatt Nr. 2, “An alle Ärzte und Ärztinnen,” OMGH PHD box 998.

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Chapter 4

DENAZIFICATION AND ITS EFFECTS, 1945-1955

The political attitude of the German citizens of 1933 to 1945 has so many different backgrounds, and their apparent political alignment leads to so many wrong conclusions, that considerable time will elapse until the endeavors of competent observers will permit a right and exhaustive judgment. — Georg Aigner, business manager in Frankfurt, (1945)1

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O

bservers of numerous political stripes have come to accept the thesis that denazification “failed” in western Germany.2 By the early 1950s, dismayed reformers, angry revolutionaries, and critical conservatives concurred that the program had foundered, although they cited varying causes. Conservatives criticized the very concept of a purge extending beyond the highest echelons and radical core of the Nazi apparatus.3 Leftists and many moderate democrats usually aimed their criticism at what they viewed as the bungling and premature abandonment of a necessary political purge.4 When the Americans terminated the official program in the late 1940s, critics from the right attributed the “failure” to American naiveté and a misplaced vindictiveness by the victors over the vanquished. While some favored the idea of a purge but criticized the method, others seemed generally relieved at the early truncation of denazification, even if they rarely said so openly. Later scholars have accepted, reiterated, and sometimes clearly documented both of these appraisals. More than a few researchers have assessed denazification for specific occupational groups or regions.5 The goal of this chapter is to establish whether, as critics of denazification frequently claim, elites disproportionately escaped the personal and political consequences of their complicity, and why. Did the same individuals who had welcomed, supported, and survived Nazi rule continue to dominate elite occupations after the war? Did the admittedly imperfect political vetting of the elite produce any lasting positive results, and thereby contribute to the “recasting” of West Germany’s elites? Notes for this section begin on page 194.

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In assessing the long-term effects of denazification on elite occupational groups, a crucial distinction needs to be made between “rehabilitation” and the re-assumption of power. My purpose is not to investigate whether Allied or German denazification programs justly punished prominent or active Nazis; rather, I am interested in whether these people re-entered their professions, and the degree of influence they were able to wield. The distinction is important mainly to correct a common fallacy of conflating justice and reform. While the two questions impinge on one another, the blatant inadequacies of the postwar punishment of many German elites does not necessarily prove the failure of reforms. In some cases, the two goals were even at odds. The British, the Americans, and the Soviets all paid homage to this regrettable reality when they relaxed or abandoned efforts to punish middleand lower-level National Socialists out of fear of stirring a widespread antiAllied or anti-democratic backlash. Distinctions also must be made between the professional survival and the relative status of compromised elites. One case helps illustrate this point. The geneticist, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Josef Mengele’s dissertation advisor, had been a leading voice in the study of racial biology. He curried and found favor with the National Socialists once they were in power. In 1935, he was chosen to head the newly created Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt; in 1942, he assumed the prestigious leadership of the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, the pinnacle of the racial research in the Third Reich.6 Accepting Verschuer’s arguments that he had joined the Nazi party only reluctantly, and failing to dwell on Verschuer’s intellectual contribution to the official Nazi pseudo-science of racial hygiene, a Frankfurt denazification tribunal classified him as a “follower.” This was certainly a lenient outcome given Verschuer’s contribution to Nazi pseudo-science, his party connections, and his almost certain knowledge of the nature of the death camps (He had corresponded regularly with Mengele, at one point serving as an intermediary in the discussions about the shipment of racially “exemplary” skeletons to an institute in Strasbourg, and in many other ways before 1945 acknowledged his research collaboration with Mengele). Verschuer lost his position at the Kaiser Wilhelm foundation, which was closed, but in 1951 took up a position as full professor of human genetics at the University of Münster.7 Without condoning his professional survival, it should be noted that the Münster position represented somewhat of a demotion, albeit not a devastating one. The fact that he never joined the NSDAP lent some credibility to Verschuer’s exaggerated claim that he was “apolitical” and never let politics interfere with his research. Due at least in part to the burden of his past, Verschuer’s nazi-era professional eminence never returned, even after 1952, when the Allies would no longer have been able to intervene had they wanted to. He continued to teach and publish mainstream articles on genet–

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ics, but was no longer prominent within the medical organizations.8 This does not, however, excuse the obvious failure of the medical community to acknowledge the extent of his connections with the medicalization of National Socialist murders, nor its unwillingness to distance themselves from him on ethical grounds. A similar analysis applies to the extensive Allied role in protecting Nazi functionaries, scientists, and business leaders from justice after the war. American military and intelligence planners were so intent on securing the Germans’ scientific expertise and intelligence that they flouted their own country’s laws and policies as well as principles of justice. In a classic example of such glaring ethical lapses, the Americans asked SS physician Siegfried Ruff to report on high-altitude survival experiments he had conducted at Dachau, during which several Dachau prisoners had died. Two other physicians obliged the Americans by explaining their experiments on the ingestion of sea water.9 When American policy turned toward the rapid rehabilitation and reconstruction of German industry in the heat of the Cold War, top industrial executives who up to that point had been held responsible for their companies’ financing of Hitler or their use of slave labor found sudden favor with the Allies, who facilitated their return. Consequently, former executives returned to Krupp, Bayer, Höchst, and other companies.10 These cases reveal a serious lapse of ethics in postwar Allied policy, as well as the insensitivity and poor judgment of the German government and elites who welcomed the rehabilitations. At the same time, very few of these individuals came to dominate their occupations as they had during the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich. Werner Bührer has pointed out that “the example of [Ruhr steel magnate Gustav] Krupp clearly demonstrated how quickly an unscrupulous profiteer, who had been despised only a short time before, could turn into a respected businessman” in the eyes of American policy makers.11 However, the role of prominent individuals in the Third Reich was not easily swept entirely under the rug. Many continued to face hostile public and private opinion that limited their ability to maneuver. A younger, more prosperous generation confronted anew many of those who survived into the 1960s, this time with special vigor. Numerous prominent Germans with Nazi pasts found that they could not make those pasts disappear. The failure to keep former National Socialists and otherwise politically compromised individuals out of even the upper echelons of the state and elite occupations has often served as evidence of the recalcitrance of West German elites. This certainly applied in situations in which serious ethical lapses, wartime criminal activity, or previous fanatical devotion to the Nazi cause were deliberately ignored or discounted as an onus for employment. The many cases of elites in influential positions in the civil service, business, and medicine have, however, often served as the basis for identifying what one author has called “the hidden enemy” within the Federal Republic. This –

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enemy was a strong, well connected cabal of unreconstructed Nazis who had infiltrated into the highest levels of German society and waited only for the return of an appropriate demagogue to lead them to a fourth Reich.12 This extreme view was balanced by the more prevalent belief that Germany had firmly established a functioning democracy. Still, the obvious failures of denazification and exclusion raised serious doubts concerning the depth and durability of West Germany’s conversion. After outlining the institutional history of denazification, this chapter discusses the criteria that were applied to elites in the political purges that began in 1944. Focusing on the American denazification program in Hesse, it assesses the degree to which denazification excluded active National Socialists from the senior civil service, business, and medicine and promoted an alternate elite. At issue are two related goals of the American occupation. On the one hand is the extent of the exclusion of tainted elites. This involves not only an attempt to analyze the short-term purge, but also to assess longer-term renazification of West German elites that, according to much of the existing literature, took place beginning in the late 1940s. On the other hand, stock must be taken of the fate of the alternate elite that many American leaders hoped would displace National Socialists, monarchists, reactionary nationalists, and other anti-democratic elites.13

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Removing Nazi Political and Occupational Leaders Although thousands upon thousands of Germans actively participated in crimes and atrocities during the National Socialist era, and millions passively accepted them, the Nazi rise to political power provided the impetus for such crimes. For this reason, the virtual disappearance of the National Socialist leadership and their main activists in the occupations represented a very significant departure. Almost without exception, top Nazis and occupational leaders were removed from positions of authority through death, imprisonment, or ostracism. The absence of the ideologically driven elite, combined with the easing of the radicalizing pressures of war, eliminated the atmosphere required for the commission of the worst murderous and racist policies that we associate with the Third Reich. The limited purge of the highest echelons certainly did not eradicate the forces that supported völkisch nationalism, but it was, at least, a beginning. Not a single major figure in the National Socialist leadership remained active in German public life after World War II. Adolf Hitler was only the most prominent of numerous Nazi leaders that death permanently removed from German society. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels similarly took his own life, as did Hermann Goering, the latter while awaiting execution at Nuremberg. Eleven others were executed at Nuremberg, and dozens more at other trials. Hitler himself had eliminated many rivals within the Nazi and völkisch –

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movements, and virtually no prominent figures remained who were untainted by total defeat and thus could have rebuilt the movement, even if Germans had been receptive to a revival of National Socialism, which they were not. Other party Bonzen, or bigwigs, who set the policies and the tone of the elite occupations during the Third Reich fared only marginally better than Hitler’s inner circle. Among the twelve defendants sentenced to death at Nuremberg were many in the highest administrative echelons, such as former Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, the Chief of Hitler’s Chancellery Martin Bormann, and Hans Frank, Governor of the Generalgouvernement. Organizers of German industry’s contribution to the war effort were also removed. The fate of Hermann Goering, plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan of 1936, has already been noted. Albert Speer, the young architect responsible for armaments and munitions, and consequently the distribution of slave labor beginning in 1942, was sentenced to twenty years in prison.14 Fritz Sauckel, to whom Speer delegated much of the direct responsibility for slave labor, was sentenced to death. Similarly, the top leaders who set medical policy disappeared from the scene. Gerhard Wagner, responsible more than any other for the Gleichschaltung of the medical community, the purge of Jewish physicians, and the bureaucratic machinery that made Nazi “euthanasia” possible, died in 1942. His successor, Leonardo Conti, Reich Physicians’ Leader and State Secretary for Health in the Interior Ministry, committed suicide in 1945. Dr. Karl Brandt, Reich Commissioner for Hygiene and Health, the second-ranking Nazi medical leader after Conti, was condemned to death by a U.S. Military tribunal and executed in 1948.15 The elimination of those primarily responsible for Nazi policy regarding each of the professions must be seen as a major step in the recasting of the German elite. Statistics are incomplete, but military and civilian courts, whether German, Allied, or in countries of former German occupation, sentenced thousands of Germans to death or long prison terms.16 Most of those who received considerable sentences, it should be noted, were not members of these three occupations. Nevertheless, the postwar justice meted out by the Allies effectively decimated the radical pinnacle of the Nazi-era leadership of the civil service, business, and medicine. The majority of those who were neither executed nor committed suicide were released by the mid 1950s.17 While raising serious questions of propriety and judgment, the leniency shown to prominent Nazis in the early 1950s did not guarantee their return to influential positions. Emil Helfferich, head of the dominant Hamburg-based shipping line Hapag-Lloyd under the Nazis and a major figure in the “Keppler circle” of business luminaries who associated themselves with Heinrich Himmler, amazingly emerged “exonerated” from a British denazification court (after appeals) in April 1949. Cleared politically, he remained in retirement until his death more than 15 years later.18 Further down the hierarchy of the elite occupations, the purge of the elite was less comprehensive still. With few exceptions, the main National Social–

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ist leaders of the civil service, business, and the medical profession were removed from positions of authority. This is clearest in the case of the civil service, where politics added a powerful check on pressures to rehabilitate the prominent Nazi officials.19 The influential Chamber of Industry and Trade in Frankfurt ejected all Nazi-era members of the presidium, as did the local satellite chambers throughout Hesse. Most returned to their businesses, but only a few to the chambers. As a result, the flagship Frankfurt chamber’s presidium and top management remained free of former party members until 1955. In that year, the board member of a large Frankfurt company was elected to one of six IHK vice-presidential posts, despite the fact that he had joined the NSDAP in 1933, became a “supporting member” of the SS the same year, and joined other Nazi-affiliated organizations in succeeding years. A denazification tribunal labeled him a “follower,” and levied the maximum fine of 2,000 Reichmarks.20 More commonly, lower and mid-level National Socialists reemerged in prominent positions after the war. Hans Globke, Adenauer’s eminence grise, was perhaps the most celebrated example of a high civil servant of the Nazi era to maintain a position of considerable responsibility after 1945. As disturbing as the postwar professional ascent of Globke was, it would be exaggerating to characterize him as a leading Nazi figure in the civil service of the Third Reich. As State Secretary in Chancellor Adenauer’s Office until the latter’s resignation in 1963, Globke served as the highest-ranking civil servant in the Federal Republic. The outlines of the debate are summarized in the following, overly apologetic statement: Dr. Hans Globke worked in the Reich Ministry of the Interior even before 1933. As a convinced Catholic, he regarded it as his duty to continue working in the Ministry after Hitler’s seizure of power. After Hitler had promulgated the “Nuremberg Laws”, Globke wrote a commentary in which he attempted to somewhat modify these provisions against the German Jews. Many persons in the Federal Republic now reproach Globke for having agreed to do this work and demand that Globke should not be allowed to work as a civil servant. Others disagree, saying that there is proof of resistance activity on Globke’s part in the interest of the Catholic bishops. Globke’s tragedy is that he “took part in order to prevent something worse”, thus becoming to some extent an accomplice of the Third Reich. On the other hand, Globke has repeatedly proved his anti-Nazi attitude during his period of activity for the Federal Government.21

Whether Globke’s commentaries in fact softened the impact of the Nuremberg laws at all, as Globke and his supporters claimed, remains a topic of debate. Because he also helped draft the 1938 law that required German Jews to carry the second name “Sarah” or “Israel,” it is difficult to conceive of his activities in the Nazi interior ministry as anything other than active complicity. Other high-ranking civil servants in federal ministries clearly had supported National Socialism enthusiastically. How else can one explain, for example, a state secretary’s entry into the SA in 1930 followed by member–

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ship in the NSDAP one year later?22 Whether these enthusiasts remained so throughout the Third Reich or beyond depends on the individual case; many, certainly, had not. Still, prominent Nazis were not prominent in the Federal Republic. Of the dozen highest officials and civil servants identified in an American report prepared for military government, none reappeared in the higher echelons of Hesse’s postwar administration.23 In business, however, several cases of former active National Socialists reemerging in the Federal Republic taint an otherwise positive picture. These cases, it should be noted, were the exception rather than the rule. Professional continuity of such individuals occasionally serves as the main exhibit in broader public charges that elites failed to take responsibility for the darker aspects of their professions’ recent pasts. The Thyssen, Krupp, and Flick dynasties continued to wield considerable influence in German industrial and financial circles, even in cases where the torch was passed to the next, less implicated generation. Yet the notoriety that some cases received indicates that their detractors would not permit them to conveniently place the past behind them in the public sphere. Leaders of the medical community who had figured in Gleichschaltung, sterilization, “euthanasia,” and to a lesser extent the “final solution” found it less difficult to avoid the public limelight than did their entrepreneurial counterparts. For the most part, attention to the failure of denazification in this sphere did not gain strength until the 1980s. By then, the surviving Nazis in leadership positions had retired or died. Hans Reiter, for example, president of the Nazi-era Reich Health Office, served as a clinic physician in Kassel from 1949 to 1952. The case of Werner Heyde, who had been instrumental in organizing the “euthanasia” program, caused a justified scandal. From 1947 to 1959, he worked as a medical consultant for the courts under the assumed name of Dr. Sawade with the full knowledge and protection of many of his colleagues.24 Had the media, above all Der Spiegel, not exposed Heyde in 1959, he would quite likely never have come to justice. Heyde’s very public trial was followed by others, although most ended with lenient sentences, or were dismissed because the accused were allegedly to ill to stand trial. In the 1969-1970 “Hartheim” trial of three euthanasia physicians, Hans-Joachim Becker and Friedrich Lorent were found guilty, and sentenced to ten and seven years in prison, respectively. After two years, Becker was transferred to a medical facility, and was freed after four. Lorent served only a third of his mild sentence before being released. The third defendant, Georg Renno, was declared medically unfit to continue to stand trial just days before an expected conviction.25 Others, like the Racial Hygienist Fritz Lenz, survived in the profession until long after the end of the war. Lenz became a professor of human genetics at the University of Göttingen in 1946, after the chair he had held in racial hygiene at the University of Munich was eliminated. He published actively into the 1970s. Josef Mengele’s mentor, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who advocated racial biology both before and dur–

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ing the Third Reich, has already been discussed. Verschuer’s predecessor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Eugen Fischer, also remained active after 1945.26 The Allies undertook to bring to justice a limited number of elites directly responsible for wartime atrocities. In addition to the main four-power International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the American Military Court conducted twelve other major trials at Nuremberg under their own name, including the 1947 “Physicians’ Trial” that focused on twenty-three doctors implicated in “euthanasia,” inhumane medical experiments, and the medicalized killing of concentration camp inmates. Two other American military courts weighed charges against the major industrialists Friedrich Flick and Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, who were charged with the exploitation of foreign workers and the illegal expropriation of foreign property. Still others brought selected Nazi judges and the leaders of IG Frarben to the docket.27 As a result of Cold war calculations, pressure from the German federal government, and domestic U.S. opinion, all of the economic figures convicted, and many of the political figures were released in 1951 or shortly thereafter, insofar as they had not already served their sentences.28 Neither the Nuremberg trials nor other Allied tribunals intended to weed out all Germans guilty of war crimes, crimes against the peace, and crimes against humanity. Rather, their proponents hoped they would both publicize the criminal nature of the Nazi regime and set precedents for future cases. In this light, the sentences meted out to defendants are instructive of the Allied courts’ view of what was, and what was not, damning. The widely held belief that big business played a major role in backing Hitler and his party led to trials of many leading industrial figures, but relatively light sentences from American, British, and French courts. Hjalmar Schacht, for example, was one of only three defendants at Nuremberg whom the tribunal actually acquitted, mainly because he broke so visibly with Hitler at a relatively early date, by stepping down as Economics Minister. Helping to erect the National Socialist state in its early years did not equate with preparing an offensive war, participating in war crimes, or committing crimes against humanity. Prominent business leaders also emerged relatively unscathed from charges that they had used slave labor, as long as they had not personally—and demonstrably—ordered or participated in their mistreatment. Thus both Friedrich Flick and Alfried Krupp received only light sentences, despite their firms’ large-scale exploitation of foreign workers, POWs, and concentration camp labor. IG Farben, on the other hand, was treated much more severely (if inadequately, according to many critics). Investigations and trials involving physicians tended to focus on those implicated in the most heinous medical atrocities. Allied courts did not even hear cases related to the Nazi forced sterilization program, and physicians and psychiatrists involved in the “euthanasia” program remained relatively spared from legal scrutiny.29 The purging of the top leadership, then, while porous and selective, was on the whole successful in limited but important ways. The upper echelons –

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of the medical community and business fared better than their counterparts in the civil service. Most notable is that the professional exclusion of the most prominent National Socialists succeeded relatively well. Viewed as a program for dispensing justice, denazification merits its frequent characterization as a failure. However, as an effort to weed the worst elements from the leadership of the “new” Germany’s elite occupations, denazification could claim some success. In the lower echelons, both at the regional and local level reveals, denazification’s efficacy declined.

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The Machinery of Denazification The victorious Allies of World War II agreed at Potsdam to purge active Nazis from positions of influence, especially those in the civil service and the economy. Responsibility for the development of coordinated denazification policies was placed with the Allied Control Council, which issued specific guidelines on 12 January 1946 (ACC Directive No. 24). However, due to differing conceptions of what denazification should actually look like, a wide gulf developed between implementation in the various zones of occupation, above all between the Soviet Zone and the Western Zones.30 The United States pursued denazification more stringently than either the French or the British in their respective occupation zones. The Soviets purged the political and economic leadership still more severely than the Americans, but placed less emphasis on punishing rank and file militarists and National Socialists, whom they hoped to harness for the construction of a viable socialist state. Believing that the root cause of “German fascism” was the overweaning influence of “monopoly capitalism” and the Junker elites, the Soviets and their German Communist allies placed greater store in the confiscation of large landed estates and the nationalization of large industries.31 The shortcomings of the American effort, especially when compared to the program in the Soviet zone, stemmed partly from its virtues. The American-zone denazification program, much more than that in the East, was hampered by a semblance of legal due process. Significantly, Hesse’s authorities enforced denazification more diligently than Bavaria, the other large state in the U.S. zone and the subject of a number of postwar studies.32 Denazification in the American zone went through three stages.33 The first, lasting from liberation until the spring of 1946, was marked by direct American enforcement of denazification measures. In the first weeks of occupation, local commanders wielded wide latitude within the provisions of JCS 1067. They arrested top Nazi officials and functionaries as well as other prominent individuals according to automatic arrest tables. As a result, specially created internment centers swelled with political and economic elites. The biggest such center in Hesse, on the outskirts of Darmstadt, quickly grew to contain 28,000 inmates.34 In many cases, the real or perceived need –

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to keep compromised individuals in key positions to maintain orderly administration induced many Allied commanders to make exceptions to the otherwise rigid automatic arrest criteria. The role of such exceptions has often been exaggerated, however, leaving the false impression that former Nazis easily evaded the purges with the blessing of the occupation authorities. In fact, public pressure in America, other European countries, and Germany itself spawned random reviews, followed by a more categorical approach to political liability. Successive waves of “vetting” were aimed at particular occupational groups and institutions.35 In general, denazification officials proceeded more severely with civil servants in the summer of 1945, stepped up their efforts in the economic sphere (following Military Government Law No. 8) in September, and cracked down on physicians toward the end of the year.36 The categorical approach led, however, to an even greater backlash in public opinion. The popular view prevailed that denazification would be best if it concentrated only on the “real Nazis” and left minor followers alone, regardless of their formal memberships. The second phase began on 5 March 1946 with the promulgation of the “Law for the Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism” and lasted until mid 1948.37 The “Liberation Law” established a German bureaucracy featuring German tribunals under American oversight. In the Soviet Zone, by contrast, a similar devolution of administrative authority came only with the passage of SMAD directive 201 in August 1947, although German civilians had been involved in denazification even in the earlier stages.38 The importance of this task as an indicator of the political vitality of the fledgling civilian government was indicated by conferral of cabinet status on the denazification office. The “Liberation Ministry” reviewed potentially tainted individuals based on formal, legalistic principles. Drawing on information provided in special questionnaires, self-representation before the tribunal, and the testimony of witnesses, the tribunals placed defendants in one of five categories of varying political responsibility. Each category brought with it a circumscribed range of punishments from mild monetary fines to ten years of hard labor and suspension of civil rights.39 The system permitted the accused legal representation, justification of previous actions, mitigating circumstances, and an appeal process. Combined with the sheer numbers of cases facing the tribunals, this time-consuming legalistic approach caused an administrative overload. To relieve the problem and get denazification back on track, General Clay issued two broad amnesties. The first was the so-called Youth Amnesty of 8 June 1946, which exempted individuals under twenty years of age in 1945 (provided they were not accused as major offenders); A Christmas Amnesty in December 1946 exempted menial laborers and the financially weak.40 In addition, the Ministry for Political Liberation took measures to accelerate the processing of so-called “followers” based solely on written procedures.41 The third phase of denazification stretched from the passage of the second revision of the Liberation Law of 9 April 1948 until 1954, when the last –

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remnants of the denazification program officially ended. Most actions during this period aimed to wind up denazification as quickly as possible. Interestingly, the Americans, whose policy on denazification (and other punitive programs) shifted toward increased leniency as Cold War tensions rose, pressed harder than Hesse’s political leaders for the rapid conclusion of denazification.42 While German leaders had long sought procedural modifications to accelerate the program, they also feared that shutting it down too rapidly would benefit the worst offenders most, and thus undermine what little credibility denazification still retained among the German public.43 Some political leaders, especially within the SPD, also worried that they would be viewed as backpedaling if they now criticized the program whose necessity they had originally touted in spite of its unpopularity. To deal with the incredible backlog, denazification officials simplified the program. By early 1949, all but a handful of the most difficult cases had been tried, with the remaining cases mainly appeals of verdicts that had been handed down. The Ministry of Liberation was dissolved, with other ministries assuming its responsibilities and absorbing its tenured civil servant personnel. The practical result of the rushed conclusion of denazification was that individuals who came before the tribunal at an earlier date, for example in the summer of 1946, generally faced more careful scrutiny and stiffer punishments than those whose cases came up in 1948.44 A number of factors led to the unfortunate result that the later cases often involved the more highly incriminated individuals and those in positions of importance. First, the Liberation Ministry had expended much energy during 1946 and 1947 processing clear-cut fellow travelers and those “not subject to the law,” by far the bulk of the cases. Second, prosecutors often needed more time to gather and organize evidence against heavily incriminated individuals or those in responsible positions. Finally, defendants with more money and connections could afford lawyers, and those with more to lose—elites and the most active Nazis—were more likely to use delaying tactics and appeal even tribunal decisions that labeled them as fellow travelers. The denazification bureaucracy created by the Liberation Law played a more important role in the lives of most Germans in the American zone than the earlier and shorter-lived first phase of denazification. Because the denazification apparatus affected the outcome of cases, it deserves a careful description. All three American-zone Länder promulgated the Liberation Law simultaneously and with identical wording to ensure “uniform and fair implementation.”45 The law of 5 March 1946 conformed to Allied Control Council guidelines of January 1946. Significantly, the U.S. Military Government insisted on a German law rather than simply decreeing it based on their power as an occupying army. Many German political leaders preferred the latter solution, which would absolve them of responsibility for an unpopular program. The Liberation Law aimed to sort out and assign political responsibility for National Socialism on an individual basis, and mete out –

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appropriate punishments. The ultimate goal was to remove National Socialists from positions of power and influence: In order to liberate our people from National Socialism and Militarism, and to insure the lasting establishment of a democratic state at peace with the world, all those who actively supported the National Socialist tyranny, or were responsible for offenses against the principles of justice and humanity, or exploited such circumstances for their own profit, will be excluded from exerting influence on the political, economic, and cultural life [of the land] and will be required to make restitution.46

The Liberation Law further stressed that this political review was to be based on a careful case-by-case evaluation of circumstances during the Third Reich: The judgment of each individual will take into consideration individual responsibility as well as actual and comprehensive behavior; this will determine, in carefully considered gradations, the degree of atonement and the exclusion from participation in public, economic, and cultural life of the people. […] The goal is to eliminate the influence of National Socialist and militaristic attitudes and ideas in the long term.

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External features such as membership in the NSDAP, one of its branches, or another organization are, according to this law, not in and of themselves decisive for the degree of responsibility. These [facts] constitute important evidence for the comprehensive attitude, but can be wholly or partly weakened by mitigating evidence. Conversely, non-membership in and of itself is not sufficient to exclude responsibility.47

The emphasis on individual, as opposed to categorical, responsibility reflected not only Americans’ and Germans’ sense of justice, but also pragmatic concerns. Throughout the first phase of denazification, military government officials were often forced to concede their own inadequate grasp of local complexities.48 Foreshadowing the concept of “Germans judging Germans” enshrined in the Liberation Law, many local detachments, such as one in the north Hessian city of Kassel, found it convenient to leave denazification to a special political advisory committee staffed by handpicked anti-Nazis. “The Germans themselves,” ran this reasoning, “know who were and were not ardent or active party members better than anyone else.” Some sample analyses indicated that the judgments of German committees and American experts tended to be quite similar. In Kassel, reviews showed that the political committee’s recommendations concurred with those of the American intelligence officers ninety-five percent of the time.49 If this approach was to succeed, experience taught, then policy had to accommodate the strong German aversion to categorical condemnation.50 The Ministry for Political Liberation, headed by Gottlob Binder, a moderate Social Democrat, presided over 110 tribunals, called Spruchkammern (literally “chambers of judgment”), organized into 48 administrative districts representing Hesse’s 47 city and county units (Stadt- und Landkreise) plus a large internment camp for National Socialists on the outskirts of Darmstadt.51 –

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These tribunals were not regular courts, but rather lay institutions designed to measure political responsibility for the Third Reich and its crimes. They were never intended to measure criminal guilt; that remained a matter for the Allied occupiers or the regular court system. In the tribunals, three or more lay judges familiar with the local situation, one of whom acted as chairperson, passed judgment on defendants. Prosecutors, commonly with little or no legal training, prepared and argued the cases. Detailed guidelines incorporated in the Liberation Law and its extensive appendices established the boundaries of presumptive guilt, leaving prosecutors only limited leeway in seeking charges and punishments. Prosecutors had to document the charges before the tribunal, but since this usually consisted of objective criteria (memberships, office-holding, writings, and public activities) the main burden of proof rested with the defense. Defendants could hire legal council or represent themselves. At the discretion of the tribunals, cases involving lesser offenders and followers could be completed in writing, but more serious cases had to be argued in person. The Law required every adult resident of Hesse to fill out a questionnaire (Meldebogen) giving information about personal political activities, financial history, and occupational data between 1932 and 1945.52 In order to insure the widest possible compliance in the chaotic circumstances that prevailed in 1946, Hesse made completion of a Meldebogen a prerequisite to the distribution of food rationing cards.53 In Hesse alone almost three and one-quarter million persons filed Meldebögen by the fall of 1949.54 Procedurally, the tribunals first separated all adults within their districts into those “subject to the law” (vom Gesetz betroffen) and those “not subject to the law” (vom Gesetz nicht betroffen). The former, nearly one-third of those who submitted questionnaires, were presumed to be politically tainted, and had to undergo a review by a denazification tribunal in their district (See Table 4.1). The others received written certificates attesting to their clean bill of political health. Among the most common flags that signaled presumptive guilt according to the detailed criteria of the Liberation Law were the following: 1) membership in the NSDAP, one of its branch organizations (SS, SA, Hitler Youth, National Socialist Motor Corp, National Socialist Aviation Corps, National Socialist German Student League, National Socialist University Instructors’ League, and National Socialist Women’s League); 2) holding office (but not simple membership) in an affiliated association, such as the German Labor Front (DAF), National Socialist Peoples’ Welfare Association (NSV), the Reich League of German Civil Servants, or the National Socialist Physicians’ League; 3) holding positions of responsibility in key sectors of society during the Third Reich, such as high governmental offices, or sitting on the supervisory board of a major corporation; –

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4) having received certain Nazi Party medals and certificates of recognition, such as the National Socialist Order of the Blood, the NSDAP Service medal, or the Gau NSDAP certificate of honor; 5) university officers after 1934; 6) published writings or public speeches intended to “spread National Socialist or fascist ideology.”55 Individuals subject to the Liberation Law fell into one of three automatic categories based on criteria that were carefully delineated in an appendix. Part A of the appendix divided heavily compromised individuals into “Class I” presumable “major offenders,” and “Class II” presumable “offenders.” The rest fell under Part B, those “who should be scrutinized with particular care,” but were usually fellow travelers, opportunists, or simple party members.56 Working from these schematic categories, tribunal prosecutors collected and weighed evidence, and accordingly charged individuals who were subject to the law, seeking classification in one of five categories of guilt or responsibility:

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Group I (major offender); Group II (offender); Group III (lesser offender); Group IV (follower); and Group V (exonerated).57 By law, prosecutors had to request that persons falling under Part A, Class I be placed in Group I (major offender), whereas part A, Class II required a charge of Group I, II, or III. Those who merited “careful investigation” (Part B) had to be charged in groups I to IV. The responsibility of presenting mitigating evidence, or seeking a lighter decision than charged by the prosecutor within the strict parameters of the Liberation Law, rested with the individual. Prosecutors could neither drop nor reduce charges. The wording of the Liberation Law reflects the enormous effort put into its drafting; nearly every conceivable heinous activity, political transgression, suspicious office or membership associated with the Third Reich found a place among the incriminating criteria. Conversely, the law permitted almost every imaginable mitigating circumstance, but within clear limits. The Liberation Law was thus an impressive legal document. It was technically precise, thorough, and scrupulously fair. Its virtues, however, became its Achilles’ heel. Denazification Minister Binder, although dedicated to his ministry’s task, conceded in a speech just six months after the publication of the Liberation Law that several problems already vexed the program.58 The first was the overwhelming mass of cases.59 By the fall of 1946, a denazification staff numbering only 1,200 faced the Sisyphean task of evaluating millions of Meldebogen and prosecuting hundreds of thousands of those –

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cases. The staff grew to 4,717 by 1 January 1947, and to 6,725 six months later, but even this larger staff could not denazify quickly and thoroughly enough to satisfy the Americans or the Germans.60 Another difficulty arose because the Liberation Law barred individuals from employment based on their presumptive denazification classification while their case was pending. Since prosecutors were forced to charge defendants according to their formal classification, even in spite of patently credible mitigating circumstances, the eventual verdict was usually lower than the original charge. The Liberation Law permitted no plea bargaining. As a result, the tribunals needlessly squandered valuable time and energy on essentially clear-cut fellow travelers.61 These problems continued to plague the ministry even after the Youth Amesty and Christmas Amnesty of late 1946.62 Yet another criticism not mentioned in Binder’s speech, but often cited in the popular press was that the Liberation Law primarily targeted those with institutional affiliations to National Socialism, such as party membership, while it overlooked non-Party members who actively supported the National Socialist movement and program. Few who criticized this state of affairs could offer specific suggestions about how to make the system more just, but this hardly protected denazification from growing popular animosity. On the contrary, it heightened the common perception that denazification, in Hesse as elsewhere in the American Zone, “punished the small fry but let the big fish off the hook.” The Spruchkammer faced other problems as well. The overworked staff was under extreme pressure to document cases quickly. The press, the public, and military government overseers frequently blasted them for errors that sometimes resulted from time constraints. Prosecutors relied on a standard background check to validate the information provided on the two-page Meldebogen. The investigative staff filled in inquiry forms with information regarding membership, offices held, and income for specific years between 1932 and 1945. These forms were then sent for verification to the local police department, the state tax office, political committees, and the central Berlin Document Center (where the Americans held captured Nazi Party files). In many cases, civil service personnel offices, chambers of industry and trade, or physicians’ chambers, were also consulted.63 This system might have functioned reliably, because it insured overlapping corroboration.64 However, loss of files in wartime bombing, postwar migration, willful destruction of incriminating evidence, and other problems complicated the task.65 Corruption was a further obstacle to the success of denazification, and one which stuck in the public mind. Overworked, poorly compensated, and subject at times to public harassment, it was not surprising that some tribunal personnel exploited their gatekeeper function for their own benefit. Several reports from the tribunals complained that food rations were insufficient to maintain them for the long hours they worked. In Frankfurt, one military government investigator noted, “a prosecutor and two of the employ–

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ees fainted from lack of food,” and an appellate tribunal judge in Wiesbaden died of malnutrition.66 The public prosecutor in Wiesbaden complained that “the catastrophic food situation” was adversely affecting tribunal productivity, as employees checked into the hospital for malnutrition and judges fell asleep from exhaustion during hearings.67 The conditions of postwar Germany, combined with the difficulty of finding people of real caliber to serve on the local tribunals, helps explain why cases of impropriety and outright blackmail on the part of tribunal personnel grew in both rumor and in fact. The effective long-term exclusion of the politically tainted from responsible posts required constant verification, and this, in turn, necessitated a considerable commitment of bureaucratic energy in all sectors of government administration. Thus the Liberation Law and related ordinances obligated municipal, regional, state, and military government authorities to keep tabs on the activities of tens of thousands of individuals in “sensitive” occupations in order to ensure that former Nazis did not return. The denazification ministry maintained detailed lists of individuals, categorized according to the severity of their presumed guilt, actual judgments of the tribunals, and appeal status. Others broke cases down by tribunal, by occupation, place of work, or region. For the physicians in the Darmstadt district alone, the civil administration catalogued all physicians, separated according to those who were working without restrictions, those working with special permission, and those who had been removed and were “not yet readmitted to practice”.68 Enforcement of employment restrictions, blocking of assets, and collection of fines required special offices of their own, employing thousands. The magnitude of the operation is also evident in the effort that went into tracing, tracking, and verifying assets of those whose property was blocked by the tribunals. 69 Hesse’s Ministry for Political Liberation earnestly sought to carry out denazification according to the spirit of the law.70 “A sin,” Minister Binder explained in response to growing criticism, “can be overcome only through atonement, but not through simple forgiving and forgetting.”71 Clearly convinced of the importance of their task, Binder and his subordinates repeatedly tried to process the untainted and the simple “followers” expeditiously, and to maintain tighter scrutiny of the most sensitive sectors: education, the press, and the civil service. The ministry in Wiesbaden seldom hesitated to reprimand tribunals for lax judgments, or to keep their staffs focused on established priorities. In spite of their efforts, they never fully overcame the numerous obstacles that hindered a full and expeditious denazification. The dedication and sincerity of Hesse’s denazification staff are supported by similar findings in the Karlsruhe district of Württemberg-Baden, where tribunals took their duties “responsibly, dispassionately, but without illusions.”72 Ultimately, the program foundered less due to its relative laxity than due to its rapid truncation in the late 1940s at the insistence of the Americans. By the spring of 1947, military government leaders, with an eye to the growing –

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Cold War competition for the favor of the Germans, noted that even many German intellectuals who originally supported the denazification program had changed their views and were now “strongly endorsing the swift termination of denazification altogether.” .

There is a growing conviction that should denazification be continued for a number of years according to the present program a large percentage of the population would be lost to any type of democratic reeducation and would readily fall for new nationalistic and totalitarian slogans.73

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A letter from “a concerned citizen,” noting that many Beamte with NSDAP membership who had consequently lost their jobs and their pensions were living in desperate circumstances, illustrates the fear that strict denazification could undermine Germany’s transition to democracy. “The democratic German state that must be constructed,” she argued, “which has to struggle with a thousand other difficulties, cannot afford to create by its own activities a whole army of opponents.” She pleaded (as a non-Nazi and a non-civil servant) that these denazified servants of the state at least have their pensions restored.74 Like the Americans, Germans who hoped for a democratic renewal of the country thus began to view denazification as an obstacle to “democratization.” The political parties in Hesse recognized an opportunity to make political hay out of the growing popular antagonism. At a rally in Offenbach, one SPD leader declared that if denazification had been left to the Germans from the beginning, we would not face the present difficulties … We must push with more energy and industry for quick punishment of the guilty, and, at the same time, attempt to conclude the whole program as soon as possible.75

Communists, who constituted a sizable proportion of the Spruchkammer staff, grew bitter over the leniency of many tribunals. In the spring of 1947, many KPD members responded to their party’s call to resign from the tribunals, with others following their lead in subsequent months.76 Walter Deeg, a communist and one of the most active prosecutors in Giessen, resigned in disgust in June, writing a scathing open letter.77 Sensing the popular mood, and recognizing that it was fueled by serious inconsistencies from tribunal to tribunal, Land to Land, and zone to zone, the American-zone military and civilian governments began to seek the quickest possible retreat without conceding failure. In October 1947, the first amendment of the Liberation Law permitted prosecutors greater leeway in bringing charges “strictly according to the evidence.” This usually meant lower classifications than the minimum demanded by the original law.78 The second revision of the Liberation Law of 9 April 1948, reclassified all those whom the tribunals had placed in Group III (minor offenders) as Group IV (followers). Subsequent laws all but urged those sentenced in Groups I or II to appeal –

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those rulings in favor of a more lenient classification.79 Binder’s disappointment was palpable when, in late 1948, he told his counterparts from other American-zone Länder: We would have preferred to finish [denazification] earlier. It was a great risk [Wagnis] to carry out denazification in legalistic fashion with personnel who were not trained in law. But we had no other option, since the revolution was overtaken by the capitulation. […]

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As for the question of how to end denazification, the setting of specific deadlines must be resisted. We should also reject attempts to draw a line under the past with a general amnesty or similar measures. We already experienced before, when we made necessary changes, that a great uncertainty crept into our work. We must follow to the end the path on which we have embarked.80

No general amnesty was announced, and the Schlussstrich was not drawn until the mid 1950s. However, the ministry and the tribunals entered a frenzied phase that sometimes resembled a fire-sale.81 As the process was winding down, even the leading officials in the ministry urged prosecutors to conclude cases rapidly, mainly by favoring written procedures. Henceforth, only those who had carried out “influential activities” were to be personally called before the tribunals. Lest there be any misunderstanding, the main prosecutor for Hesse (soon to replace Gottlob Binder as Liberation Minister) specified that “high standards” should be used when interpreting the term “influential activities”: it should not apply, for example, to cell leaders of the NSDAP.82 Clearly, the public mood had shifted so strongly against the program that American occupation officials were justified in fearing a serious backlash if denazification were not concluded quickly. The costs, however, were twofold and high: far too many active National Socialists escaped just punishment, and an opportunity to really confront the errors and crimes of the past was lost.83 At the end of 1951, Hesse’s denazification program had evaluated 3,302,059 cases. Of these 2,351,611 were “not subject to the law.” Table 4.1 indicates the statistical results of the conclusion of the program.

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Table 4.1 Denazification in Hesse as of 1 January 195484 1. Meldebogen received 2. Not subject to the law 3. Subject to the Law 4. Under appeal (11), case reopened (4), or case in progress (9) 5. Case completed

N

Percent

3,305,140 2,353,448 951,692

71.21 28.79

24 951,668

0.00 100.00

N

Percent of completed cases)

312,706 409,517 55,149 174,296 951,668

32.86 43.03 5.79 18.31 99.99

Results of completed cases (breakdown of line 5):

6. Youth Amnesty* 7. Christmas Amnesty* 8. Case dropped for other reasons* 9. Case heard by tribunal 10. Total Results of cases heard by Tribunal** (breakdown of line 9)

N

11. Group I (Major Offender) 12. Group II (Offender) 13. Group III (Minor Offender) 14. Group IV (Follower) 15. Group V (Exonerated) 16. Total

455 5,682 28,290 134,575 5,294 174,296

Percent of cases heard (line 9)

Percent of all cases subject to law (line 3)

0.26 3.26 16.23 77.21 3.04 100.00

0.05 0.60 2.97 14.14 0.56 18.32

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* Youth amnesties, Christmas amnesties, and dropped cases are aggregate statistics for cases that were closed by decision of the tribunals and those concluded (after April 1947), before going to trial, by decision of the prosecutor. Most official statistics distinguish between the two. * * These numbers reflect outcomes of cases after all appeals had been exhausted. Statistics of decisions in original hearings are somewhat more strict. Source: Denazifizierungsbericht, Land Hesse, Nr. 94 (as of 1 Jan. 1954), HHStA-W 501/247.

These results justifiably disappointed those who had hoped that denazification would help transform German society. Only slightly more than six thousand of an adult population of roughly three million had been classified major offenders or offenders by the tribunals and appeal boards—one out of every 540 individuals who submitted a Meldebogen, or three and a half percent of all those charged. Minor offenders, as mentioned above, were treated as “followers” by the end of the 1940s.85 The proportions at the conclusion of denazification in 1954 had not changed considerably since the spring of 1948, when the sprint for completing denazification was in full swing.86 A year before that, proportions were weighted slightly more toward the more tainted categories, although it was presumed that pending cases tended to be the more incriminated individuals.87 Those who find the results of denazification disappointing assume that a much better outcome could have been achieved. However, nearly every alternative to the program’s major flaws harbored new pitfalls. Early critics emphasized primarily the problem of casting the net too widely; if only the denazifiers had concentrated on the “real” offenders and left the mass of –

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minor opportunists in peace, this argument went, they could have accomplished their task more efficiently and with real effect. Yet how could they determine who the “big fish” were without considering each individual case? The authorities in the Soviet Zone simply excluded all former members of the NSDAP and its affiliated organizations from sectors of society considered sensitive, for example the courts, education, and the civil service. By largely ignoring the simple “followers” in other sectors, and showing less inclination to split legalistic hairs, the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) was able to declare the completion of denazification in their zone on 26 February 1948. Not incidentally, they were also able to fill the many vacancies with communist cadres.88 This, in turn, pressured the Western Allies to accelerate their own programs toward a hasty conclusion. Some later critics argued that denazification would have been more effective had it been carried out more stringently. However, the leniency of the tribunal process followed from two related developments. First, a just denazification process that would assess individual circumstances required longer than public support could be sustained. Second, without that support, either in the United States or in Germany, the necessary political will flagged as well. The alternative, rapid denazification by decree, was no solution. If anything, the first phases of denazification, carried out by the American military government prior to the Liberation Law, had produced far worse results, alienating not only former Nazis, but other Germans and even much of the American public. As a concept, the Liberation Law was actually quite good. Its major shortcomings stemmed less from its implementation than from its sudden and premature conclusion. The resulting lenient treatment of later cases only confirmed popular complaints.

The Spruchkammer Process and Elite Occupations As elites, high civil servants, business leaders, and physicians incurred both disadvantages and benefits from denazification. They bore the brunt of the first phase of denazification, during which the Special Branch of the U.S. Military Government concentrated on purging sensitive and influential sectors of German society. These included, in rough order of importance: the civil service, the media, education, business, and the free professions. The tribunal process, too, emphasized that those who had held influential positions during the Third Reich deserved special scrutiny. Leaders of most professional and business associations as well as the highest-ranking civil servants who had also joined the NSDAP were presumed to be “offenders,” unless they could prove otherwise, whereas non-elites with the same Nazi Party connections were generally charged as “followers.” Moreover, the political yardstick for elites was considerably longer than for, say, white-collar workers, farmers, or nurses. On the other hand, elites benefited from certain advantages, especially –

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after the Liberation Law took effect. Their positions generally required special skills and training that could only be acquired over time. In the interest of maintaining or restoring order, the economy, and health, Allied and German leaders often had to (or became convinced they had to) circumvent the political dictates of denazification. Furthermore, many elites had both the means— influence, connections, wealth—and the motivation to navigate the technicalities of denazification in order to arrive at a favorable verdict. The impact of formal denazification on elite occupations depended greatly on how the tribunals weighted the seriousness of particular activities and attitudes as well as the availability of incriminating or mitigating evidence. In general, this favored leniency for physicians, and more often worked against civil servants and business leaders. At issue in most Spruchkammer hearings was an individual defendant’s Gesamthaltung (a term suggesting both “behavior” and “attitude”) during the Third Reich. Statements from employees, superiors, and—above all—professional colleagues figured prominently alongside statements from friends, family, and clergy. These affidavits were essential for measuring “activism,” “militarism,” or “opportunism,” distinctions on which the verdict turned. Denunciations, that is, unsolicited accusations, were rare in denazification proceedings, and could consequently prove seriously damning when they arose. The gulf in class, status, and often political orientation between employers and their dependent workers left business leaders more exposed to negative statements than their counterparts in government administration or the free professions. Employees provided one of the best sources for incriminating managers and owners. The files of Hesse’s denazification ministry reveal numerous examples of employees speaking out against their bosses and former bosses. When a Darmstadt woman who worked in a local factory during the war testified that her former employer had flaunted his Nazi Party connections, held Nazi rallies on the shop floor, and reported on political activities of his workers, she demonstrated that some actively National Socialist business leaders had difficulty suppressing their political pasts. This was particularly true for managers and owners who had mistreated their German work force, and thereby increased worker-management resentments. The occupational context had created a situation that favored the recollection of those activities before the tribunal. At the same time, employees’ dependent relationship vis-à-vis their employers served as a powerful counterforce, especially once the former became convinced that denazification would not permanently remove their antagonists. At the Merck chemical factory in Darmstadt, shop stewards who had at first identified and demanded the removal of all those who had joined the NSDAP prior to 1933, gave in to a more lenient policy proposed by management which only targeted individuals who were guilty of “indecent actions.” Most of the executive and supervisory board remained in their posts until an American review jettisoned several former Nazis.89 –

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Employees often chose their words and statements carefully, or even perjured themselves, fearing retribution. The work exclusion clauses of the Liberation Law had been designed partly to address this problem, but many employees rightly believed that their superiors would eventually return. Colleagues were in a position to provide the most damning evidence, but most refrained from doing so. Some were indeed motivated by a desire to remove Nazi activists from influential positions. A prominent physician in Fulda claimed that a colleague, Dr. W., “is well known as a National Socialist. He was also one of the first to hang a sign [in front of his practice] with the words ‘Jews not allowed’.” Another physician added that Dr. W. “always greeted people with ‘Heil Hitler’.”90 Even those elites convinced of the need to clean house rarely wished to take a wide broom to their own abode, preferring instead to see the uppermost Nazi leadership removed. Anti-fascists, and even victims of Nazi persecution, tended to loyally support their professional peers. In Marburg, proven anti-Nazis in the municipal administration devised strategies to circumvent American denazification guidelines in favor of seriously incriminated high civil servants.91 When occupational organizations incriminated one of their own, they were usually offering up those individuals whose actions had been so radical that they had breached the limits of professional conduct and “collegiality” during the Third Reich. One physician who earned the enmity of colleagues was an “old fighter” who, accompanied by brownshirted thugs, had physically threatened his colleagues at the local insurance fund to stop making payments to Jewish doctors.92 A number of Hessian physicians testified against him before the denazification tribunal. What seemed to upset his accusers most was the Nazi physician’s unbecoming treatment of his colleagues rather than his National Socialist convictions. Others whom colleagues identified as active Nazis were viewed as upstarts who owed their positions solely or largely to the Nazi Party connections. The Leather and Paper Processing Association of Hesse revealed to the Spruchkammer that one of its members, while not a member of the NSDAP, had demonstrated his “vile character” in propaganda parades even before 1933, and was “a 150 percent Nazi.” He had used his political reliability to increase his share of the local market. Through his son, who joined the SS, he also acquired a leather shop in occupied Poland.93 During my research, almost no cases came to light of civil servants denouncing other civil servants. Yet another motivation for incrimination by colleagues was the instrumentalization of denazification in internal professional disputes. In one instance, two physicians in Lauterbach, both former National Socialists, deliberately passed on an unfounded rumor that a young colleague with no known ties to the Nazi Party had been a member of the SS. When the physician who had been accused complained to the military government and identified his anonymous detractors, the president of the district Physicians’ Chamber, Carl Oelemann, and several chamber leaders called him to task in –

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an interview. They explained that “there will be no attacks from doctors against doctors in front of the Spruchkammer,” and more or less directly threatened to block the young physician’s accreditation in Hesse.94 Sometimes the boundary between professional and political disputes blurred. This was true within the medical faculty at a Hessian university, where two factions had developed, one staunchly reactionary and well disposed toward the Nazi program. While only a few of its members had been deeply incriminated, most had joined the NSDAP in the course of the Third Reich. The other main faction, which had held an unfavorable view of Nazism but had not actively resisted, offered statements to the tribunals that exaggerated the political activity of those remaining from the conservative wing of the department.95 Denazification became an arena in which professional as well as political battles could be fought. Exculpatory affidavits were far more common than incriminating ones in the Spruchkammer. Germans, disgusted with the phenomenon of well known local Nazis passing themselves off as apolitical or even as opponents of the Hitler regime, referred to whitewashing affidavits as Persilscheine, or Persil-tickets, a reference to a popular laundry detergent that got clothes “whiter than white.”96 For elites, the bulk of testimony for the defense came from fellow civil servants, business leaders, and physicians. Professional culture, especially among civil servants and physicians, rewarded those who supported other members and punished those who carried political or personal differences into the public sphere. Collegial loyalties among civil servants and physicians, and to a lesser extent within entrepreneurial circles, served as a strong bond. Hermann Pünder, a state secretary in the Bonn government, was an opponent of Nazism from a conservative Catholic background, much like his longtime associate, Konrad Adenauer. Pünder had a knack for writing convincing Persilscheine that began with a disarming claim that he generally refrained from writing them.97 A top manager of the Opel factory in Rüsselsheim presented references not only from colleagues at the plant claiming that Gestapo spies in the plant had orders to watch him closely, but also from a British colleague who knew the manager from before the war, and who testified that he was “an honest, upright and splendid human fellow […] with correct appreciation of right and wrong.” Allegedly, the manager had contacted the American embassy in Paris in 1937 to help free the European director of General Motors from Gestapo detention. The “splendid human fellow” had also joined the NSDAP and the German Labor Front in 1933. An even more glowing reference arrived from the American Assistant General Manager of Opel before the war. The reference was transmitted through General William Draper, Chief of the Military Government Economics Division and a close advisor to Deputy Military Governor Clay.98 The breadth of exculpatory statements is astounding, and, as the tribunals discovered, their accuracy was, and remains, difficult to ascertain. Largely for this reason, American liaison officers headed off attempts to create tribunals along occupational lines.99 Supporters of the idea argued –

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that only occupational peers could adequately understand the circumstances that reigned in their occupations during the Third Reich.100 The Americans supervising denazification, on the other hand, recognized that corporatist chambers would most likely protect professional colleagues. This did not stop some tribunals from accepting individual physicians to tribunal boards hearing the cases of tainted physicians, evidently with the sanction of the Liberation Ministry.101 In all three occupations, colleagues singled out mainly those who had somehow behaved unacceptably in their professional context, and found myriad ways of justifying opportunistic behavior. The beneficiaries were frequently the Schreibtischtäter (desk perpetrators) and careerists who had not directly antagonized fellow elites, as well as truly “nominal” Nazis. Tribunals often became bogged down in issues of character rather than fact, and much of the evidence could be trivial, including whether a party pin was worn openly or the Nazi salute was used as a greeting. In their case against a chief physician in a Marburg hospital, the prosecution produced a nurse who claimed the doctor made the children on the pediatric station “stand at sharp attention and shout ‘Heil Hitler’ when he entered the room.”102 Most defendants could present numerous character references. Among the most common were Persilscheine from priests and pastors testifying that the individual had never left the church. One leader of the local Chambers of Industry and Trade, who had joined the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK) in 1933, and the NSDAP in 1938, received a letter of support from a Protestant minister. The official, according to the pastor, had negotiated the sale of church property to the state, as ordered by Gauleiter Jakob Sprenger. All the while, however, he had expressed his distaste for the transaction.103 The volume of such testimony sometimes overwhelmed the overworked tribunals, whose judges tended to accept it uncritically. For elites who had been Nazi Party (or SA, SS, etc.) members, however, portraying themselves as upstanding or apolitical human beings under unusual circumstances sufficed only for a classification in Group IV. To hold top positions—section heads in the state administration, company chairpersons, or medical professors—exoneration was the only sure way to escape the threat of a future purge. A professor of surgery quite blatantly justified his belated appeal by noting: “In contrast to earlier assurances, as a ‘follower’ I have been hindered in my professional advancement.”104 For this reason, many retained lawyers, appealed for reclassification in Group V, and generally dragged out the final outcome until they received a satisfactory verdict. On the other hand, the Liberation Ministry and American supervisors reviewed tribunal and appeal board decisions with special care. Because civil servants, above all those in the higher ranks, were so closely bound up with the state and the government, a significant amount of sympathy for National Socialism sufficed to bring about the Beamte’s placement in Group IV or higher. Such a classification represented a considerable –

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impediment to future employment until restrictions eased in 1948 and 1949. Employment, and above all noticeably rapid professional advancement in key National Socialist bureaucratic institutions such as the propaganda ministry or the security services (SD, Gestapo) proved especially incriminating. One indicator of this was the high proportion of SD and Gestapo agents in Hessian work camps.105 Nevertheless, many who fell under suspicion for these reasons were able to convince the tribunal that they had either disagreed with the goals and policies of the institutions or had played no significant role in formulating and implementing offensive policies. When preparing cases against formally tainted business leaders, prosecutors generally relied heavily on information supplied by employees. When this was not forthcoming, defendants found it relatively easy to produce sufficient mitigating evidence to be classified in Group IV or even Group V. Because membership in Nazi organizations and the holding of influential positions served as the main flags for presumptive guilt and a Spruchkammer hearing, no blanket program existed to uncover common Nazi-inspired criminal activities, such as the mistreatment of slave labor. Trade union representatives and anti-fascist workers occasionally brought such matters to the attention of the Spruchkammer. However, entrepreneurs were usually able to deflect the charges based on the statements of other workers, colleagues, and letters from forced laborers themselves. Their use of slave labor per se rarely proved incriminating, as owners and managers successfully maintained that they had little or no choice; the SS had foisted slave laborers on them in lieu of German workers who were needed in the war effort. Such was the argument of a top manager in a Darmstadt factory, who also claimed to have heard—second-hand—of only a single case of mistreatment of the Russian POW’s working there. The Spruchkammer accepted these arguments, just as it gave credence to his claim that workers’ accusations against him were motivated by spite or misunderstandings. The workers had accused the defendant, who had been the firm’s military procurement officer, of denouncing them to the Gestapo and causing their arrests. One of the victims even testified that the manager had spoken against him when he was called before the infamous people’s court in Berlin. The Spruchkammer placed the manager, who had not joined the NSDAP until 1940, in Group IV.106 The same failure to ferret out broad categories of criminal behavior on the part of some German businessmen is also evident in the case of “aryanization.” Early efforts in this direction were not carried through. Hesse’s Ministry of Economics instituted a special program, based on military government directives, to identify “aryanized” firms. The regional Chambers of Industry and Trade, most notably in Frankfurt, established committees that played a key role in gathering material on questionable transfers of Jewish property during the 1930s.107 Very few of these cases seem to have been resolved satisfactorily, and the program dissipated by 1949. Moreover, the information thus gathered was not routinely shared with the tribunals, and therefore did –

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not, as a rule, figure into the assessment of individual political activity and opportunism.108 Individual cases appear in the files mainly when the victims or their families were still alive and pressed for compensation or retribution. Beginning in 1945, two Jewish brothers who had emigrated and remained in the United States sought restitution of their medium-sized chemical plant in western Hesse. Desperate for money to finance their emigration, the brothers had sold their factory in 1936. The buyer, a Nazi Party member, used his knowledge of their plight to buy the company at a fraction of its original value. He vented his unbridled anti-Semitism and vague threats in correspondence presented to the tribunal. In his defense, the buyer argued that the transaction had been a legally documented contract, and that the brothers had “willingly” sold it. The case dragged on for four years. After initial classification in Group III (minor offender), the buyer appealed for Group IV, while the Liberation Ministry simultaneously annulled the decision and demanded a more appropriate sentence in Group II, with three years of “special labor” on weekends and the confiscation of half his property. The appeals resulted in a reaffirmation of the original decision, and a new appeal by the defendant. Finally, in 1950, the appeal board dropped the case entirely, based on the Law for the Conclusion of Political Liberation.109 The Liberation Ministry also did not systematically pursue the medical participants in the “euthanasia” and forced sterilization programs. On the other hand, some perpetrators of “euthanasia” were tried before American and regular German courts. The killing facilities in Hadamar, near Limburg, where a special staff systematically gassed or lethally injected thousands of children and adults, was immediately closed by arriving Americans troops (although some personnel stayed on until June 1945). Only the regular children’s hospital kept functioning. In October 1945, an American military court tried six central figures for the murder of forced laborers who allegedly had contracted tuberculosis. Four defendants, including the administrative director, were sentenced to death and executed. One of the two physicians tried received a life sentence, and a nurse received thirty years; these two were both released. Hesse’s state court again took up the Hadamar “euthanasia” killings in the spring of 1947. The criminal court tried 25 individuals, only a few whom were physicians, in connection with the murder of German patients.110 However, most doctors who contributed to “euthanasia” by informing on their patients or recommending them for sterilization could block investigations by blocking the use of patient files based on the professional confidentiality rules they had formerly abused. Both Americans and Germans viewed participation in the forced sterilization plan differently from complicity in the T4 “euthanasia” program. Overlooking the central role that sterilization played in the National Socialist vision of perfecting the race, many leading German physicians judged forced sterilization to be legally defensible. The Public Health Committee of the Council of States specifically requested that the 1933 Law for the Prevention –

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of Hereditary Diseases not be considered in denazification proceedings in the U.S. zone. They argued that “the prevention of heredity offspring by no means sprang solely from National Socialist ideas; rather, it had been advocated by serious domestic and foreign scientists for some time. Sterilizations have been carried out in other countries for years.”111 Dr. Wilhelm von Drigalski, a Darmstadt physician who headed the medical division in Hesse’s interior ministry, attested to the Ministry for Political Liberation:

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Sterilization law[s] had been in force and had been applied abroad long before the Nazi period. Consequently, physicians’ activities in the implementation of this law during the Nazi period cannot be construed as a political liability, unless it can be proven that political or racial considerations played a role in the application of the measures.112

Drigalski expressly requested that the Ministry of Liberation advise all denazification tribunals accordingly. Despite the protest of one leading Liberation Ministry official, the courts, both at the state and federal levels, tended to agree with this position.113 A Nazi physician who was “instrumental in the sterilization of a number of Wiesbaden residents” was nevertheless classified as a follower. The result of a retrial ordered by the Liberation Ministry reaffirmed the original decision.114 Liberation Ministry officials in Lauterbach reported some resentment when the physician in charge of medical policy for Lauterbach, whom many residents believed was politically responsible for forced sterilizations in their region, was exonerated by a tribunal in the Darmstadt internment camp, where he was being held.115 In yet another case, a company doctor who had reported a former psychiatric patient and child laborer as having “schizophrenia,” but who in fact suffered from fatigue, proved unprosecutable in the civil courts.116 After 1949, the federal government effectively blocked most applications for restitution from victims. It was not until 1980 that sterilization victims began to receive monetary compensation, with the maximum set at DM 5000.117 The combination of the requirements of the Liberation Law, the particular way in which it was implemented, and the advantages enjoyed by defendants with both personal pull and deep pockets resulted in light treatment of former National Socialists who counted among the social elite but not the Nazi elite. In order to gauge more fully the impact of denazification on German elites, it is necessary to investigate the broader effects that denazification had on the higher civil service, business leaders, and the medical profession. One critical question that remains to be answered is whether denazification limited the presence and influence of former National Socialists at the pinnacles of their professions. Another aspect of the same query is whether the flawed and temporary political purge favored the advancement of non-Nazis and opponents of National Socialism into the higher echelons of elite occupations.

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Effects of Denazification on Elite Occupations The foregoing discussion drives home one unmistakable and disappointing conclusion: beyond the most active and prominent National Socialists, denazification did not permanently exclude former members of the NSDAP, SS, SA, and affiliated organizations from German society. Spruchkammer hearings overwhelmingly classified activists and opportunists leniently, most emerging as “followers” or even “exonerated.” By the early 1950s, virtually all formal employment restrictions for politically tainted elites of all stripes had fallen away. Only a small handful remained in prison or work camps, far fewer, in fact, than the proportion who had died or retired. To what extent did the former Nazis return to positions of prominence and power? One way to answer this critical question is to compare the actual effects of “denazification” and “renazification” at different levels of the occupational hierarchies. The intention of this study, when I embarked on this project, was to compile lists of high civil servants, entrepreneurs, and physicians in Hesse, and to subdivide these into the “elites of the elite” and “rank and file” elites. I would use access to denazification records to statistically correlate political past and long term professional trajectories. Numerous obstacles necessitated a more limited venture. A wide variety of sources aided in the construction of lists for Hesse or cities within Hesse.118 These lists offer a revealing glimpse at the degree of general continuity and discontinuity among local German elites. Locating information concerning the political pasts of the individuals on the lists proved an arduous, and often insurmountable chore. Hesse’s Cultural Ministry inexplicably delayed access to Spruchkammer files for more than seven months.119 Once granted, the organization of the Hesse’s denazification files rendered it all but impossible to locate many individuals, especially those, such as vast numbers of civil servants and entrepreneurs, who had moved since their denazification.120 The main effect of the “missing files” has been to render many statistical operations, such as direct links between occupation and NSDAP membership, insignificant by rigorous statistical standards. There are simply too many individuals whose political backgrounds are unaccounted for in most of the compiled databases.121 Consequently, the statistical information that follows draws conclusions based on the cases for which information suffices to draw reasonable conclusions, but the reader will also be provided information concerning the number or proportion of cases for which no information is available.122 Of the three elite occupations that are the focus of this study, none has been more heavily scrutinized than the civil service. Higher civil servants bore the brunt of that screening. Hans Mommsen has argued that automatic dismissals and political screening of civil servants, coupled with the desperate need for experienced administrators, indirectly favored the disproportionate return of conservative-authoritarian career civil servants, since these –

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individuals had generally been under less pressure to prove their political reliability to the Nazi regime by joining the NSDAP.123 This was perhaps less true in Hesse than elsewhere in Germany, largely because of the long postwar domination of that Land by the Social Democrats. Hesse’s political leaders in the immediate postwar period all presented relatively clean political accounts of their activities during the Third Reich. Considering the military government’s close political scrutiny of such high officials, this hardly comes as a surprise. No member of Hesse’s early postwar cabinets had joined the NSDAP or its main branch organizations. Robert Fritz, however, a stout conservative and perhaps even a “reactionary” professor of law, whom the military government appointed Minister of Justice in Geiler’s first cabinet, had accommodated himself to the Nazi regime. The considerable criticism that followed his appointment led the Americans to replace him with the Social Democrat, Georg August Zinn after only two days in office.124 Many had outstanding credentials as anti-Nazis.125 Werner Hilpert, Minister of Finance, had been incarcerated in Buchenwald during the war along with Hermann Brill, head of the Hessian governor’s office.126 Peter Paul Nahm, whom Minister-President Geiler chose as the State Commissioner for the Integration of Refugees and Expellees, had been sent to a concentration camp in 1933 because of his founding role as editor of the journal Der Katholik.127 Hesse’s government also cooperated more readily with the American military government than the postwar Bavarian leadership. In part, this flowed from the personalities of leading officials on both sides. The political journalist, Eugon Kogon, has noted that the relationship between the occupation power and the Hessian government generally developed well (much better at any rate than in Bavaria). This lay in the willingness on the part of a number of key individuals on both sides to communicate in a manner that resembled a partnership. A special relationship of this sort developed between Werner Hilpert and Georg August Zinn, on the one side, and Samuel Wahrhaftig on the other, one of the most important and wisest advisors on the American staff in Hesse.128

The need for qualified civil servants, especially in the higher levels of the civilian administration, was real, even though many American and German denazifiers became jaded to the exaggerated invocation of this line of defense. The exigencies of restoring order to the seeming chaos of early postwar Germany forced the Americans to rely on quick, often perfunctory political screening in order to return relatively, rather than absolutely, “untainted” individuals to public administration.129 By late 1945, German administrators who favored denazification in principle, such as Heinrich Ahl, who headed the Personnel Department in the Darmstadt region, complained that the Americans’ orders for immediate dismissal had so denuded the civil service that there remained hardly any qualified personnel to train their replacements.130 The German civil service, of course, was a special case, in –

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that professional mobility generally occurred within given ranks rather than between them. The retention of the traditional three-tier structure, described in the previous chapter, hindered the replacement of purged high civil servants with the promotion of middle-level administrators, since the latter seldom possessed the university degrees and special training expected of high civil servants. This only made the loss of former Party adherents more acute; the pool of politically acceptable civil servants with the proper qualifications was finite. One solution was to hire former high civil servants whose political histories barred full reinstatement as non-tenured employees. This practice, which essentially amounted to a considerable demotion, was common as late at 1949, when denazification zeal was otherwise flagging.131 Up to 1949, and often beyond, individual offices in Hesse’s ministries were required to send personnel reports to the newly-established Hessian personnel office. These statistical reports contained information on either former party affiliations or, after mid 1946, Spruchkammer decisions. Individuals in Group III or higher could work only as Beamte with special permission, which was apparently never granted. The November 1946 Law Regulating the Rights of Civil Servants and Public Employees in Hesse explicitly ruled out the employment of individuals who fell into Groups I, II, or III according to the denazification law of March 1946. However, it provided for exceptions. Followers and the exonerated could be hired only after the probationary periods stipulated by the denazification tribunals.132 Although no set quotas were established, the bulk of civil servants, above all higher civil servants, were expected to have been “not subject to the law” or exonerated. The proportion of Mitläufer varied according to rank and the branch of the bureaucracy in which they worked. Especially in the higher echelons, the dominance of the SPD in state government and politics limited the proportion of former National Socialists in top spots.133 A Liaison and Security Office report seems to have been in error in claiming that “the followers who have returned to the Hessian German Government as of 31 December 1947 are as follows:” Lower Ranks (Einfacher Dienst) MiddleRanks (Mittlerer Dienst) Upper Ranks (Gehobener Dienst) Higher Ranks (Hoeherer Dienst)

32.5% 33.7% 50.6% 48.5%”134

The source of the report’s statistics are unclear. They contradict nearly every other summary, which show proportions of followers hovering around ten percent, with slightly more in Group V or amnestied (see Table 4.2).135

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Table 4.2 “Followers” among High Civil Servants in Hessian administration, 1 December 1948

Source: Gesamtübersicht der im öffentlichen Dienst Beschäftigten “Mitläufer” usw. Stand vom 1. Dezember 1948, HHStA-W 507/1341.

In general, Table 4.2 indicates a tendency in the Hessian civil service for the highest levels of service to employ fewer “followers” than the lower levels. In part this resulted from methods used to “hide” tainted higher civil servants by employing them officially at lower, less sensitive ranks while they carried out the tasks of higher civil servants. However, such tactics were probably less common at the Land level than in the municipalities, where American supervision was spread thin and personal ties were stronger.136 Even among Hesse’s Social Democrats, the desire to compromise political exactitude in the interests of efficiency grew over time. As Table 4.2 shows, tainted higher civil servants were far more likely to return to the Ministries of Finance or the Department of Natural Resources than other sectors, simply because these required complex skills. The Interior Ministry included administrative specialists who understood the arcane civil service rules and regulations, probably accounting for some of the ten “followers” employed there as higher civil servants. A report from a military government detachment in –

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Kassel noted that a wave of arrests in the city’s high civil service was making non-Nazi officials “nervous.” They believed that the schematic approach was inherently unfair and destabilizing, and that, “if arrests could be limited to those who were convinced Nazis all would be fully content.”137 Defining who was really a “convinced Nazi” was precisely the problem that plagued not only the American military government, but also the Spruchkammer personnel. In the end, as Table 4.3 indicates, the Americans conceded that some former National Socialists would be brought into posts in the high civil service. By September 1947, one-fifth of civil servants ranking as Referenten (the next level below section head) or higher were “subject to the law.” Of the twelve, the Spruchkammer had classified five as followers and three had been exonerated; the remaining four had either been amnestied or were awaiting tribunal decisions. Table 4.3 Top Civil Servants in the Administration of Hesse, 1947-1956138 (Section heads, Referenten, and higher) 1947

1950

1952

1954

1956

Not subject to law

61

34

34

34

26

Subject to Law

12

2

5

4

4

0

47

63

52

79

73

83

102

90

109

Unknown Total

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Source: HHStA-W/520 (Spruchkammer); List of 1947 Beamte, with Spruchkammer classification, Sept. 1947, HHStA-W/507/1341.

After 1949, the political makeup of Hesse’s top administrative layers becomes difficult to gauge with precision. The fact that the government remained firmly in Social Democratic control certainly helped keep to a minimum the return of formerly Nazi civil servants into the upper echelons. On the other hand, there was a considerable turnover of Land personnel at the close of the 1940s. An undetermined number of high civil servants left to join either the Bizonal administration or, after 1949, the federal civil service. Hesse lost some of its most distinguished and most decidedly democratic top civil servants, such as Werner Hilpert, to the ministries in Bonn. More than half of Hesse’s leading civil servants in 1950 do not appear on lists for the same positions just three years earlier, at the height of the occupation. It is tempting to speculate that these “newcomers” were indeed individuals the Americans had removed for political reasons not long before. However, virtually none of the “new” names in 1950 and later years appear on lists of the politically tainted the Americans diligently compiled during the purges from 1947 to 1948. The Bizonal administration, which was widely viewed as the precursor to a federal government, showed a tendency, similar to the one in the Hessian bureaucracy, to place higher standards on the upper than on the lower ranks. As late as May 1949, the personnel department of the bizonal economic –

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administration continued to employ lengthy questionnaires (based on the sixpage American Fragebogen) to scrutinize political pasts.139 Statistics compiled by the bizonal personnel office reveal that the proportion of politically tainted individuals fell considerably with increasing responsibility (See table 4.4). This was true not only for civil servants whom the denazification tribunals had classified as Group III “offenders” (no bizonal civil servants at any level had been classified as Groups I or II), but also for those whom they had labeled “followers,” “exonerated,” or even “amnestied”; in other words, the Mitläuferfabrik (follower factory) of denazification had perhaps let individuals off lightly, but the sheer fact of membership still appears to have affected professional advancement. Of the forty-one high civil servants who held top positions, such as division chiefs, only one had been classified a “follower,” while sixteen others had been subject to the law, but exonerated or amnestied. The proportion of former party members increased further down the ladder. Weighing against an overly sanguine view, however, is the certainty that many “exonerated” civil servants had not earned that distinction through overt opposition toward the NSDAP (as stipulated in the Liberation Law), but rather because they had used every conceivable ploy to clear their name during their Spruchkammer process.

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Table 4.4 Civil Servants in the Bizonal Administration, by Rank and Denazification Classification, as of 30 April 1949

† Common groupings in American or Zone, although British zone tribunals tended to exonerate more readily than American zone tribunals. Because Christmas Amnesty affected older individuals who were either wounded, handicapped, or relatively poor, and Youth Amnesty all those born after 1919, it was often assumed that the political responsibility of the former was often greater. †† In German original, from left to right: Verwaltungsleiter (Abteilungsleiter, Unterabteilungsleiter, Ministerialdirigent und Verwaltungsangehöriger mit einer Besoldung über 14,000 DM jährlich), sonstiger höherer Dienst, gehobener Dienst, nachgeordnete Dienststellen. Source: “Übersicht über die politische Zusammensetzung der Verwaltungsangehörigen der Verwaltungen des VWG, Stand 30.4.1949,” Ffm, 10 July 1949, BA/Z11/389. Percentages that do not add up to 100 due to rounding error. –

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At first, it appeared as if federal institutions would adopt the somewhat stringent standards witnessed in the states in 1946 and 1947. The notably progressive personnel office in the Council of States which was responsible for hiring all civil servants, categorically ruled out the employment of individuals placed in Groups I, II, or III. The personnel office required individual Länder that wished to nominate Beamte for positions in the bizone to send denazification records as well as personnel files for scrutiny. If Land superiors had “doubts” not mentioned in the files, they were to pass the information on as well.140 The federal government successfully avoided accepting the stringent political scrutiny of applicants by bypassing the bizonal Personnel office altogether, and disbanding it in 1953.141 When compared to the experience of the civil service, denazification was a relatively short-lived intrusion into the operation of West German businesses. During the spring and summer of 1945, the need for reestablishing order at the local level prompted military government commanders to grant broad exceptions to mandatory arrest orders. Laws specifically targeting private enterprises began in early August, and then followed one after another with sufficient frequency to elicit consternation from those affected as well as from those charged with carrying them out. On August 4, the Regional government of the Wiesbaden district issued directives concerning the “political cleansing of private enterprise.” These orders, which applied to businesses of all sizes and branches, required the removal of owners, managers and board members who had held offices in the NSDAP, SS, or SA, had joined the Party before Hitler’s seizure of power, or had in any way demonstrated “more than nominal membership regardless of the date of entry into the Party.”142 To the extent that companies continued to operate at all, they had barely begun to remove tainted personnel when the regional directive was supplanted by the Military Government Law No. 8. This law extended to the private sector schematic denazification of the sort previously applied to the civil service, the media, and education. By issuing Law No. 8 in all four American-zone Länder in October 1945, the Americans hoped to attain a uniform and thorough purge.143 The main effect of Law No. 8 was to expand the political review of owners and board members to any company member in “more than ordinary work.” It was soon overtaken by the much broader Liberation Law, but officially remained in effect until 1948. Despite its very limited application, it had an impact that is greater than often believed. By prohibiting “tainted” individuals from holding positions of responsibility in business it did temporarily exclude many owners and managers who had joined the National Socialist ranks.144 In accordance with Law No. 8, local governments formed supervisory committees that made recommendations on dismissals and reinstatements of those in business enterprises.145 Working from six-page American-designed Fragebogen and information provided by the supervisory committees, American Special Branch officers removed thousands of –

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owners, managers, supervisors, skilled workers, and others throughout the fall and winter of 1945-46.146 In late 1945, the American military government transferred the administrative responsibility for denazification, including the economy, to Gottlob Binder, who became Hesse’s first Denazification Minister. The Liberation Law would expand his responsibilities only a few months later.147 The military government, however, continued spot inspections of large industries to ensure that Law No. 8 was being followed. These inspections, which uncovered numerous lapses, resulted in the removal and trial in military government courts of many “important owners.”148 Apparently, a number of business leaders decided to hold off on implementing Law No. 8, anticipating instead the Liberation Law, which would supersede it when it took effect in June 1946.149 Once the tribunal system was established in the American zone, business leaders had to prove their political credentials at almost every step. Until 1949, individuals seeking to register a new company or reconstitute an old one had to provide their classification by the Spruchkammer. Without it, they were not permitted to work in “positions of responsibility.” The application for a license required that they provide, in addition to the tribunal’s verdict, information about membership in the NSDAP and its affiliated organizations, perhaps because tribunal classifications were recognized as inadequate.150 Commerce committees [Gewerbeausschüsse] established under the auspices of the local Chambers of Industry and Trade reviewed applications between 1947 and 1949.151 By 1949, however, enforcement of denazification measures in the field seems to have been relatively lax. Unlike public employees, “followers” from the ranks of the business leadership, once classified by the Spruchkammer, were free to resume their positions, provided the tribunals did not explicitly impose a ban on professional activity. Probably for this reason alone, fewer business managers and owners seem to have appealed the initial verdict. A classification in Group IV generally met the criteria for a return to their métier. Until late 1948, owners and managers “subject to the law” were forbidden to work in positions of authority or even within their own plant. In their place, the Liberation Ministry, often in consultation with the owners and Ministry of Economics, appointed proxies (Treuhänder) to operate the companies until the tribunal reached a final verdict.152 The occupational ban proved to be the most galling aspect of denazification for the economic elite. The confiscation of property acquired through “opportunism” (Nutzniesserschaft—usually “aryanization”) ran a close second only because it affected relatively few entrepreneurs. It is difficult to gauge the effect of denazification on the continuity of the entrepreneurial elite in Hesse. Many owners openly told American investigators that denazification had not proved especially harmful, since the prostrate German economy (especially the scarcity of raw materials) and –

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wartime damage had all but eliminated production anyway. Denazification offered a means of culling their work force, as long as it neither affected them personally nor robbed them of their most skilled managers and technicians.153 In countless other cases, businessmen and women circumvented regulations with greater ease than civil servants. One of the most effective and enduring ways in which the Spruchkammer could proceed against those convicted in a high category (Groups I through III) was to confiscate all or part of their property. This included the business capital of convicted individuals, which was often placed under the auspices of a government trustee until the final decision in the denazification process. Whereas sentences could be reduced and pardons given, confiscation of property was usually more difficult to reverse. Confiscation was an infinitely more serious blow to entrepreneurs than the more commonly levied monetary fines, which were usually paid off in inflated currency. In addition to punishing some former National Socialists in business, did denazification begin to “recast” the business leadership? Relatively few top business leaders were permanently excluded from their occupation as a result of their ties to National Socialism. Large firms that operated in Hesse continued to exist, and even prospered in the rapidly expanding economy of the 1950s. Opel returned to the ownership of General Motors, which had bought it in the interwar period. The Ada-Ada shoe factory in Frankfurt reverted to its Jewish owners, three brothers who had converted it to a publicly held company and sold it under value before emigrating to the United States in 1937.154 Of 157 randomly selected owners or board members of Hessian companies listed in the 1941 Handbuch der Großunternehmen, only 68 could be located in the same reference work or the “economic Who’s Who”, Leitende Männer der Wirtschaft, in the 1950s. This unexpectedly low correlation undoubtedly understates the occupational survival rate of the economic elite.155 Even if the one assumes that as many as half of the sample survived, there is no reliable method of determining the cause of the discontinuity, much less tracing it to denazification. As with civil servants, it is also useful to consider whether denazification had a greater relative long-term effect on business leaders in influential positions. To assess this issue, I chose two representative samples. The first is a complete list of the presidium members of the eleven Hessian Chambers of Industry and Trade.156 The second consists of a broad sample of top managers, board members, and owners from the city of Darmstadt.157 The Chambers of Industry and Trade, which served as an important element in the organization of the West German economy and as a bridge between the private and the public sectors, were headed by respected business leaders from the community. Officers were elected by a council (Beirat) of member businesses, elected in its turn by the membership at large. The (almost exclusively) men on the presidium are therefore leaders in their occupation in two respects. First, their election is an indicator of the respect which their peers –

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bestow. Second, from their positions, they play a key role in setting policy for business and the economy as a whole. The Darmstadt sample, by contrast, offers a local cross-section of active entrepreneurs. Denazification initially had a considerable impact on the political composition of the Hessian Chambers of Industry and Trade. Of the sixty-one presidents, vice-presidents, and general managers who headed the eleven chambers in 1947, only fourteen (or 22 percent) had been associated with Nazism closely enough to have been subject to the law. Of these, all were placed in Group IV, Group V, or exonerated. (see Table 4.5). Notably, not a single presidency was filled by a former Party member, and nine of the fourteen followers were general managers, a tenured position, rather than elected business leaders. When one also considers that several of the “followers” had exhibited very little sympathy for National Socialism, the conclusion might be that denazification was attaining its goal. However, once a “clean” political background ceased to be a primary determinant of employment in the chambers, followers began to return in greater numbers, and even constituted a majority of the presidencies in the Land (7 out of 11, or 64 percent). Already by 1953, there was a greater proportion of former NSDAP members among presidents than among vice-presidents. More disturbing is the absolute decline of non-Nazis in influential positions in the economy within five years after the end of denazification.

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Table 4.5 Denazification Classification of the Leadership of Chambers of Industry and Trade in Hesse, 1947 to 1956.

Source: Die Industrie- und Handelskammern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, (1951, 1953, 1956); HHStA-W 520 (Spruchkammer); HHStA-W 507/4799.

Comparing these results with a random sample of Darmstadt entrepreneurs and managers (see Table 4.6) leads to two conclusions. First, “renazification” was more pronounced in the influential Chambers between 1951 and the mid 1950s than is the case for a cross-section of Darmstadt’s business community. Second, the return of many “followers” (an increase of two-thirds in five years) was not accompanied by a decline in the real num–

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bers of those “not subject to the Liberation Law.” As a proportion of the entrepreneurial community in large enterprises in Darmstadt, the followers were not increasing. In the Chambers, on the other hand, where the absolute number of presidium seats increased only slightly, non-Nazis were displaced by those who had been politically untenable only a few years earlier. Table 4.6 Long-Term Effects of Denazification on Hessian Chambers of Industry and Trade and Darmstadt Business Leaders

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Presidium consists only of presidents and vice presidents (honorary chairmen not counted). IHK managers (Geschäftsführer) also not included, since they are not, technically, business leaders. However, there were proportionally more “followers” among Hesse’s Geschäftsführer than among presidium members in the 1950s. Source: Handbuch der Großunternehmen (1951, 1953, 1955); Die Industrie- und Handelskammern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, (1951, 1953, 1956); HHStA-W 520 (Spruchkammer); HHStA-W 507/4799. Use of Darmstadt Einwohnermelderegister was indispensable in obtaining information leading to Spruchkammer files for Darmstadt business leaders. StA-D Einwohnermelderegister

In Hesse, denazification affected the business leadership much less, and with fewer long-term effects than was the case in the civil service. In the fall of 1945, all permissions for physicians to practice medicine were revoked.158 Physicians’ medical credentials (“approbation,” the Latin term used in Germany) remained unaffected, but without a license, they were barred from practicing their craft. Physicians had to apply for new licenses with their local military government detachment. The American Public Health Division issued or denied new licenses based on Fragebogen answers. Physicians whose Nazi affiliations were too incriminating could request special “temporary” licenses. These exemptions were issued if physicians could present a compelling case that their work was essential for maintaining public health. Military government officials were aware of the serious problems of malnutrition, disease, and exposure, but also apparently determined to promote the establishment of non-Nazis in local communities. Consequently, they granted physicians 60-day extensions only if local civilian authorities, or the –

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Physicians’ Chambers, convinced them that no suitable replacement was available. “It is the consistent policy for Land Gross Hesse,” declared U.S. Military Government headquarters in Hesse, “that all non-Nazi physicians (those not in the mandatory or discretionary removal classification) shall be permitted a private practice at the expense of physicians in the mandatory removal classification now holding temporary and revocable permits”.159 Second extensions were even more difficult to arrange. Within the month, the Americans assigned the Physicians’ Chambers the responsibility of purging all physicians who had joined the NSDAP before 1 May 1937 or held offices of any kind in Nazi-affiliated organizations. Soon afterward, the military government also turned over responsibility for issuing temporary permits, although these remained subject to American review.160 All temporary licenses automatically expired in tandem with the implementation of the Liberation Law on 5 June 1946.161 Spruchkammer documents became the decisive factor in granting licenses. More stringent conditions were placed on renewing temporary permits prior to receiving a tribunal verdict. Classification in Group IV and, unless otherwise specified by the tribunals, Group III was sufficient for a physician to resume private practice. Tainted physicians were not, however, permitted to hold supervisory positions, a stipulation that affected surgeons and clinic directors severely.162 This led to the temporary exclusion—at least on paper—of many tainted physicians. These measures could be circumvented in many ways, most frequently using the escape clauses permitting the Minister President to grant or extend temporary licenses in the interest of immediate and pressing health concerns.163 Physicians’ chambers exercised some discretion over the employment of politically undesirable physicians. They frequently flouted military government regulations, probably with the knowledge of some in the Land government and the occupation authorities. It is impossible to gauge the extent of the exceptions that they permitted, but leadership strife in the regional Physicians’ Chambers brought some details to light. In Wiesbaden, the president of the chamber, Erich Langer, in consultation with the head of Hesse’s health department, Dr. Wilhelm von Drigalski, contracted with National Socialist physicians for specific tasks, such as the medical supervision of refugee camps. Their rivals for the leadership of the regional physicians’ chambers reported this to the American authorities in a call for their replacement. They certainly were not engaged in a deliberate “renazification” campaign, but were also aware that their actions contravened American policy. Both Drigalski and Langer had excellent political credentials, having suffered for the Nazis’ suspicions about them.164 More than either of the other two groups, physicians exploited the dire need for trained personnel in order to keep their posts. In Darmstadt, which boasted a truly anti-Nazi professional leadership by the summer of 1945, the physicians’ chamber explained to military government authorities that –

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removing Nazis from practice would leave only 52 out of 128 practitioners, a mere forty-five percent. Of the fifty-two non-Nazis, 14 were over sixty-five years old, and four were obstetricians. Strict adherence to denazification guidelines, in other words, would leave the undernourished and overstressed population with only a third of the normal medical care. The appeal raised the specter of potential epidemics, especially among children. Since “one cannot make a physician in eight weeks [sic] training”, they argued, it would be better to relax the rules.165 In addition to other common strategies, physicians found means of defending themselves before the Spruchkammer that were particular to their occupation. Doctor/patient privilege, a tradition in Germany as elsewhere (although it was seriously abused during the Third Reich), placed many records of medical crimes beyond the easy reach of tribunal prosecutors. In the summer of 1946, the regional Darmstadt Health Department sent an order to all local Health Offices, which held many of the records of stateordered sterilization cases from the Third Reich. It stated simply that:

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The turning over of sterilization files to the Spruchkammer is not possible, because this would break the protection of professional confidentiality. In such cases, the State Health Department can provide the Spruchkammer with the information that is necessary for the consideration of their cases. 166

One investigator, who did not trust the physicians at the Health Offices to provide accurate information, insisted on personally reviewing the files but was turned away. He filed a legal motion, which was not granted. 167 Given the time constraints under which tribunal personnel worked, the hurdle of engaging medical examiners to review physicians’ files constrained the gathering of evidence, even if it was not an absolute hurdle. With timing that paralleled the easing of politically-based restrictions in private enterprise, physicians, too, faced less scrutiny. With the occupation statute signed by the Western powers in 1949, the United States relinquished its authority over public health, which had largely been turned over to the Germans at any rate. The effects of denazification on the medical profession are illustrated by Darmstadt. All physicians in private practice were listed in the annual address books that served as the precursor to telephone directories. A database for all practicing Darmstadt physicians between 1949 and 1956 was then cross-checked against the city’s official residence registry, which included outlying towns. Thus, a fair proportion of denazification files could be located for the city’s physicians. 168 An overview of the results is presented in Table 4.7.

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Table 4.7 Denazification of Physicians in Darmstadt, 1949-1956

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Source: Amtliches Adreßbuch der Stadt Darmstadt, 1949, 1952, 1954/55, 1956/57. Compiled lists checked against Einwohnermelderegister, StA-D, to determine place of residence; this, in turn, enabled the locating of a relatively high degree of denazification files, HHStA-W 520 (Spruchkammer).

Darmstadt’s free practicing physicians can be considered representative of Hesse’s, indeed of West Germany’s medical profession in the postwar period. The early phase of stringent denazification threatened to create a serious shortage of medical care due to the large proportion of physicians who had joined the Party. By the end of the occupation, most of them had been rehabilitated. As early as 1949, well over a third of those for whom information was available had been members of the NSDAP or its branches.169 The fact that this proportion remains fairly constant through the mid 1950s suggests that most “tainted” physicians had already returned to practice by 1949. Also notable is the low number of Darmstadt physicians “not subject to the Liberation Law.” The proportion of politically unburdened doctors actually decreases from one-fifth to less than a sixth between 1949 and 1956. On the surface at least, the Darmstadt sample also indicates that only a single physician, arriving in 1956, was more than nominally involved with National Socialism. This positive note is qualified somewhat by the realities of the tribunal process. Several doctors had originally been classified in higher categories, but had their final verdicts reduced upon appeal. This was the case for two of the holders of “Group V” tribunal certificates. In addition, more than one-fifth of all Darmstadt physicians appealed their initial verdicts. Most appeals were granted, but roughly a third were not. More than anything else, the data support the conclusion that the denazification program kept few former National Socialists out of the medical profession beyond the period of direct occupation. –

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The Darmstadt physicians, who represent a cross-section of the “rank and file” of practitioners, can be compared with the pinnacle of the profession. The Hessian town of Marburg hosts one of the more respected medical faculties in Western Germany. Because the Americans placed a premium on purging Party members from education in general and higher education in particular, Marburg’s medical faculty offer a glimpse at the medium-term effects of careful denazification. Like other medical faculties, that at the Philipps University in Marburg became highly nazified during the Third Reich. More than three-quarters of the roughly forty faculty members had joined the party, most of them after 1933.170 Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, full professor and Director of the Institute for Hygiene, rose to the rank of Standartenführer (roughly colonel) in the SS, and traveled frequently to evaluate sanitation at sites controlled by the SS. This included an August 1942 trip to the Belzec extermination camp, where he witnessed the gassing of some 500 Jews, noting later that the disposal of the bodies “was not entirely satisfactory from the point of view of hygiene.”171 A core of four professors had drawn on their Party connections to fill vacancies with NSDAP loyalists and to terrorize the few non-Nazis and opponents into silence and acquiescence. The faculty became deeply divided between the “Nazi clique,” as one professor described it, and the politically neutral faculty, who strongly resented the politicization of the faculty and uncollegial behavior.172 In preparation for the re-opening of the university in the late summer of 1946, American officers from the Divisions of Education and Liaison and Security (responsible for denazification) carefully vetted the faculty. Eighteen out of forty-one medical instructors were dismissed “because they were members of the Nazi party or subsidiaries thereof, or because they had demonstrated through speeches and writings that they were ardent Nazi sympathizers.”173 The remaining twenty-three were employed pending further review. Because the Liberation Law had already entered into force when the University opened, the implementation of denazification was handed over to the Liberation Ministry, but with close American oversight until 1948. Faculty lists had to be approved before the beginning of each semester, and each “follower” kept in office had to be justified. Under a system established at other universities in the American zone, the university rector created a standing “political committee” to review the faculty and make recommendations.174 In theory, this committee was charged with carefully reviewing individuals’ political records in the interest of denazification. In practice, however, the faculty members and administrators who sat on it were more concerned with meeting the difficult staffing needs of the university. In one of many glaring examples, the committee recommended for further employment one professor whom many had placed within the “Nazi-Clique.” On the one hand, they stressed the university’s need of his particular specialty. On the other, the recommendation stressed that the professor “had been –

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denounced [to the Spruchkammer] out of vengeance by an employee whom he had fired.”175 The Marburg professors realized a verdict of Group IV or worse would leave their positions in jeopardy. Many hired lawyers to argue their cases, often with positive results. Most presented an extraordinary number of Persilscheine, commonly from colleagues on the faculty. Occasionally, the lower verdicts they sought were justified. One individual, for example, had strongly lobbied for Hindenburg in the 1932 presidential election, earning him the enmity of others closer to the radical than the conservative right. He joined the NSDAP in 1933 to protect his career. He was not promoted for the duration of the Third Reich; one colleague, himself “not subject to the Law,” testified that “his position was permanently in danger.” The treatment he received from the primary Nazi zealot in the department was presented as incriminating evidence at the latter’s tribunal hearing.176 Table 4.8 University of Marburg Medical Faculty and the Spruchkammer Denazification Process: Analysis of all Faculty “Subject to the Law for Liberation” Final Verdict resulting from denazification ruling and appeals

Of these, … Initially Charged As

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Placed in Group Group IV (Follower) Group V (Exonerated)

total 7 15

I-III IV 5 2 1 11

V 0 3

First Verdict: placed in Group I-III 1 0

IV 5 7

No Appeal

V 1 8

4 5

Source: Adreßbuch der Stadt Marburg, 1950/51, 1953/54, 1956/57, 1959/60; also numerous files in HHStA-W 504; Spruchkammer files, HHStA-W 520; and HHStA-W 501. Note: Number in the second column from the left is the final verdict, regardless of the number of appeals, if any. For example: of those who ended up in Group IV, four were placed there in the first instance, and chose not to appeal; one was placed originally in Group III and received Group IV on appeal, one appeal failed, and another was appealed (voided) by the Liberation Ministry for being too lenient.

Despite their efforts, twenty faculty members for whom files were found were placed in Group IV or Group III in the first instance, but seven of them were “exonerated” on appeal (See Table 4.8). They used two strategies to reverse the decisions. First, they launched aggressive appeals, using lawyers and the entire gamut of exculpatory arguments to justify their political behavior during the Reich. This frequently sufficed to “exonerate” them (Group V). The Liberation Ministry, however, just as aggressively fought to have the classifications reflect some sense of reality, and annulled the verdicts, calling for retrials.177 In the end, most of the professors won out, and continued to teach at the Philipps University, especially those who had not belonged to the inner –

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clique before 1945. The second approach was to pull up stakes and move to different universities, especially in the British zone, where denazification was more lax for the moderately tainted. Of the seven most active National Socialist agitators during the Third Reich, three remained. Two others moved to other universities further north, and two could not be traced.178 Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, whose work with the SS had directly supported the “final solution,” was removed and never returned to university teaching, although criminal proceedings against him were dropped.179 The unusually high number of exonerated individuals in the medical faculty of the Philipps University (See Table 4.9) is both a partial vindication of denazification and a reflection of its shortcomings.180 On the one hand, it demonstrates the serious effort the Hessian officials expended on denazifying sensitive institutions. On the other hand, it indicates the ability of those with adequate motivation and means to manipulate the Spruchkammer system.

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Table 4.9 Denazification Status of University of Marburg Medical Faculty, 1950-56

Source: HHStA-W 504; HHStA-W 520 (Spruchkammer); and HHStA-W 501; Kürschners Gelehrten-Kalender; Adreßbuch der Stadt Marburg, 1950/51, 1953/54, 1956/57, 1959/60.

An examination of Table 4.9 shows, among other things, that the more exalted positions in the medical profession had a higher number of former National Socialists than did the rank and file.181 The denazification of the high civil service, the business leadership, and the medical profession was not ultimately successful; nor, however, was it an unmitigated failure. Rather, its effects were ambiguous. Certainly the commitment of Hesse’s Liberation Ministry to see the program through was sincere. In this, Hesse under the occupation differs markedly from Bavaria.182 The results, however, were similar. Not only did former National Socialists return to elite professions, but, at least among entrepreneurs and physicians, the trend was stronger in the higher levels than in the lower echelons. By the mid 1950s, the proportion of former Party members was greater in the Chambers of Industry and Trade and the university medical faculties than among the rank and file. This relationship is the reverse of the hypothesis with which this study was launched. The elite had both the will and the means to resist a complete exchange of personnel. At the same –

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time, the record falls far short of a “renazification.” Elites’ defensive claims that they had joined the Nazi movement out of opportunism, or that they had broken with it in spirit if not in fact by the end of the war were not always fabrications.

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Temporary Exclusion The occupational, demographic, and economic upheavals of the immediate postwar years gradually gave way to a degree of “normalcy.” This return to familiar procedure included, among other things, a de-emphasis of prejudicial hiring and promotional practices based on political backgrounds. By the early 1950s, few employers inquired about applicants’ activities during the Third Reich, and as early as 1950 such questions ceased to play a formal role in the ownership and management of businesses or the licensing of physicians. Only sensitive government posts continued to require background checks. The consequent return of many former National Socialists to positions of power, respect, and influence raised concern at the time and criticism in retrospect. But a balanced assessment of the trend should take into account the temporary exclusion of elites from their chosen professions. Germans involved in the denazification process often used the term Entfernung, literally “removal,” or “distancing” to describe a programmatic goal that the Americans espoused: to bar politically tainted individuals from exerting real influence. Even temporary Entfernung, so the logic, could have significant long-term effects on the exchange of personnel among elites, as an example from the scientific community illustrates. Johannes Stark, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, headed the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft until 1936. Unlike many other prominent scientists, he promoted the völkisch movement and the NSDAP. Owing largely to his political activity, he became increasingly isolated within the scientific community. A Bavarian Spruchkammer convicted him as a “major offender” on 20 July 1947, and sentenced him to four years’ hard labor. His classification was soon reduced and his sentence suspended, but Stark died in Traunstein on 21 June 1951.183 The end of the war effectively ended his activity in his profession. Ralf Dahrendorf has referred to “the staying power of the administrative elite in the storms of political change.”184 While this may be true for the structural institution of Germany’s three-track professional civil service, it certainly exaggerates the civil service’s compositional continuity. On 1 May 1946, only 55 percent of Hesse’s public workers (this includes Beamte, employees, and wage workers) had been taken over from previous public institutions. Two percent were reemployed, most after having been dismissed during the Third Reich. The rest, 43 percent, were new to their positions.185 Regardless of the influx of “131ers” beginning in 1951, many thousands of former higher civil servants were unable to find employment in the public –

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sector for several years. This argument is underscored by the case of excluded Beamte, who after 1951 could claim a legal right to reinstatement so long as they were not considered highly tainted politically. Despite this considerable advantage, compared with either physicians or business leaders, thousands of so-called 131er were never reinstated. Instead, they took generous early retirement benefits or languished in lower positions in expectation of future promotions as “Civil Servants awaiting reinstatment” (Beamte auf Wiederverwendung). Many of those who were excluded until after 1948 faced considerable disadvantages compared to both established elites and early newcomers. Later arrivals had often missed the boat; by the time of their arrival many questions of property, allocation, and professional networks had been established. It was also more difficult to recreate a financial base in the world of tight money following the currency reform. Hesse’s state parliament did not regulate the integration of late returning Beamte until 1951. In the first drafts, the law stipulated that Hesse would reinstate Beamte in positions of similar rank if, on 8 May 1945, they had been working in the administration in the territory or under the jurisdiction of the areas now comprising Greater Hesse. The law actually aimed at eliminating the possibility of future claims as much as it did at re-instating the civil servants, since § 6 stipulated that returning bureaucrats had to make their claims within three months of returning to Hesse.186 Moreover, the term spätheimkehrender Beamte was deliberately defined so as to apply only to those Beamte who had been native to Hesse in 1945; these Beamte received preferential treatment in their reinstatement compared to refugee Beamte. The refugees, covered by the concurrent legislation to implement §131 GG, were accorded no legal right to re-instatement, which the Spätheimkehrergesetz granted natives.187 Clearly, argued the government, Hessian Beamte who had been prisoners of war for several years had paid their price and deserved a chance to rebuild their lives. Most found re-employment, although 273 late-returning civil servants had not been reinstated at former ranks. Roughly one hundred of these 273 were earning a salary as non-tenured employees or laborers.188 Some of the most active National Socialists were physically isolated from postwar German society for several years in prisons and camps. The earliest operational guidelines that the American Joint Chiefs of Staff issued to military government ordered the automatic arrest of individuals who fell into any of ten key categories. These arrests were both systematic, because they followed clearly formulated guidelines based on affiliations and offices held, and arbitrary, due to the latitude exercised by the arresting commanders. In addition to officers and officials of the National Socialist Party, the military general staff, the police, the SS, and the SA, JCS 1067 (issued 26 April 1945) called for the automatic arrest of ministers and leading civil servants as well as territorial officials down to mayors. Leaders in the private sector were not spared, as the directive also included Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in indus–

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try and commerce. By contrast, physicians were not singled out for special scrutiny.189 However, many physicians were picked up because they held a rank as medical officer of the SA or the SS, even though the SA frequently conferred this title on physicians who merely conducted physical exams on SA recruits. The townspeople of the medium-sized town of Lauterbach took note of the fact that the first columns of American troops that passed through contained civilian prisoners of war of all stripes, and that the mayor was ferreted out of hiding within two days.190 Detention camps flourished in the spring and summer months of 1945. An archipelago of small and medium-sized camps shot up to house prisoners of war and Germans subject to automatic arrest. Most of these camps disappeared within months, as arrestees were funneled into the official interment camp system. The largest camp for Hesse was located near Darmstadt and housed a maximum of nearly 30,000 Germans. By the end of 1948, the denazification ministry transformed the internment center into a labor camp for offenders sentenced by denazification tribunals (Groups I, II, and occasionally III).191 The number of detainees at the Darmstadt camp declined to 11,000 by mid 1947, and to only 6,500 four months later. The size of the camp dwindled rapidly in 1948, leaving only a few hundred of those sentenced to labor by year’s end (see chart 4.10).

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Chart 4.10 Inmates held in Darmstadt Internment – and Work Camp, 1948

Source: Belegungsstärken der Internierungs- und Arbeitlage Darmstadt 1948, HHStA-W 501/19.

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Among the 11,354 inmates in April 1947, the largest occupational contingent consisted of state and municipal civil servants (2,751, including all ranks as well as police). Also high on the list were independent businessmen (with 1,111 the fourth largest occupation represented), “manufacturers and independent businessmen” (163), and physicians (295, ninth largest).192 The decline was attributable mainly to releases as the five denazification tribunals in the camps cleared many inmates of serious offenses. Others were transferred to other zones, countries, or camps.193 The Darmstadt work camp was the last to be dissolved in Hesse, on the last day of 1951, with the handful of remaining prisoners released or transferred to regular prisons.194 Automatic detention did not end when the German civilian government assumed basic responsibility for denazification. The Liberation Law of 5 March 1946 mandated the detention of anyone initially charged as a “major offender” or an “offender.” The tribunals generously granted appeals to delay detention prior to the verdict if an individual was occupationally indispensable (with a work permit from the Americans) or medically unfit to serve time. However, the detention and work camps were a small but significant aspect in the recasting of German society because they removed many of the most politically tainted individuals from their occupations (and consequently from positions of influence) for up to a few years, including many who were eventually classified as “followers” or “exonerated.” Two or three years of detention is a considerable length of time to be excluded from one’s métier. Unfortunately, the automatic detention system also caught many whose formal affiliations greatly overstated their involvement and support of National Socialism. When the Youth and Christmas Amnesties were announced in 1946, Frankfurt prison officials were “relieved.” The bulk of the incarcerated “little Nazis,” they believed, had committed minor offenses under economic pressure. Releasing them would allow “small” Nazis to contribute to the reconstruction of German society, “their experience still having the value of a warning.”195 Just how conducive the detention and exclusion of the more heavily incriminated Germans was to the recasting of the political culture of the Federal Republic is largely a matter of speculation. On the one hand the original hope that the exclusion of these individuals would offer less incriminated colleagues time to establish themselves surely succeeded in some cases. Already in 1947, 79 percent of Darmstadt inmates had been incarcerated for more than 18 months.196 However, because the period of exclusion was usually fairly short, most having been released by the end of 1948, and because the laws regarding civil servants eventually mandated that most of those released had a right to reinstatement or compensation, many rapidly reattained positions comparable to their old ones. H. T., a gynecologist in Kassel, resumed practice in his old home town within a year after being released from the camp in April 1947. Having been classified in Group II, he was sentenced to 1 year of labor, which he served out. O. G., general practitioner of Fulda, also reestablished himself after serving a year.197 –

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The labor camps that existed alongside detention camps housed individuals convicted of serious political crimes by the Spruchkammer. Sentences could range up to ten years for serious offenders, but all sentences that would have lasted beyond the end of 1952 were either pardoned or commuted to probation by the laws concluding denazification. Only a small minority of physicians, higher civil servants, and businessmen (in that order) were sentenced to labor camps, reflecting the criteria that were applied in Spruchkammer decisions; most of the camp inmates had been Gestapo agents, SD agents, or ranking SS officers.198 To exclude these people from the labor pool for several years was justified, and professional exclusion over such a long period was bound to disrupt their careers. Even a one-and- ahalf-year delay could prove demoralizing and detrimental to future prospects. An OMGUS report maintained that the ability to reintegrate into the community after release from internment

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seems to be conditional upon the ex-internee’s social status. Those of the lower strata, social and economic, find it easier to adjust themselves to the new order. A laborer with an active Nazi record has less difficulty in finding work that is in keeping with his abilities than does a businessman, official, or even white-collar worker who is barred by the denazification law from anything but common labor.199

A Spruchkammer sentence to a labor camp did not preclude further legal action against an individual under the civil or criminal codes, although such cases were rare. Some inmates of internment and work camps, many of them the most active Nazis, drew political and personal consequences from their situation during their months or years in the camps. The Hessian Liberation Ministry, which assumed responsibility of the camps in 1946, sought to reeducate them, even though the term “reeducation” was studiously avoided.200 The Hessian camp administrators provided reading material and regular lectures on contemporary Germany, democracy, and the Allies. The books in most demand in the libraries, according to one report, were those revealing the criminal aspects of the Third Reich. In the main internment camp at Darmstadt, the five copies of Alexander Mitscherlich’s and Fred Mielke’s Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung, the precursor to their classic report on inhumane medical experiments, Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit, based on documents from the Nuremberg trials, “was positively a sensation.”201 The internment camp report’s authors insisted that more copies of Eugon Kogon’s The SS State be provided to meet demand. Lecturers were frequently men (no women apparently) of considerable stature. They included Pastor Martin Niemöller (“Impressions from my travels in America”), Darmstadt governor Ludwig Bergsträsser (“How do England and France view the German question?”), Professor Karl Jakobi (“Authority and Freedom”), and Dr. Gerhard Ockel (“An answer to the question of collective guilt”). Based on discussions following the lectures and on anonymous questionnaires, inspectors of the camps –

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in the fall of 1947 estimated that only a minority of inmates remained “unshaken Nazis,” and that a much smaller number had not internalized aspects of the National Socialist ideology at all. By far the largest group, they posited, had been convinced National Socialists or opportunistic followers who were later “completely disappointed and have concluded that they were duped.” As a result, these mostly young former Nazis were “searching for something new without clear direction.” In an anonymous statement, one internee who identified himself as a businessman lent credence to the report’s assessment: “After everything which has happened without our knowledge or wishes, we do not want to be Nazis anymore; but can we be democrats after everything which has happened?”202 Only a small, albeit radical minority of National Socialists were held in detention and labor camps for any length of time. As this chapter has shown, most former National Socialists returned to their professions by the early to mid 1950s. The majority of these were the opportunists who had joined when they recognized the advantages membership in the NSDAP or its affiliated organizations could bring. Others jumped on the bandwagon enthusiastically, if belatedly, but had never held positions of real responsibility. In retrospect, as American and German denazifiers discovered, it is exceedingly difficult to differentiate between these fellow travelers and others who carried more responsibility. Nevertheless, a large proportion of the rank and file Nazis among high civil servants, business leaders, and physicians suffered some notable professional disadvantages as a result of their political activity during the Third Reich, even if they eventually reestablished themselves in their professions. Foremost among the disadvantages was temporary exclusion from their chosen occupations, which lasted anywhere from a few months to several years. Hesse’s political leaders, seconded by high-ranking civil servants, repeatedly distinguished between ending denazification and former National Socialists’ right to reinstatement. Even at the end of 1950, they maintained the policy that the beneficiaries of the 1946 Christmas Amnesty, as well as those convicted in foreign countries but subsequently released, should be treated as nominally incriminated. Consequently, they should not be entitled to reinstatement.203 Temporary exclusion hit civil servants particularly hard, the more so the higher they stood in the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. Most of those removed did not return to administrative positions until the early 1950s, and then without restitution for the time between their removal and their reinstatement. Despite intense lobbying on behalf of the “victims” of denazification, Hessian leaders insisted, with the backing of the courts and military government, that their removal amounted to the “loss of all legal rights as Beamte.”204 The 1951 federal law based on Article 131 of the Basic Law reversed this policy, which had already been undermined by the return of Beamte identified by the denazification tribunals as followers. The 1951 law –

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required state and federal governments to give denazified followers preference before new civil servants, but not Nazi victims or opponents, in hiring and promotion. In the meantime, many opted for retirement—and their full pensions—rather than reinstatement. Still others waited for reinstatement or worked in positions considerably below those from which they had been removed for many years. In fact, the League for the Protection of Beamte viewed as one of their main responsibilities the continual struggle for the “appropriate” reinstatement of civil servants who had lost their positions in the course of denazification and German territorial losses. They complained bitterly of the slow and incomplete restitution even in the mid 1950s.205 Of more than 200,000 civil servants in the Federal Republic with a right to reinstatement in 1954, only about 120,000 had been notified of suitable positions, and 14,000 applications for recognition had not yet been processed.206 Still, especially at the federal level, the returning 131ers was quite significant. It has been estimated that 131ers constituted 33 percent of all ministerial civil servants in Bonn by 1933, and considerably more in individual ministries: 40 percent in the Foreign Office, 42 percent in Interior, 53 percent in Justice, 62 percent in Economics, and an astounding 75 percent in the Refugee Ministry).207 Tainted business leaders and physicians also found themselves barred from their occupations in the late 1940s, first as a result of military government regulations in the fall of 1945, then, if they could not arrange special dispensation, while they awaited the outcome of their denazification hearings.208 Business owners petitioned the Liberation Ministry so frequently for permission to return to their firms that German denazification ministers became exasperated. They reminded the petitioners that only the Liberation Minister himself could grant their requests, and that he could do this only if there were no appropriate trustee. Privately, they considered delegating the decisions to regional heads of government, but the idea was rejected.209 Physicians had less reason for such petitions, since the denazification process had been applied with less rigor in their profession than in many others. It was in part this relative laxity that enabled even many involved in outright crimes to escape detection. When Werner Heyde or Gerg Renno assumed false identities and continued to practice medicine in the late 1940s and early 1950s, their occupational activities were only possible because no one asked to see their certificates of approbation, which were of course in their real names. Naturally, the hardships associated with living under a false identity, such as breaking with one’s family and past associates, meant that only individuals who had committed crimes for which they expected to be prosecuted, would go underground. It also meant keeping as low a profile as possible. Renno, for example, under the assumed name Reinig, worked first as a substitute physician and later as a sort of sales manager for the pharmaceutical company Schering. He was discovered soon after he legally applied to resume his real name in 1955.210 –

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Temporary exclusion was no panacea for transforming German society. It did not even accomplish the moderate goal of rooting out former National Socialists from positions of influence, as many, and probably most, of those who had been excluded returned to the civil service, business, and the free professions returned top former levels of influence. Nevertheless, temporary exclusion ought to be viewed as a partial vindication of a program that failed to achieve the lofty goal of rooting out once and for all former National Socialists and their ideas.

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An Alternate Elite? While it would be a falsification of the record to argue that an alternate elite replaced the “old elite” during the occupation period, non-Nazis and even outright opponents of Nazism were able to rise to or regain positions of prominence during the period of political purges following World War II. In the elite occupations, as in the general public, anti-fascists remained but a small minority. Nevertheless, their presence and persistence helped ever so slightly to recast the occupations as a whole. The denazification program helped promote the careers of civil servants, business leaders, and physicians whose opposition or lack of association with the Nazi regime meant that they were in demand to fill positions vacated, if only briefly, by others who had supported Hitler’s policies and party. In immediate postwar Hesse, the SPD and KPD most adamantly demanded that individuals be chosen for the Land political leadership “who have demonstrated a clear anti-fascist position in the past.” Many appointments to the high civil service, some of which have been described above, brought to positions of power and influence those who had opposed National Socialism. In the business community, even a Chamber of Industry and Trade whose members, in 1953, voted in a majority of presidium members who had joined the NSDAP retained the non-Nazi newcomers who had been raised to, or reinstated in, the same body by the occupying power. No significant sentiment developed in any of the three occupational groups discussed here that called for turning back all of the personnel changes that had taken place between 1945 and 1949.211 The first woman to become a judge in Germany since the Nazi rise to power was sworn in in Limburg in the early months of the occupation, with the same rights of tenure that had helped the deeply compromised judges of the Third Reich regain positions they had— temporarily—lost in the course of denazification.212 The opportunities for qualified non-Nazis to gain a foothold in the high civil service, big business management, or medicine, could be enormous during the first two to three years of the occupation. “For the next five years,” explained one American legal officer in 1946, “Germany will be a swell place for lawyers. It’s an opportunity for non-Nazis to get in on the ground floor of –

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the new house that’s being built. They’ll be making beaucoup money.”213 Of course, the house was not so much new as it was in the process of renovation and remodeling, but the comment captures the Americans’ desire to open doors of upward mobility for politically untainted Germans. Non-Nazis were indeed in great demand, insofar as they were capable and not associated with Communism after 1947. Adolf Arndt, one of the main authors of Hesse’s constitution, a high civil servant, and Justice Minister in Georg-August Zinn’s first elected postwar government, was a shining example of a successful anti-Nazi rising to prominence after the war. Forced out of his position as a judge by the Nazis because his father was a Jew (although converted to Christianity), and eventually ordered into the “Organization Todt” during the war, Arndt emerged after 1945 as a leading light of constitutional law. After joining the SPD and Hesse’s Ministry of Justice, Arndt went on to become a representative in the Bundestag and one of the architects of the SPD’s Godesberg Program of 1959, which moved the party toward the political center.214 Other Hessian leaders actively recruited civil servants who had been acknowledged anti-Nazis, victims of persecution, or both. In addition to Minister of Justice Arndt and Minister of Finance Werner Hilpert, Kurt Böhme, whom the Nazis had dismissed from the Civil Service as an enemy of the state in 1933, was placed in charge of administrative affairs at the Hessian state chancellery. Dr. Hans Meyer, dismissed from the Hessian Civil Service as a “half-Jew,” became chief of the Political department of the State Chancellery.215 Hilpert, in turn, recruited Walter Leiske, who had also suffered for his opposition to National Socialism, from the Soviet zone of occupation in 1946.216 Werner von Trott zu Solz, related to the resistance leader executed for his involvement in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, actively sought a post in the Hessian administration, noting that he was “in close contact with the political leadership and representatives of the antifascist population.” In a cordial letter, however, Minister President Geiler regretted that he could not offer von Trott zu Solz the position he sought, since it was already filled.217 The denazification ministry itself provided a few high civil servants to postwar Hesse’s administration. Most of the upper ranks of the Liberation Ministry had been filled with newcomers to the civil service. Like the Liberation Law, a “Law for the Transference of Persons Employed with Political Liberation” was passed in all U.S.-Zone Länder in November 1947. It obligated the states to guarantee denazification employees positions in either the private or public sectors.218 Due to the scarcity of private-sector employment in the wake of the currency reform in the summer of 1948, most of the beneficiaries of the law sought civil service positions. After an apparent initial reluctance to transfer these public servants to positions in other ministries, citing a general hiring freeze (also a consequence of the currency reform), most eventually attained appropriate positions in the state administration. –

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Since none of these veterans of denazification were fired during their initial three-year probationary periods (one resigned), it would appear that they at least did not suffer from their connection to the unpopular denazification program.219 While many received tenure in Hesse’s administration, however, none of them had risen to positions as section heads or higher by 1953.220 Only those with a university degree, moreover, and especially individuals who had completed a legal degree, were considered eligible for regular appointment as high civil servants.221 Still others chose to accept an alternate severance settlement rather than wait for an appropriate position in the administration to open up.222 Businessmen and physicians who had resisted the National Socialist regime or had been persecuted by it, while they did not receive the legal leg up into leadership positions frequently enjoyed by surviving victims in the civil service, received a measure of vindication in the 1953 federal Law for Restitution for the Victims of National Socialist Persecution and subsequent amendments.223 In addition to the frequently mentioned monetary compensation for damages and suffering, this law required medical regulators and businesses to reinstate those removed due to persecution during the Third Reich. For physicians, this right to reinstatement applied regardless of existing physician-to-population ratios. Businesses, however, could deny reinstatement based on “serious economic or entrepreneurial grounds,” opting in such cases for alternate monetary payments. The extent to which higher civil servants, business owners and managers, or physicians persecuted during the Third Reich took advantage of this law could not been ascertained for the purposes of this study. Compared to the effort that had been expended on the denazification purge, attempts to foster actively an “alternate elite” were quite weak. By most accounts, the nurturing of unquestionable democrats was buffeted by two winds. First, the majority of Germans who maintained permanent antipathy to the National Socialist regime either belonged to the left of the political spectrum or harbored deep religious convictions. With the acceleration of the Cold War, Communist anti-fascists fell completely from favor with the American military government. Even earlier, the bourgeois parties, especially the CDU and the LDP (later FDP), sought to limit the influence of the SPD and KPD by weakening restrictions against “nominal” NSDAP members. The second barrier to the promotion of an alternate elite was the shortage of qualified anti-Nazis. Physicians, entrepreneurs, and especially civil servants who could demonstrate their democratic convictions by their actions rather than their postwar rhetoric generally had little trouble rising in their professional world during the occupation. In the end, the denazification program failed to achieve its grander goals. It did not permanently bar former National Socialists from influential positions; nor did it bring about a fundamental exchange of the elite. Former National Socialists returned, if in smaller numbers than before 1945. Not –

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only were they able to reestablish themselves professionally; many soon found themselves once again in the key ministries, the Chambers of Industry and Trade, or the university medical faculties. Their return, however, did not constitute a renazification of the elite. First, the environment was unlike the elite occupations of the Third Reich. The vocal, active radical right had dissipated. Extremist right-wing activities were limited to fringe groups, with former Nazi leaders dead, in exile, and discredited. Many of the people against whom they had campaigned and whom they had cowed or persecuted had also returned, and with a strong measure of vindication. Their return owed at least something to the denazification programs of the occupation years. Second, most of the former National Socialists who broke through the restrictions of denazification were just that: former National Socialists. How far this recasting of their professional and political outlooks went is the subject of the next chapter.

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Notes 1. Cover letter to plan for “efficient and just denazification,” 1 May 1945, IHK-Ffm, Notebook “denazification.” 2. In a study of Marburg between 1945 and 1949, John Gimbel concludes that “denazification failed to achieve both its negative and positive goals.” “American Denazification and German Politics,” American Political Science Review 54 (1960): 84. Also Gimbel, The American Occupation of Germany: Politics and the Military, 1945-1949 (Stanford, 1968). 3. Justus Fürstenau argues that the Americans set unrealistic goals and misunderstood the complexities of individual circumstances. J. Fürstenau, Entnazifizierung (Berlin, 1969). From the political right, C. Schrenck-Notzing roundly denounced the very concept of denazification as victors’ justice and brain washing on a grand scale. Schrenk-Notzig, Charakterwäsche: Die amerikanische Besatzung in Deutschland und ihre Folgen (Stuttgart, 1965). 4. During the 1950s, East Germans pointed to prominent ex-Nazis as evidence West Germany’s coddling of National Socialists. Tom Bower, a disappointed left-wing participant in denazification in the British zone, claims that conservative Allied authorities conspired with German elites to rehabilitate prominent Nazis as a corollary to rehabilitating Germany itself. Bower, Blind Eye to Murder. Constantine Fitzgibbon, a British commentator, blamed denazification’s failure on overly ambitious goals. Fitzgibbon, Denazification. Echoing Fitzgibbon, an official American history acknowledges the shortcomings of denazification. Korman, U.S. Denazification 1944-1950 (Bad Godesberg, 1952). 5. A sample of the literature includes W. Albrecht, “Die Entnazifizierung,” Neue Politische Literatur 24 (1979): 73-84; “Das braune Schleswig-Holstein: Wie sich in Norddeutschland Verantwortliche, Nutznießer und Aktivisten des NS-Regimes der Entnazifizierung entzogen,” Die Zeit, 2 Feb. 1990, 13; V. Dotterweich, “Die ‘Entnazifizierung’,” in Vorgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, eds. Becker et al. (Munich, 1979), 93-123; E. Ettle, Die Entnazifizierung in Eichstätt. Probleme der politischen Säuberung nach 1945 (Frankfurt a. M., 1985); K.-D. Henke, Politische Säuberung unter französischer Besatzung: Die Entnazifizierung in Würt–

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6.

7. 8.

9.

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

temberg-Hohenzollern (Stuttgart, 1981); I. Lange, Entnazifizierung in Nordrhein-Westfalen (Siegburg, 1976); Niethammer, Die Mitläuferfabrik; H.-U. Sons, “‘Bis in die psychologischen Wurzeln.’ Die Entnazifizierung der Ärzte in Nordrhein-Westfalen (Britisches Besatzungsgebiet),” Deutsches Ärzteblatt C79:36 (1982): 60-62; Tent. Mission on the Rhine; C. Vollnhals, Entnazifizierung und Selbstreinigung im Urteil der evangelischen kirche (Munich, 1989); H.A. Welsh, Revolutionärer Wandel auf Befehl? Entnazifizierungs- und Personalpolitik in Thüringen und Sachsen, 1945-1948 (Munich, 1989); K. Werum, “Die Entnazifizierung der Verwaltungsbeamten,” Demokratie und Recht 17:4 (1989): 422-32. Verschuer replaced the anthropologist, Eugen Fischer upon the latter’s retirement; Fischer has been considered one of the leading legitimizers of racial biology and research in the 1920s and 1930s. U. Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler (Cambridge, 1996), 229. U. Völklein, Josef Mengele: Der Arzt von Auschwitz (Göttingen, 1999), 75-81 Robert Proctor calls the chair in human genetics at Münster “prestigious;” indeed, Verschuer was not isolated or shunned in the profession. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 307-8. The rector of the medical faculty at the severely damaged Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt, hoped to retain Verschuer, whom he described as “a positive Christian […] whose research work has an international reputation.” Verschuer allegedly had held a speech in London in 1939 at the invitation of The Royal Society of London, two years before Mengele began “research” on twins at Auschwitz. The title: “The Research Work on Twins from the Time of Francis Galton up to the Present.” Rector of the Faculty of Medicine of the J.W.G. University, 3 July 1945, report on faculty, OMGH box 1002. However, the discrediting of the Third Reich also limited the dominance of genetics within German medicine, and the prestige of human genetics as a field of study. L. Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990 (New York, 1991); also C. Lasby, Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (New York, 1971); Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 301; more complete accounts are available in L. Hunt, “U.S. Cover-up of Nazi Scientists,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (April 1985): 20. A few examples that have frequently been cited are the release from prison and return to major German industrial or financial enterprises of Friedrich Flick, Alfried Krupp, Philip Reemtsma, and Hermann Abs. See R. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (New York, 1982). J. Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben. Bührer, “Return to Normality,” 137. Tetens, The New Germany and the Old Nazis, 37-55. This combination of changes is tested as a hypothesis for a statistical study in Edinger, “Post-Totalitarian Leadership,” 58-82. Speer was released in 1966, and died in 1981. His memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, convinced many that he was a man of honor and integrity among the other, fully disreputable leaders of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, he never held any position of influence in in architecture, business, or political life. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, 290-92. R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1967), 1092. The best summary remains Rückerl’s Die Strafverfolgung von NS-Verbrechen, although it provides only aggregate statistics (where available) for non-German executions immediately following the war. Rückerl headed the Central Office for the Administration of State Justice for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. Founded in 1958 by the Justice Ministers of the West German Länder, it gathered evidence and prepared cases against Nazi-era criminals. Also A. Rückerl, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung mit Mitteln der Justiz,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B43 (1982): 11, 43. For details, see the appendices of F.M. Buscher, The U.S. War Crimes Trial Program in Germany, 1946-1955 (New York, 1989). His memoirs are a classic example of a politically tainted elite rather vapidly accusing the Nazi leadership while failing to admit any personal responsibility. Helfferich, 1932-1946 Tatsachen.

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19. Gauleiter Sprenger committed suicide in April 1945. 20. On the composition of the leadership of Hessian Chambers of Industry and Trade, see table 4.4. 21. M. Jenke, “Former National Socialists Today,” in The Politics of Postwar Germany, ed. W. Stahl (New York, 1963), 239. 22. Die unbewältigte Gegenwart, 9-10 and14-23. 23. Available sources after 1949 only list top Hessian officials, so it is conceivable that the high officials and administrators on the list held subordinate positions after 1949. It cannot be ruled out that they took up positions in other Länder. The list is in “Summaries South Germany,” vol. 1, 172, OMGH box 59. 24. Cited in “Das braune Schleswig-Holstein,” Die Zeit (2 Feb. 1990): 13-14. The article was based on a study commissioned by then minister president of Schleswig-Holstein, Bjorn Engholm. See also Hamilton, Who voted for Hitler?, 39. 25. W. Kohl, “Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig.” Georg Renno, Euthanasiearzt (Vienna, 2000), 277-96. 26. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 299-300. 27. Rückerl, Die Strafverfolgung, 25-32. 28. An insightful analysis of the complex dynamics behind the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany’s decision to commute numerous sentences in Buscher, The U.S. War Crimes Trial Program. 29. The Erbgesundheitsgesetz was officially suspended on 15 December 1945, supposedly “to give to the German people an opportunity to decide for themselves, through democratic processes, whether enforced sterilization is justified in the interest of the general welfare”. James Owens, OMG, RB Kassel, to Ober- and Regierungspräsident, 15 Dec. 1945, OMGH PHD box 992. 30. “Entnazifizierung,” in W. Benz, ed. Deutschland unter Allierter Besatzung 1945-49/55 (Berlin, 1999), 114. 31. R.-K. Rößler, ed. Entnazifizierungspolitik der KPD/SED 1945 (Goldbach, 1994), esp. 16-17. 32. Few studies evaluate denazification in Württemberg-Baden, the other American-Zone Land. Exceptions include A. Borgstedt, Entnazifizierung in Karlsruhe 1946 bis 1951 (Konstanz, 2002), as well as sections of B. Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der württembergischen NSDAP. Funktion, Sozialprofil und Lebenswege einer regionalen NS-Elite (München, 1998). The small American-occupied enclaves of Bremen and Bremerhaven have been almost entirely overlooked. Regional and local studies probably prefer Bavaria because of its historical continuity as a political unit. The most important study of denazification in Germany, Niethammer’s Die Mitläuferfabrik, focuses on Bavaria. 33. The general description of the Spruchkammer process that follows, except where otherwise noted, stems from the following sources: Lutz Niethammer, Die Mitläuferfabrik; Walter Mühlhausen, Hessen 1945-1950: Zur politischen Geschichte eines Landes in der Besatzungszeit (Frankfurt a. M., 1985), 307-42. 34. At the request of Denazification Minister Gottlob Binder, the former concentration camp inmate, Eugen Kogon visited the camp at Darmstadt for three days and prepared a lengthy report, available in HHStA-W 501/800. Besides serving to insure that conditions in the camp were acceptable, the report also aimed to counter negative comparisons between the internment camps and Nazi concentration camps. “Der Kampf um Gerechtigkeit” in Frankfurter Hefte (1947): 373-83. 35. Within OMGUS, “vetting” was the preferred term for blanket political investigations. 36. The occupation-by-occupation approach is evident from regional weekly reports from military government detachments, available in OMGH box 567 (for Kassel district), box 518 (for Marburg district), and box 64 (for the implementation of MG Law No. 8 throughout Hesse). At the local level, similar reports on Special Branch (in charge of denazification) in Marburg, OMGH box 518. These reports tended to exaggerate the effectiveness of denazification, but occasionally aired significant shortcomings as well.

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37. The plethora of laws, regulations, and directives relating to denazification became quite confusing, because their titles tended to be quite unwieldy. In part to combat this confusion, and in part due to the tradition of legalistic jargon among Germany’s bureaucrats, the latter developed a shorthand vocabulary. The Liberation Law, for example, was also identified simply as the “Law of 5 March 1946. 38. Rößler, 26; “Denazification,” Deutschland unter alliierter Besatzung, ed. W. Benz (Berlin, 1999), 114-15. 39. The absence of more extreme punishments follows from the fact that the denazification process was neither a civil nor criminal judicial system. More serious offenses, such as war crimes, criminal activity, or direct involvement in the Nazi-era racial extermination process fell outside the Liberation Ministry’s jurisdiction, passing to either the Allied occupation authorities or the regular German courts. Few such cases came to trial in the decade following the war. 40. The Christmas Amnesty applied if the individual in question had not earned a significant income during the entire period of the Third Reich and 1945. American liaison officers had to remind prosecutors, however, that the Youth Amnesty did not apply to those who fell presumptively in the Groups I or II. OMGH Weekly Summary no. 85, 22-28 May 1947, 5. OMGH box 65. 41. This effort, known as the B-Procedure, for Beschleunigungsverfahren (acceleration procedure), involved less routine corroboration of information provided by the defendants, usually only by the tax office and public notification. If no objections to the classifications arose within 14 days, the tribunal placed composite lists of twenty defendants in Group IV (follower) after little or no deliberation. The process applied only to presumed followers (Group IV) who had a maximum taxable income of 12,000 RM between 1934 and 1945 but were not subject to earlier amnesties. If placed in the “follower” category, defendants received a card in the mail that specified fines (if any) and payment deadlines. Ironically, these cards were officially called Notifications of Atonement (Sühnebescheid). See “Einführung der B-Verfahren,” Amtsblatt der Ministerium für Wiederaufbau und Politische Befreiung No. 8 (Wiesbaden, 15 Feb. 1947). English translation in OMGH box 1124. 42. For example, letter from Assistant Denazification Minister Knappstein, to the Darmstadt Tribunal, 20 Oct. 1947, in HHStA-W 501/650. Knappstein admonishes the tribunal for not instituting simplified procedures (the so-called B-Verfahren), referring to the “desire of the American Military government … that all appropriate cases be concluded by about Christmas.” See also American complaints that German thoroughness in minor cases was detracting from rapid prosecution of the more heavily incriminated, and thus delaying the conclusion of denazification. G.H. Garde, Adj. General, Office of the Military Governor, to Directors of Land MGs, 2 Dec. 1947, OMGH box 1114. Also OMGH “Revidiertes Special Branch Verfahren,” 25 Mar. 1948, HHStA-W 501/1142. 43. Memo from Oppenheimer, Oberster Kläger im Hessischen Ministerium für politische Befreiung, to Erster öffentlicher Kläger bei der Berufungskammer, Wiesbaden, 6 Jan. 1949; and reply HHStA-W 501/1010. Also Binder’s letter complaining that “the vacillations of the [American] denazification policies” were hampering denazification’s efficiency and public image. Binder to the Director of the Land Military Government, 11 Jan. 1949. HHStA-W 501/1010. 44. Kropat, Hessen in der Stunde Null, 245. 45. This was unusual, because no German administration presided over either the American zone or the western zones as a unit. The British-American Bizonia, established in 1946, was an economic marriage with some political functions. See the preamble to “Gesetz zur Befreiung von Nationalsozialismus und Militarismus vom 5. März 1946,” GVBl Nr. 78 (1946): 57-65. Denazification policies in the French and British zones differed from those in American-occupied Germany. Although all three applied the five-category

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

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53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

system, the British tended toward greater leniency, whereas the French emphasized strict denazification in some spheres (the media, politics, business leadership), but were more lax in others. Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism, Section 1, Article 1. Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism, Section 1, Article 2. MG for Land Hessen, 2nd MG Regiment, Weekly Summary, 23-29 Sept. 1945, OMGH box 62. OMGH HQ MG RB Kassel, Weekly Summary Report, 3 Oct. 1945, OMGH box 567. Germans continued to make finer distinctions than most Americans between National Socialism per se and what they viewed as its most reprehensible aspects. As late as 1960, only 30 percent of Germans would have opposed a former Nazi Party member’s selection as a minister in government, whereas 79 percent would have opposed a person who had reported another to the Gestapo out of a sense of duty. E. Noelle and P. Neumann, The Germans: Public opinion Polls 1947-1966 (Allensbach, 1967), 206. The ministry began work on 1 November 1945 as the Ministry for Reconstruction and Political Cleansing (Ministerium für Wiederaufbau und politische Bereinigung). Originally, it was responsible for implementing Military Government Law No. 8 for the denazification of the private sector. It was renamed after the promulgation of the Liberation Law a few months later. Umlauf-Notiz, signed Binder, 26 Mar. 1946, HHStA-W502/919. Numerous implementation orders and ancillary laws relating elaborated on particular aspects of the denazification process. On Binder’s resignation, Mühlhausen, Hessen, 331. A two-page Meldebogen stipulated by the Liberation Law replaced the more extensive sixpage, fan-folded Fragebogen. The Americans had introduced the latter in 1944, and it assumed iconographic status in Germany’s cultural vocabulary. Thus the term Fragebogen came to symbolize overzealous, categorical denazification. A novel critical of the denazification program became a bestseller in the 1950s. E. Salomon, Der Fragebogen (1951). The procedure was spelled out in an implementation order issued simultaneously with the Liberation law on 5 March 1946. It extended to those holding property or employment in Hesse even if their main residence was elsewhere. See “First Implementation Order Concerning the Notification Requirements of the Liberation Law,” GVBl Nr. 11 (1946): 93-94. The precise number of registrants was 3,222, 922 in October 1949. Report on the Abwicklung of the Hessian Ministry for Political Liberation, from Ministerium für politische Befreiung to Minister President of Hesse, 27 Oct. 1949, HHStA-W 502/919. See also Kropat, Hessen in der Stunde Null 1945-47, 243. This is but a sampling of the thorough enumeration of organizations, ranks, offices, and activities. In practice, however, many distinctions still needed clarification in subsequent orders. For example, the issue of supporting membership, as opposed to full membership in the SS. Specified in the appendix to the Liberation Law, GVBl Nr. 7-8 (1946). The following text refers frequently to these numbered groups as a convenient shorthand for the formal political classification of individuals. When referring to formal charges, the term “Group” will be capitalized. Transcript of radio address (based on an official report to the Länderrat dated 10 Sept. 1946), 18. Oct. 1946, HHStA-W 502/919. The practical problem of finding sufficient qualified personnel to try such a large proportion of the population was immediately apparent to a judge who was saddled with the burden of establishing the tribunals in and around Kassel, a city of 120,000. He voiced his exasperation in a report to the Liberation Ministry dated 27 March 1946. HHStA-W 501/1282. A breakdown of denazification employees in Hesse in July 1947 was as follows: tribunal chairmen, 306; prosecutors, 276; employees, 2,807; and assessors and investigators, 3,337. OMGH Semi-Monthly Report, 15-30 June 1947, 8-9, OMGH box 63. –

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61. See report, “Das zweite Änderungsgesetz zum Befreiungsgesetz,” [n.d.], HHStA-W 507/1488. 62. Transcript of speech by Binder [n.d., probably Feb. 1947], HHStA-W 501/459. 63. For examples of how these forms (called Arbeitsblätter) were used, here to vet the Chamber of Industry and Trade in Giessen, see HHStA-W 520/IHK Beirat und Vorstand. 64. This method caught many Meldebogen falsifications. When two sources provided conflicting information, the Liberation Ministry scrutinized the case more closely. 65. See Ich klage an, 2. 66. Hubert Teitelbaum, Director, Denazification Div., OMGH, to Chief, Denaz. Section, PSB, IA&C Div., OMGUS, 20 March 1947, OMGH 1114. 67. Jacobs, 1st Public Prosecutor, Wiesbaden, to Minister for Political Liberation, 13 May 1947 (English translation of original text for OMGH), OMGH box 1114. 68. Verzeichnis der im Stadt- und Landkreis Darmstadt niedergelassenen Ärzte, Stand 1. Dez. 1947, HStA-D 4a02. For the order requiring comparable lists of civil servants, see Minister des Innern, Großhessisches Staatsministerium (Wiesbaden) to Regierungspräsident Darmstadt, 12 Sept. 1946, HStA-D H1/4a02, folder “Bestätigung von Personal durch die Militärregierung.” 69. See lists, dated 1946 to 1949, in HHStA-W 501/1576. 70. For example, this entailed serious efforts to focus on “the more heavily tainted National Socialists, especially those who held influential positions during the National Socialist period.” Rundverfügung Nr. 117 vom Hessischen minister für politische Befreiung Binder, 23 Dec. 1947, to 1. öffentlicher Kläger der Spruch- und Berufungskammer, HHStA-W 501/1267. 71. Speech [n.d., probably Feb. 1947], HHStA-W 501/459. 72. Borgstedt, Entnazifizierung in Karlsruhe, esp. 265. 73. OMGH Hessen ICD Research Branch, Public Opinion Review No. 2, 15 May 1947, 1-2, OMGH box 63. 74. Letter from Irma Gunau to the Minister of Political Liberation, Frankfurt/M, 6 July 1946, HHStA-W 501/1026. 75. MGH Hessen ICD Research Branch, Political Analysis and Public Opinion Weekly Review No. 13, 2 April 1947, OMGH box 62. 76. OMGH Hessen Semi-monthly Report, No. 15, 1-15 August 1947, p. 1, OMGH box 63. 77. P. Hain, “Entnazifizierung in Hessen, beispielsweise in Giessen. Als der Krieg Zu Ende War: Hessen 1945,” Berichte und Bilder vom demokratischen Neubeginn (Frankfurt a. M., 1980), 134. This source incorrectly identifies Deeg’s resignation as the first by a communist in Hesse. 78. On its effects in Marburg, Gimbel, “American Denazification,” 91. 79. Gesetz über den Abschluß der politischen Befreiung in Hesse, HHStA-W 502/919. 80. Excerpt of Protokoll über die 33. Sitzung des Entnazifizierungsausschusses beim Länderrat am 28. Oct. 1948 in Wiesbaden, HHStA-W 501/746. 81. The ministry sought to accelerate the process without compromising its spirit. For example, Binder to Director of OMGH, via Minister President Stock, 20 Jan. 1949. In the field, however, the tribunals often mistook the pressure to proceed quickly for a license to extend leniency ever further, leading to numerous reprimands from superiors. A general rebuke issued in Memo from Funk, main prosecutor in Frankfurt, to subordinates, 27 Apr., citing numerous examples. HHStA-W 501/573. 82. Oberste Kläger, Joachim Oppenheimer, MfpBefr, to 1. öffentlicher Kläger der Berufungskammer, 6 Jan. 1949, HHStA-W 501/1010. 83. A sad epilogue to the denazification program was the investigation of denazification Minister Binder after he resigned his post in 1949. The charges proved groundless. Oberregierungsrat Oppenheimer, Ministerium für politische Befreiung, to Ministerpräsident Hessen, 31 Oct. 1949, HHStA-W.

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84. Source: Denazifizierungsbericht, Land Hessen, Nr. 94 (Nach dem Stand vom 1 Jan. 1954), HHStA-W 501/247. 85. The results of denazification differed in the other western occupation zones. In the French zone, 52 percent of all cases were dismissed before trial, compared to 33 percent in the American and 29 percent in the British zone. In the British zone, 58 percent of defendants subject to the law fell into Group V (exonerated). In the French and American zones, the proportions were 1.9 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively. The high proportion of Group IV decisions in the American zone (51 percent of all subject to the law) differed substantially from results in the French (45 percent) and British (10.9 percent) zones as well. Statistics from Fürstenau, Entnazifizierung, 233-35. 86. “Stand der Entnazifizierung im Lande Hessen nach dem Stichtag vom 15. April 1948,” Binder to Chef der Staatskanzlei, 23 Apr. 1948, HHStA-W 502/922. 87. OMGH Semi-Monthly Summary Report for 1-15 June 1947, 1, OMGH box 63. Comparison with the later reports in HHStA-W 501/247 (1948-1954) reveals that hearings in the 1950s indeed focused on the more highly incriminated, mostly complex cases that had been put off while the less incriminated were processed. Abwicklungsamt des Ministerium für politische Befreiung, to Minister of Finance, 24 Feb. 1954, HHStA-W 501/247. 88. One SED leader estimated in June 1948 that 38 percent of judges, state attorneys, and administrative lawyers belonged to the SED. Rößler, 26-29, 34, 53. 89. MG for Land Hessen, 2nd MG Regiment, Weekly Summary, 23-29 Sept. 1945, p.7, OMGH box 62. 90. In his defense, a patient claims that he never noticed any propagandistic activity on Dr. W’s part, and that he was only in the party “so he would be left alone.” All documents, 1945-1946 in HHStA-W/SK Mb/L-St., Az. Fulda-Zentrale A/526. Dr. W. was still listed as a practicing physician in Fulda in 1959. 91. Numerous examples in Gimbel, “American Denazification,” 89. For an exception from the business community, Spruchkammer file on Wilhelm K., HHStA-W 520/SK DarmstadtStadt. 92. Dr. J. H., to First Prosecutor at the Darmstadt denazification tribunal, 9 October 1947, HHStA-W 520, Spruchkammer (hereafter SK) Darmstadt, Az. 520/DZ/51964. 93. The testimony led to the opening of a case that would have otherwise been treated as “not subject to the law.” The investigation revealed a family that used the political situation after 1933 to its great advantage. Statement, Landesinnungsverband des Leder- und Papierverarbeitenden Handwerks für Groß-Hessen (copy), HHStA-W 501/1083. 94. “Memorandum on my hearing by the Aerztekammer, on 29 June 1946,” by Adolf Haug, 1 July 1946, L&S Security Office for SK Lauterbach, to OMGH Hessen, Detachment E-5, 5 July 1946, OMGH box 989. 95. Any closer description of the university or the individual faculty members would breach the confidentiality limits imposed on my research by the Hessian Ministry of Culture. This general account summarizes careful study of eighteen Spruchkammer files, some voluminous. HHStA-W 520. 96. Alfred Grosser, Germany in Our Time, 45. 97. Twelve references from 1945 and 1946 in BA NL5/215; still others in BA NL5/214. Yet another in NL5/693. 98. Personal letter from London, 29 Apr. 1946; Letter from Lagrange Illinois, 12 June 1946. According to the American letter, the German manager had joined the party because “he had been impressed with the tremendous increase in industrial activity which had occurred under the Nazi regime, which had resulted in putting everybody back to work.” The writer appears to be unaware that the defendant had joined the NSDAP in 1933, before the apparent economic recovery. Charged in Group II, the tribunal eventually exonerated him (Group V). HHStA-W 501/830. 99. The president of the state court in Kassel, after consultations with the major political parties, suggested creating four special tribunals, one each for civil servants, large landhold–

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100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107.

108.

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109. 110.

111. 112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

ers, small farmers, and “all others, especially free professions.” Landgerichtspräsident, Bericht von Kammern auf Grund des Gesetzes zur Befreiung vom Nationalsozialismus und Militarismus vom 5. März 1946, Kassel, 3 Apr. 1946, HHStA-W 501/1282. R. Wallach, Asst. Exec. Officer (OMGH) to Minister for Political Liberation, 25 Sept. 1946, HHStA-W 501/831. Dr. Hemm, representative of Ärzteschaft Darmstadt, to Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt, Abt. Gesundheitswesen, 17 June 1946, HStA-D 4a02. Aussage J.W., Hebamme, 27 Aug. 1946, HHStA-W 520/SK MSt Ma/1098/Kasten 54, Az. MSt 419/46. ”Pfarramtliche Bescheinigung, 4 May 1946, HHStA-W 520/SK Giessen, Az. Gst/Sch/784. HHStA-W 520/SK MB/L, Az. 1050/47 E. Kogon and F. Römhild, Das Internierungslager Darmstadt, Apr. 1947, HHStA-W 501/800. The energy with which the Spruchkammer countered each charge, to the point of confirming the manager’s assessment of the arrested worker as a “gossiper” (Schwätzer) and “shirker” is astounding. The decision was confirmed by the Local Military Government and the Liberation Ministry. Witness testimonies (mostly Nov. and Dec. 1946), investigator’s report (26 Nov. 1947), and tribunal decision (2 Mar. 1948) in HHStA-W 520/SK DSt I Az. DZ504172. OMGH ICD Research Branch, Public Opinion Review No. 1, 1 May 1947, OMGUS OMGH Box 68. Letter from MQ, Military Government, Stadtkreis Frankfurt a. M., to Director of the Reichsbank, Oberbürgermeister, Stadtkämmerer, and Manager of IHK Ffm, 10 Sept. 1945 (in German translation); IHK Ffm to Reg.Dir. Magnus (Staatskanzlei Hessen), 18 Oct. 1945; Hess. Minister f. Wirtschaft und Verkehr, to all Hessian IHKn, 30 Nov. 1945; also other documents concerning aryanization committees in HHStA-W 507/1381. I have not been able to locate the files gathered by the IHK Frankfurt, although they are mentioned in documents in the IHK-Frankfurt archives. One list exists of thirteen leather, textile, and clothing enterprises in the Frankfurt area that had been identified as “aryanized,” and placed under state-appointed managers. N.d. (probably early 1949). See File “Entnazifizierung und Entarisierung” in IHK-Ffm-Archiv. Related, more detailed documents could not be found in either IHK Ffm or in HHStA-W. All materials (the thickest Spruchkammer file I encountered, of thousands viewed) in HHStAW520/SK Obl, Az. Ob387/46. “Soll nach Hadamar überführt werden.” Katalog der Gedenkausstellung in Hadamar. Den Opfern der Euthanasiemorde 1939 bis 1945, P. Chroust et al. (Frankfurt a. M., 1989), 108. Many convicted physicians and nurses applied for pardons between 1949 and 1951. Hesse’s Minister-President denied most of these applications. HHStA-W 502/330. Dr. v. Arnim, Secretariat of the Länderrat in the American zone, to Manager of the denazification committee of the Länderrat, Stuttgart, 31 May 1947, HHStA-W 501/470. Drigalski to Oberlandesgerichtsrat Dr. Schlesinger, Ministry of Political Liberation, 24 Sept. 1947, HHStA-W 501/470. Dr. Schlesinger, who, as a Jew, had been persecuted during the Third Reich, frequently had a less lenient view of transgressions. Schlesinger, Oberlandesgerichtsrat, to Drigalski, Medizinalabteilung, 8 July 1947, HHStA-W 501/470. The case of Dr. Stemmler was even noticed by the Military Government. OMGH Denaz. Div., Monthly summary, 7 June 1948, 1., OMGH box 1130. SK Kreis Lauterbach, Vors. Schreiber an MmfPB, 9 Oct. 1947, HHStA-W 501/473. Ich klage an, 12. Sierck und Radtke, Wohltätermafia, 23-56. The sources used to compile lists for each occupation are as follows: High civil servants: Taschenbuch für Verwaltungsbeamte. Behördennachweis und Personalverzeichnis (Berlin, 1950/51, 1952, 1953, 1954/55, 1956/57); Entrepreneurs: Handbuch der Großunternehmen (Darmstadt, 1941, 1944, 1953, 1955, 1956/57, 1958/59); Leitende Männer der Wirtschaft und der dazugehörigen Verwaltung. Ein wirtschaftliches “Who Is Who” (1951, 1953, 1955); Die –

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119.

120.

121.

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122.

123. 124. 125. 126.

127.

128.

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Industrie- und Handelskammern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bonn, 1951, 1953, 1956). Physicians: Address books, with special listings of physicians and, where applicable, university faculty. Titles and publishers vary from city to city (see bibliography). Extensive lists compiled for the following cities: Darmstadt (1934, 1935, 1937, 1940, 1941, 1949, 1954/55, 1956/57); Frankfurt a. M. 1949, 1950, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1956, 1957, 1958/59, 1960; Fulda 1928, 1937, 1939, 1950, 1957; Kassel 1933, 1936, 1939, 1949, 1954; Marburg 1930/31, 1932/33, 1934/35, 1936/37, 1938/39, 1950/51, 1953/54, 1956/57, 1959/60; Wiesbaden 1938, 1947/48, 1950, 1951/52, 1953/54, 1955/56; Kürschners Gelehrten-Kalender 1923, 1927, 1935, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1958. The Cultural Ministry is in charge of state archives as well education and museums. Dr. Eiler of the Main State archives was particularly helpful in trying to expedite the application for special access, despite the slow response of the ministry. There is no central register of files organized by name. Instead, the files are organized by district and tribunal, and each tribunal developed its own, often very peculiar, central system of organization. As a result, individuals’ files can only be located if the site of denazification is known, or at least correctly guessed, in advance. Those civil servants, entrepreneurs, or physicians who appeared on my research lists had often come before the tribunal at a different location that was impossible to identify. Since most of the tools used to compile the lists were first published in 1949 or later, and most denazification hearings took place in 1946 or 1947, it was all but impossible to trace the files of those who had moved during a period of German history marked by excessive mobility. Klaus Scherpe has aptly titled his collection of early postwar prose “On the Move in Germany.” In Deutschland Unterwegs: Reportagen, Skizzen, Berichte, 1945-1948 (Stuttgart, 1982). In some cases, the Berlin Document Center has been helpful in filling in gaps. However, many sources, such as address books and Handbuch der Großunternehmen provide no birthdates, without which there is little possibility of finding a match even at the BDC. On the requirements for statistical significance in quantitative social science research, refer to K. Jarausch and K. Hardy, Quantitative Methods for Historians. Guide to Research, Data, and Statistics (Chapel Hill, 1991). Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität der Institution des Berufsbeamtentums,” 66. Mühlhausen, Hessen, 47. Information Control Branch, Political Analysis and Public Opinion Weekly Review, period ending 8 Jan. 1947, OMGH box 62. Born in 1895 in Thuringia, Brill received his doctorate in law at Jena in 1927. He rose to the position of Ministerial director in Thuringia’s interior ministry and a justice in that state’s administrative court in the late twenties and early thirties, was dismissed in 1933. A member of the SPD since 1918, he was “a leading member of illegal groups” from 1933 to 1938, including the Popular Front Committee (Volksfrontkomittee). He was taken into temporary “protective custody” in 1933, and in 1935 imprisoned for “defamation.” Sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment for “preparation for high treason” in 1939, he was transferred from Brandenburg-Görden prison to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1943, where he survived until liberation. From July 8 to Dec. 31, 1945, he was president of Thuringia’s Association of the General Federation of Civil Servants, before leaving for Hesse. HHStA-W 502/1904. E. Kogon, “Hessen nach dem Zusammenbruch. Marginalien zum Neubeginn,” in Eugon Kogon – Ein politischer Publizist in Hessen, ed. H. Habicht, (Frankfurt a. M., 1982), 17-18, 2223. Kogon, “Hessen nach dem Zusammenbruch,” 25. Kogon, a founding editor with Walter Dirks of the Frankfurter Hefte, cites Wahrhaftig’s article-length reminiscences in that journal, S. L. Wahrhaftig, “In jenen Tagen. Marginalien zur Frühgeschichte eines deutschen Bundeslandes (Hessen),” Frankfurter Hefte 1970, 785 and also 1971, 93ff. Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität der Institution des Berufsbeamtentums,” 66.

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130. In the same momorandum to his superiors, he also urged a more active government involvement in denazifying business, because the Americans’ lack of knowledge about local affairs had permitted many business leaders to sacrifice lower-level managers and employees to the Americans in order to keep their own jobs. Ahl’s views thus followed the common belief that denazification should zero in on elites rather than the Nazis at the lower levels. “Bericht über hauptsächliche Verwaltungsprobleme usw.,” 8 Nov. 1945, HStA-D, H1/RG2, Liste 21, Az. 34/19. 131. One refusal of reinstatement, with a thoughtful justification for not making glibexceptions to the spirit of denazification, in letter from Hilpert to Minister for Economics and Transportation, 19 Feb. 1949, HHStA-W 501/193(2). 132. See esp. §6 in GVBl 1946, Nr. 30/31 (25. Nov. 1946), 205-15. 133. Unfortunately, it was not possible to locate the SK files on an ample proportion of state civil servants. As a result, no independent statistical data can be compiled against which to check the reports filed at the time. These reports generally don’t reveal party membership or activities, but only final verdicts. 134. Report from E.A. Knoblauch, District level civilian intelligence officer, Marburg L&S, to Director of OMGH (Attn: Chief, Intelligence Division), OMGH box 1125. 135. Compare with numerous reports from 1948, subdivided by rank, and by office as well as aggregate statistics, in HHStA-W 507/1341. It is possible that Knoblauch is comparing all chargeable individuals (including amnestied and exonerated civil servants) with the number of Nazis dismissed since capitulation. Still, even assuming some doctoring of the “official” statistics from the Hessian government, it is unclear how the proportions could be as high as Knoblauch claims. 136. Gimbel, “American Denazification,” 88-89. 137. HQ MG RB Kassel, Weekly MG Summary Report, 17 Oct. 1945, 4, OMGH box 567. 138. Large number of unknown cases could not be resolved. Unlike Spruchkammer files, civil service personnel files from the early period of the Federal Republic remain closed to researchers. In at least three cases, files indicated by indexes are missing. Locating the rest would require more information, such as birthdate or residence in 1946. 139. Various drafts of this questionnaire in “Politischer Fragebogen,” BA/Z11/382. 140. See Richtlinien über die Anstellung und Beförderung von Verwaltungsangehörigen in der Verwaltung des Vereinigten Wirtschaftsgebietes, Wirtschaftsrat Drucksache Nr. 1336, Ffm, 18 June 1949, HHStA-W 503/500. 141. R. Morsey, “Personal- und Beamtenpolitik im Übergang von der Bizone zur Bundesverwaltung (1947-1950). Kontinuität und Neubeginn,” in Verwaltungsgeschichte. Aufgaben, Zielsetzungen, Beispiele (Berlin, 1977). 233-35. 142. Regierungspräsident Wiesbaden, Erste Verordnung betreffend Bereinigung der Wirtschaft von jeglichem nationalsozialistischen Einfluß, 4 Aug. 1945, HHHStA-W 507/1381. 143. On the reasoning behind Law No. 8 as well as orders for its implementation, see Brig. Gen’l R. B. Lovett (by command of General Eisenhower], HQ USFET, to Commanding Generals, 3rd U.S. Army, Eastern Mil. Dist., and Seventh U.S. Army, Western Mil. Dist., 15 Aug. 1945, OMGH PHD box 993. 144. The ungainly official title of MG Law No. 8 was “Prohibition of Employment of Members of Nazi Party in Positions in Business other than Common Labor and for Other Purposes.” Repeal of the Law announced as Military Government Law No. 11 of 10 may 1948. HHStAW 501/831. 145. HQ MG, RB Kassel, Weekly Summary Report, 17 Oct. 1945, p. 1, OMGH box 567. 146. Their claim that “this has met with complete accord among civilians” is dubious at best. HQ MG, RB Kassel, Weekly Summary Report, 10 Oct. 1945, p. 1, OMGH box 567. Notably, however, “[i]n most cases the recommendations of the German examination committee have been concurred by Military Government.” OMGH Weekly Summary no. 13, 29 Dec. 1945-4 Jan. 1946, OMGH box 64.

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147. Binder to Regierungspräsidenten Wiesbaden, Kassel, and Darmstadt, 12 Dec. 1945, HHStA-W 501/66. 148. HQ MG, RB Kassel, Weekly Summary Report, 20 March 1946, p. 3, OMGH box 567. 149. This is also the conclusion of John Gimbel, “American Denazification,” 86-87. 150. See, for example, the application forms distributed to Landräte and Oberbürgermeister, based on the Law Concerning the Establishment of Commercial Enterprises of 24 Feb. 1947 [n. d.], HStA-M 180/4145 Marburg. 151. RP Kassel, Abt. Wirtschaft und Finanzen, to Landräte and Oberbürgermeister, 15 Jan. 1948, HStA-M 180 (Marburg)/4145. 152. On the procedures for choosing Treuhänder, see “Über die Sitzung bei der Property Control Division,” 18 Jun. 1947, HHStA-W 501/391(1). 153. Herbert Gontard, Senior Denazification Field Inspector, to Chief, Denaz. Field Investigation Unit, Report on the effects of Denazification on the Opel Works, Rüsselsheim, 3 Sept. 1947, OMGH box 1131. Other reports in the same file offer similar points of view. 154. Gontard, Field Report, 2 Sept. 1947, OMGH box 1131. 155. Handbuch der Großunternehmen (Darmstadt, 1941, 1953, 1955, 1956/57, and 1958/59); Leitende Männer der Wirtschaft und der dazugehörigen Verwaltung. Ein wirtschaftliches “Who is Who” (1951, 1953, 1955). Any subjects who moved to a company in a different city are all but impossible to relocate in the Handbuch. The different criteria used to select entries for Leitende Männer also poses a problem. 156. The lists of the presidium members compiled from Die Industrie- und Handelskammern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bonn, 1951, 1953, 1956) and, for 1947, HHStA-W 507/4799. 157. Sample of 146 individuals, selected from Handbuch der Großunternehmen. Further information on these individuals drawn from Leitende Männer der Wirtschaft, and from the Einwohnermelderegister in Darmstadt, HStA-D. Individuals residing outside Hesse were discarded in order to concentrate on the remainder, many of whose Spruchkammer files could be found in HHStA-W 520 (Spruchkammer). 158. Physicians’. Draft of Procedure for Denazification of Physicians, John T. Morrison, B.P.O.C., to HQ Regional Mil. Gov’t., Land Hessen-Nassau, 3 Oct. 1945, OMGH PHD box 994. This draft was approved by both Legal and Public Health Officers in Kassel, 8 Oct. 1945 and 10 Oct. 1945, respectively, OMGH PHD box 1008. 159. Robert Wallach, AGD, by order of Col. Newman, to all Commanding Officers of all Detachments, 16 Oct. 1945, OMGH box 482. 160. W. J. Burt, Jr., Director, CAC Hessen, to Schuchard, President of Ärzte-Kammer Darmstadt, 22 Oct. 1945; also Burt to Commanding Officers, all detachments, 5 Nov. 1945, OMGH PHD box 1101. An example of the apparent cooperation with these orders in minutes of a meeting of the “permission committee” in Bad Nauheim, a Physicians’ Chamber body responsible for central Hesse that made recommendations to the military government, including many for rejections, in OMGH PHD box 1008. 161. Order and new procedures transmitted by Dr. Drigalski, head of Hesse Health Dept. after March 1946, 7 June 1946, OMGH PHD box 1017. Hesse’s Physicians’ Chambers repeatedly requested an acceleration of the denazification review of physicians faced with termination of their licenses. Dr. Heckert, Minutes to a meeting on the establishment of a Chamber of Physicians for Greater Hesse, 24 June 1946, OMGH PHD box 1017. 162. Robert Wallach, widely distributed clarification on “Right to exercise free profession by Lesser Offenders,” 6 March 1947, OGH box 1115. 163. See Letter, Robert Wallach, Exec. Off., OMGH PHD, to Minister of the Interior, Land Hessen, 23 June 1947, OMGH PHD 1011. (also a copy in OMGH PHD box 992). 164. This affair occurred in fall 1946 and was not settled until the following summer. Dr. Erich Langer, the former NSDAP member who headed the Wiesbaden Chamber, was removed in Nov. 1946. See report and related materials in OMGH PHD 1011. Drigalski claimed that the Nazis suppressed his book about the medical corps in World War I, and his son died as a result of persecution by Gauleiter Greisler in Posen; The Nazis removed him as head of the –

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165. 166.

167. 168.

169. 170.

171. 172.

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173.

174.

175. 176.

177.

178.

179. 180.

Health department of Berlin, and from all other important offices in that city, as well as from his instructorship at the University, in 1933; Numerous documents, OMGH PHD box 1101. Darmstadt Medical Doctors Organization, Darmstadt, 14 Sept. 1945, OMGH PHD 1011. Significantly, this order was issued only a month after the tribunals began operating in Hesse. Reg. Präs Darmstadt, Gesundheitswesen, to Staatliches Gesundheitsamt, OMGH PHD, box 1011. Dr. Koch, Reg.Präs Darmstadt, Gesundheitswesen, to Oberstaatsanwalt bei dem Landesgericht; also related materials in OMGH PHD, box 1011. Some source biases should be taken into account. First, the address books overlook many physicians in dependent positions in the city’s hospitals. Although many hospital physicians also maintained a private practice (and would therefore be listed), hospital administrators, who wielded more authority, would generally not be. Second, denazification files could not be located for most physicians moving to Darmstadt after about 1947. This was especially true for those arriving from outside Hesse. This explains why the number of cases “not known” increases over time. Not only “followers” (Group IV), but also the “exonerated” (Group V), and the beneficiaries of amnesties. Vaughn Delong, Chief, General Education Branch, Education and Religious Affairs Div., to Comm. Off., 2nd Mil. Govt. Bn., subject: “Facts about the Reopening of the University of Marburg,” 18 Apr. 1946, OMGH, box 460D. Pfannenstiel’s own statement describing this incident in E. Klee et al., eds. “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York, 1991), 238-44. Numerous documents, including a detailed but anonymous accusatory letter in HHStA-W 520/SK & BK Giessen, Kasten 556; also HHStA-W 520/SK Mst./ Kasten 54, Ma/1098. In order to assure anonymity in keeping with the access restrictions concerning Hesse’s Spruchkammer files, no initials or research specialties will be used for the Marburg faculty. Several “nominal” party members were temporarily left in their posts since no suitable replacements for key specialties could be found, although they were also placed on notice that the arrangement was only temporary. A higher proportion of Assistants and “private Dozenten” were removed. Vaughn Delong, Chief, General Education Branch, Education and Religious Affairs Div., to Comm. Off., 2nd Mil. Govt. Bn., subject: “Facts about the Reopening of the University of Marburg,” 18 Apr. 1946, OMGH, box 460D. Report, Prof. Hohmann, “Professors to be proposed for the faculty of Medicine,” [n.d.], OMGH PHD, box 1002; Knappstein, Min. Dir., an den Ministerpräsidenten, HHStA-W 2 July 1948. This and dozens of other reports from the “politische Prüfungsausschuß” at Marburg in HHStA-W 504/298c. One of the most fascinating aspects of the voluminous Spruchkammer files on Marburg’s physician-professors is their interaction; enough of them are available to draw a good picture of the workings of the department during the Third Reich. Some of the more interesting files on the case described: HHStA/w 520/SK MSt Ma-B, Kasten II, Az. Mst. 2919/46; SK Az. Ma-B 1198; SK Mst., Kasten 559, Az. Mst. 33/46. For example, Binder’s statements of exasperation to Minister President Stock, dated 12 Aug. 1948 and 24 Aug. 1948, HHStA-W 501/193 (2). Binder was determined to complete denazification in the universities even as denazification was being accelerated toward its premature conclusion. The seven were determined by a reconstruction based on Spruchkammer files and Culture Ministry records. Professional migration was established using the reference directory for German academics, Kürschners Gelehrten-Kalender. Klee, ed. “The Good Old Days,” 299. For a sense of just how unusual this breakdown is, compare Table 4.9 with Table 4.7 above and with Appendix 1, Table 4.1. –

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181. The missing cases in each sample, as well as the different sources used, keep them from meeting the criteria for probability testing; nevertheless, the numbers do provide reasonable evidence from which to draw conclusions. 182. Compare with Niethammer, Die Mitläuferfabrik. 183. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, 297-98. 184. Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität der Institution des Berufsbeamtentums,” 68. 185. Kropat, Hessen in der Stunde Null, 243-44. 186. Draft, Gesetz über die Einstellung spätheimkehrender Beamter, Wiesbaden, October 1951, HHStA-W 503/505. 187. The Beamte involved in drafting the Hessian law indicated their awareness of this preferential treatment. The exclusion of refugee civil servants was a financial necessity, they argued. Internal memo from Hesse’s Interior Ministry, Abt. Ic-8b, to Abt. IX, Wbn, 4 May 1951, HHStA-W 503/505. 188. Regierungserklärung vor dem Hessischen Landtag, 7 Apr. 1951, HHStA-W 503/505 189. JCS 1067/6 Directive of JCS to Commander in Chief of U.S. Forces of Operation, April 26, 1945, in Report of U.S. Military Governor, Denazification (1948), 00. 14-16. Cited by Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 1071-72. 190. R. Falck, “Das Rhein-Main-Gebiet und die Stadt Lauterbach in Hessen während des Zusammenbruches und des Einmarsches der Amerikaner im Frühjahr 1945,” Lauterbacher Sammlungen 18 (1958): 9-10. 191. Correspondence between Oberkirchenrat Hahn of the Protestant church for Hessen/Nassau and Liberation Minister Binder, Sept.-Dec. 1948, HHStA-W 501/19. 192. Kogon and Römhild, Das Internierungslager Darmstadt, April 1947 in HHStA-W 501/800. On 20 April 1946, the proportions were roughly similar, including 1155 (5.6 percent) high civil servants, 3644 mid-level civil servant (17.6 percent, the largest occupational group represented), 1305 businessmen (6.3 percent), 137 industrialists (0.7 percent), and 2373 “free professionals” (11.4 percent, not subdivided in statistics). Berufsgliederung, CIE Darmstadt, 20.6.46, HHStA-W 522/488. 193. Bericht über Aufklärungs- und Bildungsarbeit in den hessischen Internierungs- und Arbeitslagern, 1.6. - 30.9.47, Wiesbaden, 15 October 1947. (signed by Regierungsrat Dr. Robert Wagner, approved by Liberation Minister Gottlob Binder), HHStA-W 501/547. 194. Arbeitslager-Abwicklungsstelle (signed Regierungsoberinspektor Schwan), to Abwicklungsamt des ehemaligen Befreiungsministerium, 15 Dec. 1950, HHStA-W 501/1200. 195. Political Analysis and Public Opinion Weekly, period ending 15 Jan. 1947, OMGH box 62. 196. Kogon and Römhild, 7, HHStA-W 501/800. 197. Inmate lists, including dates of release, in HHStA-W 501/571; compared with listings of physicians in corresponding towns and cities. 198. The fact that government officials had to remind camp employees not to require free consultations from convicted physicians indicates that some physicians were incarcerated for more than two years. Rundbrief, Hessisches Staatsministerium, Ministerium für politische Befrieung, Abt. VII, to Landesamt für Internierungs- und Arbeitslager, 4 Dec. 1947, HHStAW 501/1635. 199. OMGH ICD Weekly Political intelligence and German Opinion Review No. 15, 17 Aug. 1946, OMGH box 66. 200. The German administration was sensitive to the negative connotations of the term Umerziehung. In one draft report, a note explained why each mention of the word was replaced with “information” or “education.” The title itself was changed from “Second Report on Reeducation Work” to “Second Report on the Work of the Section Information and Education in the Ministry for Political Liberation.” HHStA-W 501/20. Very little reeducation took place in the camp before 1947. See Kogon and Römhild, 17. 201. See foreword to the reprint, Mitscherlich and Mielke, Medizin ohne Menschlichkei, 14-15.

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202. Bericht über Aufklärungs- und Bildungsarbeit in den hessischen Internierungs- und Arbeitslagern, 1.6. - 30.9.47, Wiesbaden, 15 October 1947, HHStA-W 501/547. Report, Das Internierungslager Darmstadt. Ein Bericht, April 1947 in HHStA-W 501/800. 203. They also noted that this treatment was more severe than that sought by the Americans, and that it should be maintained in the future. Regierungsdirektor Oppenheimer, to Direktor des Landespersonalamt Wiesbaden, 9 Oct. 1950, HHStA-W 501/740. 204. Aktennotiz attached to report “Richtlinien für die Wiedereinstellung im öffentlichen Dienst … der … betroffenen Beamten, Angestellten und Arbeiter,” 26 Feb. 1947, HHStA-W 501/862. The question of pension rights was clarified in the 16th implementation order to the Liberation Law, 14 Sept. 1946, HHStA-W 501/1026. The loss of pension rights applied to those removed by the Military government in 1945 and those classified as Group I or Group II offenders by the Spruchkammer. After a hefty debate, it was decided that individual Spruchkammer could decide to revoke or permit pension rights for Beamte classified in Groups III and IV. Kerp, Minister of Finance to Ministry of Political Liberation, 27 Aug. 1946; also Bekanntmachung Nr. 8 of the Ministry of Political Liberation, Oct. 1946, HHStAW 501-1026. 205. See especially Rundschreiben Nr. 4/1955 of the Allgemeine Beamtenschutzbund, 30 Apr. 1955, BA ZK 1385. 206. Rundschreiben Nr. 3/1955 of the Allgemeine Beamtenschutzbund, 18 March 1955, BA ZK 1385. 207. Öffentlicher Dienst, Deutschland unter alliierter Besatzung, 148. 208. Memo, “Auslegung des Art. 58, I des Befreiungsgesetzes vom 5.3.1946,” HHStA-W 501/926. 209. Regierungsdirektor Fahn an Grosshessisches Staatsministerium, Ministerium für politische Befreiung, Darmstadt, 23 May 1946, HHStA-W 501/66. Reply, 1 June 1946, in same folder. 210. Kohl, 264-76. 211. Open letter in the Frankfurter Rundschau from Willi Knothe (SPD) and Walter Fisch (KPD), to Geiler, 25 Oct. 1945, in Kropat, Hessen in der Stunde Null, 33. Cited also by Walter Mühlhausen, Hessen 1945-1950, 47. 212. J. Bach, America’s Germany: An Account of the Occupation (New York, 1946), 147. 213. Quoted in Bach, America’s Germany, 147. 214. H. Ehmke, “Die Verächter der Demokratie,” Die Zeit 24 June 1994, 6. 215. They also both received promotions to Ministerialrat. Two letters from Minister President Geiler of Greater Hessen to OMGH, CAD, Wiesbaden, 22 Oct. 1946, HHStA-W 502/1904. 216. Correspondence between the two men in the late summer of 1946 in HHStA-W 502/3991. 217. Exchange, dated 14 Jan. 1946 and 8 Feb. 1946 in HHStA-W 502/3992. 218. Translation of this Law in OMGH box 1114. 219. Reg.Rat H. Alfs, Direktor des Landespersonalamtes Hessen, to Staatskanzlei, Hess. Min.Pres., 19 Jan. 1955, HHStA-W 502/919. Also Vorlage für die MinisterialdirektorenKonferenz (Anlage zur ersten Durchführungsverordnung zum Gesetz über den Abschluß der Entnazifizierung, HHStA-W 503/505. On initial reluctance to accept beneficiaries in civil service, see exchange between Liberation Minister Binder and Minister President Stock, 5 Oct. and 8 Oct. 1948, HHStA-W 502/922. 220. Comparison with leading Beamte listed in the handbook, Die Bundesrepublik, Land Hessen (1953). 221. This was not the case for Georg Aigner, a tribunal chairman, whose application for an appointment to Hesse’s high civil service was denied. Various materials in HHStA-W 501/1058. Also Interior Minister Zinnkann, to MfpBefr. Binder, 20 Aug. 1946, HHStA-W 501/3990. 222. Settlements to all claimants, usually a year’s salary or a position in the private sector, cost Hesse over 6 million DM. Of 5,432 petitioners for either reinstatement or other settlements (as of March 1948), 2,297 former Liberation Ministry employees and civil servants were promised positions, of whom 1,425 could be placed immediately. This number includes all –

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ranks of public employees. Statistics attached to Letter, Min.Dir. Reuß to Geschäftsstelle des Zulassungs- und Prüfungsausschusses der IHK Frankfurt a. M., 16 Sept. 1948, HHStAW 501/573. 223. Bundesergänzungsgesetz zur Entschädigung für Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung, BGBl I, 1953, Nr. 62, pp, 1387-1405; Erste Verordnung zur Durchführung des Bundesergänzungsgesetzes zur Entschädigung für Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung, BGBl I, 1954, Nr. 30, 271-78.

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Chapter 5

RECASTING WORLD VIEWS

After the war we donned democracy like a fashionable new suit. I would like to hope that despite the popular adage to the contrary, clothes can make the man. It may take a while to grow into them, but eventually we may feel the way we look and, above all, conduct ourselves accordingly. — Bonn government spokesman1

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C

ommenting on the often disturbing professional longevity of medical professionals who had helped formulate and implement National Socialist eugenics policy, one critic has claimed that a “continuity of persons must result in a continuity of thinking.”2 The evidence of German elites in the post-1945 era contradicts this view. Large numbers of elites who had supported the Third Reich survived in their occupations into the postwar period and maintained occupational structures with only limited adjustments. Nevertheless, the vast majority of German elites abandoned their sympathies for National Socialism, and came to embrace the new democratic order. Even if there was little tangible transformation in the relatively objectifiable realms of occupational demographics and organizations, mental constructs proved more malleable; a noticeable shift was evident in the outlooks, expectations, and behavior of the professionals themselves.3 In fact, considering the very high degree of both zealous and nominal Nazis and the failure of most attempts to exclude the bulk of them, the lack of public support for National Socialism in the postwar period should surprise us more than it does. This chapter considers some of the main reasons for this paradox. It investigates the recasting of political ideologies and shared occupational assumptions. After first demonstrating that a shift in outlook indeed occurred, several causes of these changes are discussed. Finally, this chapter turns to a key mechanism that lies at the core of the postwar recasting of the West German elite: In their attempt to evade, ignore, and neutralize their real complicity in the Nazi endeavor, German elites distanced themselves

Notes for this section begin on page 239. Recasting West German Elites : Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse Between Nazism and

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substantially from elements of that past, and strengthened their commitment to democracy as manifested in the Federal Republic. German elites did not wipe their mental slate clean in 1945. Frequently innovative proposals could not be easily identified as either “traditional,” “fascist,” or “democratic.” For example, a Frankfurt physician’s appeal for a greatly expanded social insurance net, which would cover the holistic spectrum of an individual’s “social environment,” employed arguments reminiscent of völkisch thought and even National Socialist ideology: The broadened system would combat the “mental and psychological disturbances” brought about by “technology and civilization” by adjusting an individuals’ environment as well as the body. Expanded social insurance would, however, “reject socialization in the sharpest terms.” To these völkisch and anti-socialist strains, the author added the corporatist notion that physicians would regulate the system in consultation with other responsible groups. Ultimately, he argued, such an expansive, inclusive social insurance program would achieve its aims “in a truly democratic manner.”4 Depending on one’s point of view, one could emphasize its völkisch, corporatist, traditionalist, or democratic elements. While the process may have been difficult and slow, peoples’ political views changed in response to their experiences and circumstances. Hans Wallenberg, the chief editor of the American-sponsored Die Neue Zeitung from 1946 to 1953, assessed the prospects for the survival of West German democracy in the mid 1950s with cautious optimism: Only a small number of those who passed the democratic “color line” [i.e. former Nazis who squeaked through denazification with no serious consequences] seem to have ambitions dangerous to the democratic government of 1955, and quite a few seem to have undergone a genuine change of heart and political concept. To deny the possibility that their contribution can be of particular value to the German commonwealth would be tantamount to a negation of the educational and missionary power of democratic ideas. In fact, there are in Germany now quite a few people once connected with Hitlerism who atone for their error by dedicating themselves to the propagation of democratic ideals.5

This point is important because it permits observers of West German history—and of other countries seeking fundamental political change—to accept that a recasting of cultural and political life is possible even where the perpetrators of past injustices are not justly punished or excluded from positions of influence. However, such an interpretation should not imply that, as Heinrich Lübbe postulates, the lax treatment of National Socialists and their professional survival in West Germany was a necessary precondition of the Federal Republic’s stability and success. On the contrary, it was a hindrance in many ways. Nevertheless, this conclusion directly challenges the all too frequent suggestion that the failure to remove former National Socialists was a dire and immediate threat to West German democratization, or, in the more extreme view, constituted a “restoration.”6 By no means did all Nazi –

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zealots came to support the Federal Republic’s democratic institutions, nor did all remnants and strands of thought associated with National Socialism disappear. Certainly there remained a fringe of unrepentant and unreconstructed elites. Throughout numerous postwar interrogations and a trial in the 1960s physician Georg Renno rejected any sense of personal guilt for his central role in “euthanasia” killings at Hartheim. He continued to justify the program as late as 1997, when he was last interviewed before his death.7 Any generalization about the beliefs of a collective run the risk of oversimplification. While no monolithic world view existed among senior civil servants, business leaders, or physicians, a close reading of statements by members of these groups points to some strong general trends.

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New Departures in Elite Attitudes: Combining Tradition and Reform The attitudes, assumptions, and outlooks of German elites changed in many ways during the decade and a half after 1945, although the shifts were evolutionary rather than abrupt. The upheaval that Germans perceived all around them in the early postwar years proved conducive to a rethinking of cherished beliefs. It is therefore quite significant that this perceived upheaval was even greater than the reality, as shown in the case of economic destruction and demographic change. May 8, 1945, may not have been the Stunde Null, the zero hour of popular lore, but it did shake the world view of many Germans. The widespread shell shocked apathy that many American visitors described in the wake of Germany’s defeat was a visible sign of the population’s internal despair—not just at having endured the bombings, suffered the second major military defeat in thirty years, or experienced the foreign occupation of their country, but also because many were overcome by the loss of purpose, justification, and self-respect, in short the near total collapse of their constructed world.8 At the beginning of the occupation, a large minority of German elites believed that western democracy was alien to German culture and stood little chance of taking firm root there. Of 162 community leaders polled in February 1946, one-third (34 percent) felt it was generally not possible to establish democracy in Germany, compared to 43 percent who were more optimistic, and 23 percent who had no opinion.9 Although some Allied political leaders were inclined to agree, Germany’s social elites had mostly abandoned such opinions by the mid 1950s. Studies have shown that Germany’s leading strata had a better understanding of the concept of democracy and valued it more highly than did workers and white-collar workers—a reversal of the situation in the Weimar Republic.10 The Federal Republic, Germany’s second experiment with democracy, rapidly established much deeper roots than its ill-fated predecessor.11 Civil servants, business leaders, and physi–

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cians all exhibited a newfound pride and confidence in the young institutions that governed their lives, just as Germans generally began to rally around the constitution as a meaningful symbol of their “new” society.12 Undoubtedly, the Germans’ understanding and application of democracy often remained fuzzy and inconsistent, even among the intellectual elite, and evolved considerably over time.13 For example, leaders of the profession quickly adapted to the participatory system and learned to use it to their advantage. In urging his colleagues to enter the political discussion about the potential socialization of German medicine (a hot issue at the time), one physician reminded them that “politics is a power struggle of particular groups whose goal is to translate the doctrines of these groups into reality through peaceful means.”14 This statement reveals an admirable grasp of the nature of the democratic process, albeit one marked with an emphasis on interest groups over the individual. Some new departures were evident in individual occupational spheres as well, further distancing postwar elites from the interwar era. This was true in spite of the fact that the generational turnover and institutional restructuring were limited before the 1960s.15 Undoubtedly, the outward attachment to the institutions and legitimizing rhetoric of the Federal Republic stemmed in large measure, but indirectly, from a desire to avoid a full and honest confrontation with the recent past. Nevertheless, as I shall argue in this chapter, the shift in loyalties and sentiments went deeper than many social critics have allowed, and the new commitments rapidly gained strength and depth, independently of strategies of evasion. Psychological and political recasting is evident in three main areas. First, members of all three occupations emphatically and repeatedly praised the new system and their wholehearted support for it in their public rhetoric— in marked contrast to the beleaguered Weimar Republic, for which few German elites had found kind words. Since the ability of democratic institutions to function depends more on social and cultural factors such as attitudes and public commitment than on the technical construction of the institutions themselves, the role of elite loyalties in the success of the Federal Republic was crucial.16 Civil servants’ attitudes about the new system of government that emerged in the late 1940s were particularly important. As in any modern system of government, the efficiency and ultimate success of the system rested largely on public servants’ desire, willingness, and ability to implement policy, not to mention their central role in formulating West Germany’s laws. Both Allied and German architects of the West German Länder and federal governments recognized the often hostile attitudes of civil servants toward the Weimar system as one of the main causes of its demise. That collective memory led, among other things, to the priority that the military government attached to denazifying and reforming the civil service, especially its upper echelons. Because the long term reform and denazification of the civil service were limited, having been reversed by Article 33 of the Basic Law and the legislation that implemented Article 131, the attitudes of –

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civil servants, both newcomers and “131ers,” attains heightened significance. While the higher civil service retained its special non-egalitarian aloofness from lower echelons of the civil service and from the general public, their commitment to the new constitutional order and democratically elected governments was strong compared to their performance during Germany’s first experiment with democracy. This impression of a traditionbound and insular civil service that was nonetheless loyal to the Federal Republic is summarized in a book-length assessment of post-Nazi Germany, a common genre in the mid 1950s:

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The new Civil Service, after an initial period of skepticism […], eventually became loyal members of the regime. Indeed many members of the Government and the Bundestag were themselves senior civil servants. As long as their authority was maintained and their pensions safeguarded from inflation the Bonn system was eminently satisfactory and far superior to Weimar.17

The League of German Beamte even argued that “[t]he German professional civil service is the central pillar of the democratic rule of law.”18 Both business leaders and physicians also came out in support of democracy, however defined, and the new system in particular. These were no longer elites who disparaged parliamentary rule as a danger to national and parochial interests. According to the German-American editor of Die Neue Zeitung, business leaders in 1955 expressed positive opinions of democracy, quite in contrast to their attitudes between the wars. “External identification with, if not enthusiastic support of, democratic government has become the order of the day.”19 Professor von Drigalski, head of Hesse’s medical branch in the Interior Ministry, argued that the Physicians’ Chambers’ rationing of practices, which eliminated free competition among physicians, represented “the best and finest democratic method to maintain healthy medical morale” (his emphasis).20 An official petition written by the Hessian Chambers applies the term “democracy” similarly.21 Upon reflection, the “democratic” nature of this arrangement might be elusive, but the commitment in principle was repeated and strong. Second, each occupation, as a group, confidently sought to realize its goals and represent its interests within rather than outside or against the formal institutions of the Federal Republic. This held true, with some exceptions, even when the outcome of the democratic process was perceived as unfavorable. Two important milestones in this regard were the struggles over the Civil Servants’ Law and the debate over codetermination in industry. Of course, one reason for the widespread acceptance of postwar institutions was the fact that they usually worked in favor of the interests of entrenched elites, especially in reaffirming the fundamental principles each occupation held most dear. Thus civil servants saw their special status and lifetime tenure in office anchored in the Basic Law; business leaders enjoyed the reaffirmation of private property and the gradual abandonment of Allied dis–

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mantling, import/export controls, and production limits for heavy industry; and physicians fended off all efforts to abrogate self-regulation in favor of closer state and private control. Finally, on a broad range of issues relating to their specific spheres of interest, each occupation, to differing degrees, moved away from activities, demands, and beliefs that were closely associated with National Socialism, some of them rooted in older German traditions. The actual shifts in world view and occupational philosophy exhibited by the three professions were diffuse and sometimes contradictory. None of the elite occupations completely abandoned all remnants of völkisch and otherwise Nazi-related thinking. The civil service exhibited a particularly surprising degree of conceptual continuity across the divide of 1945-1955. At the same time, neither civil servants, business leaders, nor physicians viewed these continuities as legacies of National Socialism. Rather, they drew the lines of continuity back to an older, more palatable tradition, often ignoring the fate and consequences of such views when they had been carried to their extreme during the Third Reich. The complex coexistence of tradition and reform was nowhere more apparent than in the civil service. While pressing firmly and relentlessly for a return to the three-track, professional civil service, against American- and socialist-inspired reform impulses, the Parliamentary Council in 1948 and 1949, as well as the Christian Democratic leaders in Bonn deliberately added loyalty oaths to the basic democratic order, as well as additional assurances that the professional civil service would generally remain politically neutral.22 Loyalty oaths, of course, while they had an older history in the civil service, also became a primary feature of the Nazi Gleichschaltung when civil servants had been required to swear allegiance and obedience to the Führer. The architects of Federal Republican system, however, stressed that the new oath was to the fundamental constitutional order, rather than to a person or partisan political movement. In this instance as in many others, the return to “tradition” did not signal a blind and complete reinstatement of past practice; rather, it meant that proven institutions should be maintained, with adjustments or corrections where, according to prevalent perception, those institutions had failed. One progressive change that civil servants generally accepted was the formal realization of the principle of gender equality in their calling. Neither did they overlook the fact that the Nazis had exacerbated the legal inequality of men and women who served the state.23 Reformist thought in the civil service, however, did not generally manifest itself as a desire for institutional change. Even a cursory review of the civil service journals shows that civil servants expended an inordinate amount of energy on their rear-guard battle to solidify their incomes and careers. The discussion over restitution laws, the implementation of article 131 of the Basic Law, pay scales, and pensions occupied most of their pages. The majority of their claims rested on the premise that –

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their special relationship to the abstract “state” had been continuous. On the other hand, one discerns even among self-laudatory, unrepentant statements a considerable and growing respect for postwar institutions. Business leaders, too, rejected the Third Reich, not infrequently because they, like so many other Germans, blamed the defeat of 1945 on the National Socialists, projected as the “other.” Even the shipping magnate, Emil Helfferich, who had actively supported the regime, accused the Nazis of having suffered from a lack of vision and humanity, even while he offered a pat apologia for the Nazi “idea” and “courage to action.”24 A wide spectrum of the country’s business leadership, in contrast to their popular image, especially among critical intellectuals on the left, believed that Germany should not again become a major arms producer. The leader of one business group told a German-American representative of the U.S. State Department in 1952, at the height of the Korean War boom and amid international discussions of a German contribution to Western security organizations: “We [German businessmen] do not want to produce arms. It would be much better if we stayed out of the arms race and exported goods. Let’s not have any German tank production.”25 Having twice been burned by the postwar evaporation of demand for excessive military-industrial production, not to mention the actual destruction of much of their plant in World War II, most German business leaders perceived the relative benefits of consumer-oriented industrial production. This did not, of course, translate into a refusal to produce raw materials and machine tools for other countries’ arms industries. The Korean War boom’s creation of international demand for high-quality steel and machine tools was largely responsible for the astounding recovery of the West German economy in the early 1950s, and German manufacturers knew where the products they sold were going.26 The employment of cheap “guest workers” beginning in the late 1950s represented a mixture of a disturbing return to past practices but also a subtle new departure. In many ways, the recourse to foreign cheap foreign labor to work in German enterprises as the pool of “surplus” refugee labor dried up beginning in the late 1950s recalls the exploitation of slave labor and “volunteer” labor from occupied and allied countries during the war. Many business managers viewed these mostly unskilled Italians, Spaniards, and later Turks, as expendable, able to serve an enterprise’s needs for a time, but expected to return to their home countries when the business cycle made them redundant. Some differences are, however, apparent. Whereas innumerable German businesses had ruthlessly exploited slave labor and its near equivalent during the Third Reich, the foreigners who began to arrive in the late 1950s were drawn to German enterprises with what, for the workers themselves, were relatively high wages, even if they were low by German standards. In another vein, many leading business figures embraced a more flexible attitude toward the social aspirations of their employees and workers than –

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ever before. In their own justifications of their social policies, they voiced hope that a willingness to compromise on labor questions would forestall the types of labor-management resentments that had facilitated the rise of National Socialism. On the other hand, at least one commentator locates the origins of more flexible socio-economic policies in the Nazi-inspired Wirtschaftsgruppen.27 Physicians departed from previously common beliefs. They achieved this by largely ignoring their past complicity. Above all, “racial hygiene,” as well as concepts that resembled it, disappeared almost entirely, and did not return with former Nazi physicians. This branch of medical “science” apparently lost so much credibility that few physicians even bothered to condemn it publicly or in the pages of professional journals. At no time in the postwar period did any notable group of physicians seriously attempt to resuscitate human genetic theories of the sort common before 1945. In fact, human genetics itself fell into relative torpor in German medicine, only slowly recovering from the misguided and faulty research of the Nazi years. The University of Frankfurt did not even employ a faculty researcher in human genetics until the 1960s, after having distinguished itself in that field before the 1930s, and then turning increasingly toward Nazi racial genetics. The prestige of genetics as a discipline declined, it should be noted, even though former German eugenicists remained in or returned to the profession. Otmar von Verschuer, discussed above, obtained a chair in human genetics at the University of Münster in 1951, a position he held until his accidental death in 1969. Many of his colleagues who had written and lectured on racial theory also received or retained positions in higher education.28 Some were Verschuer’s own students. Robert Proctor argued that “the overt ideological trappings of Nazism were purged from their works, yet many of the research interests remain unchanged.”29 This claim holds true not only for many of the cases cited by Proctor, but others as well. The physician Kurt Hoehne, for example, a student who earned his doctorate in 1936 under Marburg University professor Ernst Kretschmer, published an essay entitled “Out-Migration as a Biological Problem” in 1949, in which he speculates about the effects of resettlement programs on the “existing human material” (Menschenmaterial). Ultimately, he assumes that his investigation will shed light on the ultimate effects, and even the desirability, of a resettlement of people from “a European continent overflowing with people” to less densely inhabited territory in Africa, Asia, or South America. He states unselfconsciously that the scientific knowledge about “the ‘normal’ human being and its many psychophysical variations was extraordinarily limited until, in the past one and a half decades, the psychiatrist Kretschmer” developed his constitutional morphological theories. “One can call this a reorientation of our understanding of man.”30 What is striking about this essay is not only its reliance on many of the geo-racialist assumptions common in the Third Reich, but –

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also its complete lack of overt reference to the perversion of medicine in Germany between 1933 and 1945. This and other medical works, not least those cited by Proctor, often resemble only slightly cleansed versions of an older racialism. Still, such writings were hardly the norm after 1945, and the fact remains that there was no revival of research in the extremist vein that characterized “racial hygiene.” Instead, professional forums more frequently emphasized medical ethics. In the wake of the medical trials of 1947, a prominent Darmstadt physician exhorted his colleagues to consider that the ethical lapses of the physicians sitting in the docket followed directly from medicine in the service of economic thinking and political expedience. In a letter to the head of the American MG health officer in Hessen, accompanying a copy of his published article, he declared, “we, the present leaders of the German doctors, after our experiences during Nazi-time, think it to be especially important that the mental and ethical level of the German doctors will be raised again.”31 The director of a major Hospital in Wiesbaden lent his support to the “euthanasia” trial taking place in a civil court in Frankfurt, noting that “it was the duty of a doctor to heal rather than kill, and any physician who willfully mistreats his patients is punishable under existing German law.”32 Even doctors who had qualms about the validity of the Nuremberg trials concurred that the convicted “euthanasia” physicians were guilty, and that, in this case, the defense argument that they were “just following orders” did not apply.33 In most cases, calls for greater emphasis on ethics or other reforms in German medicine made at best surprisingly vague references to the Third Reich. Dr. Oswald Bumke of Munich, writing in a cultural journal of higher education, referred to a “crisis in medicine,”which he identified mainly as the overemphasis of technique at the expense of attention to the soul. Without mentioning Hitler or the Third Reich, “euthanasia” or the Holocaust, Bumke dated the rise of “materialism” in medicine to the late nineteenth century, and proposed countering it by integrated more philosophical study into medical training.34 Bumke’s selective critique of historical developments in German medicine are echoed and elaborated in a two-part essay in the same journal by Paul Diepgen, professor of the history of medicine in Mainz. This 1950 exposition on “The Transformation of the Ideal of the Physician” covers the past two centuries of medical history, beginning tellingly with reference to the Hippocratic oath. With wide-ranging references to physicians, good and bad, from many countries, including some German-Jewish luminaries (although not explicitly identified as Jewish), Diepgen seeks to explain the triumphs and missteps of medicine since the eighteenth century. In particular, the author identifies two extremes that tended to lead medical professionals astray: overemphasis on rationalistic technique, which caused many practitioners to forget to treat the soul as well as the body; and romanticism, which allowed physicians to ignore the science inherent in their craft. One of the more positive turns in this overall account was the mid nineteenth –

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century support of many physicians, above all the legendary Virchow, for freedom from state control and in favor of self-regulation. Amazingly, while the cult of Mesmer’s magnetism receives extensive commentary, the growing popularity of eugenics and racial hygiene beginning in the late nineteenth century are not even mentioned.

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Old Hippocratic observations and medicine that is based on it appear in a new light and are valued anew, above all the eternal principles of Hippocratic ethics. As this line of thinking is implemented, then the true ideal type of the physician will last through the difficult present situation.35

Physicians who attempted to fend off the American assault against mandatory membership in semi-public physicians’ chambers drew on a reformed rhetoric, neither nationalist nor remotely National Socialist. Like the defenders of the Chambers of Industry and Trade, advocates of traditional physicians’ chambers maintained that the self-regulation and selfpolicing of the medical profession was inherently democratic. They countered the American fear that mandatory-membership chambers represented a concentration of power by arguing that the chambers “could only seize power with the aide of the reign of the National Socialist leadership principle.”36 Burghard Breitner, a physician from Innsbruck, claimed that the Hippocratic oath spanned the unbroken history of medicine. “The ethical stance of the physician,” he wrote, “stands above all upheaval and change.” Ignoring the less than humanitarian activities of his German and Austrian colleagues in the very recent past, Breitner claimed that physicians could be “the eternal soldiers of eternal human dignity”37 The general tendency to conflate all of the negative experiences of the late Third Reich and the early occupation as “the results of the war” is also noteworthy. This conception was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it indicated an understanding that unwelcome social policies imposed by the Allies came as a direct reaction to “Hitler’s war,” and permitted German elites to criticize the reforms without necessarily rejecting the Allies or their intentions. On the other hand, advocates of tradition won an important tactical victory if they could portray reform measures as “wartime aberrations.” The natural response to aberrations was of course to return to the “normal” way of doing things. The ability of tradition-bound elites to cast the terms of the debate in this manner played no small part in the dissipation of the boldest reforms, regardless of how overdue they seemed to some. The resuscitation of many defeated Allied reform ideas in the 1960s and 1970s bears witness to the underlying need for structural and legal innovations in various aspects of German society. Progressive Germans periodically called for civil service reform in terms similar to those voiced fruitlessly by the Americans in the 1940s. As earlier, civil service interest groups fended off plans to overhaul the civil service system in the 1960 and 1970s, despite a public that increasingly favored American-style reforms to loosen the Beam–

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tentum’s grip on the political system, and to enhance the bureaucracy’s responsiveness to the people.38

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Roots of Ideological Recasting What caused this shift away from previously held beliefs and assumptions among Germany’s elites in general, and the specific recasting of some of high civil servants’, business leaders’, and physicians’ formerly cherished views? Why were they willing to embrace a system of government so similar to the one whose demise they had welcomed or hastened in 1933? To the extent that the contemporary literature and subsequent historical accounts acknowledge such an attitudinal adjustment, a number of different theories have been proposed. First of all, the learning process of nationalists, reactionaries, and National Socialists did not begin in 1945. The brutal realities of life in the Third Reich, especially during the later years of the war, discredited National Socialism in the eyes of many elites who had originally hailed Hitler’s accession to power. The National Socialists’ intrusion into traditional prerogatives fostered an aversion among many elites to the methods of terror, repression, and state control. Germany’s undeniable and unconditional defeat, combined with the fact that the horrors of the war-ravaged hometown Germany, fundamentally changed the way that most Germans viewed war. Those whose homes, businesses, or offices had been bombed out were often quick to follow the causal chain back through the war to the Nazi party, even if they themselves were members. Certainly, this fit the picture they preferred to paint of themselves as victims. But by labeling the war as “the other’s,” the Nazis’ war, as did a tobacco wholesaler in southern Hesse, they took an important step in distancing themselves from Nazi beliefs.39 Businessmen and businesswomen suffered greatly from wartime bombing and Hitler’s last-ditch scorched-earth policy. One German émigré who returned as a civilian advisor to the American military government in October 1945 noted that, in Frankfurt, at least, “not a single factory seems to have escaped damage or demolition.”40 An American journalist simply and hyperbolically declared—too soon as it turned out—that “[t]he most significant fact about German industry is that it no longer exists.”41 Unlike World War I, the Second World War “undermined the effectiveness of the myths and symbols that had inspired the cult of the nation, as well as the stereotype of the new soldierly man,” a mainstay of the fascist mystique.42 As a result, few continued to espouse National Socialism as a system or wished its outright return. At the same time, the many strands of divergent theories, ideas, and approaches that had combined to constitute National Socialism did not simply disappear. In fact, the aversion to what could be termed “real existing National Socialism” did not always translate into com–

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plete rejection. Postwar opinion surveys conducted by the American military government’s Information Control Division throughout the occupation showed about half of Germans in the American-occupied Germany (including the American Sector of Berlin) clung to the belief that National Socialism was “a good idea badly carried out.”43 While this is disturbing, related questions revealed that only a small group actively hoped for a Nazi resurgence. “We would be the last to want to see any of the leaders of the period 1933 to 1945 in a position of responsibility,” claimed a civil servant writing to a professional journal.44 To further explore the significance of the public opinion surveys, it would be interesting to know how many of the same Germans would have asserted that Communism was “a good idea badly carried out,” but simultaneously reject the actual imposition of such a system.45 The OMGUS surveys came closest to providing such information by asking respondents to choose between National Socialism or Communism. Those opting for neither rose from 22 percent in November 1945 to 66 percent a year later, but fell to 52 percent in early 1949. Whereas only 17 percent would have chosen either National Socialism or Communism in November 1946, by February 1949 (notably after months of the Berlin blockade and airlift) those choosing National Socialism rose to 43 percent, while those who expressed a preference for Communism fell drastically to 2 percent.46 One postwar journalist and commentator, Manfred Jenke, has suggested that there is little mystery to the disappearance of devoted National Socialists as either a political or social force in the postwar period. The National Socialist movement had been “an accumulation of the most diverse forces” from the beginning, he argues. Only strong leadership held together all of the pillars of National Socialism, especially with the growing disgruntlement, disgust, or resistance of such diverse groups of formerly active supporters as the radicals from the Kampfzeit, or the alienation of the respectable middle class at the repeated application of brute violence, racial policies, and antireligious campaigns. With the destruction of the centripetal forces of the central leadership in 1945, the majority of the movement disintegrated completely.47 Jenke upholds the view, so common among defendants before the denazification tribunals of the late 1940s, that many Germans who had cheered Hitler on in the early days lost their naiveté over time: It must always be kept in mind that the true face of National Socialism did not become apparent to many Germans until after they had naively applauded Hitler on 30 January 1933. But the same Germans were able to condemn this system completely—on the basis of bitter experience—on 8 May 1945.48

This interpretation is borne out in the case of those at the core of this study. Proud, ambitious civil servants, business leaders, and physicians were relieved to reverse the Nazi regime’s encroachment on their freedoms. Entrepreneurs welcomed the end of the “guided economy” (gelenkte Wirtschaft) –

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that the Four-Year Plan of 1936 had ushered in and the war had accelerated. They had come to resent the increasing limitations on their decision-making freedoms, which, from the perspective of many, had reduced the entrepreneur “to nearly a public office.”49 K.S., a manager at the Opel automobile factory, had originally welcomed the apparent economic recovery brought about by the National Socialist regime. However, Hesse’s Nazi Gauleiter, Sprenger, and Gestapo agents so harassed and infiltrated the factory that K.S. constantly clashed with party policies and representatives, becoming quite antagonistic toward National Socialism in the process.50 In addition to an aversion to Nazi methods during the Third Reich, or Nazi policies, such as the deliberate instigation of war, the effect of the total defeat on German political opinion was considerable. In a chronicle written at the end of the war and beginning of the occupation, a tax official in the town of Lauterbach registers his own amazement at the unexpectedly well-provisioned American troops. Clearly, the regime was squandering countless lives and property in pursuit of a war that was already lost.51 Late conversions brought on by the loss of the war and the devastation it brought to Germany might seem suspiciously opportunistic, but many were surely genuine and lasting. For one thing, defeat often carried with it the shocking realization of the true character of the regime. The dissipation of support for National Socialism and other forms of reactionary radicalism by the end of the war should not detract from the observation that large portions of Germans continued to cling to some ideas dear to the National Socialist heart, such as racial stereotypes. However, the overall concept lost its unity, and therefore its mass appeal. One commentator has pointed out that the majority of Germans after 1945 “retrospectively regarded the period of National Socialist rule as an infectious childhood disease.”52 One characteristic of all of the organizations representing Hesse’s physicians was that they consistently cast their self-interest in altruistic terms. They justified their efforts to open the golden trough of the insurance panel funds to a larger proportion of physicians with the argument that the war had “strongly deteriorated the population’s state of health” and that advances in medical science now necessitated a larger number of panel physicians.53 If commitment to the Nazi program had largely withered in the final stages of the war, then what effect, if any, did the postwar years have on the mentality of Germans in general, and, more specifically, on elites? Unquestionably, the crisis engendered by the war made a change more likely, reform more justifiable. In a wide-ranging contemplation of transitions to from dictatorship to democracy, Giuseppe Di Palma argues that such dire crises as military defeat have historically been the most common moment at which democratization has successfully taken hold. In Germany’s case, the circumstances of utter defeat engendered “an ingrained rejection of any new totalitarian experiment.”54 As they assumed occupational responsibilities in –

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Germany, the Allies aimed to alter German beliefs just as they hoped to eradicate Nazi laws and institutions. In particular, the signatories at Potsdam agreed to

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convince the German people that they have suffered a total military defeat and that they cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves, since their own ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable.55

To carry out this mission, the four occupying powers went their individual ways, but all relied mainly on reforms of educational institutions, propaganda, and example. The reform of educational institutions, while more effective in Hesse than in any other American-zone Land, had little influence on higher education and even less, in the short or medium term, on the elite groups discussed here.56 The Western occupiers proved much more effective in establishing an independent media, a fact that had a strong, if unmeasurable, influence on the long-term democratization of the country. In numerous ways, the Allied occupiers and many anti-Nazi Germans used the period immediately following surrender to drive the Potsdam points home. They demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Germany had been defeated on the battlefield, in deliberate contrast to the misconceptions that held sway at the end of World War I and provided grist for the stab-inthe-back legend. Allied army leaders, especially from the military government units that moved in behind the advancing combat lines, went to great lengths to publicize German atrocities, particularly the machinery of genocide. When Allied units marched local civilians through liberated concentration camps, they sometimes singled out community leaders, such as officials, professionals, and businessmen. Allied-sponsored and licensed newspapers printed pictures as well as descriptions of the camps. In late 1945 and early 1946, the British and Americans distributed the film Death Mills, a documentary with footage from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and other camps. We will never accurately know how many Germans first learned the full nature and extent of the Holocaust before or after the end of the war; what is clear is that great numbers of people knew or suspected what was happening before 1945 but preferred to look away. There was no escaping knowledge about the discriminatory policies, the persecution, and the systematic deportation of Jews that took place incrementally. Whether they had heard rumors or reports beforehand, the confrontation with the facts and horrible images in 1945 had a considerable impact. 57 Revelations about the extent of the corruption and the lavish lifestyles of some Nazi leaders reinforced German resentment against the Bonzen (the fat cats).58 Due to new revelations about the Nazi regime, the same tax official who had been awed by the strength of the Western armies confided to his journal “the population has had to discover […] the extent to which German propaganda has misled them. The population feels betrayed and deserted.”59 –

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The third instrument of reeducation, teaching by example, met with divergent results. Edward Peterson has demonstrated that American policy often proved counter-productive to its intended goal, and succeeded best where Americans interfered least. The impression left by the occupying armies varied radically and depended on the personalities of the local commanding officers.60 However, the military government’s overall policies played an important role as well. The lenient attitude of the American occupiers toward the West Germans, which began with the Byrnes Speech of 1946 and picked up momentum along with the Cold War, had an ironically positive effect on Germans’ attitudes toward their occupiers and toward democracy. Perhaps the first great misstep in reeducation policy had been the attempt to convince Germans of their collective guilt. Because the majority of Germans continued to believe that others, either the Nazi leadership or Hitler, were responsible for German atrocities, they bitterly resisted the concept of “collective guilt.” Even the eminent philosopher Karl Jaspers, who strongly believed that the entire nation bore some “responsibility” for the actions of its institutions and leaders during the war, rejected the more absolute “collective guilt.”61 Soon the official American policy shifted to one that permitted greater differentiation between individuals and their responsibility.62 While this allowed many individuals to deny their personal responsibility, it also left them more receptive to positive messages. The change from collective to individual guilt took place in the first weeks and months of the occupation. The Nuremberg trials must be viewed in this light, as both an effort to differentiate between types and levels of individual guilt and responsibility and as an instrument to inform Germans about the crimes committed during the war. When the shift from stringent denazification to a more lenient policy took place in 1948, it had an equally salutary effect on German attitudes toward the Americans and the occupation. In fact, the systematic political vetting set in motion by the Law for Liberation irritated even many ardent anti-Nazis who originally sought a clean sweep. One high civil servant in the judiciary who out of conviction played an active role in the denazification program beginning in May 1945, and who became a chairperson of a Kassel tribunal in 1946, resigned in disgust a year later because of the program’s shortcomings. He complained that the increasingly bureaucratic tribunals were meting out occupational bans too liberally, delaying former “followers’” reintegration, so that the meticulous work of the denazification tribunals is being made illusory. Large numbers of people have already been materially and psychologically ruined—and, I must fear, also renazified.63

This man, who believed in the need for denazification of public life and institutional reforms, shared with many others the conviction that the formal denazification program threatened to undermine attempts to reform Germans’ political attitudes. It was the American desire to reduce such irritants –

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in the German-American relationship that prompted them to abandon a whole range of punitive programs, including industrial dismantling and denazification. The Western Allies’ desire to forge a closer relationship, in turn, was motivated in large part by the emerging Cold War. Anti-Communism, rampant throughout the West in the 1950s, provided convenient cover for German elites to avoid an honest confrontation with their past. Physicians, business leaders, and high civil servants, like many other members of the “informed” sectors of German society, embraced democracy for much the same reason that they had accommodated themselves with the National Socialists during the Third Reich. They viewed the Soviet Union as the major threat to their way of life. Like their American counterparts of the late 1940s, the Soviet system of government and the structures it began imposing on Eastern Europe and the Soviet zone of occupation served as the confirming antithesis of democracy. One group that incorporated democratic anti-Communism of this type was the Nauheimer Kreis (Nauheim Circle), formed in 1948 in the Bavarian city of Würzburg but with many members in Hesse as well. Of the twenty-one leading personalities who attended the group’s second meeting, three were physicians, two were business leaders, and three were public administrators or officials.64 The aversion of Germany’s elites to Communism built on a long tradition that itself had been a major motivation for elite accommodation with National Socialism. Why did this anti-Communism, which remained strong among conservative political leaders, business leaders, and high civil servants, not cause them to seek right-radical solutions as in the past? Part of the answer lies in the discrediting of National Socialism. Also critical, however, is the change that took place in the political attitudes of most of the West German left. They, too, had generally lost faith in extremist solutions. The overwhelming majority of Communists who had not died during the war either lost faith in the movement as a result of the multiple flip flops in international policy (especially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939), never returned from emigration, or moved to the Soviet zone. The latter focused their energies on building the German Democratic Republic beginning 1949. Left Social Democrats and trade unionists sought consensus rather than confrontation with the democratic right, as they and their constituents deeply desired stability and prosperity. They consequently accepted a share in the decision-making power of enterprises rather than outright socialization.65 The result was a de-radicalization of political culture on the left, among West German workers, as well as on the right. Because Germany’s conservatives did not perceive a strong internal threat from the left, they were even less motivated to seek extreme solutions themselves.66 One former National Socialist, who joined the Hitler Youth in 1930, when he was 16, explained in a long memorandum (requested by governor Ludwig Bergsträsser of Darmstadt) that he and many others in his generation had seen only two alternatives in 1930: National Socialism or Communism. Now that other options –

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were viable, and their youthful radicalism (which he euphemistically referred to as “idealism”) had diminished, punitive denazification was not necessary for their conversion to democracy. In fact, he argued, strident punishment would prove counterproductive.67 Going almost hand-in-hand with the cultural and political deradicalization, the pace of Americanization accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s.68 Favorable attitudes toward the United States and many aspects of American political thought and culture were particularly strong among elites.69 However one chooses to define the term, Americanization took place most rapidly when promoted by Germans themselves, often long after the end of formal occupation in the Federal Republic. Thus education, including higher education, attained its widest-ranging reforms based heavily on American modelsin the late 1960s and early 1970s.70 Similarly, business and economic organizations adopted many American concepts during the 1950s and 1960s.71 At least one civil service association set as one of its main goals the quest for “insights [into civil service personnel policies] through the analysis of experiences both at home and abroad.”72 When in the early 1950s the medical community considered a long-overdue revision of the 1939 licensing regulations (which specified the requirements for medical students), they looked closely at the American and British systems, and determined that German medical students could benefit from more practical training before receiving their license.73 The broadcast and the print media reforms were some of the few reforms laid down by the Allies during the occupation that took firm root, without suffering serious rollbacks in the 1950s.74 The Civil Service, however, remained relatively insulated against intrusions from both American and domestic German attempts to break down traditional structures, as discussed above. After the return of the traditional three-track system and easing of many denazification restrictions in the early 1950s, the civil service functioned as it had in the past—methodically and hierarchically. The medical profession, once it had regained a large measure of its international standing, was less resistant, owing largely to the pressures of the international community of scholarship on which its reputation depended. The contact alone brought a fundamental awareness of other professional approaches, just as it brought a knowledge of surgical techniques developed in other countries. Numerous articles on foreign professional organizations, health care associations, and licensing practices in German medical journals testify to this.75 The adaptability of medical professionals to a new political environment bore out an appeal by Darmstadt physicians to the military government that they should ease restrictions on nominal Nazi physicians. “If we are to build a democratic Germany, and if that should be based on tradition, it is a mistake to throw away those who have been only formally affiliated with the party but glad to work in a new liberal state.”76 Although it proved a blow to individual justice, the relaxation of punitive American denazification indeed did hasten the shift of political loyalties among physicians. –

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Those who are skeptical about the role that the United States played as an organizational and political model for German elites in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, need only consider the importance that was attached to informational trips to the U.S. This was most important for business managers, who, while often critical, looked with envy to the booming American economy, and consequently sought to imitate many American business methods.77 Economic leaders who traveled to the United States wrote lengthy reports and gave presentations that discussed the “American system,” much as American managers assessed the Japanese model thirty to forty years later. Upon returning from a three-month tour of American businesses, Dr. Kurt Hoffmeier shared his experience with other business people at the Chamber of Industry and Trade, to which he also submitted a written report, complete with photographs.78 When in the mid 1950s the U.S. High Commissioner in Germany drastically reduced the number of exchange trips it had sponsored since the late 1940s, German institutions picked up much of the slack on their own initiative. By 1955, the Carl Duisberg Society, a chemical interest group based in Frankfurt am Main, began to send industrial leaders to Harvard business school.79 Not all of their impressions of the American way made Germans uncritical advocates of Americanization. The Westphalian manufacturer of bicycle parts, Fritz Berg, had spent years in the United States, and had even married an American.80 This did not stop him from vigorously resisting measures aimed at enhancing the degree of market competition in Germany according to the American model. A crucial element of the receptiveness of German elites to new ideas lay in the evolutionary nature of those reforms. Historians, like contemporary observers, note that postwar Germans were almost obsessed with the search for stability. Voters reacted very favorably to the famous campaign pledge of Adenauer’s CDU: keine Experimente (no experiments). Likewise, civil servants had defied all attempts at fundamental reform and opted instead for the familiar three-track system. Business leaders and physicians alike blocked the dismantling of structures they found familiar, and therefore comfortable. By contrast, all three feared not only socialization, but any serious form of direct state control. Admittedly, German elites accepted a higher degree of state intervention and regulation than either the British or the Americans, again drawing on a long tradition. But this new corporatism resembled interest group politics more than a reflection of pre-modern patterns of decision-making. Even more important, the affirmation of familiar patterns and structures, while it represented a relative victory of tradition over reform, was the keystone to the stability of the young Federal Republic. Does this mean, as disappointed reformers lamented, that a restoration of the old took place? Why did the restored elites not carry the same congenital weaknesses into Germany’s second republic that they had brought to the first? For one thing, the traditions that had prevailed by the mid 1950s were not generally as incompatible with a pluralist society as reformers had assumed. The three-track –

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civil service, while elitist and relatively unresponsive to public will, was not predestined to ignore or stifle that will. Large, privately-owned, interconnected enterprises favored conservative politics and fought the aspirations and demands of organized labor, but could also compromise when compelled to do so. Physicians, reasserting their legal claim to self-regulation, generally perceived no desire to reestablish theories of racial or genetic pseudoscience as a professional credo. Another reason that multiple restorations did not restore elite antipathy to democracy was that this new system, the Federal Republic, worked in their favor. Despite limited reform measures adopted during the founding years of the FRG, the system itself was the guarantor of their hard-fought rights. Especially after the extreme challenges of the early occupation years, West German elites, whether in Hesse or Hamburg, could view the new constitutional order as “their” institution, one containing elements—restorative and conservative, to be sure—for which they had gone to the mat. Unlike the Weimar Republic, which they had viewed as alien and antagonistic (often far beyond reality), most elites felt both as insiders and increasingly secure (both institutionally and economically) in the Federal Republic. This change of political allegiance, in turn, grew out of the peculiar way that German elites constructed their memory of a difficult past.

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Remembering German Remembrance: Some historiographical notes The academic discussion about postwar German treatment of National Socialism and German responsibility for the rise of National Socialism, the outbreak of World War II, and the genocide committed against European Jews falls mainly within a fairly narrow spectrum. The vast majority of the writings on this subject confirm or elaborate on a wide consensus that has existed—especially in academic circles—since the 1960s. According to this view, Germans generally resisted acknowledging, much less accepting responsibility for, the sinister aspects of the Third Reich, the war, and the Holocaust. What began in the late 1940s as a variety of strategies to shift blame to a few individuals or criminal organizations, gave way to wholesale repression of unpleasant memories in the 1950s.81 During this decade, Germans turned their attention and energies to reconstructing West Germany, and shunned discussing or otherwise confronting what had occurred in Germany and German-occupied Europe before 1945. There had been in Germany no cathartic confrontation with what had transpired. This was, according to the work that coined the terms and framework of the discussion of the topic, Germany’s “inability to mourn.”82 These strategies of repressed memory, so the canon, began to break down in the early 1960s. The first opening came in 1956 with the trial in Ulm of –

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members of one of the Einsatzgruppen that had massacred Jews and communists behind the front lines on the Eastern front.83 This was followed by the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, which was widely reported and commented on in the Federal Republic. The trial of Auschwitz personnel by a German court in Frankfurt am Main from 1963 to 1965 deepened awareness of—and revulsion for—the crimes committed in Germany’s name, as did the vociferous public debate about extending the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity in the late 1960s. This positive shift in attitudes about Germany’s recent past arose from the confluence of several factors, above all the coming of age of a skeptical postwar generation demanding to know what their parents did during the war, the rapid expansion of higher education, which drew in outsiders eager to challenge existing orthodoxies, and the end of the economic miracle.84 A few commentators have challenged this orthodoxy. Before the Mitscherlich analysis became accepted wisdom, Alfred Grosser, the distinguished French historian of modern Germany, acknowledged that the German public had been informed about the Third Reich, including the Holocaust, throughout the 1950s. More recently, Jeffrey Herf has convincingly demonstrated that elites, especially in West Germany, promoted public discussions of the Nazi past in the 1950s, although the sixties generation took this a step further.85 Some of the very common instruments that carried the discussion to the German public sphere and problematized the issues of German responsibility were President Theodor Heuss’ pronouncement of Germany’s “collective shame” (as opposed to collective guilt), government-published information for schoolteachers about the Holocaust, brochures about the gas chambers, the wide distribution of Alain Resnais’ 1955 film Nuit et Bruillard (Night and Fog), and The Diary of Anne Frank. Public discussion about the appropriateness of German restitution payments to Israel, set down by treaty in 1952, also thematized the nature of German wartime atrocities.86 Public acts of atonement or compensation, above all the politically and morally expedient restitution, or Wiedergutmachung paid to Israel beginning in 1952, represented at least an acknowledgment of some collective responsibility, not to mention diplomatic exigency. Throughout this period of supposed silence a cottage industry of books, articles, and research about the Nazi period produced without interruption. The popular press periodically exposed the compromised political backgrounds of Germans in high positions. This was confined neither to fascination with sensationalist history nor to the intellectual elite. Popular magazines, such as Der Spiegel, returned repeatedly to issues about the causes of Hitler’s rise to power, the march toward war, and German atrocities. In Frankfurt, a public lecture about National Socialism’s impact on contemporary speech could fill an auditorium in Frankfurt in the mid 1950s.87 The public furor over German rearmament, and the majority that originally opposed it, was fueled mainly by consideration of Germany’s recent past.88 Herman Lübbe, a conservative –

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historian, takes a different tack, conceding the dearth of open discussion about the Third Reich, but arguing that the 1950s were in fact a period during which leading German politicians and intellectuals dealt with the past in many ways, above all by beginning to analyze National Socialism as an historical development. The relative lack of critical discussion about the Third Reich among the general public occurred at a time when Germans faced more immediate concerns, such as reconstruction and reintegration of uprooted members of society. Lübbe does not stop there, however, but goes on to argue that the absence of a thorough public discussion in the 1950s was an essential precondition of stability and recovery:

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This relative silence [about National Socialism] was the social-psychologically and politically necessary means for transforming our postwar population into citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. […] [T]he timidity that marked the public discussion of either individual or institutional Nazi-pasts in the early history of the Federal Republic does not indicate an attempt to integrate those pasts into the Federal Republic, but rather its subjects.89

At the root of the upsurge of interest in the Third Reich in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the apportioning of individual blame, Lübbe contends, was an attempt by the younger generations’ leftist leaders to legitimize their political ascent. By pointing to the wartime generation’s failure to make a clean sweep of the past, the ’60s generation could claim the moral high ground, without sullying themselves. As in the postwar years, the culprits were once again others. Lübbe overstates his case when he claims that the 60s generation attempted to differentiate itself from both the immediate postwar generation and the Third Reich by “rewriting the history of the Federal Republic as a history of an incomplete overcoming of the National Socialism.”90 Increasingly, more recent accounts of Germans’ treatment of their past recognize the considerable progress that was made in the 1940s and 1950s in informing Germans about the nature and realities of the Third Reich, National Socialism, and the Holocaust. This corrective to the postwar history of German remembrance, as Lübbe rightly indicated, was overdue by the mid 1980s. However, the ways in which Germans confronted their past indeed lacked crucial elements until the 1960s and, in many cases, beyond.91 As Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen, one of the original authors of The Inability to Mourn, pointed out in the mid 1980s, modifying earlier interpretations of her work, Germans may have dealt with the facts of the Third Reich in the 1950s and 1960s, but not the feelings, ideals, and mechanisms of accommodation.92 Germans dealt with their past before the 1960s, but often “in a highly blurred and evasive way.”93 The Eichmann case was a milestone for Germany, many believed at the time, not because it revealed new information about the Holocaust, but because it energized Germans (especially some youth) to delve deeper into its intricacies and moral implications: “The story –

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of the horrors has been available for anyone to read or see or study. Those of the youth who are interested have read about it, seen the television shows and movies, and studied the period. Those who did not care before do not seem to have changed.”94 This picture of an awareness of the past, accompanied by an incomplete evaluation, is evident in elite groups’ statements throughout the 1950s. One of the most common strategies in evading an honest evaluation of the past has been the conflation of perpetrators and bystanders as victims. Charles Maier calls this “Bitburg History,” in reference to Ronald Reagan’s visit to a cemetery at the site of the former concentration camp, where Helmut Kohl engineered a simultaneous commemoration of the camp’s dead inmates and forty-nine Waffen-SS.95 The portrayal of one’s own in-group as a victim of National Socialism rather than a perpetrator, collaborator, or bystander has been a European, and not solely a German affair.96 The Waldheim affair in Austria in the 1980s revealed the extent to which Austrians had accepted and internalized their status as “the first free country to fall victim to Hitlerite aggression,” which the Allies bestowed on them in 1943.97 In 1970, Marcel Ophuls’ path breaking movie, The Sorrow and the Pity unleashed a hitherto repressed wave of national soul-searching about French collaboration.98 The most vivid Japanese memory of the war is the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, not their own aggression on the Asian mainland or atrocities such as the massacre at Nanking.99 Even victorious societies have not been immune from doctoring their role in the terrible events of World War II.100 Most social groups similarly sought to sanitize the collective history of their own specific group, just as many Germans in general tried to rationalize their national past.101 The civil service, the medical profession, and the business leadership, while they recognized the criminal nature of the Nazi regime, portrayed themselves, both individually and as occupational groups, equally as victims. As will be argued below, this duplicitous selective memory exerted a positive, integrative force not unlike that described by Lübbe in his analysis of postwar Germany.

The Victimization Myth: a Soothing Balm? Contrary to a popular view, members of these occupations were not completely silent about their past. The occupation powers, denazification tribunals, the mass media, and to a lesser extent political rhetoric, confronted them frequently with the record of the Third Reich. In response to these challenges, German elites used a variety of strategies to render the past more palatable. Despite notable differences, the civil service, the medical profession, and the business leadership redefined their past to fit postwar contingencies. They emphasized their disagreements with National Socialist –

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policy, held up anti-Nazis in their ranks as examples of their overall professional conduct, and glossed over numerous forms of complicity. By portraying themselves and, collectively, their occupations as victims rather than fellow travelers, they soothed their own consciences and deflected pressures for fundamental reform. Ironically, they also laid the groundwork for political stability in the early Federal Republic. According to the victimization myth, the Nazi State, run by a handful of demagogues, had run roughshod over the interests of individuals and constituent groups within German society. Physicians, civil servants, and, indeed, members of many other occupations voiced similar interpretations of National Socialist society. “We tenured civil servants suffered particularly [under the Nazis] because of our autonomy from the state,” claimed a letter to a professional journal for civil servants.102 Likewise, business groups remembered the Third Reich as a time during which “the economy became an instrument of politics.” The Nazi state diverted investment away from normal capital creation and into rearmament, supposedly against the wishes of business leaders.103 Physicians, less frequently accused of having supported National Socialism as a group, tended either to project an image of themselves as individual victims (bombed out, forced out of their positions, conscripted, captured, injured, or expelled from former German territory), or to see themselves as the victims’ helpers and sympathizers. Because so many German physicians had been Jews, and thus forced out of the profession in the 1930s, formerly prominent Jewish physicians were presented as victims of “National Socialist persecution and law,” but not as victims of their fellow physicians.104 An amazing number of physicians apparently convinced themselves, as they tried to convince others, that they had placed themselves in danger by continuing to treat Jewish patients until the latter emigrated, were deported, or stopped making appointments. Consequently, in their view, they should be considered victims, if not resistors. Many backed up such claims with convincing documentation, but more often the evidence was thin, of dubious authenticity, or nonexistent.105 In many variants and examples of the victimization myth, elites had little or no difficulty combining admissions of initial support of Hitler or his movement with their constructed status as victims. Even before the denazification tribunals, individuals conceded that they had supported or welcomed the political change of 1933. Others justified joining Nazi organizations even before 1933 with the claim that they had been “idealists” or “naive” at the time. Almost invariably, these individuals stress growing disenchantment with the cause and the system, or with particular policies. Among elites, the foremost among the offensive policies—at least as individuals portrayed their pasts—were measures taken against Jewish colleagues, friends, customers, and patients.106 In one of many illustrative examples, a Darmstadt physician, admitted that he joined the NSDAP willingly in 1933 because he expected the Nazis to combat the German malaise. At the same time, as con–

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firmed by multiple Persilscheine, he despised the vilification and repression of the Jews and the church. Disgusted by the events of the Night of Broken Glass, he stopped attending party functions in 1938. This, he maintained before the Spruchkammer, was tantamount to courting financial ruin.107 In other words, he, too, was a victim, even if he had been duped by his earlier political “idealism.” The portrayal of elite professions as victims of the Hitler State was not entirely fabricated; like most legends, it was grounded in at least partial historical reality, but embellished and cleansed of incongruous elements. After the fall of the Third Reich, Germans from all three of these groups emphasized their resistance and their positive historic traditions rather than their complicity. What emerges is a heavily skewed professional history, with acts of resistance to the encroachment of the Nazi Party outweighing less honorable moments. But the importance of selective memory as an agent in the recasting of the postwar German elite hinges less on its accuracy than on its perceived accuracy and on the lessons that those perceptions conveyed. After 1945, high civil servants, business leaders, and physicians all had multiple reasons, both conscious and unconscious, to construct their individual and group memories as they did. Any group, in order to create a positive centripetal identity, draws on shared experiences and, more important, on shared interpretations of those experiences. In most cases, this reconstruction of the past occurs at an unconscious level. At times, however, the process is deliberate or engineered, as with Goebbels’ propagandistic manipulation of European history in the cause of National Socialism. As an institution, the Nazi leadership had frequently neglected, bypassed, and overruled the civil service in the formulation and the implementation of policy. After the war, therefore, representatives of the civil service felt justified in calling for a return to an orderly administration based on the “traditional” principles of a professional civil service. Ignoring or playing down their simultaneous complicity, they portrayed the traditional Berufsbeamtentum as an antidote to authoritarianism.108 Rudolf Zorn, a high civil servant at the ministerial level with anti-Nazi credentials, illustrated the use of selective memory in a 1951 speech. He claimed that “most Beamte” acted “honestly and with integrity” during the Third Reich. “Roughly 50 percent of all tenured civil servants were not party members.”109 While his explanation that the non-affiliation of those 50 percent was remarkable given the pressure to join has a ring of truth, one cannot avoid the conclusion that Zorn is focusing only on the full half of the glass. What about the 50 percent who did join? The traditional virtues of the civil service took on almost mythical dimensions. Time and time again, Berufsbeamte harked back to their historic role as servants of the state rather than servants of a particular person, party, or ideology. They drew a direct line between Frederick II’s famous dictum that he was the “first servant of the state” and their own claim that they had served during the Third Reich in the interests of the state and nation rather –

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than in the interests of the National Socialists.110 Indeed, the belief that the professional civil service was the most reliable guarantor of German statism had, if nothing else, been strengthened by the utter loss of confidence in political parties during the Weimar Republic.111 The business community, too, conveniently overlooked the less honorable aspects of their recent past, and saw themselves as victims. In their collective memory, business leaders had supported free association and individual freedom from state control, ideas that the Nazis had systematically destroyed. “In the Nazi days,” recalled the highly successful soap manufacturer, Jost Henkel, “they used to run ten trains of sleeping cars every night from Düsseldorf to take us to Berlin where we’d get our orders and our allocations. God preserve us from another state-run economy!”112 Proponents of the Chambers of Industry and Trade could assert that “[t]he National Socialist state introduced the [Nazi] leadership principle and dissolved the Chamber’s freely elected councils. The State then named the presidents and members of the plenary councils.”113 Chambers of Industry and Trade had resisted the State’s drive to eliminate internal democratic measures, and as a result, the Nazis had replaced them with regional economic chambers. While it is true that the hierarchical economic chambers superseded the older Chambers of Industry and Trade, it was not because the latter opposed National Socialism, but rather because they wished to retain some measure of autonomy in their decision making. Thus, chamber leaders turned a turf war into a political struggle. They also formulated innovative justifications for traditional structures. In a September 1945 report written to stave off potential dissolution, they contended that the chambers had long been democratic institutions. They argued that they had chosen their leaders in secret balloting until the Nazis imposed the leadership principle.114 Moreover, they continued, mandatory membership had prevented narrow interests from dominating the chambers, since powerful companies could not threaten to withdraw and, by extension, to withhold dues. Besides the rather open and frequent discussion of developments in which they had been victims, the issue of Aryanization of Jewish businesses rarely made the popular press, much less the pages of business journals.115 Similar statements emanated from the postwar medical profession. Physicians, too, had been victims of the great political force from outside their own group. Although hardly any individual admitted complicity in serious offenses, many declared they had been politically persecuted. One physician who made this claim had joined the NSDAP in 1933 (and falsely claimed to have joined in 1937), but pointed out that the Nazis had thrown him in jail in 1938. His denazification tribunal discovered that he had been incarcerated for slander after falsely accusing another physician of malpractice, an incident without political overtones.116 In defense of another doctor who appeared before the tribunal, one who, many attested, had actively supported National Socialism from the beginning, several colleagues maintained that he had fol–

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lowed his own convictions rather than the party’s. Consequently, “it could only be luck that saved him from the concentration camp.”117 More important than the persecution of individual physicians, in their view, the Nazi state had harmed the image and prestige of their guild. Over and over, when physicians publicly commented on their role during the Nazi period (a relatively rare occurrence compared to either civil servants or business leaders), the real evils had been the lowering of professional standards “as a measure to prepare for war,”118 the perversion of the Hippocratic ideal by permitting or initiating medical crimes like widely known experiments on concentration camp inmates,119 and causing the loss of valuable members of the medical community, most of them Jews.120 Clearly lacking in most of these portrayals was a recognition of physicians’ and medical organizations’ own complicity in the events of the Third Reich. One review of Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke’s Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit, which chronicled the Nuremberg medical trials of 1947, went so far as to claim that “the physicians’ organizations were wholly uninvolved in the events [i.e. medical experiments on concentration camp inmates] and knew nothing about them, since everything related to the despicable medical experiments was ‘top secret’ and nearly exclusively within the purview of the SS and the concentration camps.”121 The critical reader of physicians’ journals and public statements usually searches in vain for mention of racial hygiene doctrines, taught as a required subject to an entire generation of medical students. Almost as rare are voluntary comments on forced sterilization, hereditary courts, or the euthanasia program, except as policies against which individual doctors rebelled. Physicians were not able to avoid these subjects completely, however. When broached, the topics usually arose in the form of a specific legal, legislative, or academic challenge. A spate of public and professional statements appeared in 1947, as the Nuremberg Doctors’ trial took place, and as a German court tried and convicted medical professionals for their roles in the “euthanasia” program. Victims of forced sterilization, “euthanasia” policy, and racially-motivated crimes, or their families occasionally brought legal claims for restitution. Because physicians were often the accused in these cases, professional journals and newsletters reported important court decisions and cases. The same was true of civil service journals, which reported on salary, reinstatement, restitution, and related cases. Business journals focused more on cases involving claims of former victims of National Socialism, especially Jews seeking restitution for aryanized property. More than anything else, all three groups decried the politicization that the National Socialist regime had supposedly forced on them. Within this framework, even some individuals’ memberships in the NSDAP, its affiliate organizations, and attendance at Nazi functions became a burden that Nazis had imposed on them. Civil servants viewed themselves as victims of the Nazi party and its state, which functioned arbitrarily (Willkürstaat). The –

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Nazis, so their view, had watered down the standards and ethics of the civil servant caste by introducing ever-growing numbers of political appointments and unqualified non-tenured salaried employees.122 One physician who had joined both the NSDAP and the SA in 1933 asserted that he did so only due to pressure from those groups and to protect himself from further harassment as a former SPD member. In the infrequent cases in which members of these elite groups acknowledged their colleagues as active National Socialists, they usually portrayed them as isolated individuals who acted in the interest of the Nazis and against those of the profession. Speaking of the professional civil service, a professor from the university of Göttingen claimed that civil servants could be “proud that the professional offenses and cases of corruption in recent years can be overwhelmingly attributed to intruders [Eindringlingen] into tenured civil servant positions” rather than to the genuine civil servants.123 A dedicated anti-Nazi physician in Darmstadt, who even overestimated the number of physicians who were NSDAP members at 80 to 85%, believed that almost all of them were in truth uninterested in politics.124 One physician who earned the enmity of colleagues was an “old fighter” who, accompanied by brownshirted thugs, had physically threatened his colleagues at the local insurance fund to stop making payments to Jewish doctors.125 A number of Hessian physicians testified against him before the denazification tribunal. What seemed to upset his accusers most was the Nazi physician’s unbecoming treatment of his colleagues rather than his National Socialist convictions. Individuals of particularly brutal character could be roundly denounced. Thus, Josef Mengele, once the extent of his crimes were revealed, could become an object of derision from physicians concerned about the public image of the profession. Werner Heyde, whose identity medical colleagues in Schleswig Holstein had protected while he worked under a postwar alias, found few supporters among them when his wartime activities became public knowledge in 1960. Business publications and business leaders, on the other hand, were generally more reticent about singling out individuals from within their ranks as scapegoats or real Nazis. This is especially surprising when one considers the popularity at the time of the notion that big business moguls had made Hitler salonfähig and eased his ascent to the chancellorship.126 In their own recollections, abuses during the Third Reich were usually acts carried out by the Nazi state rather than by members of their own ingroup. One general manager of a regional Chamber of Industry and Trade spoke of the “confiscation of Jewish property by the Nazi-State.” He overlooked the fact that business leaders had often initiated the confiscations or used the State as a weapon with which to blackmail Jewish owners into selling cheap. Moreover, as an official of the chamber during the Third Reich, he must have known that the chambers themselves had willingly processed most of the transactions.127 In reviewing the career of the coal and steel –

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mogul Friedrich Flick just before the American military government tried him in 1947, an article in a popular business magazine justly noted that he had expanded his holdings through the acquisition of Jewish property, but suggested that the transaction was most likely a tradeoff demanded by the State-owned Reichswerke Hermann Goering. While Flick profited considerably during the Third Reich, so the article concluded, he amassed his main fortune before 1933. He had worked with other regimes just as he had with the National Socialists.128 In an ironic twist on the pattern of scapegoating, some elite occupational groups located blame primarily with other occupational groups. One psychiatrist claimed in 1949 that “[t]he most recent past” (a euphemism for the Third Reich) demonstrated that a combination of duty and authority had fostered exaggerated obedience within the civil service, and that this, in turn, was the root of Nazi totalitarianism. Thus, this physician constructed a past in which the origins of all that was bad with the Third Reich lay in an entirely different occupational group.129 Civil servants and physicians could fall back on the very prevalent theory that big business interests had hoisted Hitler to power. A high civil servant could blame not only the Nazi disregard for the laws of the state, but also politically opportunistic investors who “smelled profit” and forced Jews to sell their property.130 Of the three groups, physicians most effectively escaped popular charges of complicity. As a result, they were least compelled to confront their past, or to construct a coherent past that deflected criticism. Such psychological evasiveness left a complex legacy of problems that still plague German society today.131 However, selective memory also had positive effects that are often overlooked. In creating a professional past that exaggerated their democratic and humanitarian roots, civil servants, physicians, and entrepreneurs strengthened their commitment to those positive aspects of their traditions. In fact, their loyalty to the Federal Republic during the crucial first decade of its existence followed as much from their (historically skewed) self-conception as non-Nazis or victims as it did from the integrative effects of the economic miracle. In a sense, their selectively crafted occupational histories became models that they had to live up to in the present. The most noticeable shift came in the outward demonstration of support for the vague but nevertheless meaningful concepts of democracy, freedom, and state of laws (Rechtsstaat). Open, public declarations abound in professional journals, letters to the editor, speeches at occupational conferences, and in correspondence with both German and Allied decision makers. Official ceremonies and even obituaries became occasions to praise the occupations’ democratic convictions.132 These concepts are notoriously elastic, so that the observer must constantly consider what a speaker (or author) meant in the contemporary context. In fact, many physicians, civil servants, and businessmen do speculate about what, for example, “democracy” means both in the abstract sense and as applied to their occupations.133 It –

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has been said that many Germans invoked the terms democracy or freedom merely to pay lip service to the occupying powers, because that was what was expected of them, much as they had greeted with “Heil Hitler” before 1945. This was undoubtedly true in some cases. Commonly, however, such outward demonstration of democratic leanings helped complete the selfdeception of selective memory. Second, civil servants, physicians, and businessmen committed themselves to the creation or strengthening of democratic institutions in order to accentuate the positive, often democratic traditions of their occupations. Noting that the absence of a truly democratic legal structure governing civil servants contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Rudolf Zorn believed that newer, more modern civil service laws were in the works.134 He was referring to the drafts of what became the German Civil Service Code of 1953, which recreated the 1937 Code in many respects. It did, however, require a commitment, in the form of a sworn oath, discussed above, to uphold the basic democratic order of the Federal Republic, and to “dedicate themselves to the democratic form of state in their entire behavior”; the main civil service organization had proposed even stronger language.135 Another advocate of the civil service even claimed that “without the professional civil service there can be no more democracy [in Germany].… In this regard, the civil service is not an element hostile to democracy in the modern partystate, but rather it is the prerequisite for its survival.”136 At the 1955 plenary meeting of the League of German Beamte (DBB), the Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia, Karl Arnold, called for a deepening and widening of the professional civil servants’ role as a “supporting pillar of democracy.” He suggested that individual civil servants publicly swear an oath to uphold the “free and democratic order,” and that they contribute actively to the political life of West Germany.137 By insisting that the Nazi State had ignored laws protecting private property in order to dispossess German Jews, business advocates sought to protect themselves from state-ordered socialization in Land Hesse.138 But they also implicitly acknowledged that the Nazi-era expropriations were unlawful. Such thinking was reflected in the initiative of Chambers of Industry and Trade in Hesse and Württemberg-Baden to establish dearyanization committees to compile evidence in preparation for restitution.139 Likewise, the chambers widened and strengthened the election processes within the chambers, claiming this would build on their already long democratic tradition.140 From the self-righteous platform they constructed for themselves, civil servants, physicians, and business leaders could adjust the aims and substance of their occupations to eradicate currents that they believed had contributed to the success of National Socialism. From the skewed reconstruction of the past came positive action in the postwar years. A concrete example helps illustrate this process. One commentator demanded an end to unofficial denazification, or Naziriecherei, among civil servants, who after all –

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(in his view) had suffered so much. To take its place, he proposed that “professional aptitude and a positive attitude toward the democratic state” should become the sole criterion for hiring and promotion.141 Another Beamter wrongly concluded that greater freedom to participate in politics in 1933 would have strengthened the democratic parties the most, noting the low proportion of civil servants in the NSDAP in 1933. While totally ignoring the rush of civil servants to join after the political ban was lifted, the author called for a lifting of the postwar restrictions placed on political activity by civil servants.142 While one might criticize the result, physicians, civil servants, and the courts alike often supported the stringent restrictions on access to abortion in West Germany with references to the National Socialist eugenics and so-called euthanasia as possible outcomes of tempting the slippery slope.143

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Conclusion Members of key elite German occupational groups who experienced a high degree of structural and even personnel continuity with the Third Reich were nevertheless capable of changing their minds on crucial issues. As seen in the senior civil service, business leadership, and the medical community, they rejected National Socialism, dictatorship, or totalitarianism in the strongest terms. At the same time, such elite organizations as the Federal Chamber of Physicians, the Chambers of Industry and Commerce, and the League of German Beamte sidestepped what, for their own in-group, were the most delicate issues concerning the Third Reich. Sometimes individuals even squelched nascent attempts at self-reflection, fearing that historical muckrakers in their midst would “sully their own nest.” In trying to interpret the meaning of the widespread reluctance to face up to all aspects of the past, the phenomenon should not be construed, as it often has been, simply as a conspiracy of the perpetrators. The psychological avoidance of difficult issues of recent history seems to be a common mechanism. Destalinization in the Soviet Union manifested itself mainly at the political summit, when Khrushchev acknowledged Stalinist misdeeds. The United States government could bring itself to memorialize the veterans of the Vietnam War years after the American military withdrawal. The point here is in no way to compare or relativize such fundamentally different events as the Holocaust, Stalinist crimes, or the Vietnam war. Rather, each event traumatized, and in many ways paralyzed, both perpetrators and victims, certainly for different reasons, but with similar effects. The relative silence of the 1950s was in part possible because the victims, too, were reluctant to revive the past, which had held such horrors. Raul Hilberg has pointed out that the destruction of the European Jews was hardly memorialized even outside Germany: –

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No special observances were held, no major monuments were erected, and not many efforts were made to record the meaning of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Little by little, some documents were gathered and books were written, and after about two decades the annihilation of the Jews had a name: Holocaust.144

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In the examples cited above, the silence was not a permanent state, but a phase during which groups, like individuals, reconstructed the recent history of themselves and their own group. This doctored memory distanced them from deep complicity. This history of themselves as victims, however, forced them to place as much distance between themselves and ideas that had been widespread just a few years earlier. In a sense, the aspects of their past that they wished to erase or forget remained with them, and informed postwar political and professional ideology. Jeffrey Herf has demonstrated that the top political leaders of the Federal Republic defined many of their positions with a mind to the Third Reich, National Socialism, and the Holocaust. Adolf Arndt, among others, openly explained that National Socialist atrocities were constantly in the minds of the men who drafted Hesse’s postwar constitution.145 Dr. Neuffer, newly elected first chair of the federal Working Association of the West German Physicians’ Chambers, posed the question about the fundamental lesson of “our national catastrophe.” He replied that Germany’s physicians, in losing their ethics, had lost their soul. “Without ethics,” he concluded, “one can neither become nor remain a good physician.”146 Although he did not mention “euthanasia,” inhumane medical experiments, or the Holocaust by name, they all lurked just beneath the surface of his words.

Notes 1. Anonymous German government spokesman, quoted in J. Dornberg, The New Germans: Thirty Years After (New York, 1975), xii-xiii. 2. “Diese Kontinuität der Personen muß eine Kontinuität des Denkens zur Folge haben.” Sierck und Radtke, Die Wohltätermafia, 79. 3. Lewis Edinger suggested the possibility of an attitudinal shift among elites who had otherwise not been replaced in “Post-Totalitarian Leadership,” 81, fn. 31. 4. Otto Lachmann, “Mensch und Arzt in der sozialen Versicherung,” HÄBl 11:10 (Oct. 1950), 195-97. 5. Wallenberg, Report on Democratic Institutions in Germany, 16-17. 6. This assumption provides the main motivation for most of the exposé literature that offers information on the activities and memberships during the Third Reich of important individuals in the Federal Republic. In addition to the Brown Book, compiled by East Germany about West German elites, there is the documentary collection Die unbewältigte Gegenwart by the Union of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime (VVN). The same is true of works –

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

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12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

published about prominent national figures, such as Friedrich Flick, Alfried Krupp, or Hans Globke, as well as companies like the major German banks. Despite his protestations, Renno’s use of a false identity until 1955, as well as his lies about the extent of his role at Hartheim reflect a sense of legal culpability. Kohl, passim, esp. 264-97. A typical description of the widespread apathy and resignation in Bach, America’s Germany, 27-28. The despair that came with a loss of purpose is ably depicted in Alphons A. Merritt and R. Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys, 19451949 (Urbana, 1970), 74-75; Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt, eds. Public Opinion in Semisovereign Germany (Urbana, 1980), 13. O. W. Gabriel, “Demokratiezufriedenheit und demokratische Einstellungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B22 (1987): 42. Public opinion analysis, which became more sophisticated in the 1950s, provides contradictory evidence concerning the depth of commitment to democracy, but the commitment clearly increased throughout the 1950s and 1960s. An annual poll of Germans in 1950 showed that 53 percent of respondents preferred a multi-party system of government over a one-party system, with a large number of undecided respondents. The proportion opting for the multi-party system increased to almost 75 percent by 1955. Gabriel, “Demokratiezufriedenheit,” 32-45, esp. 34-35. According to another source half of respondents in 1953 believed that multiple political parties were preferable to a one-party or a no-party system (21 percent preferred one party, 7 percent no party, and 22 percent had no opinion). The percentage of those who had not made up their minds decreased dramatically; by 1979 only 7 percent had no opinion, whereas 86 percent preferred a multi-party system, 6 percent a single party, and 1 percent no party at all. (Interestingly, women constituted the large majority of “undecided” in both years, and were much more likely than men to prefer a single-party system). E. Noelle-Neumann and E. Piel, eds., Eine Generation Später: Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1953-1979 (Munich, 1983), 201. Ellwein, “Verfassung und Verwaltung,” 48. As reasons for this notable success, Ellwein explains that the Basic Law seldom became the object of fundamental debate, and that it created the framework for successful political activity. Hesse’s constitution of 1946 also drew support, not least from organized labor. “Rede des Opel-Betriebsratsvorsitzenden Fritz Zängerle vor der Betriebsversammlung am 20. März 1946,” Als der Krieg zu Ende War, ed. U. Schneider, et al., 98-104. A good account of the evolution in democratic thinking and theory in Western Germany, especially the role of the student generation of the 1960s, in changing the nature of democracy in Dubiel, “The Acceptance of Democracy.” Dr. med. Georg Ostermann, “Realitätenpolitik,” ÄM 35: 18 (20 Sept. 1950): 370. Changes in personnel composition, legal structures, and institutions have been discussed in previous chapters, especially Chapters 2 and 3. R. A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven, 1982), 138-40. Ch. Thayer, The Unquiet Germans (New York, 1957), 265. “Entschließungen des Delegiertentages 1951,” Der Beamtenbund 2:6 (1 June 1951): 82. Wallenberg, Report on Democratic Institutions in Germany, 46. Prof. von Drigalski zur Frage der Notwendigkeit einer Landesärztekammer, Hessisches Staatsministerium, Min. d. Innern, OMGH PHD 998. Landesärztekammer Hesse, Stellungnahme zum Ärztekammer-Problem, 1 June 1948, OMGH box 998. See Wunder, Die Rekrutierung der Beamtenschaft, 24-25. W. Grabendorff, “Verwirklichung der Gleichberechtigung der männlichen und weiblichen Beamten. Außerkrafttreten des dem Gleichheitssatz widersprechenden Rechts am 1.4.1933,” Der Beamtenbund: Zeitschrift des Deutschen Beamtenbundes (hereafter DBB) 4:4 (Apr. 1953): 55. Of course, the real change was an end to overt, legal acts of discrimination. Real change occurred only at a snail’s pace in the civil service, especially in the senior –

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24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

ranks, where only one percent were women by 1955. “Der Anteil der Frauen im öffentlichen Dienst,” DBB 5:7 (July 1955): 104. Among the most disturbing apologetic statements that Helfferich (who retired and did not return to business affairs after the war) offered in his 1968 memoirs was that “the implementation of [the Führer principle] failed due to the good, weak character of the German people. […] If the German character had been strong, the leadership principle would never have been deformed and this war would never have taken place.” Helfferich, 1932-1946 Tatsachen. Speier, From the Ashes of Disgrace, 141. Abelshauser, Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945-1980, 67-70. Some business leaders in the top ranks of the main employers’ associations who were open-minded on social issues include Walter Raymond, Hans Constantin Paulssen, and retired Federal Minister Siegfried Balke Herrmann (all BdA), Hanns Martin Schleyer, and Otto Friedrich. “Der Wiederaufbau,” 90. On this topic, meticulous research by the non-historian Ute Deichmann on academics in the biological sciences not only analyzes the research done during the Third Reich, but also considers career continuity after 1945, in Biologists under Hitler (Cambridge, 1996). Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 309. Proctor cites Gerhard Koch, Die Gesellschaft für Konstitutionsforschung, Anfang und Ende 1942-1965 (Erlangen, 1985). K. Hoehne, “Auswanderung als biologisches Problem,” Universitas 4:11 (Nov. 1949): 1341-50. English translation of “The Nuremberg Doctors’ Process,” Südwestdeutsche Ärzteblatt, with cover letter, Dr. Friedrich Koch to Lt. Col. Moseley, MG Public Health Division, Wiesbaden, 25 Jan. 1947, OMGH PHD box 990. “German Reactions: Frankfurt Euthanasia Trials,” in “Political Analysis and Public Opinion Weekly Review,” period ending 5 Feb. 1947, OMGH ICD box 62. “German Reactions: Frankfurt Euthanasia Trials,” in “Political Analysis and Public Opinion Weekly Review,” period ending 5 Feb. 1947, OMGH ICD box 62. O. Bumke, “Eine Krisis in der Medizin,” Universitas 3:6 (1948): 677-86. Prof. Dr. Dr. Paul Diepgen, “Die Wandlung des Arztideals,” Universitas 5:11 (1950)1331-44; Diepgen, “Die Wandlung des Arztideals II,” Universitas 5:12 (1950) 1361-72 Quote from Hessian Physicians’ Chamber, position statement regarding the “Physicians’ Chamber Problem,” Frankfurt a. M., 1 June 1948, OMGH PHD box 998. Burghard Breitner, “Das Ethos des Arztes,” Universitas 3:1 (1948): 49-56. Benz makes an allusion to the irony of the belated support in the 1970s for reforms previously pushed by the American military government and the Allied high commission for Germany (HICOG). See “Versuche zur Reform des öffentlichen Dienstes,” 245. H. G., Reply to Official Charges, SK II M der SK Bergstrasse, Kirschhausen, 18 June 1947, HHStA-W/SK Bergstrasse, Az. Be. II M 1733/46/277. H. Speier, From the Ashes of Disgrace, 9. Counter to a common perception, “only” about one-fourth of Frankfurt was destroyed, mostly buildings and transportation infrastructure rather than productive plant and equipment. Bach, America’s Germany, 104. G. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990), 20025. Quoted passage on p. 200. The respondents answering this way hovered between 40 and 55 %, with a slight increase between late 1945 and early 1948. A closer look at the survey of August 1947 showed that 61 percent of Hessians shared this view, more than any other area of except West Berlin. Merritt and Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, 32-33. Letter, “Gegen die ‘Naziriecherei’,” Neue Deutsche Beamtenzeitung 3:3 (March 1953): 42. Similar views on civil servants under the Nazis in W. Frederica, “Zehn Richter korrigieren die deutsche Geschichte,” Die Zeit, 7 January 1954.

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45. A 1994 survey by the Allensbach Institute revealed that 57 percent of Eastern Germans believed that “socialism was a good idea that was badly implemented.” This was five years after they had brought down the communist regime through demonstrations and migrations to the West. These same Eastern Germans voted against the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the communist Socialist Unity Party (SED) in national, regional, and local elections at a rate of five, six, or seven to one. “Germany Survey,” The Economist (21 May 1994): 27. 46. Merritt and Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, 33, 163, 294-95. Many other surveys by the Institut für Demoskopie based in Allensbach from the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s, in Elisabeth Noelle and Peter Neumann, The Germans, esp. 196-206. 47. Jenke, “Former National Socialists Today,” 233-39. 48. Jenke, 236. 49. The contemptuous comparison to public office comes from Herrmann, “Der Wiederaufbau der deutschen Wirtschaft nach 1945,” 84. It sums up the sentiment evident in many postwar statements about their role in the Third Reich by business leaders. 50. An account from his former American superior, who personally witnessed this transformation, dated 12 July 1946 in HHStA-W Abt. 520, SK Gross-Gerau, K. S. Az. GG 3068/46. 51. Falck, “Das Rhein-Main-Gebiet und die Stadt Lauterbach,” 11. 52. H. Glaser, “Kultur und Gesellschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Eine Profilskizze 1945-1960,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (1991): B1/2, 9. Glaser’s terminology has ironic, although probably unintentional, implications. By likening national political and social developments to a disease, Germans would be following in the (certainly not exclusively) National Socialist tradition of viewing the nation as a biological organism. 53. “Protest der hessischen Ärzteschaft,” HÄBl 11:4 (Apr. 1950). 54. G. Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley, 1990), 32-33. 55. Protocol of the Proceedings of the Berlin (Potsdam) Conference, 17 July – 2 August , 1945,” Germany 1947-1949: The Story in Documents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of State, 1950), 48-49. 56. More information on American plans to restructure German educational institutions in Tent, Mission on the Rhine. Additional insights in Nicholas Pronay and K. Wilson, eds., The Political Re-Education of Germany and Her Allies after World War II (London, 1985). 57. B. Chamberlin, “Todesmühlen,” VjZ (1981): 420-36. Its effect on German viewers is described in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5 February 1946. Soon after its release, 12 percent of Bavarians (one-third of all movie-goers) answering an OMGUS survey reported having watched Death Mills. Eleven out of twelve who viewed it believed it was an accurate representation of conditions in the camps. Merritt and Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, 101. 58. In late 1946, more than three quarters of American-zone Germans thought that Nazi officials bore a heavier burden of guilt than others. Merritt and Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, 122. 59. Falck, 24. 60. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany. 61. K. Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage (Zurich, 1946), 18. A rather negative reaction to a personal discourse in November 1945 by Jaspers on the question of collective guilt and responsibility (at a time when the philosopher was certainly working on the essay cited above) in Hans Speier, From the Ashes of Disgrace, 37-40. It should be noted that Jaspers had been prohibited from teaching between 1937 and 1945 because he refused to divorce his Jewish wife. Convinced that Germany would not accept its share of the moral responsibility for the Nazi period, Jaspers left Heidelberg for Basel, Switzerland, in 1948. Henningsen, “Politics of Memory,” 2229-30. 62. See Ziemke, The U.S. Army, 368. Also Merritt and Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, 30-39. First signs of the slackening of the collective guilt approach are discussed in –

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63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

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69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

Lawrence Hartenian, “Propaganda and the Control of Information in Occupied Germany: The U.S. Information Control Division at Radio Frankfurt 1945-1949,” Dissertation, Rutgers Univ., 1984, 55-60. Oberlandesgerichtsrat a. D. B. Biermann, to Minister for Political Liberation, Kassel, 15 Aug. 1947, HHStA-W 501/470. See “Program of the ‘Nauheimer Kreis’: The Neutralization of Germany,” and attached attendance list for the second meeting of the Nauheimer Kreis on 18-19 Sept. 1948, OMGH box 460d. See Prowe, “Economic Democracy,” esp. 459-612. Jerry Mullers’ study presents the process of “disenchantment of European intellectuals with totalitarian solutions to the purported problems of modern life,” and their return “to the center of their respective political cultures.” The result was a stabilization of politics throughout most of Europe in the postwar period. Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1987), 12-13. Other arguments he leveled against denazification of youthful offenders (except those who committed “criminal acts”) were that it was an “anti-democratic program” and that it would undermine the reconstruction of the economy (“an engineer can be a productive ditch-digger, but the ditch-digger makes a lousy engineer”). Denkschrift zur Denazifizierung der Jahrgänge 1910 bis 1919 (17pp.), 1 Dec. 1946, HHStA-W 501/776. The role of cultural Americanization throughout Europe, and especially in Germany, is hard to overestimate. See R. Willett, The Americanization of Germany, 1945-1949. A similar process took place in Austria; see Reinhold Wagenleiter, “The Irony of American Culture Abroad: Austria and the Cold War,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. Lary May. (Chicago, 1989), 285-301. This assumes that individuals with higher incomes, higher levels of education and generally high socio-economic status should be considered elites. On German attitudes toward Americans and the United States during the occupation, see Merritt and Merritt, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, 183-84. These feelings, already strong, grew during and after the Berlin airlift in the summer of 1948. Jarausch, Deutsche Studenten. V. Berghahn, The Americanization of Business in the BRD. Article two of the Satzung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Personalwesen e.V., Frankfurt a. M. (signed by the high civil servant Dr. Oppler, Dr. Drath, Raab, E.W. Meyer, Altwein, Dr. Wolfgang Schmidt, and Helene von Bila). BA-Ko Z11/241. Note that at least Oppler and von Bila hail from Hesse’s early postwar administration. B. Rodewald, “Über die Reform der ärztlichen Ausbildung,” ÄM 35: 19 (1 Oct. 1950): 398-404. Radio and later TV concerns were modeled on the British experience. Hartenian, “Radio Control”. O. Spühler, Die Entwicklung der amerikanischen Medizin,” Universitas 3:2 (1948) Darmstadt Medical Doctors Organization, Darmstadt, 14 Sept. 1945, OMGH PHD 1011 Berghahn notes that business leaders returning from such trips rarely concentrated on the dark side of American capitalism. Berghahn, Unternehmer, 166. Dr. Kurt Hoffmeier, Report on Trip to the United States and Canada, May-July 1952, IHKFfm/Karton I, 1950 to 1955. This and other examples of German business world’s fascination for and acceptance of American business practices in the mid 1950s in Wallenberg, Report on Democratic Institutions in Germany, 79-80. Herrmann, “Der Wiederaufbau der deutschen Wirtschaft nach 1945,” 92. In a classic rendition of this interpretation of “repressed memory,” which also became a bestseller in West Germany in the late 1980s, see R Giordano, Die Zweite Schuld oder von der Last Deutscher zu sein (Hamburg, 1987). About its impact on Germany in more recent years,

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82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

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92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97.

98.

99. 100.

101.

see M. Henningsen, “The Politics of Memory: Holocaust and Legitimacy in Post-Nazi Germany,” in Remembering for the Future, ed. Yehuda Bauer et al. (Oxford, 1989) 2236-37. M. Mitscherlich and A. Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich, 1967). Rückerl, Strafverfolgung, 49-50. These ideas are summarized succinctly in W. Mommsen, “The Germans and their Past: History and Political Consciousness in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Coping with the Past: Germany and Austria after 1945, eds. K Harms et al. (Madison, 1990), 252-269. Also D. Simon, “Zäsuren im Rechtsdenken,” 157-158; and Hermann Rudolph, “Mehr als Stagnation und Revolte: Zur politischen Kultur der 60er Jahre,” in Zäsuren nach 1945: Essays zur Periodisierung der Nachkriegsgeschichte, ed. M. Broszat (Munich, 1990), 142-50. They first emerged in journalistic writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly as the student protests of that time prompted analyses, as in other Western countries, based on generational schemes. This view permeates Dornberg, The New Germans: Thirty Years After (New York, 1975). A characteristic reiteration of the generational theory in H. Dubiel, “The Acceptance of Democracy: Intellectual and Political Culture in West Germany,” in Coping with the Past: Germany and Austria after 1945, ed. K. Harms et al. (Madison, Wis., 1990), 137-38. J Herf, Divided Memory (Cambridge, 1997), esp. 334-35. Merritt and Merritt, Public Opinion in Semisovereign Germany, 198-99. The lecture was given by Max Picard, author of Hitler in Ourselves. B. Reiffenberg, “The New Generation, its Attitudes and Interests,” The Atlantic (March 1957): 175. A. Grosser, The Federal Republic of Germany: A Concise History (New York, 1963), 105-8; Merritt and Merritt, Public Opinion in Semisovereign Germany, 92. Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewußtsein,” 585, 587. Lübbe, 578-99. Similar ideas are presented in “Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewußtsein der Gegenwart,” in Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur (Berlin, 1984). M. Postone, “After the Holocaust: History and Identity in West Germany,” in Coping with the Past: Germany and Austria after 1945, eds. K. Harms et al. (Madison, 1990), 233-51. M. Mitscherlich-Nielsen, Reden über das eigene Land: Deutschland 3 (Munich, 1985), 59-77. The quote is from J. Carmichael, “The Eichmann Case: Reactions in Germany,” Midstream 7:3 (1961): 14. S. Gruson, “Eichmann: Impact on Germany,” New York Times, 17 April 1961, reprinted in The Politics of Postwar Germany, ed. Walter Stahl (New York, 1963), 342. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 9-16. Some excellent insights into the widespread evasion of the Holocaust in individual nations (despite errors in historical detail) in J. Miller’s One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York, 1990). According to the Moscow declaration of the Allied powers, 1 Nov. 1943, cited by R. L. Rubenstein, “Waldheim, the Pope, and the Holocaust,” in Burning Memory: Times of Testing and Reckoning, ed. A. L. Eckhardt (Oxford, 1993), 268-69. This questionable historical analysis served to free Austria from many burdens, not least of which were reparations. The Sorrow and the Pity, dir. Marcel Ophuls (1970), produced for Switzerland’s Lausanne Télévision Rencontre. See Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, 1991). I. Buruma, Wages of Guilt: Memories of the War in Germany and Japan (New York, 1994). The Soviet Union’s post-1945 construction of a national myth around its role in the Great Patriotic War will be the subject of a forthcoming book by N. Tumarkin, For the Living and the Dead (New York, 1994). The degree of guilt and the appropriate responses to it are largely, but not completely, subjective. I personally find much to admire in Karl Jaspers’ 1946 treatise on the question of German guilt. In it, the social philosopher identified several levels of responsibility, ranging from actual crimes to political, moral, and metaphysical guilt. Each type carried its own –

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102.

103. 104.

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105.

106.

107. 108. 109.

110.

path to redemption, or, in Jasper’s phase, “cleansing.” Direct implication in mass murder, especially by authority figures, deserved condemnation and prosecution. National Socialist activists would have to answer to Allied or German authorities. Beyond these groups, however, “every German without exception shares in the political responsibility”, and furthermore, “every German has cause for moral self-examination—admittedly in very different ways.” Collective guilt, at first decreed by American military planners but quickly abandoned, finds a measure of sympathy in Jaspers’ tract. He argues that the guilt of the collective cannot be cleanly separated from the guilt of the individual. I believe that these distinctions apply also to collectives more limited in scope than the spongy category “the Germans.” Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage. Letter, “Gegen die ‘Naziriecherei’,” Neue Deutsche Beamtenzeitung 3:3 (March 1953): 42. Similar views on civil servants under the Nazis in W. Frederica, “Zehn Richter korrigieren die deutsche Geschichte,” Die Zeit, 7 January 1954. Achterberg, Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt am Main, 83. Obituary for Dr. Isaac Jacob Feuerstein, a Frankfurt physician, social democrat, and editor of the pre-1933 Ärztliche Mitteilungen, the main organ of the interwar Hartmannbund. Tellingly, the obituary fails to mention what Feuerstein did between 1938, when he was forced out of the profession because he was Jewish, and 1949, when he returned. He died 31 Dec. 1949. “Heimgang eines Vorkämpfers der ärztlichen Berufsfreiheit,” ÄM 35 (1 Feb. 1950): 57. Dr. K. of Marburg joined the NSDAP in 1933 (and the NS-Automobile Corps in 1932), but did not consider himself a fanatic, got by as a minor offender when he argued that he had continued to treat Jewish patients and remained friendly toward them until 1936. Due to unrelated differences with the SA and a leader of the local Nazi Physicians’ League, he was actually arrested for 6 months in 1944. Klageschrift gegen Dr. H. K., Az. ML 1016/46 D/To., HHStA-W 520/SK Marburg-Land. A physician in Darmstadt made a similar case when applying for a temporary license to practice while his SK-case was under review. He argued that he had shown his differences with Nazi policy by working in a clinic run by a Jewish colleague until 1939 and acting as his substitute. His appeal was denied, but he benefited from the Christmas Amnesty in 1948. Az. Dst WA5446/48, HHStA-W 520/SK Darmstadt-Stadt. Most minor acts of disobedience to Nazi policy such as continued professional association or assistance to Jews that could be adequately verified belong to the category of “resistenz” rather than “resistance,” a distinction first made, to my knowledge, by Martin Broszat of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. The strong evidence that Hesse’s elites rejected anti-Semitism, at least subsequently, supports Postone’s contention that “the public repudiation of anti-Semitism became instrumentalized as an ideology of legitimation for the postwar conservative republic.” Postone, “After the Holocaust,” 235. Statement by Dr. med. K. A. to Spruchkammer Darmstadt-Stadt, 24 Dec. 46, HHStA-W 520/SK Da-St., Az. Dz500114. See also Mommsen, “Die Kontinuität des Berufsbeamtentums,” 69. Zorn, “Zum Beamtenproblem,” Bayerische Beamtenzeitung 3:2 (February 1952): 18; Another commentator used similar statistical arguments to prove that German Beamte “were not more strongly affiliated with the NSDAP before 1937 than were the members of other occupational groups.” His evidence is a 1940 publication that declared that the Civil Service Section of the NSDAP already had 120,000 members in 1933. J. Donsberger, Der Leidensweg der Beamten seit 1945,” Bayerische Beamtenzeitung 3:9 (September 1952): 134. For example, W. Kühn (MdB), Freier Deutscher Kurier, 21 Jan. 1954, reprinted in “Die deutsche Presse zum Urteil des BVG,” DBB 5:2 (Feb. 1954): 22. Another article illustrates this view particularly well, while also hinting at its ultimate aim of separating the civil service from responsibility for National Socialist policies and actions: “Just as the totalitarian state dissolved the democratic state between 1933 and 1945, so this police regime embodied nothing else but the state, which the civil servant served and to which alone he was –

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111. 112. 113.

114. 115.

116. 117.

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118. 119.

120. 121. 122.

123. 124.

125.

bound on account of his loyalty relationship. This was true even though the new the new regime wrapped itself in political declarations such as ‘unity of Party and State’ or ‘the Party orders the state,’ and forced the civil servant to swear an oath to ‘Hitler and Reich Chancellor’. In spite of all the manipulations with which they tried to bend the civil servant to the political rule of National Socialism […] the Beamten-relationship remained a legal relationship between the Beamte and the state and not between the Beamte and the respective holder of power. “Beamter und Staat: Gedanken zum Spruch von Karlsruhe,” DBB 5:3 (Mar. 1954): 36-37. On the civil service’s long statist tradition, see G. Kvistad, The Rise and Demise of German Statism (Providence, 1999), esp. 85-94. Quoted in Thayer, The Unquiet Germans, 111. C. Krull, (General Manager of the Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a. M.), “Die Kammer im neuen Gewand,” Mitteilungen der IHK Ffm 7 (1 April 1958): 134. In fact, most of these chambers had introduced the leadership principle on their own initiative or at the mere urging of State/Party officials. Coercion was hardly necessary. Report, “Handelskammern und Wirtschaftsorganisation,” Sept. 1945, Archive of the Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a. M., Box 1945-1950. Henningsen contends that the pardons, prison releases, and exonerations of prominent business figures such as Flick and Krupp in the early 1950s helped stifle discussion about the “involvement of economic interests in the process of the Holocaust [….] Allowing a debate about the economic aspects of the Holocaust would also have reminded the postwar public of the profiteers of Aryanization of Jewish business interests by the Nazis.” Henningsen, “The Politics of Memory,” 2234. I contend, by contrast, that the release of these high-profile individuals was much more of a symptom than a cause of the dearth of open and honest confrontation with the crimes of the Third Reich. HHStA-W 520/SK Darmstadt-land, Az. 522/DL/1572. Dr. med. R. H., Beurteilung des Dr. med. G., 15 May 1946. This and similar statements in HHStA-W 520/SK Darmstadt-Stadt/Az. Dz502552. B. Rodewald, “Über die Reform der Ärztlichen Ausbildung,” ÄM 35: 19 (1 Oct. 1950): 399. “Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit,” ÄM 35: 6 (15 March 1950): 108-9. These experiments had been publicized widely in the popular press, although precious little was reported in prominent medical journals. The first article devoted to the 1947 physicians’ trial in the main West German physicians’ journal, the Ärztliche Mitteilungen, was the one quoted above. It appeared almost a full year after the journal resumed publication after the war. In fairness, it should be added that the journal was not publishing at the time of the actual trial. Carl Oelemann, “Zum Geleit,” ÄM 34: 1 (15 May 1949): 1-2. “Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit,” 108-09. The distinction is between tenured Beamte, who had to pass a series of qualifying exams and training periods, and those who were either placed in the positions based on their political reliability, or hired as (less expensive) untenured employees to carry out work that should have been reserved for Beamte. Josef Hölzl, “Beamten-Reform?” Bayerische Beamtenzeitung 1:5 (Feb 1950): 77. Prof. Werner Weber, “Das Berufsbeamtentum im demokratischen Rechtsstaat,” DBB 3:5 (June 1952): 9. To his credit, this official of the physicians’ chamber expressed his belief that “those few who had been extremely active politically” should be barred from practicing medicine. Weygand, Ärztekammer Darmstadt, to Major Litton, American MG Darmstadt, 29 Aug. 1945, OMGH PHD box 1011. Dr. J. H., to First Prosecutor at the Darmstadt denazification tribunal, 9.10.1947, HHStA-W 520, SK Darmstadt, Az. 520/DZ/51964. According to an agreement with Hesse’s Cultural Ministry, the names of individuals drawn from the denazification records housed in the State archives will be cited in a manner that will protect the individuals’ anonymity. –

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126. Prowe calls this the dominant view in the minds of postwar Germans. Prowe, “Economic Democracy in Post-World War II Germany,” 455-56. 127. A. Dederer (General manager of the Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a. M.), “Um die Sozialisierung: Ist Hessen noch ein Rechtsstaat?,” Mitteilungen der Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a.M. 9 (1 March 1952): 197. 128. H. Hermes, “Friedrich Flick,” Der Wirtschaftsspiegel 2:6 (1 March 1947): 164-67, esp. 166, 167. 129. Dr. med. E. Kohlhepp, “Psychologie und Beamtenauslese,” Bayerische Beamtenzeitung 1:3 (Dec. 1949): 36-37. 130. W. Weynen, “Firmenwert und Arisierung,” Der Wirtschaftsspiegel 2:8 (1 June 1947): 218-20. 131 . t is no coincidence that physicians, who avoided assuming or discussing responsibility for the Third Reich more successfully than the civil service or business interests, have most recently experienced an overwhelming surge in exposure of crime and complicity. Simultaneously, the role of the civil service and, especially, of “big business,” has met with more favorable revisionist treatment. Judith Miller has called the rationalization and relativization of difficult aspects of a nation’s history “the most common, insidious, and hence problematic forms of the suppression of memory.” Miller, One, by One, by One, 277. 132. When Hermann Ehlers, president of the Bundestag, died in 1954, eulogists not only attested his strong democratic convictions, but also suggested that these beliefs derived from his background as a professional civil servant. “Die Beamtenschaft trauert um Dr. Ehlers,” DBB 5:12 (Dec. 1954): 1. It is true that Ehlers was a staunch supporter of the Federal Republican democracy, and equally true that he continued to maintain close ties to the professional civil service. The causal connection, however, is questionable at best. 133. For example, “Gedanken über deutsche Demokratie und die Vorbetrachtung eines Beamten dazu,” Neue Deutsche Beamtenzeitung 6:12 (December 1956): 245-47; Fritz Nadollek, “Die freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung nach dem Bonner Grundgesetz,” DBB 6:2 (Feb. 1955): 26-27. 134. R. Zorn, “Zum Beamtenproblem,” Bayerische Beamtenzeitung 3:3 (March 1952): 34. 135. See especially U. Wengst, Beamtentum zwischen Reform und Tradition; also“Was bringt das kommende Bundesbeamtengesetz?” DBB 2:9 (Sept. 1951): 130. 136. Prof. W. Weber, “Das Berufsbeamtentum im demokratischen Rechtsstaat,” 11. 137. “Ein tragender Pfeiler der Demokratie,” DBB 6:6 (June 1955): 104. 138. Dederer, 197-98. 139. OMGH ICD, Research Branch, Public Opinion Review No. 1, 1 May 1947, NARA RG 260 OMGH, Box 68. 140. “Gesetz zur vorläufigen Regelung des Rechtes der Industrie- und Handelskammern” of 18 December 1956, Bundesgesetzblatt Nr. 52 (21 Dec. 1956), mandating that all officers in the plenum be elected by the at-large members, and that the plenum in turn elect the presidium and advisory councils. In fact, every chamber in Germany had already introduced or reintroduced this system in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Krull, “Die Kammer im neuen Gewand,” 134-35. 141. Letter, “Gegen die ‘Naziriecherei’,” Neue Deutsche Beamtenzeitung 3:3 (March 1953): 42. 142. L. Friedl, “Entpolitisierung der Beamtenschaft?” Bayerische Beamtenzeitung 2:3 (March 1951): 37. Others believed that the civil servants’ traditional (and purely theoretical) political neutrality should be maintained, but for the same reason: it would promote democracy in Germany. Prof. Dr. H. Krüger, “Der Staat sind wir,” DBB 1:1 (1 Sept. 1950): 4. However, the official position taken by the League of German Beamte at its 1951 annual meeting of delegates was that “a restriction of the political activity of civil servants is not compatible with the principles of democracy.” “Entschliessung des Delegiertentages 1951,” DBB 2:6 (1 June 1951): 81. 143. The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe acknowledged this argument in a 1975 decision to maintain the virtual ban on abortions. See “West German Abortion Decision: A Contrast to Roe v. Wade,” trans. Robert E. Jonas and John D. Gorby, John Marshall Journal –

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of Practice and Procedure 605 (1976): 662; cited in Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, 30. 144. Hilberg cites three major exceptions to the early avoidance of memorialization: the Yad Vashem in Israel, the YIVO Institute in New York City, and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 1051-52. 145. See Arndt, “Das Problem der Wirtschaftsdemokratie in den Verfassungsentwürfen” (1946). 146. Neuffer, “Kolleginnen und Kollegen!” ÄM 34:10 (1 Oct. 1949): 1-2.

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T

here are two ironies in the experience of the occupational elite during the decade after World War II. The first is that many of the reform policies that Allied planners believed were necessary to insure democracy did not succeed, but pluralist democracy took firm root in Western Germany nevertheless. The second irony must be seen from the point of view of the elites themselves: while higher civil servants, entrepreneurs, and physicians successfully resisted many occupation-era reforms, they found themselves recast in the process. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Germany’s utter defeat and apparent devastation fostered a mistaken belief in some spheres that the old had been smashed and that something entirely new could be built in its place. The murderous war that Hitler’s Germany had launched provided the moral and political imperative to transform German society. Above all, American reformers, in some cases backed by German constituencies, aimed to alter the elite. With the “four D’s” of demilitarization, decartelization, denazification, and democratization, the United States took up this challenge more vigorously than the other Western Allies. In their quest to transform German society, activists within the American military government tried to break down traditional institutions that could be associated with elitism and authoritarianism, and so, by implication, with the Third Reich. The threetrack civil service, interlocking and overlapping business relationships, and the corporatist organization of interest groups, such as the Chambers of Industry and Trade or the Physicians’ Chambers, were singled out for reform. Denazification, the largest systematic political purge ever attempted by victorious military powers, was seen as a crucial pillar of Allied attempts to transform the elite. Although the American approach changed rapidly, sometimes even erratically, the goal of denazification remained consistent at first: former National Socialists were to be removed from positions of influence. Beginning in the fall of 1945, denazification spared no occupational group, but it did single out certain sensitive sectors for special scrutiny. In addition to the political leadership, the media, and education, such sensitive sectors included the civil service and big business. The university medical faculties, Notes for this section begin on page 254.

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the pinnacle of the medical profession, also suffered from repeated scrutiny, first from the Americans directly, then, after passage of the Liberation Law in March 1946, from Hesse’s dedicated Ministry of Political Liberation. German elites resisted reform. In spite of reform movements within their own ranks, the broad majority did not locate the source of Germany’s troubled history within their time-honored institutions, but outside them. High civil servants, entrepreneurs, and physicians all argued that they had been betrayed, misled, and even persecuted by the Nazi leadership, and thus brushed aside assertions that they or their institutions bore significant responsibility. Such self-serving and counterfactual claims drew selectively on their perceptions of history. Interference in occupational concerns had cost the Weimar government the allegiance of many elites, especially that of the Beamtenschaft. Exploiting elites’ concerns, the National Socialists had promised to return them to a nostalgic and largely fictitious past in which they rationally tended their own affairs. Ultimately, however, the Nazis failed to deliver on such pledges. In fact, the Nazis themselves undermined the autonomy and authority of the elite occupations. The main result was an erosion of elite support for the regime, which had been largely conditional to begin with. Their construction of the past justified elite opposition to far-reaching reforms after 1945. The selective amnesia which accompanied selective memory glossed over the many forms of complicity with National Socialism, especially with atrocities committed during the Third Reich. Bolstered by the common conviction that their institutions had been subverted rather than won over, infiltrated rather than converted, postwar occupational leaders fought for the maintenance or survival of their corporate structures. This view helped, indeed required, the suppression of a full and exhaustive reckoning with their own professional past. At the same time, it was neither a wholesale falsification of history, nor did it sweep the twelve years of National Socialism entirely under the rug. On the contrary, it necessitated an overt rejection of all sympathy with radical völkisch ideals. The power of selective recollection was that it offered elites both a justification for resisting reforms and provided them with an intact, if highly skewed, self-image that integrated them into the newly forming conservative democracy as supporters rather than antagonists. The increasingly organized conservative resistance to reforms coincided with decreasing American and German commitment to social change projects. The first wave of military government officials and Washington policy makers, exemplified by the anti-trust devotees in the Decartelization Branch and by Henry Morgenthau in the Treasury Department, gradually lost influence to the proponents of a more constructive policy toward Germany. In the lengthening shadow of the nascent Cold War, winning German sympathy for Western-style democracy took priority over rooting out German fascism. When Secretary of State James Byrnes, in his widely noted Stuttgart speech –

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on 6 September 1946, declared the end of the punitive phase of the occupation, the road was opened for a retreat from the most far-reaching reforms of the elite occupations. Numerous firms were scratched from dismantling lists; decartelization went no further than a few prominent examples, such as IG Farben. By late 1947, the Americans were pressing the German Liberation Ministries for the fastest possible conclusion of denazification. The frantic rush to comply led to more lenient treatment former National Socialists who delayed or appealed their Spruchkammer cases, many of them the most deeply implicated. As a result, the German-administered denazification program lost what little public credibility it had retained, and the German tribunal staff became demoralized. By the early 1950s, many were already labeling the results of the Allied reform programs a failure. German elites, they noted, had restored authoritarian institutions, such as the elitist three-track civil service, rebuilt their economy around powerful enterprises, and restored only slightly altered corporatist institutions, foremost among them the public-law chambers and tight networks of influential interest group associations. There were also disturbing signs that National Socialism had not been rooted out. Former National Socialists were appearing in prominent positions. In 1951, American High Commissioner John J. McCloy commuted or reduced many of the sentences pronounced by Allied courts against German war criminals. That same year, the law regulating Article 131 of the Basic Law effectively offered civil servants whom the Allies had purged a right to reinstatement. The Krupps and the Thyssens had rebuilt their business empires. The postwar generation in West Germany borrowed these themes and elaborated on them; an opportunity for a radical transformation of society, a fundamental social revolution, had been squandered or even deliberately quashed. Despite the rhetoric, however, the limitations of reform measures did not constitute a restoration. The vocal disappointment over the continuity between the Federal Republic and the German past was fueled largely by false expectations. The real opportunity for radical social revolution in occupied Germany was limited. If deep change was to take place and establish roots, it required either broad, sustained popular support or the long-term commitment of the occupation authorities to push it through. Neither, however, was present in sufficient measure. On the contrary, the United States, even as it entered the most internationalist era in its history, did not support the long-term occupation of Germany, with its consequent costs and the contradictions of establishing democracy by decree. More important, decades of upheaval had left Germans wary of radical experiments in social change. This was particularly evident among the elite, whose interests, after all, were most at stake. Commenting on the disappointing result, the historian Fritz Stern has stated that “our efforts inside Germany were largely unsuccessful and often risible.”1 A more productive approach than this success-failure dichotomy is Jeffrey Herf’s recognition that the postwar changes –

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constituted “multiple restorations.” Speaking particularly about political elites of various ideological stripes who reemerged after 1945, Herf maintains that non- and anti-Nazi leaders promoted their own conceptions of a post-Nazi German society. The differences between Adenauer’s and Walter Ulbricht’s approaches informed the East/West contrast, but differences between leaders within each German state were also considerable.2 So what went right with West German elites? For one, the Third Reich had indeed traumatized many, and separated most elites from the search for radical solutions, as far as they had been attracted to begin with. They achieved their central goals in the struggle between tradition and reform. This left them more open to experiment with less radical, but nonetheless important changes, for example in the question of codetermination, an important innovation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was an element of truth to the self-serving claims of postwar higher civil servants, business leaders, and to a lesser degree physicians: the traditions they vigorously defended were, indeed, compatible with democracy in the postwar German context. The pictures that they painted of themselves and their professions committed them to rejecting radical or völkisch solutions and embracing the Federal Republic. High civil servants had to demonstrate the effectiveness of their professionalism and their support of the new parliamentary state. Business leaders shied away from confrontation with organized labor and sought negotiated settlement. Physicians dropped their earlier fascination with the pseudo-scientific theories of race and racial hygiene, and, without explicitly citing the cause, touted the central importance of medical ethics and the doctor/patient privilege. In short, the trauma, exposed complicity, and dislocations of the Third Reich, military defeat, and foreign occupation, along with the rearguard battle to preserve vaunted traditions against radical reforms, combined to reorient important elite professions. The German civil service, business leadership, and medical profession disavowed some attitudes and practices that had contributed either to the failure of Weimar democracy or to the virulence of the Third Reich. Having charted a course toward social reintegration that perpetuated elite status while contributing to their material prosperity, each group continued to evolve. All of these developments point, ultimately, to the ability to change. The recasting of the elite in the postwar decade was subtle, but indicates that even intransigence can promote a measure of progress. Finally, the stabilization throughout the early Federal Republic, built as it was on conservative containment of radical reform and social change, not to mention a highly selective reading of the events of the Third Reich, was temporary. Beginning in the 1960s, many early postwar shibboleths were challenged, and gave way to further incremental reform. Gregg Kvistad, for example, contends that, after World War II, the civil service was instrumen–

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talized as a pillar of German democracy, but in a way that viewed grassroots democracy with trepidation. By the 1970s, such assumptions were under attack. The anti-Radical decrees which effectively banned communists from public employment in the 1970s aroused a storm of controversy, whereas in 1950, similar anti-Communist orders issued by Adenauer had been taken very much in stride.3 Something had clearly changed; the veil of postwar myths was breaking down along with consensus politics and the end of the economic miracle. Developments on the scale of Germany’s renewal after 1945 are always so complex as to discourage analogies with other historical contexts. Comparisons that have been drawn have rarely come from professional historians, but more often from political scientists and philosophers.4 Nevertheless, some conclusions can be drawn that carry broader ramifications. For one, the Allied occupation of Germany did not fail utterly. The positive ironies of the German elite’s postwar recasting depended heavily on the dialectic between attempted reform and the restoration of tradition. Without the challenge of social change programs, backed up by the authority and early commitment of the occupying powers, German elites would have had less need to reject National Socialism and related tenets to the extent that they did. Certainly elite experience in the Third Reich, especially during the war, had begun the process. The first postwar years then forced most German elites to reckon with and justify, however problematically, their actions during the twelve years of National Socialist rule. In this sense, the attempt to eradicate German militarism and National Socialism, while based partly on faulty assumptions, partially achieved its long-term goals, but in unintended ways. The success of western Germany’s postwar recasting cannot be easily transferred to other situations. On the most general level, it testifies to the near impossibility of breaking completely with the past. Attempts to radically overturn the social order, as in the Soviet Union or the German Democratic Republic, create as many problems as they solve. The Federal Republic, by contrast, succeeded in establishing a stable democracy by building on continuities and harnessing elites in the process of limited, gradual change. The integrative power of selective memory, as utilized by West German elites, should also not be taken as a prescription for overcoming a troubled past, but rather as a common and troublesome human reflex. Working through personal and collective responsibility is a necessary and continual process that exposes, although rarely exorcises, old ghosts. By failing to confront their full complicity and responsibility, the majority of West German high civil servants, business leaders, and physicians left themselves exposed to later accusations, turmoil, and soul-searching. What was expedient in the immediate aftermath of World War II left a difficult legacy for a recast West German elite.

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Notes 1. Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: National Socialism in the Drama of the German Past (New York, 1987), 221.

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2. Herf, 3-5. 3. Kvistad, 102-9. 4. E.g., Di Palma, To Craft Democracies.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Documents

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Berlin Document Center (BDC) Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BA-Ko) B103 Bundesamt für die gewerbliche Wirtschaft B106 Bundesinnenministerium B150 Bundesinnenministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge, und Kriegsgeschädigte NL5 Nachlaß Hermann Pünder NL112 Nachlaß Abraham Frohwein NL230 Nachlaß Max Pferdekämpfer Z11 Verwaltung für Wirtschaft des Vereinigten Wirtschaftsgebiet Z11 Personalamt des Vereinigten Wirtschaftsgebiet Z42 Spruchgerichte in der britischen Zone Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden (HHStA-W) 501 Ministerium für politische Befreiung 502 Hessischer Ministerpräsident—Staatskanzlei 521 Landesamt für Internierungs- und Arbeitslager 503 Ministerium des Innern 504 Kultusministerium 507 Minister für Wirtschaft und Technik 520 Spruchkammer 1126 Nachlaß des Prof. Dr. Geiler, Ministerpräsident von Hessen

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Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (HStA-D) H1 Präsidial-Regierung Regierungspräsident-Ablieferungslisten, Registratur-Gruppen 1, 2, 5, 58 [not yet fully catalogued] Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStA-M) 165 Preußische Regierung Kassel, Präsidialabteilung 180 Landratsämter Marburg, 1821-1952 Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt am Main, Archiv (IHK Ffm) Uncatalogued boxes: Karton I, 1945-1950 Karton II, 1945-1950 Karton I, 1950-55 Karton II, 1950-55 Stadtarchiv Darmstadt (StA-D) Einwohnermelderegister (alte Kartei, bis ca. 1954)

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Stadtarchiv Frankfurt am Main (StA-Ffm) Magistrat-Akten U.S. National Archives, Suitland Records Center RG 260 Office of Military Government in Germany (U.S.) (OMGUS) Office of Director of Intelligence Economics Division Civil Affairs Dvision (CAD) Public Health Division (PHD Office of Bipartite Control Office (BICO) Office of High Commissioner Office of the Military Government, Hesse (OMGH) Fragebogens [sic]

Printed Primary Die Beschäftigten des öffentlichen Dienstes im Lande Hessen am 30.6.1948. Statistisches Landesamt Hessen. Beiträge zur Statistik Hessens, 7. Wiesbaden, Oct 1948. Datenbuch zur Geschichte des deutschen Bundestages 1949-1982, compiled by Peter Schindler. Baden-Baden: Presse- und Informationsamt des Deutschen Bundestages, 1989. –

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Fünf Jahre Land Hessen, 1945/46 - 1949/50. Hessisches Statistisches Landesamt. Wiesbaden, 1950. Handbuch der Großunternehmen. Darmstad, 1941, 1944, 1953, 1955, 1956/57, 1958/59. Handbuch der Beamten und Behördenangestellten. Transport und Verkehr Gewerkschaft öffentliche Dienste. Düsseldorf, 1949. Hessische Gemeindestatistik, 1950. Statistisches Landesamt Hessen. Wiesbaden, 1952. Die Industrie- und Handelskammern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bonn, 1951, 1953, 1956. Leitende Männer der Wirtschaft. Heppenheim, 1951, 1953, and 1955. Malzahn, Manfred, ed. Germany 1945-1949: A Sourcebook. London, 1991. Personalstand der öffentlichen Verwaltung in Hessen. Statistisches Landesamt Hessen. Stand Okt. 1958. Wiebaden, 1959. Pollock, James and James H. Meisel, eds. Germany under Occupation: Illustrative Materials and Documents. Ann Arbor, 1947. Reform des öffentlichen Dienstes: Pläne der Kabinettskommission zur Reform des Beamtenrechts, ed. Chef der Staatskanzlei Hessisches Staatsministerium. Offenbach, 1948. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate, ed. Documents on Germany under Occupation 19451954. London and New York, 1955. Schweitzer, Carl-Christoph et al., eds., Politics and Government in the Federal Republic of Germany: Basic Documents. Leamington Spa, 1984. Statistisches Handbuch für Hessen. Statistisches Landesamt. Wiesbaden, 1948ff. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1949-1960. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich. Berlin, 1934. Taschenbuch für Verwaltungsbeamte. Behördennachweis und Personalverzeichnis. Berlin, 1950/51, 1952, 1953, 1954/55, 1956/57. U.S. Department of State, Historical Division. Documents on Germany, 19441961. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961. Die Verwaltungsreform in Hessen. ed. Kabinettskommission zur Vorbereitung der Verwaltungsreform. Wiesbaden, 1948. Vorträge und Aussprachen anläßlich der 150-Jahre-Feier der Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a. M. am 21.6.1958. Frankfurt a. M., 1958. Wiedererrichtung des Deutschen Industrie- und Handelstages. Ansprachen und Reden der Ludwigshafener Tagung am 27. Oktober 1949. [No author]. Bonn, 1949. Wiese, Walter. Handbuch des öffentlichen Dienstes. Zehn Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung. Wiesbaden, 1959.

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Address books (used to construct statistical series for Hessen’s physicians) Adreß- und Einwohnerbuch der Stadt Kassel, 1933, 1936, 1939, 1940, 1949, and 1950. Adreßbuch der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958/59, and 1960. Adreßbuch der Stadt Marburg, 1930/31, 1932/33, 1934/35, 1936/37, 1938/39, 1950/51, 1953/54, 1956/57, and 1959/60. Amtliches Adreßbuch der Stadt Darmstadt, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1940, 1941, 1949, 1952, 1954/55, and 1956/57. Fuldaer Adreßbuch 1928, 1937, 1939, 1950, 1957, and 1960. Wiesbadener Adreßbuch, 1938, 1947/48, 1950, 1951/52, 1953/54, and 1955/56.

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Professional Periodicals Das Ärzteblatt des Bundes der Freien Ärzte Deutschlands, 1949-1950. Ärztliche Mitteilungen (Köln), 1949-1955. Bayerische Beamtenzeitung. Monatsschrict für den Standesinteressen der bayerischen Beamten, 1949-1952. Mitteilungen der Industrie- und Handelskammer Frankfurt a. M., 1949-1955. Der Beamtenbund. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Beamtenbundes, 1950-1955. Der Betrieb, 1948-50. Der Deutsche Beamte. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, 1951-1954. Deutsches Beamtenrecht, 1951. Bundesgesetzblatt, 1949-1960. Hessisches Ärzteblatt, 1949-1955. Hessisches Gesetzes- und Verordnungsblatt, 1946-1957. Neue Deutsche Beamtenzeitung, 1953-1956. Der Wirtschaftsspiegel, 1946-1948.

Secondary Literature _____. “Die ordnungspolitische Epochendeutung der Weltwirtschaftskrise in Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte der sozialen Marktwirtschaft.” Ordnungspolitische Weichenstellungen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, 11-29. Berlin, 1991. _____. Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945-1980 (Frankfurt a. M., 1983. Abosch, Heinz. The Menace of the Miracle. New York, 1963.

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A

British zone of occupation, 8, 10, 91, 97, 120; denazification in, 147, 148, 183. See also Bizonia Bundesärztekammer. See Federal Medical Chamber Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI). See Federal League of German Industry Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände (BdA). See Federal League of German Employers’ Associations

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abortion, 37, 42, 113-14, 238 Adenauer, Konrad, 103, 145, 162, 226, 252 Allied Control Council, 91, 100, 114, 148, 150 Allied Control Council Law No.2, 92 americanization, 94, 108, 225-26 anti-Semitism, 30, 35, 42-43, 164-65 anti-trust legislation. See decartelization Arndt, Adolf, 89, 96, 104, 192, 239 Ärtztekammer. See Physicians’ Chambers aryanization, 18, 31, 35, 55-56, 164-65, 174, Association of German Health Insurance Physicians (Kassenärztliche Vereinigung Deutschlands, KVD), 31-32, 122

C Caplan, Jane, 17, 23, 28 Chambers of Industry and Trade and integration of refugees, 63-64, 69 and role after German defeat, 90-92 as public-law bodies, 30 denazification of, 145, 154, 175-77, 183, 191 in Third Reich, 30-31 origins and structure, 30 postwar reforms of, 233-34, 237, 238, 249 role in denazification of business, 164-65, 174, 237 chiropractors. See Heilpraktiker Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 7, 94, 103, 214 Churches, 8, 36, 163, 232 Churchill, Winston, 104 Civil Servants’ Protective Association (Beamtenschutzbund), 118-19 Clay, Lucius D., 75, 89, 93, 104, 107, 109, 149

B Basic Law (Grundgesetz), 90, 91 and article 131, 56, 66-67, 71, 7677, 100, 101-2, 118-19, 184-85, 189-90, 212-14, 251 and article 33, 66, 100 and basic rights, 93, 110-11, 116 and economic system, 105 Beamte. See Civil Servants Beamtenschutzbund. See Civil Servants’ Protective League Berg, Fritz, 108, 226 Berlin, 55, 107, 218 Berlin Document Center, 75-76, 154, 202n. 121 Binder, Gottlob, 151, 153-54, 155-56, 157, 174 Bizonia, 73, 100 Brandt, Karl, 32, 144 Brill, Hermann, 63, 168, 202n. 126 –

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Codetermination of labor, 88, 93, 104, 213, 252 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 25, 98, 113, 156, 191, 193 Constitution of Hesse, 88, 90, 92-94, 96-97, 102, 108-9 federal. See Basic Law Conti, Leonardo, 32, 144, 51n. 91 continuity debate, 2-5, 9-11, 56, 90, 115, 127, 145-46, 184-85, 214, 238, 251 corporatism, 3, 28, 136n. 152, 88, 109, 114-15, 163, 210, 249. See also neocorporatism Council of States (Länderrat), 65, 97, 165, 173

procedures for, 148-57 results of, 141-42, 167-191 passim, 210, 225, 230-31, 249-50 denazification tribunals (Spruchkammer), creation of, 151-52 denunciations to, 160-61 problems with, 112, 153-59, 163 criticism of, 154-57, 159, 223 hearing procedures, 160-65 exculpatory affidavits (Persilscheine), 162 military government oversight of, 169 penalties imposed, 175, 185-89 statistics on, 157-58 Deutsche Arbeiterfront (DAF). See German Labor Front Deutscher Beamtenbund (DBB). See League of German Civil Servants Deutscher Beamtengesetz 1937. See German Civil Service Code Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB). See Federal Trade Union League displaced persons (DPs), 54-55, 60-77. See also refugees among business leaders, 57-58, 6264, 67-69, 71, 74 among civil servants, 56-57, 59-60, 66-67, 70-71, 73, 185 among physicians, 59, 62, 69, 7173, 74-75 assistance programs for, 62 associations representing, 61, 64, 115, 117, 186 camps, 55, 178 categories and demographics, 5455, 66, 77n. 2 denazification of, 75-76, 178, 185 discrimination against, 61-62, 6970, 72, 115 effect on elites, 54, 75-77 general integration of, 60-61, 63, 66-67, 215 quotas for, 61, 65-66 women among, 73-74 doctor/patient confidentiality, 37, 111-12, 114, 179, 252 Doctors’ Trial of 1947. See Nuremberg trials Dorn, Walter L., 14n. 30, 89 DPs. See Displaced persons Draper, William, 106, 162 Drigalski, Wilhelm von, 27, 91, 166, 178, 213,

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D Dahrendorf, Ralf, 88, 184 Darmstadt, 7, 56, 59, 60-61, 72, 74, 89, 113, 122, 155, 160, 164, 166, 175-80, 217, 225, 231, 235 Darmstädter Echo, 104 decartelization, 3, 94, 103, 106-8, 249, 251 denazification, Chapter 4 passim. See also Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism American pressure to conclude, 150, 157, 250-51, 224 and Christmas Amnesty, 75, 149, 154, 158, 172, 187, 189 and internment, 185-89 and lack of qualified personnel, 26-27, 99 and promotion of alternate elite, 191-94 and work restrictions, 63, 174, 178-79 and temporary exclusion, 184-91 and Youth Amnesty, 149, 158, 172, 187 of business leaders, 146, 164-5, 173-77, 190, 193 of civil service, 144-46, 163-64, 167-73, 189, 192-93 of physicians, 146, 165-66, 177183, 190, 193 of newcomers, 63-65, 75-76 opposition to, 117-118, 154, 237-38, 224-25, 251 phases of, 148-50 problems with, 153-59, 171, 223 –

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E

German Labor Front (DAF), 35, 92, 152, 162 Globke, Hans, 4, 145, 13n. 16 Goebbels, Josef, 143, 232 Goerdeler, Carl, 64 Goering, Hermann, 45, 143, 144, 51n. 91 Grundgesetz. See Basic Law

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 89, 107 elites; definition, 5-6 Equalization of Burdens Law (Lastenausgleich), 67-68, 71 Erhard, Ludwig, 104, 108, 121 Eschenburg, Theodor, 92 euthanasia program (T-4), 7, 19, 32, 36-7, 42, 110, 111-12, 144, 146, 147, 165, 211, 217, 234, 238 expellees. See displaced persons

H Hadamar T4 killing center , 19, 165 Hartmannbund, 31-33, 124, 125 healers. See Heilpraktiker Heilpraktiker, 7 Hermann-Goering Works (Reichwerke Herrmann Goering), 35, 46, 236 Hess, Rudolf, 24-25, 29, 51n. 91 Hesse business structure of, 119-20 civil service in postwar, 56-57, 5960, 61-62, 95-104 creation of Greater Hesse, 7, 89-90 demographics and geography of, 79 in Third Reich, 29 Jews in, 55-56 medical professions in, 6-61, 12125, 180-83 postwar governments of, 7-8, 90, 105, 156 refugees in, 54-77 passim Hesse Plan for refugee integration (1947), 62 Heyde, Werner, 146, 190, 235 Hilpert, Werner, 76, 63-64, 168, 171, 192 Hitler, Adolf, 15, 17-22, 27, 32, 36, 41, 45, 143-44, 192, 219, 223, 235-36 Hünfeld, 72

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F Federal Civil Service Law of 1953, 94, 102, 237, 131n. 57 Federation of German Employers’ Associations (Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände, BdA), 30, 120, 50n79 Federal Expellee Law (1953), 69 Federal League of German Industry (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, BDI), 108, 121 Federal Personnel Code of 1950, 103 Federal Physicians’ Chamber (Bundesärztekammer), 64, 124 Federal Trade Union League (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB), 97, 100, 109, 120, 117-18 Fischer, Eugen, 6, 41, 147, 195 Four-Year Plan, 33, 35, 45, 144, 221 Fragebogen (denazification questionnaire)75, 172, 173, 177, 198n. 52 Frankfurt, 7, 9, 38, 55-56, 57-58, 60, 6364, 89, 90, 107, 108, 119, 122, 141, 144, 145, 164, 175, 210, 216, 217, 219, 226, 229 French Zone of Occupation, 7, 90, 148, 137n. 173, 197n. 45, 200n. 85 Frick, Wilhelm23, 24-25, 29, 33-34, 144 Fritz, Robert, 168 Fulda, 59, 60, 161, 187

I IG Farben, 18, 29-30, 44, 107-8, 147, 251, 52n. 126 Immediate Assistance Act (Soforthilfegesetz) of 1949, 67-8, 71 Industrie- und Handelskammern. See Chambers of Industry and Trade internment camps in Hesse, 148, 186, 188 criteria for, 148, 186 criticism of, 110 denazification tribunals in camps, 151-52, 166 effects of, 188-89

G Gau Economic Chambers (Gauwirtschaftskammern), 31, 33, 46, 93, 119-20 Geiler, Karl, 89-90, 168, 192 German Civil Service Code (DBG) of 1937, 33-34, 38, 44, 94, 96, 98, 99-100, 102, 118, 133n. 94, 237 –

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League of German Civil Servants (Deutscher Beamtenbund, DBB), 28-29, 64, 92, 11718, 237, 215, 238 Leiske, Walter, 64, 68, 55, 192 Lenz, Fritz, 146 Ley, Robert, 32, 35 Liberation Law. See Law for Liberation from Nazism and Militarism Limburg, 19, 191 Lübbe, Hermann, 4, 210, 228-30

Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 (JCS 1067), 89-90, 106, 148, 185 Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1779 (JCS 1779), 106-7 Jews, 55-56, 233-35 absence from society after 1945, 39 businesses in Third Reich, 18, 25, 30-31, 35, 39 exclusion from medical profession, 25-26, 36, 55-56, 235-36 in business, 42-43, 175 in civil service, 55, 192 in medicine, 42-43, 231-32 restitution of property to, 164-65, 175, 233, 234

M Mainz, 9, 65, 217, 14n. 41 Marburg, 89, 122, 181, 161, 163 Marburg League (Marburger Bund), 62, 12425 Meldebogen, 75, 152-54, 158, 198n. 52 Mengele, Josef, 15, 141, 146, 235, Merton, Richard, 55 Mielke, Fred, 188, 234 Military Government Law No. 8, 149, 17374, 203n. 144 Military Government Law No. 15 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 16, 188, 234, 228 Mitscherlich, Margarethe, 229

K Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, 41-42, 141, 147 Kassel, 7, 8-9, 56, 59, 67, 71, 76, 122, 146, 151, 170-71, 187, 223 Kassenärztliche Vereinigung Deutschlands, KVD. See Association of German Health Insurance Physicians Kater, Michael, 20, 22, 23-25 Kiesinger, Kurt, 4 Kogon, Eugen, 63-64, 168, 188, 196n. 34 Kohl, Helmut, 10, 230

N Nahm, Peter Paul, 62, 64-66, 168 National Socialist Physicians’ League (NSÄB), 31, 152 neo-corporatism, 88, 92, 109, 114-17 Niethammer, Lutz, 8, 196n. 32 NSDAP (National Socialist Party), 5-6, 1618, 27-37 electoral support, 19-20 membership, 20-27, 152-54, 15761, 234-35 oulawed, 92 Nuremberg race laws, 4, 36, 94, 110, 145, Nuremberg trials, 143-44, 147, 188, 223 International Military Tribunal (IMT), 147, 217 Doctors’ Trial (1947), 147, 234

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L Länderrat. See Council of States Lastenausgleich. See Equalization of Burdens Law Lauterbach, 161-62, 166, 186, 221 law faculties, 26 Law for Combating Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 111 Law for Liberation from Nazism and Militarism76, 110, 149-59, 161, 169, 172, 174, 178, 181, 187-88, 223, 250 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring of 1933, 36, 110, 165-66, 135n. 132 Law for the Regulation of Civil Servants and State Employees (Hesse), 96-98, 102, 169 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (1933), 34, 38, 43-45 Law to regulate §131 of the Basic Law, 101-2

O Oelemann, Carl, 72, 74, 123, 161 Offenbach, 55, 78n. 5 OMGUS surveys, 219-20. See also public opinion Opel, 39, 107, 162, 175, 221

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Social Democratic Party (SPD), 7, 8, 25, 62, 90, 94, 95-98, 103, 104, 105, 127, 150, 168-69, 171, 191, 192, 193, 224 Social Market Economy, 103-4, 105, 108 Soforthilfegesetz. See Immediate Assistance Act Soviet Zone of Occupation, 96, 99-100, 115, 224 denazification in, 148-49, 159, 238 refugees from, 63-64, 72, 76, 192 Soziale Marktwirtschaft. See Social Market Economy Speer, Albert, 31, 35, 144 Sprenger, Jakob, 29, 39, 163, 221 Spruchkammer. See denazification tribunals Staatssicherheitsdienst. Stasi), 10-11 sterilization law. See Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring Stock, Christian, 62, 90

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Pfannenstiel, Wilhelm, 181, 183 Pfundter, Hans, 44, 45 Physicians’ Chambers and allocation of practices, 72, 74, 213, 218 and denazification, 154, 161-63, 177-79 and integration of refugees, 61, 69, 72-74 in postwar Hesse, 91-92, 121-26 in Third Reich, 31 postwar reform of, 122-24, 93, 218, 238, 249 psychiatrists, 7, 55, 147, 216, 236 public opinion, 219-21 concerning democracy, 1, 240n. 11, 212, 224 concerning refugees, 75 concerning former Nazis, 142, 242n. 58, 228 concerning denazification, 49, 147, 155-57, 223 in Third Reich, 20, 46 public-law bodies, 30, 31, 115-16, 119-20, 122, 125, 251

T T4. See “Euthanasia” program Thyssen, Alfried, 146, 251 Thyssen, Fritz, 21-22, 45, 146, 251 trade unions, 18, 25, 28-29, 35, 96-97, 104, 107, 109, 117-19, 164, 224

R

U

racial hygiene, 18-19, 36, 40-42, 121, 141, 216-18, 234, 252 refugees. See displaced persons (DPs) Reich Civil Service Code of 1937, 99, 127 Reich Physicians’ Chamber, 33, 121, 124 Reich Physicians’ Law of 1937, 24, 72, 94, 114, 127 Reichsärzteordnung. See Reich Physicians’ Law of 1937 Reichsbund der deutschen Beamten. See Reich League of German Civil Servants resistance against Nazis, 15, 16, 28, 31, 192, 193, 231, 232, 245n. 105 against American reforms and policy, 3, 8, 9, 11, 65, 122-23, 125, 127-28, 183, 226, 249-50 restitution, 55-56, 111-12, 166, 193, 214-15

Union of Public Transport and Communication (ÖTV), 97, 117, 118 Universities (general) denazification of, 249-50 medical faculties, 124, 162, 194 University degrees and accreditation of physicians, 61, 74-75 as requirement for high civil service, 6, 169, 193 in third Reich, 40, 54, 181, 141 University of Frankfurt am Main, 141, 216 University of Giessen, 551 University of Marburg closing, 121 denazification, 181-83 medical faculty, 181-83, 216 reopening, 181

S

V

Sauckel, Fritz, 144 Schacht, Hjalmar, 45, 147 Schleyer, Hans Martin, 4, 241n. 27 slave labor, 18, 31, 109-10, 215

Vereinigung Deutscher Kassenärzte. See Association of German Health Insurance Verschuer, Otmar von, 141, 146-47, 216, 195n. 8 –

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W Wagner, Gerhard, 31-32, 112, 144 Wiesbaden, 7, 9, 55, 56, 59, 60, 66, 72-73, 122, 89, 92, 155, 166, 178, 217 women, 73 in business, 74, 219 in civil service, 38, 73, 98, 118, 191, 214 in medicine, 40, 74 among postwar refugees, 62

Z

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Zentralschutzbund der Verdrängten Beamten, 119 zero hour, 90, 211. See also continuity debate Zinn, Georg August, 105, 113, 168, 192

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