Denazification

The elimination of German ‘militarism’ and ‘Nazism’ were among the key aims of the four allied powers in the war against Nazi Germany. In addition to the dissolution of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party, the repeal of Nazi legislation and the removal of Nazi symbols from public, the actual core of ‘denazification’ was the purging of Nazi personnel from public service and business. As things turned out, it was a difficult project that was highly controversial in German society, which ultimately, largely failed. As a first step in denazification immediately after the end of hostilities, the occupying powers carried out the mass arrests of former Nazis, and dismissed a significant proportion of civil servants.

Thus, in the American occupation zone, by the beginning of August 1945, 80,000 people had been arrested and other 70,000 dismissed. In July 1945, the Americans introduced the denazification survey with a long questionnaire with 131 items and in September 1945, denazification was expanded to include the entire economy. In March 1946 there were almost 337,000 people in the American Zone affected by dismissals or being turned down for employment, whereby the focus of the purge lay clearly on the civil service, whose personnel were to a considerable extent replaced. For example, in Hesse, 57 percent of all civil servants had been dismissed by May 1, 1946. After 1946, the American military government played a pioneering role in denazification, not least due to domestic political pressure.

The basis for denazification was the Law for the Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism of March 5, 1946, which was formulated in the negotiations between the military government and the three state governments of the American Zone – Hesse, Württemberg-Baden and Bavaria –and was therefore a problematic compromise between the Americans’ schematic concepts of purging and the wish of Germans for a legally compliant procedure that took into account the fates of individuals. The key elements of denazification implemented on the basis of the law were: extending the obligation to complete the questionnaire to the entire population over the age of 18, the implementation of denazification by German bodies, the so-called ‘Spruchkammern’ (denazification tribunals), which worked according to the principle of judicial discretion, and the division of affected persons into five categories: I. Major offenders, II. Offenders, III. Minor offenders, IV. Followers, V. Exonerated persons. The sanctions that the tribunals could impose included: internment in work camps (up to ten years for major offenders), confiscation of assets, exclusion from public office, deprivation of the right to vote and eligibility to stand for election, as well as a ban on working in the liberal professions or as a self-employed person.

In practice, the limited practicability of this comprehensive approach to denazification soon became apparent: The tribunals were overloaded with the mass of minor cases, and frequently had to postpone the handling of serious cases. Generous amnesties and various procedural simplifications, which were intended to make the tribunals capable of working again, watered down the entire procedure. A certain degree of corruption and the inflationary practice of those affected to mutually submit generous evidence for their rejection of the Nazi regime, so-called ‘Persilscheine’ (literally ‘Persil certificates’ attesting to their innocence), contributed significantly to making the proceedings appear farcical. The expansion of the schematic process to the broad middle classes led disastrously to a barely concealed solidarity with the actual Nazi perpetrators. Denazification soon lost its initial acceptance among the German population and was increasingly met with resistance.

In May 1948, the American military government gave up monitoring the denazification proceedings, which by this point, were only to be used against those facing serious charges. In the 950,000 proceedings in the US-Zone a final total of 1,654 major offenders, 22,122 offenders and 106,422 minor offenders (Group III) were declared, whereby the last group only had to reckon with probation periods up to a maximum of three years. The result was that the original idea of a purging of ‘Nazism’ had turned into a process for the rehabilitation of former Nazi Party members. Thus, by the end of 1948, among the civil servants in the Bavarian state administration, 41.5% were former Nazis, of which more than two-thirds had been dismissed in the course of denazification, but had then been re-employed.

The Law of Liberation also came into effect in the in the French occupation zone in the middle of 1947, and became the exemplar of a new settlement in the British zone by the end of 1947, although in practice, denazification took a different course in these two zones. The British occupying force approached denazification a lot less rigorously than the Americans. The British did not want to seriously endanger the German bureaucratic machinery and functioning of the economy and therefore followed a more pragmatic approach: Certain sectors of the economy were thus excluded from denazification from the outset. In the British zone, German ‘denazification committees’ dealt with over two million cases up to February 1950: A total of 27,177 persons were classified in Group III, the total number of people in groups I and II, whose processing the military government had reserved for itself, is unknown, but in North Rhein-Westphalia it was only 90.

From the beginning, the French military government followed the American denazification initiative only in a half-hearted way. Initially, purge commissions staffed by German opponents of National Socialism were still active in 1945; the German ‘Spruchkammer’ tribunals, which were only set up in the fall of 1947, then concentrated on processing the appeals against the earlier dismissals, most of which resulted in a positive result for the parties concerned. The result was that in the French Zone, of the total of 669,000 cases processed through the tribunals, 13 were categorized as major offenders, 918 as offenders and 16,826 as minor offenders. Over half (52%) of the cases were dropped.

In the Soviet Zone, denazification was from the outset understood to be an instrument for a fundamental transformation of society, and was applied more consistently than in the western zones. It was initially carried out by the state governments themselves, which led to most of the vacated posts being rapidly filled by supporters of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) or Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). A second, this time centrally coordinated, wave of denazification commenced at the end of 1946; previously issued authorizations for re-employment were re-examined and revoked. Finally, in order to secure the functional capability of the eastern German economy, in August 1947 the Soviet military administration decreed a rapid conclusion to denazification, which particularly included the rehabilitation of the nominal (Nazi) party members. The occupying force declared the official end of denazification in February 1948.