Book Reveals Postwar Germany’s Nazi Party Ties Cover-Up

[Peter Lemkin]

"New Book Reveals Postwar Germany's Nazi Party Ties Cover-Up"

By Liesl Schillinger / The Daily BeastMay 9th, 2013inShare

A new German book reveals that prominent postwar German leaders hid their Nazi past with the acquiescence of the US government. Liesl Schillinger talks to Malte Herwig about his hunt to reveal the truthand why so many Germans never owned up to their Nazi Party membership.

For the last seven years, the German journalist Malte Herwig, a reporter at Suddeutsche Zeitung magazine, has arduously, conscientiously tackled the challenge of researching and writing a book about the postwar German government's "double game," as he calls it. In Die Flakhelfer (DeutscheVerlags-Anstalt), which comes out in Germany on Monday, he reveals that, for half a century, the German leadership sought to suppress the names of prominent citizens who were Nazi Party members in the Second World War while pretending to seek them, and while simultaneously pursuing the soul-searching process of coming to terms with Germany's grievous Second World War historya process Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Herwig finds this behavior troubling. In New York this week he explained the genesis of his book.
In 2006, Herwig was working as a reporter for Der Spiegel when he learnedalong with the rest of the worldthat Günter Grass, the Nobel-Prize winning author, had been a member of Hitler's S.S. in the Third Reich. Herwig promptly called Grass for an interview. "I wanted to know from Grass, why did you keep stumm for so long, and why did you then out yourself?" he recalls. "Grass told me that, one morning, while he was in the bathroom shaving, he caught himself whistling the tune of an old Hitler Youth song, "Uns're Fahne Flattert uns Voran," which is the tune of the Hitlerjugend. He said it made him realize how deeply the Third Reich had impressed itself on him, and he decided, as a writer, that his means of trying to come to terms with this would have to be his writing, so that's what he did." Shocked that such an admired postwar figurean icon of consciencecould have concealed such a defining secret for so long, Herwig went to the Berlin branch of the Bundesarchiv, where files of the Nazi era are kept, to see if he would find other familiar names. What he saw in those files, he writes in "Die Flakhelfer," was "a political-cultural pantheon of the German Postwar era."
"They were the last people you would have expected to be members of the Nazi Party," Herwig said. The names included "leftists, Communists after the war, very educated, upright democrats." Growing up in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s, Herwig had "learned about the Holocaust in high school, learned about the Third Reich, learned even about the crimes of the Wehrmacht [Germany's army in the Second World War]," he said. "I really thought I lived in an enlightened age, and that Germany had come to terms with and owned up to its Nazi past. It was only when I discovered these files that I realized: Wow. There's a lot of hidden information here that they didn't tell us about." He wanted to know, he said, why the names had remained hidden for so long.
In his book, Herwig reveals the answer he found to this question. For decades, "political leaders at the highest level of German government" deliberately delayed negotiations for the return of 10.7 million Nazi Party membership cards called Karteikarten, which clearly identified Germans who signed up for Nazi Party membership in the War era. Herwig calls the collection "a sort of central catalogue of shame." After the War's end, in 1945, the Karteikarten were safeguarded by American officials in Berlin, in a building called the Berlin Document Center (BDC), which had served as a Gestapo listening center during the Third Reich. Immediately after the War, the Americans used the cards in their denazification. "That lasted only lasted a year or two," Herwig said. Afterwards, the American government held onto sensitive Nazi files for use in war crimes prosecution and for other purposes, but as early as 1952, U.S. official policy was that non-controversial documents could be "returned to the FRG at an early date." "The Americans decided they had better things to do in the Cold War than upset their West German allies," Herwig explained. But when, in 1968, the U.S. Mission Berlin suggested to the State Department that the BDC building and records be transferred to the German government, nothing happened.
"It was clear to anyone in Bonn that as soon as the files were back in German custody, it was a Pandora's box that couldn't be kept closed," Herwig said. "So long as the Americans had it, it was safe." Using the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S. and Germany's similar law, the Bundesarchivgesetz, Herwig gained access to sensitive files in both countries. When, in the autumn of 2011, he first looked at American administrative documents about the Nazi files in the National Archives in Washington, he said, "I found the biggest postwar cover-up imaginable, it went all the way to the top of the state."

For years, rumors had circulated that Daniel P. Simon, the American director of the BDC in Berlin in the 1970s and 80s, had a safe in which he kept the most compromising, potentially incendiary recordsrecords that showed the past Nazi affiliation of contemporary German political figures. In Washington, Herwig learned that this sensitive file had in fact existed. He held its pages in his hands. "It's the opposite of Schindler's List," he said. "I call it Simon's List." On ordinary sheets of paper, he saw typed lists of Nazi Party members, and penciled onto the margins, dozens of names that the Americans had added: German politicians of the 1970s and 1980s. "Every German cabinet, every federal government cabinet, from Adenauer to Kohl, contained former NP members right up to 1992," Herwig said. Looking at those long-protected files, he realized, "I had hit the jackpot."

He had also found vindication for his controversial subject of inquiry. Back in 2007, when Herwig began publishing articles in Der Spiegel about the public figures he unearthed in the Karteikarten, he provoked an angry backlash, which continued over time as he revealed the Nazi Party membership of more than a dozen prominent German politicians, intellectuals, and artists. "Whenever I wrote that I'd discovered a pillar of society who had a stain, people would say, Oh god, he's muckraking, he's throwing dirt at these people, it cannot be true.'" He paused. "But sorry, it is: here's the file." He added, "It's mostly liberal historians and journalists who protest; most of the people I expose do not. That is " he clarified, "I don't call it expose,' because I don't do it in a judgmental way. I don't want to smear anybody; I'm interested in the truth."

The man who makes this statement does not look remotely vengeful. Herwig is tall, relaxed and bespectacled, and wears a tan linen suit. If anything, he resembles an amiable Englishman at a country house party (Herwig spent seven years at Oxford, where he got his doctorate in 2004, and also was a visiting research fellow at Harvard). But ever since he first looked at the Nazi membership cards in 2006 in Berlin, he has refused to be diverted from his project. "I realized I had to look at the Nazi past with fresh eyes," he said. "There's no point to wringing your hands in a ritual manner if you don't try to understand what really happened. You must look into the gray areas of history, not only the black-and-white."
He continued, "So far, all we'd been looking at was Hitler, Himmler and so on; or some sort of overwrought Goldhagen approach. But I thought, I've got to look at the people who are sacrosanct," he said. "I am interested in broken biographies," he added: "I'm interested in people who started out as youthful indoctrinated Nazis, and managed to turn themselves into democrats." He had no desire to "cast blame on anyone who joined the Nazi Party as a child in wartime," he emphasized. "What I can't take is not owning up."
Acquiring permission to consult confidential U.S. diplomatic memos from the Cold War era, Herwig found a paper trail recording American frustration at German stalling tactics. One of these memos, written in 1987 by the BDC's Daniel Simon to the U.S. Mission Berlin, complained, "I am pretty well fed up with them [the German government] forever blaming us in public for foot-dragging with these transactions; when, in fact, if we were to offer them the BDC tomorrow without pre-conditions, no doubt in my mind exists that they would turn us down."Another memo dates from February 21, 1990a few months after the fall of the Berlin Walland sets out the Americans' mind-bending assessment of the "German strategy." To satisfy Bundestag members who were demanding the return of the Karteikarten, the Mission Berlin memo explained, "the German delegation will take a firm and uncompromising line regarding immediate transfer of the entire BDC or parts of it." However, the memo continued, the German Foreign Ministry, headed by Hans-Dietrich Genscher (who was also Germany's Vice Chancellor) "indicated no interest in exploring or developing any alternative compromise strategies," and "fully expects to return to Bonn with a firm response from the U.S. against any immediate turnover." Got that? Diplomacy is not for sissies.

"They would say they became members of the Nazi Party without their knowledge. This myth came about in 1946 or 1947, and still is told today. It is not true."

In 1994, nearly five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the NSDAP files were finally handed over, the BDC closed, and the millions of Karteikarten moved to the Berlin branch of the Bundesarchiv. In 1992, perhaps in anticipation of that release (so Herwig believes), Genscher "abruptly" quit political life. "What was the first name that emerged from that bag of dark secrets at the Berlin Document Center in the summer of 1994?" Herwig asks rhetorically. "It was Hans-Dietrich Genscher. He applied to join the Nazi Party in 1944." Once the news came out, Genscher said that he "had become a member of the Nazi party without his knowledge," Herwig said. "That's like Kissinger saying, Chile? Pinochet? What?'"

Genscher, born in 1927, was part of the generation of German boys, born between 1926 and 1928, who were called upon to serve as child soldiers late in the war, manning anti-aircraft guns. They were known as die Flakhelferthe flak helpers. Herwig makes clear in his book that he has no desire to assign blame, at this late date, to people who joined the Nazi party as adolescents, and who went on after the war to lead "blameless" lives, serving postwar Germany as "artists, scientists, politicians, journalists, lawyers." "Given that they grew up in a dictatorship, they were ideologically conditioned by it, they were brainwashed. So I think it's the most natural thing in a way; you would expect brainwashed little kids to join the Party, that doesn't surprise me."

What surprises and disturbs him, he said, is when his countrymen refuse to own up to their pasts; whether by claiming, like Genscher, that they did not remember signing up for the Party; or claiming, like one of the eminent Party members Herwig uncovered in 2009, the composer Hans Werner Henze, that they had not signed up at all: that they had somehow been incorporated into the Nazi Party without their knowledge or authorization. Herwig counters, "There were no collective secret inductions of people who didn't know about it. You, yourself, did have to sign an application form to become a member of the Nazi party." Many newspaper reporters deplored the release of such news, protesting, Herwig writes in his book, "that [Henze's] lifelong artistic and political engagement was being reduced to atonement by an unproven allegation.'"

Herwig profoundly disagreed with this attitude, he said. He considered it vital for the implicated people, as well as for their descendants and for modern-day German society, to admit these suppressed aspects of their shared history, and to reflect upon them. When, in 2007, he learned that Martin Walser, the acclaimed author of dozens of novels, had joined the Nazi Party in 1944, he called Walser for an interview. Walser, like Genscher, said he had been enrolled in the party without his knowledge. Herwig was skeptical. "Now, with hindsight, you read these works by Grass and Martin Walser, and you see that they circled the truth again and again in their work without going to the very core; to their membership in the Nazi Party. Their own membership was the blind spot, the historical heart of darkness that couldn't be touched." When you read them, he said, "You can sense ittheir repressed membershipbetween the lines. It wants out."

In 2012, Herwig interviewed the postwar German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was 93, but still "very sharp in mind and tongue" and asked him, "Why do you think people like Genscher even today won't admit to something as small as having applied to join the Nazi Party at 17, at the end of the war?" Schmidt answered in English. "He said to me: Tell a lie and stick to it.' I said What do you mean?' We continued in German, and he said, Once you've decided to lie, after 1945, it's very difficult later to tell the truth.' Earlier that year, Herwig had discovered at the National Archives that the U.S. government had continued keeping track of the Nazi pasts of members of the German government "as late as 1980." He asked Schmidt, he said, "Did you know the American government checked you out in 1980?' and he said, No, but I'm not surprised. There's no foolishness I'd put past American intelligence.' I said, This wasn't the CIA checking up on you; this was the State Department.' He said nothing. He just had another cigarette."

The story of the decades-long feigned tug of war over the Karteikarten is not only a German story, Herwig emphasizes, it's a "German-American story," he said. "The Americans analyzed the Nazi membership files as soon as they had them," he said. "I don't blame the Americans," he added. "They were good partners and responsible guardians of those documents, in the context of the Cold War, in which this sort of information could be used against people to considerable effect," he said. In his opinion: "The real culprits are the Germans."

Back in the mid-1940s, when American officials in Berlin were engaged in denazifacation, they discovered that "one lie had very common currency among Germans who were asked about their affiliation with the Nazi regime," Herwig said. "They would say they became members of the Nazi Party without their knowledge. This myth came about in 1946 or 1947, and still is told today. It is not true," he said firmly. "I'm flabbergasted that this lie, this excuse, that came into currency in 1945, after the Americans arrived and swept across Europe, is still current."

It was only three years ago, when he was 37, that Malte Herwig found out that his own grandfathers had both been Nazi Party members. How did he unearth this long-buried secret? "It was very simple," he said. "I just asked. My family had never volunteered the information, but as soon as I asked, they didn't hesitate to answer. That is the main reason I wrote this book," he said. "I wanted people to start asking the right questions, not only in my family, but in the Bundesrepublik as a whole."

[Magda Hassan]

[B]A new German book reveals that prominent postwar German leaders hid their Nazi past with the acquiescence of the US government.[/B]

I'm shocked Peter. Shocked, I tell you.

[David Guyatt]

For years, rumors had circulated that Daniel P. Simon, the American director of the BDC in Berlin in the 1970s and 80s, had a safe in which he kept the most compromising, potentially incendiary recordsrecords that showed the past Nazi affiliation of contemporary German political figures. In Washington, Herwig learned that this sensitive file had in fact existed. He held its pages in his hands. "It's the opposite of Schindler's List," he said. "I call it Simon's List." On ordinary sheets of paper, he saw typed lists of Nazi Party members, and penciled onto the margins, dozens of names that the Americans had added: German politicians of the 1970s and 1980s. "Every German cabinet, every federal government cabinet, from Adenauer to Kohl, contained former NP members right up to 1992," Herwig said. Looking at those long-protected files, he realized, "I had hit the jackpot."

A blackmail list perhaps?

[Jan Klimkowski]

For years, rumors had circulated that Daniel P. Simon, the American director of the BDC in Berlin in the 1970s and 80s, had a safe in which he kept the most compromising, potentially incendiary recordsrecords that showed the past Nazi affiliation of contemporary German political figures. In Washington, Herwig learned that this sensitive file had in fact existed. He held its pages in his hands. "It's the opposite of Schindler's List," he said. "I call it Simon's List." On ordinary sheets of paper, he saw typed lists of Nazi Party members, and penciled onto the margins, dozens of names that the Americans had added: German politicians of the 1970s and 1980s. "Every German cabinet, every federal government cabinet, from Adenauer to Kohl, contained former NP members right up to 1992," Herwig said. Looking at those long-protected files, he realized, "I had hit the jackpot."

A blackmail list perhaps?

There is absolutely no legitimate reason for keeping such a list of politicians and the powerful locked in a safe.

[Jim Hackett II]

Serendipity I suppose.
I am currently researching the Fascist Resurrection 1900 - the now.

Intrigued by the CIA/Nazi collaboration in MKontroll BS and the rest
brought to the US under AWDulles direction.
That will wait however.

"Conjuring Hitler" I find good as well as other known works I have assembled.
Post like this one can only help.
Thanks again.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Ease with which Nazi Party Members Reinvented their Past

By Ofer Aderet / Haaretz June 3rd, 2013inShare

Photo of Gunther Grass

Journalist Malte Herwig, reporter for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin in Germany, opened Pandora's box and into the country's past to unearth a shocking number of Nazi Party members in prominent postwar positions. The conspiracy, he says, went right to the top.

When Malte Herwig, now a reporter for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin in Germany, worked as a journalist for the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel n 2006, when, he read that the leading left-wing thinker and Nobel laureate Gunter Grass had been an SS member in his youth. Like many others, he called Grass for an interview, because he wanted to understand why the author had decided to come clean after so many years.
Grass told him that one morning, as he was shaving in his bathroom, he caught himself humming the tune of "Our Flags Lead Us Forward," a Hitler Youth song. This showed him how deeply rooted he still was in his Third Reich past, and made him realize he could no longer flee the truth.
Herwig, who was 34 at the time, was astounded by the intolerable ease with which Grass − a public figure famous the world over − managed to hide the dark secret of his past for so long. Wasting no time, he hurried to the Bundesarchiv ‏(the German Federal Archives‏), where Nazi-era files are kept, to look for names of other famous Germans hiding Nazi pasts. What he found astounded him. On the list were left-wing activists, Communists, academics and democrats − not types one would have expected to see among Nazi Party members.
As someone who was raised in the German school system of the 1980s, Herwig learned a great deal about the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it was hard for him to understand how and why so many Germans tried to hide their past − and succeeded.
"Well, I'm 40 now and thought the Third Reich was long in the past, until I discovered that former Nazi Party members sat at every German federal cabinet table," Herwig told Haaretz this week. "In fact, the last former National Socialist German Workers Party ‏(NSDAP‏) member resigned from government abruptly only in 1992 − the year I left school. To me, that is not the past, and the fact that these things were never talked about shocked me."
Herwig provides the answers to his many questions in a book just published in Germany, the result of a thorough investigation he carried out in recent years. The book's name, "Die Flakhelfer" ‏("The Antiaircraft Warfare Helpers"‏), was the nickname given to German youth who helped the German army in the last days of the war by manning antiaircraft batteries.

In American hands

Take, for example, Hans-Dietrich Genscher: Eventually serving as Germany's foreign minister, Genscher joined the Nazi Party at the end of the war and succeeded in hiding this until the 1990s. The Nazi past of his cohorts, who rose to senior positions in Germany, was kept hidden for decades. The book reveals that, for close to half a century, Germans in very senior government positions intentionally obstructed access to the 11 million Nazi member files.
It is now clear that the files were kept in a German archive in the American sector of Berlin. "For decades, the German government prevented the return of these files to Germany, even though the United States was ready to return them as early as 1967," Herwig revealed. "The German government didn't want them back because the files contained too many secrets about the Nazi past of politicians at the highest levels − presidents, chancellors, ministers … Germany knew that the Nazi Party files were a Pandora's box that would be opened the minute they came back to Germany. As long as they remained in American hands, the secrets were safe," he added.
How did the files end up in the American sector? After the war, in 1945, the U.S. army seized the Nazi files and moved them to Berlin, the German capital, where the Americans established the Berlin Document Center in a building that, during the war, had served as the Gestapo's audio surveillance center. As soon as the war ended, the Americans started using these files against the Nazi war criminals in the dock during the Nuremberg trials.
However, as Herwig explains, the American government was worried that too much scrutiny of the files would annoy West Germany − the newly formed country and America's ally in the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern Bloc. The Americans, therefore, were in no rush to reveal the material, which could have embarrassed their West German allies.
In his investigation, Herwig discovered how the Germans played the two sides off against each other: Officially, the German government publicly appeared to demand the Americans return the files, because the Bundestag ‏(Germany's Federal Parliament‏) demanded it. But, behind the scenes, the Germans asked the United States to say that an immediate return of the documents was impossible, thereby allowing them to blame the Americans.
"No wonder," Herwig said. "The German foreign ministry, headed by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, was responsible for these negotiations. But, of course, Genscher's name was itself in these files as a member of the Nazi Party. No wonder he had no interest in that becoming public. It was only after he resigned in 1992 that the files were finally handed over to Germany, in 1994."
Now, present-day freedom of information laws in the United States and Germany have forced the authorities to reveal all information and correspondence on the topic. In the fall of 2011, Herwig started digging into forgotten files in the U.S. National Archives in Washington in a search for information about the Nazi files. "I discovered the biggest postwar cover-up, going all the way up to the heads of state," he said.
Washington kept copies of the Nazi files as well as all the administrative material of the Berlin archive. The discoveries from his digging continued to shock Herwig. For years, the rumor among those in the know was that the American director of the Berlin Document Center had a secret safe where he kept the most sensitive files, including embarrassing information about the Nazi past of senior German figures. During his stay in Washington, Herwig realized the rumor was well founded. He calls the list he found there "the opposite of Schindler's list" and "the hall of shame."
The list featured the names of dozens of 1970s and 80s politicians. He was astounded that former Nazi Party members had sat at every German federal cabinet table from the time of Konrad Adenauer (‏1949-1963‏) and right up to Helmut Kohl (‏(1982-1998‏.
In 2007, Herwig started publishing a series of articles in Der Spiegel in which he exposed the Nazi past of a string of German politicians, intellectuals and artists.
Not everyone was enamored of his investigative series. Some were critical of him for having dared to reveal the stains on the past of respectable German citizens. "But, excuse me, that's what it says right here in the file," he told his critics, and went on doing his research.
"When you search for the truth, there will always be people who attack you because they don't like the truth. But without knowing the truth, we are condemned to repeat the past," he said. "I am not out to judge 17-year-olds for what they did in times of war and under a dictatorship. But I cannot take lies and denial. In my book, I expose the pervasive post-wartime lies of Germany − the collective denial that lasts to this day. Today we rightly condemn the Holocaust, Wehrmacht atrocities and Hitler's criminal policies. But if you ask ordinary Germans, you will find that the deafening silence of the postwar years persists." He summarizes this silence with the line: "No, Grandpa wasn't a Nazi!"

How the system worked

After he received permission to look at classified American Cold War diplomatic documents, he also found documentation − a single paragraph − that explained to him how the whole system worked. In a 1987 memo, Daniel Simon, the head of the Berlin Document Center, wrote the following to his colleagues: "I have no doubt that if we were to offer them [the German government] the Berlin Document Center [with its incriminating files], they would refuse the offer." Similar sentiments were also expressed over the next several years.
Only in 1994, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were the files finally returned to the German archive in the city. The first politician whose Nazi past was exposed straight afterward was Hans-Dietrich Genscher. It became clear that he joined the Nazi Party in 1944. Coincidentally or not, Genscher had retired from politics two years earlier.
Many, including Genscher, denied their Nazi past even after it came to light. Many claimed, and still claim, that some "unknown hand" signed them up for the party without their knowledge. This was true also of Martin Walser, a writer with dozens of novels to his credit; and Hans Werner Henze, a well-known composer and prominent left-wing activist. Herwig refuses to believe them, insisting that a personal signature was required from anyone joining the Nazi Party. Anyone who claims otherwise, he says, is "trapped in a myth."
"The people I feature in my book managed to turn themselves from NSDAP members into upright democrats," he says. "Looking at their broken biographies,' we learn that history is not black and white, but that even intelligent and well-educated young people could succumb to Nazism. It is worth keeping that in mind and being watchful if we want to prevent succumbing to totalitarian ideas, new forms of racism and radicalism today."
Last year, Herwig interviewed former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who served from 1974-82. He asked him: "Why do think people such as Genscher to this day refuse to admit a little thing such as signing a Nazi Party membership form at the age of 17, at the end of the war?" Schmidt answered: "After you've decided to lie, it's very hard to tell the truth."
Three years ago, when he was 37, Herwig discovered that his own grandfathers had been members of the Nazi Party. "I asked my parents whether my grandfathers − whom I never met − had been NSDAP members. They didn't hesitate to reply that, yes, they had both been in the party," he said. "I was shocked because I had always assumed I would have been told about that. It turned out I had simply never asked the question directly. This made me realize how important it is to ask these questions, and to ask them before it's too late.
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewi...m-1.527214