Hitler's Forgotten Children Read Free Page B

Hitler and Goebbels, the most notable absentee from this roll call of infamy was Himmler, creator of the SS and mastermind of the Nazi’s apparatus of terror: after being captured he had committed suicide before he could be transported to Nuremberg.
    The eventual trial and conviction of almost all these men was undoubtedly a triumph for justice, but it also marked the high point of cooperation between the occupying powers. After Nuremberg, America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union would each take a radically different approach to the land and populations they controlled: the individual fates of tens of millions of former Germans depended on which zone they happened to have been in when the war ended. Very soon these great political divides would change the lives of our little family for ever.
    The contrast between the four occupying powers was played out first in the way they viewed Nazi Party members. Denazification was a phrase coined in Washington during the last years of war: President Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, recognised that the party’s tendrils had wound themselves throughout every aspect ofGerman life, from the political to the judicial, the public to the personal. In May 1945 there were more than eight million members of the Nazi Party – around 10 per cent of the total population. What was to be done about this entwining of the mechanics of fascism with the warp and weft of everyday life?
    The search for an answer was not confined to America, of course. Each Allied power faced the problem of how to pull out the roots of National Socialism while ensuring that its own zone of occupation kept functioning. The first step was to outlaw the party. On 20 September 1945, Control Council Proclamation No. 2 announced that ‘The National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) is completely and finally abolished and declared to be illegal’ throughout the former Reich.
    But the party itself was only the most visible of a byzantine tangle of Nazi organisations. Beneath it were more than sixty other official associations, ranging from internationally notorious bodies like the SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth to more obscure societies (even within Germany) such as the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood and the Deutsche Frauenschaft, the National Socialist Women’s Movement. All were duly made illegal: more importantly, previous association with any one of them would be enough to mark someone as a possible Nazi sympathiser.
    Neither Hermann nor Gisela were – to the best of my knowledge – Nazi Party members. I never heard them express fascist opinions or support for Hitler. But their personal histories (my father as a career soldier, who had been a desk officer in the Wehrmacht for much of the war; my mother as a former member of Deutsche Frauenschaft) must have led to some investigation by the denazification officials of their respective Occupation Zones.
    The Americans were initially fiercely committed to denazification, but quickly became the most pragmatic of the occupying armies. Washington’s military government realised that, however desirable,widespread purges of suspected Nazis would mean that the entire responsibility for organising day-to-day life fell exclusively on its shoulders – a burden that, for a war-weary nation anxious to bring its troops home, was simply too onerous.
    And so while my father, like every adult living in the American zone, was required to fill out a questionnaire (termed variously a
Fragebogen
or a
Meldebogen
) in which he affirmed that he had never been a member of any Nazi organisation, there was little follow-up or detailed examination of these self-declarations. With little or no oversight, most applicants were issued with official documents pronouncing them to be ‘good Germans’, free of the stain of fascism. They quickly became known as
Persilschein
– pieces of paper that were able to wash the