Exorcising Hitler (42 page)

When the Americans took Munich at the end of April 1945, the many Nazi Party buildings and office complexes in the city (not for nothing was it known as ‘the capital of the movement’) were quickly secured and searched by US Army intelligence and security personnel. They did not always find very much of interest, even at the buildings that had housed the main Nazi Party bureaucracy.

At the Nazi Party Treasurer’s Munich headquarters, an impressive complex completed in February 1937 to replace three apartment blocks at Arcisstrasse 10–14, extending to the corner of the Königsplatz, row after row of purpose-built steel card-index cabinets had harboured the NSDAP’s ever-expanding membership records. They stayed there for more than eight years, until a senior Nazi bureaucrat took a drive out to a suburb at the north-eastern edge of Munich with an urgent request.

On 15 April 1945, an impressive official car arrived at the Josef Wirth paper mill in Munich-Freimann. The man it disgorged into the yard of the factory brought a simple but forceful order. During the next few days, he told the manager, a lot of paper would be transported here, and it must be destroyed immediately. Pulped. Naturally, the manager, Herr Hanns Huber, expressed his consent to this unrefusable command from on high. The bigwig departed, satisfied.

Three days later, trucks began to arrive at the paper mill. Turning up at the rate of twenty a day, one after the other, they contained mysterious bales of paper. The trucks continued to deliver these loads for a total of nine days. In the meantime, Herr Huber, who had originally welcomed the gift of raw materials (which were by this stage of the war in short supply), had checked the bales that had been unloaded into his yard and worked out what was actually in them. These were the cards that had been contained in the steel cabinets in the Arcisstrasse – the membership documents of every member of the Nazi Party since its foundation. Each one with a photograph of the member, with dates of joining and (where applicable) leaving, with personal details about millions of individual careers. There were even cards with red borders, representing a member considered not entirely reliable. And the thing was, Herr Huber was not a Nazi – rather, the opposite. He knew the representatives of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ were trying to destroy crucial, incriminating evidence and he determined to prevent them from doing so.

According to his story after the war, Hanns Huber found a way of stalling. He would pile the stuff up in a corner of the yard and then, when the Nazis queried why so much was there when he had been told to destroy it ‘immediately’, he said the piles were actually pulping paper that had been brought in by other clients, but he had not been able to get to them because he was working on the urgent Nazi Party business. He got away with it. When Munich finally fell on 30 April, with 50 per cent of its buildings now reduced to rubble, Herr Huber still had all the Nazi records. More than fifty tons of them.
²

Later, Huber claimed to have first contacted the American occupying forces towards the end of May 1945. He was, he said, ignored. He and his staff continued to preserve and where possible put some order to the archival trove they had come into possession of and now could not persuade anyone to take. He persisted, however, and as summer turned to autumn finally convinced Mr Sargent B. Child, a civilian attached to the Third Army’s security – a qualified archivist and the army’s adviser in such matters – to look at the material. Child did so and was astounded. ‘Any goddamned idiot’, he later declared to a colleague at the National Archives in Washington, could see that this was of the highest importance.

All the same, Child’s superior, Major William D. Brown, did not find it easy to persuade the powers that be in the American Zone of the importance of what they had discovered (or had presented to them by Herr Huber) at the paper mill in Munich-Freimann. Brown had to make a personal visit to American Military Government HQ in Frankfurt, and even then it was some weeks before action was taken. At the end of November 1945, the material was loaded back into a big convoy of trucks and transported from Munich more than three hundred miles to the so-called ‘Ministerial Collecting Center’ (MCC), a disused former munitions factory complex at Fürstenhagen, on the main Highway 7, south-east of Kassel. Here, since the second week of July, the US Military Government had been storing and attempting to catalogue an ever-increasing mass of German government records, many evacuated from Berlin into the countryside towards the end of the war, which had fallen piecemeal and often under chaotic circumstances into American hands as the army advanced.
³

The failure of the local American forces to react to Herr Huber’s offer was a curious anomaly. Finding useful and/or incriminating documentation belonging to the German military, government and Nazi Party organisations had always been a high priority. In fact, as one of the army archivists proclaimed proudly after the war, he and his team had arrived at noon on 6 June 1944 off Omaha Beach, with the shells and bullets still flying, attached to 49th AAA Brigade and ready to begin work securing enemy files and information.
⁴
It seems that Huber had simply approached the wrong people, and certainly the oversight was swiftly corrected the moment experts such as Mr Child and Major Brown became involved. They were fortunate – and the guilty, eager-to-disappear Nazis correspondingly unfortunate – that Herr Huber neither destroyed the fifty tons of files nor let them deteriorate while in his care.

The MCC, which now took charge of the Nazi Party files, was subordinate to the Office of the Director of Intelligence in Frankfurt. It had a clear if somewhat general objective, to ‘exploit German ministerial personnel and documents for the purpose of Military Government’. This meant that not only were German government documents collected here, but also the German government officials who were familiar with them, who were accommodated at Fürstenhagen along with the American troops. It also quickly became apparent that the main purpose of the archiving of the material was to provide evidence against war criminals and information relevant to the purging of German government, industry and society of Nazis.

The Nazi Party records arrived at Fürstenhagen on 25 November, but they did not stay long. MCC was already scheduled to be transferred to Berlin in the new year, and it was now clear that the NSDAP card index was treasure beyond price – most immediately, in its importance for the war crimes trials already taking place in Nuremberg. As a consequence, at Christmas 1945, the entire mass of Nazi Party documents was loaded on to a fifteen-car military train and shipped by rail through the Soviet Zone to the ‘Berlin Document Center’ that had already been established, in great part to supply the research and legal staff for the war crimes trials, which were based in Berlin. The MCC’s Fürstenhagen complex was closed by the beginning of February and the organisation itself subsumed into the Berlin Document Center.

By the beginning of January 1946, Herr Huber’s fifty-ton gift to the Allies – their guarantee that no Nazi could deny Party membership – had arrived in Berlin. So nearly turned to pulp at the Nazis’ behest, and then so nearly ignored by the victors, this material would be housed, along with SS personnel records captured after the war, largely unsorted ministerial and military documents, and some other Gestapo and Party records that had fallen into American hands, in a complex of buildings on the Wasserkäfersteig, a leafy dead-end road in Grunewald, in the American sector of Berlin. The material was quickly exploited for the war crimes trials, with many documents – to the disgust of professional archivists – ruthlessly extracted and rearranged for forensic rather than archival convenience. But here the records would stay for almost fifty years, the most valuable resource the Allies had in their mission to cleanse post-war Germany of what they, and anti-fascist Germans, saw as the Hitler plague (and of course a boon to historians).

Denazification could continue with some certainty of success. The Allies, not entirely by their own efforts, had in their possession a golden key, the Nazi Party records filling the vaults of the Berlin Document Center. Now, even the most minor and inconspicuous PG (
Parteigenosse
, or Nazi Party comrade) had no place to hide any more.

Operation Eclipse was a wide-ranging and sophisticated set of plans developed in 1943–4 by COSSAC (Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander), the joint Anglo-American planning command. It delineated structures and modes of operation for when the invasion plan that had been launched on 6 June 1944, ‘Overlord’, was officially concluded and Germany deemed to have surrendered.

‘Eclipse’ was, in effect, a blueprint for the immediate post-war role of the victorious Anglo-American forces. As such, though it included plans for securing the occupation against a possible threat from Nazi remnants, and arresting Nazi leaders to that end, the document was otherwise politically more or less neutral. Its principal aims were ‘first, to ensure that Nazism was thoroughly destroyed and Germany pacified; and, second, to free combat forces as quickly as possible for military operations against Japan’.
⁵
After this, it was presumed, military government would give way to civil administration on a four-power basis. Then would come the political part, the beginning of the cleansing of Germany.

So far as political policy in Germany was concerned, the basic decisions were hammered out, first at Yalta in February 1945, and following that – for the US Zone and rather messily – in Washington during the final battles over JCS 1067, the Chiefs of Staffs’ instructions to the American Army of Occupation. This latter detailed political and economic plan was formally imposed on Eisenhower by his masters in Washington in April, just weeks before the final victory.

JCS 1067 remained heavily influenced by Morgenthau. It still presupposed mass dismantling of German industry, sweeping elimination, regardless of possible social and economic cost, of all Nazi influence in politics, business and society, and mass arrests and/or investigations of all Germans thought to have been active Nazis. And it clearly foresaw a period of punitive deprivation for the German people as not merely inevitable but just.

It was true that, at least in the first months of the occupation, the Americans, though not the most violent of the Allies, were the most thorough in their pursuit of the principle that became known as ‘denazification’. This last was a term that had been minted in 1943 by legal planners at the Pentagon, in its first use apparently referring specifically to reform of the future German legal system. However, it soon became a catch-all phrase, covering plans to dismantle the entire Nazi apparatus, arrest and punish its key officials, and systematically eliminate Nazi supporters from the country’s political, economic and cultural life.

JCS 1067’s stipulations in this regard, though somewhat modified from the draconian Morgenthau template, were still stern enough:

All members of the Nazi Party who have been more than nominal participants in its activities, all active supporters of Nazism or militarism and all other persons hostile to Allied purposes will be removed and excluded from public office and from positions of importance in quasi-public and private enterprises . . . Persons are to be treated as more than nominal participants in Party activities and as active supporters of Nazism or militarism when they have 1) held office or been otherwise active at any level from local to national in the party and its subordinate organisations or in organisations that further militaristic doctrines, 2) authorised or participated affirmatively in any Nazi crimes, racial persecutions or discriminations, 3) been avowed believers in Nazism or racial or militaristic creeds, or 4) voluntarily given substantial moral or material support or political assistance of any kind to the Nazi Party or Nazi officials and leaders.
⁶

Such dismissals were to be enforced without regard to ‘administrative necessity, convenience or expediency’.

For this process to be carried out and the guilty individuals to be identified, every adult German would be issued with a ‘Questionnaire’ (
Fragebogen
). In filling this out, they were to truthfully answer a host of questions about their past history, political affiliation and activities, on the basis of which their status in the new, cleansed, post-war Germany would be established. The problem was the sheer numbers of Germans involved in the Nazi Party and various other Nazi-controlled organisations (including the Labour Front, the Youth Movements and the likes of the National Socialist Welfare, each of which had more than ten million members). A total of forty-five million has been mentioned.
⁷
If all were to be penalised by loss of jobs, imprisonment and so on – as some advocates within the US Army suggested – then roughly half the population would be effectively stripped of its civil rights and reduced to virtual economic inactivity at a time when the country needed every productive hand and capable, experienced brain it could muster – if only to gain the foreign exchange to buy food, let alone pay off the vast reparations demanded by the victors.

So, what had been decided was this: were the people who filled in these questionnaires ‘real’ (i.e. active and/or long-time) Nazis who had joined out of conviction? Or so-called
Muss-Nazis
(‘must-Nazis’) who had joined in order to keep their jobs? Or simply ‘fellow travellers’ in some shape or form, who had been nominal members out of convenience? The last two categories naturally overlapped and could be hard to distinguish.