hospitality and generosity, were ideal colleagues when I held a junior .. von bis in die Gegenwart (Berlin, ) ; Hans Braun, 'Das Streben nach “ Sicherheit” 7 'Atombombenexplosion in der Wüste von Neu-Mexiko', Wochenschau Welt im Film 8 Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany.
Table of contents
- “The New Germany And The Old Nazis” by leondumoulin.nl | The UFO Spotlight On…
- THE NEW GERMANY AND THE OLD NAZIS
- A Real Presence
- Religious and Social Dynamics of the Eucharistic Conflicts in Early Modern Augsburg
Under mounting evidence Wesemann finally broke down and ad- mitted several kidnappings for the Gestapo. Herbert Dittmann, who has been severely implicated by the vast evidence regarding the mass deporta- tion and liquidation of millions of Jews in the East. The Bun- destag report sharply censured him for his constant lying as a witness and declared him no longer fit to be employed in the Foreign Service. In spite of this verdict, Dr. Ditt- mann was appointed ambassador to Brazil. Since with a brief interrup- tion in the Press Department has been headed by Felix von Eckardt, who during the Nazi rule was one of the most successful script writers on nationalist and Nazi topics in the state-controlled motion picture industry.
A Bismarck film written by von Eckardt was chosen by Dr. Werner Krueger, a former Nazi who once had been trained in Dr. Edmund Forsch- bach, also a former Nazi, acted as Dr. High Commissioner in Germany, had first-hand knowledge of the conditions in the Bonn Republic. There is no excuse. However, the record showed a number of his ministers either as members of the Nazi party and the SS or as extreme nationalists who had served the Hitler cause in important positions. Gerhard Schroeder, a party mem- ber, served the Nazis as a legal adviser and storm troop leader.
As Minister of the Interior he now has control over the police and is responsible for the internal security of the Bonn Re- public. However, mounting evidence soon revealed that he had been a Nazi collaborator, and in he was removed from office and banned for several years from all political activities.
Hans Christoph See- bohm, served the Nazi regime as an economic adviser in Silesia and in occupied Czechoslovakia. Seebohm is known all over Europe as an ultranationalistic troublemaker. As leader of the Rightist German party, Dr. Seebohm has openly expressed his deep reverence for the swastika and has viciously attacked the Western powers. Of all his cabinet members, the Minister for Expellees, Dr. Theodor Oberlaender, caused the Chancellor most chagrin. Oberlaender had used the Nazi press to demand the expulsion and ex- 52 Germany Today termination of the Slavic peoples and the rapid colonization of the vast conquered territories by the German master race.
Ober- laender with packing the ranks of his ministry with former Nazis. He was blamed for the mass murder of thousands of Jews and Polish intellectuals who had been liquidated in July when a special SS task force under his command occupied the Polish city of Lem- berg Lvov. The excuse has often been heard that qualified applicants with a solid democratic record were not available.
“The New Germany And The Old Nazis” by leondumoulin.nl | The UFO Spotlight On…
This has been vehemently denied by democratic critics. In the case of the Foreign Office, there was a list of more than a thousand applicants, men of democratic principles with diplomatic and foreign-language experience. Blanken- horn chose to hire his old Ribbentrop associates. The Ministery for Expellees, once headed by Oberlaender, is still known as a haven for former high-ranking Nazis. The personal assistant to the minister is today Dr. Wolfram, a former SS officer. The fanatical race propagandist Werner Ventzki, ex-mayor of Lodz, serves as director of a department.
Head of the press office, Dr. Schlicker, was a storm troop leader. Many ex-Nazis have found shelter in the Ministry of Trans- portation under Dr. Oberlaender was an SS officer and a member of the notori- ous Abwehr. According to Reitlinger and other sources, 7, people were killed, chiefly between July 2 and 4. The Deutsche Zeitung of April 22, For many years the Ministry of Justice has drawn criticism in the Bundestag. The courts, with a few notable exceptions, are to a large extent run by former Nazis.
Mis- carriages of justice and favoritism toward ex-Nazis have be- come so routine that it is necessary to review this situation in a special chapter. Josef Rust, a former colleague and intimate of Globke. Eberhard Taubert, who in attracted attention with his anti-Semitic statements. Theodor Sonnemann who served the Hitler regime as an ideological propagandist for total war in the German high command. In several books Dr. His books were acclaimed in the Nazi press. Globke serves as State Secretary for Agriculture in the Ade- nauer government. According to the Frankfurter Rund- schau of November 22, , Dr.
A few years later Dr. Sonnenhol became the senior adviser to Vice-Chancellor Bluecher in the second Adenauer cabinet. While in this position he wrote a memo- randum in which he advocated that Germany exploit the cold war to the utmost and make sure that no agreement should be reached between the United States and the Soviet bloc.
Ac- cording to the Hamburger Echo of March 27, , the Son- nenhol memorandum aroused much criticism in England. Even in the highest office of the land, that of the President, Nazis occupy positions of trust. The administrative head of the presidential office is a former Nazi official, Dr. The conditions in the administration of the Laender, county districts, and municipalities are even worse. In many of the smaller towns the old Nazi burghermasters have been re-elected.
In industry and banking the ex-Nazi Wirtschaftsfuehrer are back in power and position. The Krupps, Flicks, Rech- bergs, and Reemtsmas have rebuilt and expanded their em- pires, and the Nazi banker Hermann Abs has greater influ- ence with Dr. Adenauer than he ever had under Adolf Hitler. That the Nazis have had a successful comeback in the Bonn Republic has been admitted even in the German press. Adenauer has often named as the foremost achievements of his postwar leader- ship. In talks with foreigners he seldom forgets to mention the fact that Nazism has completely disappeared and that the new Germany rests on a stable, democratic electorate, with the majority of voters flooding his Christian Democratic Union CDU.
But what has happened to the more than 20,, people who in voted enthusiastically for Hitler and his national- istic cause? In the March election the Catholic Center party 4,, moved over to the extreme Right, and Herr von Papen engineered the Hitler-Papen- Hugenberg coalition, which then polled nearly 25,, votes. Of these, 17,, were for the Nazi ticket alone. At that time all middle-of-the-road parties had completely disappeared and only the Left with its 12,, votes Social Democrats, 7,,; Communists, 4,, had remained intact.
The first period was notable for the systematic sabotage by most parties of the Allied denazification program. The second period was characterized by attempts to use the licensed parties as vehicles for Nazi propaganda, and to bring ex-Nazis into administrative positions. The third period to the present is marked by the quiet and gradual Nazi infiltration as a consequence of secret talks between high-ranking ex-party members and spokesmen of the leading government party, the Christian Democratic Union.
They licensed the newspapers and decided who was to be allowed to enter politics, first on the local and later on the regional level. It soon became evident that the German politicians were as shrewd as ever, but that unfortunately 58 Germany Today the Western powers had learned very little from the bitter experience of two world wars.
The third period produced the rapid growth of a Christian Democratic mass party from 7,, to 15,, votes, all within the brief span of eight years. Was it the result of a democratic enlightenment campaign conducted by Dr. Globke, and the conservative-Rightist cabinet? After a severe defeat in a local elec- tion in Bremen, the pro-Adenauer Rheinischer Merkur hoisted the following storm warning on October 12, The decline of the CDU in Northern Germany, which first be- came visible in the state elections of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, has now become alarmingly clear with the election returns from Bremen.
The latter fact is the significant hallmark of a development in which nationalistic slogans have created conditions similar to those in the late years of the Weimar Republic. There is an un- mistakable trend toward the radical Right. This statement shows that the CDU leaders were seriously concerned about the future of the Adenauer coalition. If the Chancellor wanted to stay in power and proceed with his plan for unification of Europe, he would first have to secure a safe continuation of his coalition.
The most effective way to do this was to 59 Dr. At the request of the Bonn government the SRP was soon de- clared anticonstitutional and was outlawed by the Federal Court in Karlsruhe. In the state of Lower Saxony all parties scrambled wildly to pick up the almost , votes of the outlawed SRP. In Lower Saxony, where the Christian Democrats had polled only 17 percent of the total vote in and had suffered further losses in , the returns suddenly went up to more than 33 percent of the popular vote.
Whereas in previous elections the Chris- tian Democrats could barely gain It was clear that whole blocs of voters had suddenly shifted to the CDU. How such political deals were made possible can best be shown by examining the situation in Schleswig-Holstein. To begin with, this northernmost state, almost exclusively Prot- estant and a stronghold of the Nazis, had been a poor hunt- ing ground for the CDU.
Then the neo-Nazi movement was strengthened by the influx of refugees from the lost territories in the East. The Prime Minister of the state was Dr. Walter Bartram, a Nazi who had joined the party in and who, after the war, had become a member of the CDU. In many towns of Schleswig-Holstein the Nazis had re- covered their old positions. Government officers, former 60 Germany Today party officials, and top-level SS and army officers had banded together in various organizations which wielded a strong influence in the state.
They had a large following in every town and village. According to press reports they had devel- oped a state-wide machine which had worked in behalf of the neo-Nazi SRP. This supposedly non- political organization worked in close contact with a Gau- leiter group in Hamburg connected with the Achenbach- Naumann circle and with the Bruderschaft, a nation-wide network of important Wehrmacht and SS officers. They did the most logical thing — they joined Dr.
Of course they had the choice of joining one of the three other Rightist parties, but that would only have pro- duced evidence in support of the old charge that they were using the tactic of infiltration, and it could have resulted in the outlawing of another Rightist party. Also there was this important point: The CDU could use organizers, ward leaders, speakers, district leaders, and so on. Under these circumstances the best solution for the Nazi action groups was to infiltrate the CDU state organiza- tions quietly and gradually. There is little doubt that the weakness of the CDU in 61 Dr.
Support from every political machine and bailiwick was wel- comed, provided the votes were brought in. Those who worked for the victory of the party in power could expect to be rewarded with the spoils. The following case may serve as an illustration. Among those who joined the CDU at that time was a Dr. Menzel who under the Nazis had functioned as the deputy mayor of Eckernfoerde. He had joined the Nazi party as early as After the war Dr. It was probably around that Dr. Menzel and his followers joined the CDU. Very soon afterward he became a prominent member of the State Assembly of Schleswig-Holstein.
In the Association of Former Internees and Victims of Denazification, an active Nazi group, held a mass meeting outside Neumuenster. In Catholic Bavaria the teachers, local priests, and burghermasters were those on whom the CDU relied most heavily in order to build up its new party organization. Yet the teachers and the burgher- masters had been the backbone of the Nazi movement throughout Bavaria.
Montgomery, a senior re- search official in the U. At a time when the German masses needed sane and sober leadership in order to find their way into a new future, they were exposed to waves of nationalistic in- toxication. In the race for nationalist popularity, Dr. Ade- nauer proved himself to be an astute campaigner. In his earliest speeches he expressed open contempt for England, and he depicted the British as the true enemies, because they tried to hamper the economic resurrection of West Germany by dismantling the industries on Rhine and Ruhr.
The foreigners must understand that the period of collapse and un- restricted domination by the Allies is over. On March 25, , long before he was elected Chancellor, Dr. Adenauer caused consternation among the Allies when he declared in a speech in Berne, Switzerland, that the Ger- man people had never surrendered to the Allies, implying that they were free from all obligations. From the beginning Dr. Adenauer announced that his platform was to free Germany from the consequences of de- feat, to gain back full sovereignty for the Fatherland, and to build it up again as a strong partner in a new alliance.
A program like this was bound to have a considerable effect upon millions of Germans who had just lost their Fuehrer and the dream of becoming the master race of the world. There were secret talks late in between leading members of Dr. These negotiations were suddenly disrupted when the British arrested the ex-Nazi leader and several of his co- conspirators. According to Der Spiegel,, there also had been a meeting between leading ex-Nazis and the late Bundestag Speaker, Herman Ehlers, in the fall of First, the negotiations always took place a year or so before the elec- tions to the Bundestag.
Second, preceding an election year, certain bills were pushed through the Bundestag or promises were made which satisfied to a large extent the special inter- ests of ex-Nazi officials, former SS and Wehrmacht officers, and the families of convicted war criminals. To these people, who had to look for jobs, bigger pensions, and a new status, the CDU as the party in power had much to offer. There were other even more important issues, such as special decrees and statutes which originally had been introduced by the occupy- ing authorities in order to keep the Nazis out of federal and state government offices.
If the party in power could remove such onus, if a law could be enacted that would open the doors for the SS to enter the new Bundeswehr as officers and noncommissioned officers, such an act would be well re- membered on election day. In a press conference on February 19, , Dr. He as- sured them that the Bonn government was doing everything to obtain their release. The CDU believes in giving equal status to the claims of the Waffen SS along with those accorded to other units of the regular German army.
The Chancellor has made this a prerequisite of his policy, which is aimed at wiping out the Nuremberg concept of collective guilt. The Bonn government has done its utmost to gain all advantages from the present situation and the soldiers of the Waffen SS should be appreciative of the fact that the Chancellor, in the formulation and execution of his European policies, is paying close attention to the record of common sacrifice [by the Waffen SS] in a great cause.
Needless to say, Dr. Whereas the vote of the SDP and the Rightist parties showed no unusual fluctuation, the returns for the CDU brought an upsurge from 7,, to 12,, votes. An expert in the field of Nazi infiltration and propa- ganda, Professor James H. Sheldon, gave the following anal- ysis of the CDU election returns: Any encouragement to be derived from this aspect of the matter, however, is strictly skin-deep.
The facts are that the Pan-Germans, neo-Nazis and ultranational- ists succeeded in invading the parties of the Adenauer coalition to such an appalling extent that they are now much nearer to the control of power in West Germany than before. Sheldon was able to quote ex- cerpts from an official U. There cannot be any doubt that the nationalist, revisionist and author- itarian tendencies at the policy-making level of the CDU-CSU will be strengthened by the very strong increase in votes received by the party from obviously rightist extremist circles.
After lengthy confidential negotiations, an invita- tion was sent out in January — nine months before the election — to a large group of top Nazi leaders for a secret meeting with one of Dr. Gerstenmaier in turn paid his compliments to Werner Naumann by stating: Gerstenmaier, could only come about by using the necessary patience.
Admonishing his listeners to moderation, Dr. The outcome of the election dispelled these doubts. Adenauer authorized some of his closest advisers to conduct secret meetings with the Kremlin. In October , for instance, it was discovered that the Minister of Finance, Dr. Fritz Schaeffer, with Dr. This time the CDU polled 15,, votes as against the 12,, of the election. Some German and many foreign observers have pointed out that the rapidly progressing restoration and renazifica- tion will inevitably end in another catastrophe.
As early as the German papers reprinted press comments from London charging that Dr. Adenauer was served by more General Staff officers than Hitler had in The Bonn cor- respondent of the News Chronicle was quoted as saying that Dr. Not long ago a highly respected CDU politician, Professor Walter Hagemann, director of the Institute for Publizistik at the University of Muenster, was ousted from the ranks of the Christian Democrats for having opposed German atomic rearmament and for having criticized Dr.
Among the debarking travelers was a tall, slender gentleman with a distinguished bearing. A stocky German official slowly looked through the pass- port. Then, fixing his eyes on the elegant traveler, he asked politely and calmly in German: Is this passport a genuine identification? The German official did not seem to be satisfied.
He beckoned Signor Larcher into an adjoining room. Documents revealed that Signor Larcher was not an Italian art dealer, but was rather a key figure in an inter- national ring promoting Nazi infiltration. The gentleman was really Eugen Dollmann, born in Re- gensburg, Bavaria, who had become well known to the secu- rity services of almost all European governments. Only eight months earlier Herr Dollman, alias Larcher, had been in the headlines all over Europe in connection with deporta- tion proceedings in Switzerland. It has been reported that the Madrid center has its own finan- cial department, sustained by a huge treasure chest which the Nazis shipped to neutral countries before the German col- lapse.
The latter is a propaganda organization with branches all over Europe and groups operating in the Western Hemisphere and on other continents. Observers in Bonn have traced the increasing activity of former Nazis who travel between Germany and the main centers of the International— Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Egypt and Argentina.
They often work for import-export firms and agencies and for German motor manufacturers. The names most frequently in the news in connection with the underground work of the Madrid Nazi center are the anti-Semitic, rabble-rousing Dr. It is a well-known fact that Franco has taken the Nazi plotters to his bosom. When, in , a delegation of the Nazi Condor Legion visited Madrid, Franco greeted his old civil war allies with the words: The papers hinted that it was Dollmann and his co-conspirators in Madrid who had set the fuse of an anti-British plot in Cairo which, a few months later, resulted in the explosion that ended with the ousting of King Farouk.
Despite the fact that the German law punishes the forging of passports and the use of false documents with long prison terms, Herr Dollmann did not suffer any great inconvenience. He might have been released without any trial had not the Frankfurter Rundschau given the case considerable publicity. The mild sentence given to Dollmann, the pressures to quash the prosecution against the Naumann plotters, the tol- eration of the activities of such important Nazis as Colonel Skorzeny and Hans Ulrich Rudel, give rise to the suspicion that high officials in Bonn had some secret ties with the Nazi center in Madrid.
In most Arab countries the ties to the active Nazis were not inter- rupted with the collapse of the Third Reich. Many of the Nazi experts who had escaped the Allied dragnet were later hired by the Egyptian government as military, financial, and technical advisers. Wilhelm Voss and Gen- eral Wilhelm Fahrembach was instrumental in arranging the armaments deal with the Soviet bloc.
Fritz Doris, the leader of the Socialist Reichs party, which had been outlawed in Doris, whose party had been exposed by the highest Federal Court as subversive, was, after his con- viction, secretly hired by the Bonn Foreign Office for delicate assignments in the Arab countries. Adenauer was asked in a BBC television in- terview whether there was a resurgence of anti-Semitism and Nazism. There are enough hot irons that nobody dares to touch because people deep in their bones feel a fear of the secret power and the brutality of the Nazi goon squads.
It requires a certain courage to break that spell. What is missing is an organizational banding together of all the anti-Nazi forces in order to build a firm wall against the subversive attacks which undermine our not suffi- ciently stabilized democratic society. In the Federal Republic there exist today 46 political associations of this character.
The Nazi-militaristic wing is served by 30 news- papers, 68 Rightist book and magazine publishers, and former Nazi publicists. In addition there are approximately 50 national- istic youth organizations. This guerrilla army was composed of several thousand former Wehrmacht and SS officers, and was secretly provided with weapons, money, and training facilities by U. In the U. United States authorities said they felt that the guerrilla training program was not in itself wrong, though possibly unwise.
They said what most concerned them was the proclivity of the Germans involved for engaging in political activities that possibly had de- generated into a conspiracy against political and government leaders. Similar illegal activities were discovered behind other Nazi organizations, such as the Freikorps Deutschland, the Bewegung Reich, and scores of smaller groups.
It is signifi- cant that most of these plotters, including those of the Bund Deutscher Jugend, never had to stand trial. How many stanch Nazis are today politically active in Germany? Since the Bonn government flatly denies that Nazis are still active in German politics, overtly or covertly, it is difficult to obtain figures based on official surveys. There is, however, a considerable amount of evidence — press re- ports on arrests of Nazis, the discovery of illegal organiza- tions, public opinion polls, and the circulation of Nazi pub- lications — which permits one to draw realistic estimates of the strength of the Nazi underground.
As early as , when figures were still reported, an official survey found that more than thirty illegal Nazi organizations were operating in West Berlin alone, all of them made up of former Nazi party of- 78 Germany Today ficials and SS officers. In , only two years after the Socialist Reichs party was founded, it polled , votes for its thinly camou- flaged platform, in the State of Lower Saxony. This was 1 1 percent of a total of 3,, ballots cast. Here is a vivid description by an American observer who saw the SRP in action: The speakers talked a straight Nazi line.
It went down well. The audience shouted and enthusiastically stamped at attacks on the U. Franz Richter, than a member of the Bundestag. Richter-Roessler, like many other Nazis, had used false identification papers in order to avoid arrest by the Allies. Nobody really knows how many tens of thousands of party officials and Nazi war criminals are today living under false identities. In the early 79 The Termites years of the Bonn Republic it was estimated that as many as , people were hiding behind false fronts which had been carefully prepared before the Nazi collapse. Frequent appeals by the Bonn government, guaranteeing immunity from prosecution, have not brought a change in this situ- ation.
But, as we have seen, the Nazis are there in great numbers; they are active in all parties and civic groups and they constitute an ever-present danger. Infiltrate all Rightist organizations and make them ready for the final asault. History has never been made by majorities, only by dynamic minor- ities. Applauded by the frantic laughter of the assembled Nazi elite, Colonel Zuchbold quipped: As an SS officer, I had my place on the list of war criminals that had been prepared by the Czechoslovakian government. I pre- ferred to go underground because I wanted to spare the Czechs the unesthetic view which an overweight man with such a tre- mendous paunch as mine would have presented from the gallows.
He topped this attack with a thinly veiled threat: We do not intend to go to sleep. We will stay alert and exploit all the rights and privileges which the democratic system offers to us. Yet we will be a power whenever we decide to become a power. The speaker then declared: The belief is that for the present, and as long as Adenauer stays at the helm, the comeback of an overt Nazi party is blocked by the decisions of the Federal Court and by an election law which says that only those parties shall be admitted to the Bundestag which either gain 5 percent of the total votes returned or directly elect three candidates in the districts.
These roadblocks may be adequate for the moment, but they are not sufficient to deal with Nazism as a long-term disease. During the first decade of the Bonn Republic the neo- Nazis have scored considerable propaganda achievements. Twelve years ago they set out with a rousing cry to free all war criminals, not only those serving their time in Germany but also those convicted in Russia, France, Holland, and the other countries in Europe.
They put the Adenauer adminis- tration under heavy pressure to gain official support in forc- ing the Western powers to yield to their demands. Today almost all war criminals have been set free. At the moment of this writing only three leading Nazis are held in Spandau and a handful in France and Holland.
They foster the spiritual preparation of the youth for a return to the Nazi ideals. They demand full reparation for all the hardships suf- fered by Nazis and SS men who were interned after the war, and by expellees who were driven from their homes in the Eastern territories. They propose the end of all restitutions and reparations to Jewish and other victims of Nazi persecution. They demand an end of all legal measures imposed by the victorious Allies against former Nazis and SS men, and 83 The Termites an unrestricted return of these to public office and the ranks of the new German army.
This neo-Nazi propaganda is broadcast through the ultra- Rightist press, from the highbrow neo-Nazi monthlies with a few thousand subscribers to the fire-eating expellee weeklies with circulations up to and above , Also of great influence are several Rightist publishing houses which carry on a thriving business with an ever-increasing flood of war mem- oirs. There are self-justifying reports by ex-Gestapo officials and former Wehrmacht commanders.
A booklet published in huge editions had the significant title Hitler Acquitted. The rabble-rousing paper Die Anklage is at present defunct and its publisher has been sentenced to a two-year jail term. It is now defunct. High Commission in Germany reported that only 24 percent of the population regarded themselves as actively opposed to Nazism.
There are at least 7,, to 8,, percent of the popu- lation who must be regarded as fanatical supporters of old Nazi concepts. The great majority in the middle are still favorably inclined to the Nazi past. At the beginning of Bonn canceled the Allied occupation law which had banned the Nazi party and all its affiliates. The neo-Nazis are obviously aware of such opportunities. The Nazi underground, as well as the conspicuous neo- Nazis, must be regarded as well-trained political shock troops. On several occasions the neo-Nazi parties have brought out uniformed goon squads to rough up opposition speakers, disturb meetings of other parties, or create anti-Semitic outbursts.
Such incidents are seldom reported in the foreign press. An exception was a big rally of the German party in West Berlin where Transpor- tation Minister Hans-Christoph Seebohm gave a high-pitched nationalistic speech before ten thousand fanatical followers. The turbulent meeting showed all the old-style Nazi trim- mings: On this bright autumn day in ?
It was chiefly for this purpose that the ex-SS men had as- sembled for their first reunion in the town of Verden. There were also several hun- dred men, each standing six to seven feet tall, who rallied un- der a poster bearing the initials L. Here was the cream of the sworn community of Treuegefolgschaft— -loyal followers — of Adolf Hitler. Instead of bringing greetings from the paratroopers, he attacked the Allies with an avalanche of denunciations. The 90 Germany Today evidence was obtained from thousands of top secret German documents captured by the Allies.
These documents and rec- ords have been printed in dozens of volumes. In the concentration camps the swift-moving Allied troops found corpses and bodies mingled by the thousands and tens of thousands — corpses dead for days and bodies almost dead. Photographs were taken which were introduced as evidence during the trials, together with the sworn affidavits.
Here is the report of an American correspondent who saw the inferno with his own eyes immediately after the Nazi col- lapse and who saw it again when the films were run off in the courtroom: The camp at Leipzig is first; and then we see Penig and Nord- hausen and Hadamar and Dachau and Belsen and Mauthausen and Buchenwald and half a dozen more.
And they are all alike, for the impression we get is an endless river of white bodies flow- ing across the screen, bodies with ribs sticking out through chests, with pipestem legs and battered skulls and eyeless faces and grotesque thin arms reaching for the sky. To many of us in the press gallery, these bodies are no strangers. We have seen them before and also smelled them, and it is queer how many of us imagine we smell them again.
There is no end to the bodies, tumbling bodies and bodies in mounds, and single bodies with holes between the eyes, and bodies being shoved over cliffs into common graves, and bodies pushed like dirt by giant bulldozers, and bodies that are not bodies at all, but charred bits of bones and flesh lying upon a crematory grate made of bits of steel rail laid upon blackened wooden ties.
And this body is not quite buried by the dirt, and it shines white here and there, a bony leg sticking out and one arm outstretched. How many millions were liquidated through torture, beatings, bullets, gassing, starvation, and exhaustion? The figures available are truly staggering. In one death factory alone, Auschwitz-Birkenau, between 4,, and 5,, people were exterminated in the gas chambers.
Here is an excerpt from the testimony given by Rudolf Hoess, a Nazi party member since , who joined the SS in and was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz on May 1, I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, , and estimate that at least 2,, victims were executed there by gassing and burning, and at least another , succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of 3,, This represents about percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the camp indus- tries.
At that time there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps: Balzek, Treblinka and Wolzek. When I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Cyclon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon the climatic condi- tions. We knew when the people were dead because their scream- ing stopped. After the bodies were removed, our Special Com- mandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.
Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2, people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their ten gas chambers only accommodated each. The way we selected our victims was as 92 Germany Today follows: The prisoners would be marched past the physicians who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp.
Others were sent imme- diately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. The wife of a Hungarian Jewish doc- tor, who served as a nurse in a lice-infested barrack, provides us with the following account: I have the figures only for the months of May, June and July, Pasche, a French doctor of the Sonderkommando, in the crematory, who was in a position to gather statistics on the rate of the extermination, provided me with these: In order to overcome these bottlenecks, corpses by the thousands were burned in open pits.
For him the mass killing of Jews was a businesslike affair. The SS commander of Auschwitz testi- fied that he received this order from Eichmann: Like many others before him, he escaped from an internment camp with false identification papers. In May i an announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion that avengers had captured this number-one butcher in Argentina caused a world-wide sensation. The abduction of Eichmann created a temporary rift between Israel and Argentina. Of this number, 2,, to 3,, men and women were considered well able to work.
When Germany was overrun by the Allied armies in the spring of , they found only scattered remnants, mostly living skeletons, of the 10,, Jews. It is difficult to make an accurate breakdown of how many people were shot by SS firing squads, how many died in gas chambers, and how many perished from exhaustion, disease, and undernourishment.
There is little doubt, however, that more than half of the 10,, Jews died in the gas cham- bers, together with a few million other nationals. The fore- going figures may still be an understatement. A German study group gave the staggering figure of 35,, noncombatants who perished under the impact of war and occupation in East- ern Europe alone. Germany started the aggressive war with the aim of mak- ing the Germanic race masters of the globe. What Hitler envisioned in Mein Kampf as Germanische Weltherrschaft was a declaration of war against all other races. Yet it is too often forgotten in the West that the extermination of the Jews in Europe was only to be a prelude for much more drastic action, a contemplated crime many times greater than that committed against the Jews.
In order to achieve this goal, the Hitler-Himmler scheme called for a merciless race war against the Slavic peoples of the East. The German conquerors intended to strip the East, as in fact they did, of all industry, and they would have sterilized the remaining peasant population and forced it into slave labor for the German overlords. A few weeks before the impending attack on the U. To achieve both goals SS chief Himmler created a laby- rinth of organizations, each serving a special purpose. On the other hand, there were such SS en- terprises as Lebensborn, Ahnenerbe, and Heu-Aktion, whose aim was to facilitate the build-up of a tough German soldier elite, tightly controlled by the SS.
The Lebensborn ran a chain of state-subsidized breeding establishments, where Hitler Youth leaders and SS men had to function as stallions. The idea was to make up quickly the severe losses of man power which the German armies had suffered on the Eastern plains. On the domestic scene, the terroristic Gestapo ruled su- preme and forced the opposing political groups to support the Nazi regime.
Finally, there were the ruth- less Einzatzgruppen, which shot Jews, prisoners of war, and Polish and Russian peasants by the millions. To carry out international espionage and conspiracy the SS had its own intelligence organization, the Sicherheits- dienst SD , which also ran a highly efficient department for mass forgery of foreign bank notes and passports.
In addition, the SS had its own economic branch, which ran a vast chain of factories, trade corporations, night clubs in Germany and abroad — for corruption and espionage — and a string of high- class and mediocre brothels. For the looting of Europe the SS had a special organiza- tion, designed to strip foreign countries of industry and raw materials. There were expert detachments which swarmed like locusts over the Continent in order to seize every piece of art and jewelry and ship it to Germany. The gigantic structure of the Nazi regime had its back- bone in the thirty-six divisions of the Waffen SS which, ex- cellently armed, was the nightmare of all occupied Europe.
The Waffen SS is credited with the mass shooting of hostages in all subjugated nations and with such brutal massacres as that of Lidice, which was obliterated, and Oradour in France, where the SS shot and burned women and children in a church. Although not part of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS fre- quently did front-line duty, especially in the years when the fortunes of war had turned against the Axis.
But the chief task of the Waffen SS was to serve as a party watchdog in case some of the Generals played with the idea of an insurrection. It was the SS at home and in the occupied countries that quickly suppressed the anti-Hitler putsch of July 20, What was the make-up of the SS, and what type of people flocked to this criminal organization? Some respected figures of medical science played a particularly obnoxious role in the vast crime network of the SS. There were misguided idealists, sadists, convicted criminals, and normal small-town burghers. The bulk was made up of the riffraff recruited from every corner of Germany and Europe.
One million members of this criminal organization are today scattered throughout Germany, many of them in public offices as administrators, judges, police officials, and burgher- masters; others are busy as doctors, dentists, resort directors, hotel managers, and headwaiters. These men do not look like monsters. You will find them as pleasant travel companions in trains and airplanes, and you will meet them as solid businessmen in the offices of industrial firms and in banking institutions.
The important fact is that the Bonn authorities have done nothing to prevent the SS from becoming active again. To- day every German city and town has a local SS group that has weekly meetings and larger regional rallies every few months. Of all the neo-Nazi movements none has remotely ap- proached the vigor, drive, and fanaticism of the old SS, hid- ing today behind the HIAG label.
In , when Washing- ton showed its eagerness to create a new German army of , men, the SS, together with the old Wehrmacht of- ficers, started an all-out campaign for the immediate release of all war criminals. It was a superbly organized blackmail action, enjoying wide support from the public, from all parties, and carried toward success by Dr.
The more the U. High Commission Germany Today in Germany showed leniency, however, the stronger the pressure became: Every few days we quietly released one or two more from prison — the Krupps, the I. Farben di- rectors, and dozens of former Wehrmacht Generals.
On friendly advice from Washington, the British and French, extremely reluctant, had to follow suit. When the supply dried up, there remained behind bars only the SS, the mass murderers from Dachau, Belsen, and Buchenwald, and the toughs from the Waffen SS who had massacred American, British, and Canadian prisoners of war. Roosevelt and Churchill were almost daily branded as the real war criminals. On August 14, , the Soldaten Zeitung stated: Never mind what happened during the war — any war is rough and ugly. The second objective was to force the Allies to ignore their own judicial position created at Nuremberg.
The story in brief is that the Western powers yielded on every point, that a shameful mockery was made of justice, and that the record of history was turned upside down. The Deutsche Soldaten Zeitung of August 28, , pointed to the logic of the case: In order to ease the embarrassment of the U. High Commissioner and the State Department, Dr. Adenauer sug- gested the formation of a review board, with three German members sitting in and having equal voice in making rec- ommendations.
The whole procedure was to be shrouded in secrecy, and it was decided that the names of those released should not be revealed to the public. During the Normandy fighting his SS troops had savagely executed Canadian prisoners of war. On the basis of ample evidence, Panzer Meyer was sentenced to death by a Canadian military court. His sentence later commuted to life imprisonment, he was released in and welcomed as a hero in Germany. Since his release from prison, Panzer Meyer has worked hard to keep the old SS spirit alive. During the Battle of the Bulge his troops committed the Malmedy massacre, killing more than military and civil- ian prisoners, among them American G.
He was sentenced to death, and the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
THE NEW GERMANY AND THE OLD NAZIS
Angry protests came from U. To Germans, and particularly Army officers and civil serv- ants, this issue of German honor is all-important. The implications of this policy are far-reaching. The German people today feel free of any guilt. What remains to be discussed, they believe, are only the real war crimes, those committed by the Allies. The public has completely swallowed the propaganda slogans of the SS.
We have fought against Jewry. Postwar events have proved Hans Frank grossly in error. Only five years were required to erase the guilt and to per- vert the truth. Today the SS is march- ing again. Ten years of skillful propaganda have created a new legend: A few years ago the following story was reported in the German prqss. An ex-Wehrmacht General, sentenced by the Soviets as a war criminal, was released after twelve years of captivity.
When he arrived in the West German reception camp of Friedland, he was met by a Colonel who had once served on his staff. After an exuberant reunion they settled down in a quiet corner to reminisce. The General wanted to know how some of the other senior officers had fared after the great collapse. The Colonel stared in amazement. He is serving in Spandau! What is the Admiral doing in Spandau? He got ten years as a so-called war criminal!
Of course, of course. They sent him to prison. How many years did he get? He is not in prison! Speidel is serving as the top commander of the ground forces of NATO! But what happened to that daredevil of the SS, that young General — what was his name — Meyer? He was doing time in a Canadian prison. But what happened to our last Chief of Operation, General Heusinger? He is the top General in the Ministry of De- fense. Then the General slowly rose and began to walk away. Some Generals were behind bars, denounced as war criminals.
Others had been placed in commanding positions and were honored as de- fenders of Western civilization. Had not every one of them participated in the same crime, first under the Kaiser, then under Hitler? Twice in a lifetime they had tried to conquer the world. Yet in the end they suffered humiliating defeat. In they knew they were doomed. They had all been accessories to a gigantic crime of unprovoked aggression, wholesale looting, and unbelievable mass murder.
They had shaped the Wehrmacht as an instrument to conquer countries and continents, with but one objective: Following the example of Attila and his Huns, I shall spread terror in East Asia that will be re- membered even after a thousand years. Modesty on our part would be pure madness. In the Kaiser wrote Emperor Franz Joseph: The throats of men and women, children, and the aged must be cut and not a tree nor house left standing. In such a war there will no longer be any victors or vanquished, but only survivors and those whose names are stricken from the list of nations.
The elite lie torn to pieces and poisoned on the battlefields. The survivors, a mob without a leader, demoral- ized, broken in body and mind by unspeakable horror and suffer- ing, by terror without end, are at the complete mercy of the victor. Only a few years later the German General Staff executed this program to the letter. Among the prominent military figures whose cases won the most attention in Germany were Field Marshals Erich von Manstein and Albert Kesselring. Both had fair trials before British courts. Kesselring was sentenced to death his sentence was later commuted for having ordered the shoot- ing of hostages in the Ardeatina Grotta, near Rome, on March 24, Von Manstein was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for having ordered war crimes committed in Poland and Russia.
To keep these men in line, von Manstein, on November 24, , issued the following order to his troops: The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be destroyed once and for all. It must never again infiltrate our European Lebensraum. Therefore, the German soldier is not only charged with destroy- ing the military might of this system. He also acts as an agent of the idea of racial supremacy.
The soldier must show under- standing for the necessity of severe revenge on Judaism, the spiritual carrier of the Bolshevist terror. This understanding is also essential in order to nip in the bud all uprisings, which are mainly instigated by Jews. Similar orders were given by the other army commanders, such as Field Marshals Gerd von Rundstedt and Walter von Reichenau.
The latter told his troops on October 10, Yet it is indicative of the spirit prevailing in present-day Germany that the over- whelming majority of the people believe that officers like von Manstein, Reichenau, and Kesselring kept the German honor intact. Times correspondent Arthur J. This organization flourished even during the American occupation, laying the plans for a German comeback.
Behind it was a well-financed underground, stretching all over Germany, with contacts in Italy, Spain, and Argentina. The Bruderschaft worked closely with an- other organization, the Kameraden Hilfswerk, especially designed for the legal defense and care of the war criminals. During the first two years of the occupation, the Bruder- schaft had to operate secretly. The inner circle, the Bruder- rat, was made up of some top SS functionaries and important officers from the General Staff. Adenauer and the CDU politician Dr. Karl Spieker first made their suggestions for a European union based on an integrated European army.
In the sum- mer of , Dr. Adenauer submitted to U. On July 30, , the U. News and World Report carried the item: Supported by Bonn and tolerated by the United States, a nation-wide network was created to reactivate the experienced officers and the man power of the old Wehr- macht.
A Real Presence
With the eyes of the world directed toward the hectic events of the Korean conflict, and with cold war tensions mounting, the SS and Wehrmacht officers had an ideal smoke screen behind which to mobilize their forces. The political objective was a repeat performance of the alliance formed in between the Nazi party, the ultranationalists, and the Stahl- helm veterans, which two years later brought the downfall of the Weimar Republic.
The figure behind this plan was Dr. Werner Naumann, who in found the situation sufficiently safe to allow him to emerge from his hiding place. Commanding a vast pool of old party connections from the Propaganda Ministry, the SS, the bureaucracy, and the Wehrmacht, Naumann was in an excellent position to make things move and to give advice on strategy and tactics. Through his close association with the corporation lawyer Dr. Achenbach, he was able to mobilize the financial resources of the industrial royalists on Rhine and Ruhr.
Naumann was the directing spirit be- hind almost every organization and neo-Nazi publication that sprang up between and News of September 16, One was the Stahlhelm, an extreme nationalistic group; the other called itself the Deutscher Soldatenbund Federation of German Soldiers , and im- mediately after its inception claimed a membership of 85, The spirit of both organizations was expressed in their selection of two convicted war criminals as honorary presidents. The ex-soldier organizations started off with noisy nation- alistic rallies.
A few months later the U. Founded in by men who had once served the Nazi party chiefly in the Propaganda Ministry, the Soldaten Zeitung soon became the leading mouthpiece for the most aggressive elements within the Rightist move- ment. The story of the DSZ provides an excellent illustration of the mind of the German militarist. On the basis of hun- dreds of DSZ editorials and articles, the following may be summarized: Hans Hagen, both former high officials in the Propaganda Ministry, and Dr. The present editor-in-chief is Erich Kernmeyer alias Kern , the author of several best-selling books glorifying the Nazi past.
Under Hitler, Kernmeyer was the leading press official in the Saar district. According to the Frankfurter Rundschau of April 10, , these men all had close connections with Dr. When the federal officials tried to enforce changes in the editorial staff, an open rift occurred which resulted in the withdrawal of financial support.
The millions of marks spent secretly by the Bonn Press Office every year explain why in a large number of nationalistic and militaristic periodicals mushroomed into existence. The evidence shows that the same system of financ- ing applied to the DSZ was used to keep dozens of other Rightist papers and organizations going.
Editor- in-chief Erich Kernmeyer once boasted: The Frankfurter Allgemeine re- ported on January 15, The larger urban areas usually have Social Democratic majorities among whom such nationalistic manifestations could easily provoke political incidents. But there are hundreds of smaller towns in West Germany where the Rightist elements rule with full sway. This is the reason that for ten years now the soldier associations have held both their national and weekend rallies in towns with a population between 20, and 80, people. The national rallies — Traditionstreffen — at which often 10,, occasionally up to 30,, veterans gather, are arranged many months in advance.
The ex-soldiers arrive in cars, buses, and chartered trains at reduced fares , and occupy the whole town. Quar- ters are secured in private homes, schools, and public build- ings. On the basis of several hundred reports of such rallies, printed in the DSZ and other papers, let us see what goes on.
Bands of the Bundeswehr and Bor- der Patrol provide the stirring martial tunes of old, happy days. Ex-Generals, wearing all their medals, deliver fiery speeches which usually run along the same endless groove: There are other formulas: Admiral Doenitz addressed 3, U-boat raiders and declared to frantic applause: Such a reunion is usually greeted by a cabinet member of the Bund or the Laender, by a General of the Defense Ministry, by the mayor of the town, and other officials. As an example let us take the Afrika Korps rally in September in Karlsruhe, which was addressed by the Adenauer cabinet member Dr.
Observers have frequently stated that neo-Nazism has taken firm hold of the small towns and of the countryside. This is exactly what happened during the twenties. Hitler had his headquarters in Munich where he was ridiculed , while his storm troopers and the Stahlhelm conquered the smaller towns and villages. In the large anti-Nazi cities, with the bulk of liberals and workers, fell like ripe apples. There is danger that this strategy may work again. The speaker, the be- loved and esteemed president emeritus of Harvard, Dr.
James Bryant Conant, was received with great applause. In three consecu- tive lectures Dr. Conant reviewed the postwar developments in the Bonn Republic, using the most hopeful terms. He told his audience that in West Germany he had found "a people who had turned their backs on the German past. Conant came to the conclusion that "Nazism is dead and buried. Conant gave the explicit answer: Free Germany today repudiates the Nazi past. Conant's evaluation of modern Germany cannot be overlooked. Here was a rational, informed scientist, educa- tor, and diplomat, who had made a careful study of all the facts and forces at play in postwar Germany.
The educators and political leaders heard with great relief Dr. Conant's as- surances that the Germany which had twice within one gen- eration run amuck against the whole civilized world had finally undergone a profound change. The nation of Goethe, Kant, and Humboldt was back on the road to its highest ideals. Conant concluded, "that the en- thusiasms now germinating in Germany are not the wrong ones. Laudatory reviews spread Dr. Conant's optimistic outlook on the future of Ger- many to an even larger audience.
Conant's thesis of a new purified Germany rested on "realistic optimism. Conant's opinion that a healthy state of affairs had developed in Germany: Conant's address were taken from the Chris- tian Science Monitor of January 10, Conant's report convinced the Times reviewer that "those who are always seeing a new Nazism around the corner are living in the past. Conant's statements reflected the official line of the Bonn government, as well as that of the U.
Conant made his optimistic statements on the change in Germany in and , I had had lengthy discussions with State Department officials whose considerable experience in postwar Germany had made them unquestioned experts in this field. These officials admitted quite frankly the discrepancy between Washington's policy position and the actual conditions in certain areas.
Their argument can be summed up as follows: It is not so much that the State Department is badly informed about the de- velopments in various countries and especially in Germany, but it is rather a matter of evaluation and emphasis. All un- pleasant events and facts which might unfavorably affect the realization of our plans are played down as much as pos- sible.
This is obviously done in order to avoid criticism which might undermine the confidence of the American people and that of our allies in the effectiveness of our policy. The officials admitted that there were some risks involved in our German experiment. However, it was considered necessary to take the position that in the Bonn Republic we have a dependable ally and that the large majority of Ger- mans have sincerely reformed. The dogma of the untouchable policy position was under- scored by Dr.
Religious and Social Dynamics of the Eucharistic Conflicts in Early Modern Augsburg
Conant had criticized George F. Kennan, our former ambas- sador to the Soviet Union, for having advocated in his British Broadcasting lectures December a gradual military disengagement in Central Europe and a limited rearmament in Germany. What was really startling was Dr. Conant's sug- 22 The Legacy of Hitler gestion that on such a vital issue as the future of Germany there should be no public discussion which in any way might differ from the official State Department position.
The Times quoted Dr. Conversely, anything that can be done to quiet such suspicions will strengthen the defense of our freedom. Time and again radio and television programs have come up with the significant question: Can we trust Germany? People often wonder where the millions of Nazis have dis- appeared to, all those who once hailed and faithfully served the Fuehrer.
What has happened to those thousands of top Nazis in Hitler's Third Reich — the high officials in the ad- ministration, the Brown-Shirt bullies and the SS guard officers who once strutted in snappy uniforms and riding boots, with their chests covered with "lametta"? Where are the Nazi diplomats, the geopolitical strategists, and the advocates of a master race and Lebensraum?
Where are the thousands of judges and prosecutors who, year after year, sent countless "enemies of the state" to the gallows and tens of thousands to lifelong hard labor, starvation, and death? What has hap- pened to the thousands of brutes who committed the daily massacres and tortures in the concentrations camps? Where are those who supervised the extermination of millions — in- cluding women and children — in the gas chambers? Finally, where are the tens of thousands of Nazi teachers, the millions of fanatical Hitler youths, and the thousands of highly in- doctrinated youth leaders who are today in the age group between thirty-five and forty-five?
Have they all become 23 "Nazism Is Dead and Buried" thoroughly reformed democrats, so that Nazism is really "dead and buried"? Early in the owner of an independent radio station in New York discussed the German problem in three con- secutive editorial broadcasts. The very Nazi leaders of the days of Hitler are back in power.
Thus do we conjure up the ghosts of a nation that, only a few years ago, was dedicated to sadism, torture and murder — a na- tional policy of calculated cruelty unmatched in the history of modern man. WMCA fears that our deeds today will haunt our children tomorrow. What is the truth? Is Nazism "dead and buried," or are the Nazis back in power? To obtain a balanced and true picture about the new Germany it is necessary to take a closer look at the record.
The sleepy newsmen, responding to the calls, were requested by a Foreign Office official to as- semble at Downing Street by seven o'clock the following morning for an important press conference. There was little doubt that something extraordinary had happened, since it was the first time since the end of the war that a news con- ference had been scheduled for such an unusual hour.
The next morning shortly after seven, the head of the press division of the Foreign Office, Sir William Ridsdale, dis- tributed a communique which stated that a group of seven former high Nazi officials had been arrested in Duesseldorf and Hamburg for having plotted the overthrow of the Bonn Republic. The official announcement said that the British authorities had been aware for some time that the seven men had been involved in a plot and that the arrest had been made under the authority of Foreign Minister Eden.
The ringleader of the group was a Dr. Naumann had been with Hitler during the very last days in the bunker of the Chancellery in Berlin, and he was the one designated by the Fuehrer in his testament to succeed Dr. Goebbels as Propaganda Minister. Arrested along with Naumann were the following prom- inent Nazis: Karl Kaufmann, one-time Gauleiter of Hamburg. Karl Scharping, a propaganda official under Dr. Heinz Siepen, another district leader of the Third Reich. The British announced that they had confiscated "tons of material" four truckloads , and after the first check, they hinted that a careful examination would produce ample evi- dence to back up an indictment of conspiracy and high trea- son.
The seven arrested men were described as the leaders of a group of a hundred twenty-five important Nazis whose aim was to infiltrate the three Rightist parties in the Adenauer coalition. Their final goal had been "the overthrow of the Bonn parliamentary regime. Only a handful of democratic and conservative papers took a more critical view of the Naumann conspiracy. Adenauer had to face a most delicate international situation.
At that time the Adenauer cabinet hoped for a speedy ratification of the European De- fense Community Treaty EDC which would restore full German sovereignty and would be the first step toward po- litical unification of Europe. To raise the specter of a re- surgent Nazi danger before world public opinion at such a moment was, in Dr.
Adenauer's eyes, an unpardonable crime. The Chancellor was especially bitter because the British High Commissioner, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, had not consulted him before the arrest. The British reply was polite but determined. It pointed out that the occupation authorities had been profoundly disturbed when they had found evidence of an advanced plot, instigated by a vast Nazi network spreading from Duessel- dorf to Cairo, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Malmo, Sweden.
They stated furthermore that they had had to proceed with the utmost secrecy, since the plotters had close contacts with high government circles in Bonn. Also of special significance were several articles which appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Stuttgarter Nachrichten during the latter part of January , revealing the magnitude of the Naumann plot.
Adenauer and his Minister of Justice, Dr. Thomas Dehler, had to confirm the seriousness of the case. After the British had convinced Dr. Adenauer that they had an open-and-shut case against the Naumann plotters, the Bonn government suddenly exerted great pressure to bring the proceedings under German jurisdiction. On March 13, , Dr. Adenauer wrote a letter to the British High Com- missioner asking "that the investigation and eventual prose- cution of Dr.
Naumann and his associates should be handed over to the German authorities. After taking over the investigation, Dr. Adenauer admitted at a press conference "the existence of a far-flung plot" and that Naumann's activities "had been financed with consider- able sums by Nazi groups in foreign countries. Dehler quoted from one docu- ment in which Naumann expressed the hope that, if his scheme succeeded, "the coming election might be the last of its kind.
The Bremer Nachrichten reported on June 15, , that the Nau- mann lawyers had even threatened to discuss "the true back- ground of the case openly" if their clients were not re- leased soon. By the end of June Dr. Naumann and his co-plotters were suddenly released, in violation of the most rigid stipu- lations of German law and court procedure. A year and a half later, in December , in spite of the fact that the prosecutor had brought an indictment against Naumann charging conspiracy against the constitution of the Federal Republic, the highest court quietly dismissed the case with- out any trial or hearing.
Even before the plotters were released, the British became suspicious about the handling of the Naumann case and leaked some of the incriminating material to a stanchly democratic German newspaper which had gained quite a reputation for its revealing articles on the infiltration of former Nazis into the Adenauer administration. During the early part of June the Frankfurter Rundschau published five articles dealing with Naumann's tapped telephone con- versations, notes from his appointment calendar, correspond- ence between the plotters, and significant excerpts from his diary.
The published material gave a full inside view of the scope and character of the conspiracy. Avoid noisy nation- alistic demonstrations, flag-waving and incidents; use the more efficient and unsuspicious procedure of working in small cells, which some day, at an opportune moment, might con- solidate themselves into a broad mass organization. The detailed plan, which the Germans soon called the "Nau-Nau" strategy, instructed former well-known Nazi leaders to stay discreetly in the background until the time was ripe for action.
In the meantime the leaders were to use all their connections to bring bright and capable young Nazis, especially those trained in the Hitler Youth, into influential positions, not only in the Adenauer coalition parties but also into all other political organizations. The Naumann documents revealed much more than a mere strategic blueprint of how to subvert a state apparatus or the existing parties from within. There was a detailed record of how Dr. Naumann had used his contacts with top industrial- ists and leading politicians to fill well-paid positions in the Free Democratic party with scores of young, able Nazis who once had learned the tricks of the trade in the Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry.
Naumann's most devoted collab- orator in this enterprise was his intimate friend, Dr. Ernst Achenbach, a former Ribbentrop diplomat who, after the war, had become a prominent lawyer in the Ruhr district. It was reported that Achenbach and Naumann had been close friends during the war when they served together in impor- 30 The Legacy of Hitler tant positions under Ambassador Otto Abetz in the German Embassy in occupied Paris. Achenbach who, in , recommended to the Foreign Office that two thousand Jews be shipped to the East as reprisal for an attack on two Nazi officers. In later years he became the legal counselor and political confidant of a group of right- wing Ruhr industrialists.
With the financial power of the industrial giants of the Ruhr behind him, Achenbach exerted a dominating influence in the Free Democratic party, where he held the important position of Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Many of his close friends and connections, mainly young Nazi activists, had successfully infiltrated the two other Adenauer coalition parties, the ultra-Rightist Ger- man party and the All-German Bloc Refugee party , the latter appealing chiefly to the ten million refugees from the Eastern territories.
For some time after his arrest the British kept Dr. Nau- mann incommunicado, because they regarded his lawyer, who was Dr. Achenbach, as severely implicated in the plot. The pro-Adenauer paper Stuttgarter Nachrichten of January 17, , named Achenbach the spiritus rector behind the drive toward a neo-Nazi restoration. A lengthy British white paper on the Naumann-Achenbach plot was ready to be re- leased in August , when it was suddenly "withdrawn at the last moment on Cabinet instructions, for reasons which never have been made quite clear.
This Gauleiter group met period- ically in the strictest secrecy, mainly in Duesseldorf or Ham- burg. Up to thirty former Nazi top officials assembled under false names as "old friends" in hotels, where they carried on their political scheming. According to the British correspondent Alistair Home, the "roll calls of the ex-Gauleiters and high SS officials present read like a page from some nightmare Who's Who of the Third Reich. The aim of the group was "to form the general staff of the 'National Opposition' " and build "a new political party out of the existing parties of the right.
Other fields of activities for the group were political propaganda in foreign countries, carried out in close contact with the Nazi headquarters in Madrid, and the initiation of conspiracies in foreign markets in behalf of Ger- man industrial cartels. Have they regained influence and power in the Bonn Republic? The answer has been given in the affirmative by the plotters themselves. Long before, they had captured numerous key positions in the Adenauer administration, in political parties, and in the Laender state parliaments.
They were exuberant about their successes in one of their secret directives circulated by the Nazi headquarters in Madrid. This lengthy document, issued in September , spoke con- temptuously of the total failure of the Western occupation policy and pointed gleefully to the success of the "flexible and smoothly-working organization which, at the end of the war, provided the precondition for all the gains that by necessity emerged for Germany out of the chaos of the postwar period. Five years after Potsdam, we can look back with pride at our accomplishments.
Nothing happened by chance; everything was carefully planned. Even after the collapse, the National Socialist party continued to work in a camouflaged way [getarnt] in dozens of seemingly in- nocuous societies and groups, in order to keep the national out- look of the German people alive and undiluted. Just as many small brooks go toward making a mighty stream, the various nationalistic and radical groups in the Zonen-Reich carried out, almost without exception, worthwhile and powerful propaganda! The full text of the document was printed in T.
However, it was of chief importance to direct the underlying trend of the patriotic propaganda toward the same goal. The more diverse and dis- connected these groups appeared on the surface, the less they were apt to arouse suspicion that they were directed and influenced by a central organization. We have placed our confidential agents, observers, and representatives for special assignments in all groups and parties, even among Communist organizations and their fronts. The greater the number of organizations controlled and influenced by us, the more effective will be the results of our work.
The effectiveness and results of this Nazi strategy of infil- tration will best be shown by taking a closer look at the con- ditions in present-day Germany. Beginning with Chapter 5 most data concerning Ger- man newspapers and other sources will be given in the notes following the last chapter. These are keyed to the text by num- ber. Exceptions are those sources which are clearly identified in the text by name and date of publication. From the Chancellery down through every cabinet office, through the parties, the parliaments of the Laender, the police, the school system, and the press, former Nazis are deeply entrenched in many key positions, as well as in the middle and lower ranks of the federal and state government.
In the Chancellery there are two influential senior officials, Secretary of State Dr. Hans Globke and the senior diplomat Dr. Herbert Blankenhorn, who have been accused by the Social Democratic opposition of having faithfully served the Nazi cause. Both men, in spite of their unsavory records, have been entrusted by Dr. Adenauer from the very beginning with the rebuilding of the new government for the Federal Republic.
It was here that the infamous Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of the German Blood were first drafted. Wilhelm Frick, was sentenced to death by the International Court in Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, And the one directly involved with the formulation of these laws was Dr. It was he who drafted the text of Hitler's race law and who wrote the notorious "Com- mentary" interpreting this Nuremberg law, which paved the way for the extermination of millions of human beings.
When the Nazis decided to carry out the mass liquidation of European Jews, Dr. Globke's direct superior, Ministerial Counsel Bernard Loesner, himself a Nazi party member, had scruples of conscience and resigned from office. His post was taken over by Dr. As chief legal adviser and head of the Office of Jewish Affairs, Dr. Globke thus became a direct participant in the gigantic venture to make Germany judenrein.
In applying the racial laws Dr. Globke worked hand in hand with the Main Security Office, the headquarters of the SS murder organization. Der Spiegel of September 28, i, reported a case which reveals that Dr. More than that, the evidence shows that Dr. Globke was a key administrator in the "Final Solution," the master plan for the extermination of the Jews. The article in Der Spiegel quoted the testimony of a Wehrmacht officer, Max Merten, who together with Eich- mann suggested in that 20, Jews in Macedonia marked for the gas chambers in Auschwitz should be re- leased and shipped to Palestine.
It was obviously not a feeling of humanity, but rather a personal greed for money, as well as a shortage of transportation facilities to the concentration camps, that motivated both Nazis to make this suggestion. Under pressure from the Bonn government, Merten was set free after thirty months of detention. Globke and tried to obtain permission from the Office of Jewish Affairs for the release of the prisoners.
Their efforts were in vain. Globke insisted on the strict execu- tion of the Fuehrer's order. That sealed the fate of the 20, Jews, who were then shipped in cattle cars to Auschwitz. Adenauer could not find another man capable of setting up a true democratic civil service has never been ex- plained.
Whatever lies behind this mystery, the fact is that Dr. Hans Globke, who faithfully served the Nazi hierarchy, became one of the most powerful men in the Federal Re- public. Globke has denied that he was a member of the Nazi party. But as the Frankfurter Rundschau of April 3, , pointed out, Dr. Globke forgot to tell the Nuremberg judges that "he once filled out an application for membership in the Nazi party. On April 25, , the Minister of the Interior, Dr. Frick, wrote a letter to Hitler's deputy in the Brown House in which he praised Dr.
Globke as "the most capable and efficient official in my ministry. Recognizing his "loyalty and constant willingness to act for the Nazi cause," Dr. Frick recommended that Hans Globke be promoted to the position of a senior official. Three months later Dr. Globke was appointed Ministerial Counsel. The full text of Dr. Frick's letter was published in Der Spiegel on August 10, i The German press has called Dr. Globke as "the second-in-command in the control tower of the German ship 40 Germany Today of state. Globke is the "only man who has access to Adenauer at all times or who can call the Chancellor at any hour.
Globke in his quest for power simply adopted the authoritarian principles of Hitler's Fuehrerstaat in order to establish the undisputed authority of the Fuehrungszentrale — steering center — in the Chancellery. It is possible that Dr. Globke has done more than anyone else to re-Nazify West Germany.
He has been accused by the opposition of having filled many key positions with former Nazis who are only waiting for a change in the political wind. For many years Dr. Globke's past has been an embarrassing topic in the Bonn Parliament. On July 12, , the legal expert of the Social Democratic party, Dr. Adolf Arndt, speaking before the Bundestag, de- scribed Dr.
Globke's record in detail. Arndt accused the Chancellor's chief assistant of having "committed mass mur- der with the help of legal paragraphs. Arndt pointed out, Herr Globke had "trampled upon the dignity of the human race and dishonored the Ger- man name. Gerhard Luetkens charged that the packing of the Bonn Foreign Office with ex-Nazis "was the work of a clique, once closely connected with the SS Main Security Office, which is steered by the ineffable Herr Globke, whose role has been discussed from this rostrum repeatedly" official record of the Bundestag, October 16, , p.
The result of Dr. Globke's clever manipulations is that as chief assistant to Dr. Adenauer he makes decisions about a great many affairs in the federal government. Globke is able to wield rigid control over every min- istry. The various government departments have to submit monthly reports about their activities and plans, which all end up on Globke's desk. According to this analysis, no min- ister can make an important decision without the approval of Dr. It is the Secretary of State who convenes cabi- net meetings and determines their agenda.
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- Full text of "The New Germany And The Old Nazis"!
- A Real Presence?
The Deutsche Zeitung described Globke as the head of a huge staff, a super- ministry led by thirty-six senior officials, which constitutes the hub of the entire government machinery. It is Globke who decides what part of the incoming mail reaches the Chancellor. Nominations for appointments to high positions in all ministries are made by Dr. The result is that every ministry is run either by dependable friends or loyal servants of Dr. Globke often has had more authority than cabinet ministers.
Globke is acknowledged to be one of the most influential men in West Germany. He runs the Chancel- lor's office, and nearly all papers for the Chancellor must first go through his hands. Also under Globke's direct authority is the operation of a supersecret organization headed by Hitler's former spy chief, Lieutenant General Reinhard Gehlen. In order to understand the tremendous power concentrated in the hands of Dr.
Globke, we must first take a look at the world-wide intelligence network of the mysterious Bureau Gehlen. The story of General Gehlen has often been told in the European press, but seldom has his name been mentioned 42 Germany Today in the United States. The reason is, as the Washington Post stated on September 19, , that Hitler's former intelli- gence chief is working as "America's number-one spy abroad. Without Reinhard Gehlen's name ever being mentioned in the appropriation's debate in Congress, he spends six million dollars a year from the United States Treasury.
Thousands of agents of diverse nationalities are on his payroll, together with the elite of the old German army's counter- intelligence corps. Here, in brief, is the story of the ex-Wehrmacht intelli- gence ace. In he was appointed chief of the Enemy Armies East Department. With the German military collapse imminent, Gehlen stored his valuable archives in safe places and ordered his staff to retreat into isolated regions high up in the Alpine redoubt.
He immediately asked for an interview with the commanding officer of the U. Gehlen offered the Amer- ican officer his intelligence staff, spy apparatus, and the price- less files for future service. According to Der Spiegel of September 22, , a secret understanding was reached to the effect that Gehlen would reconstruct an "exclusively German-staffed" intelli- gence apparatus, "financed with the fat dollar funds from the U. Hundreds of German army and SS offi- cers were quietly released from internment camps and joined Gehlen's headquarters in the Spessart Mountains in central Germany.
When the staff had grown to three thousand men, the Bureau Gehlen opened a closely guarded twenty-five-acre compound near Pullach, south of Munich, operating under the innocent name of the South German Industrial Develop- ment Organization. By the activities of the Bureau Gehlen had become public knowledge in Germany and all over Europe. The top secret was no longer a secret, yet "for years both Washington and Bonn refused to confirm that the organization existed.
In the early fifties it was estimated that the organization employed up to 4, intelligence specialists in Germany, mainly former army and SS officers, and that more than 4, V-men undercover agents were active throughout the Soviet-bloc countries. Thus the 44 Germany Today world-wide Gehlen network came under the direct command and control of Dr. There can be little doubt that with the conspiratorial capacity of the Bureau Gehlen, the Chancellor and his Secretary of State have at their dis- posal a formidable instrument for the internal and external struggle for power. Another organization operating under the direct control of Dr.
Globke is the Federal Press Department, which in re- cent years has been involved in several scandals in connection with the use of its multimillion-dollar "reptile funds. Adenauer's Secretary of State has been charged in the Bun- destag with "paying journalists 1, and 2, marks for a political analysis. To these sums must be added secret funds of more than 40,, marks which are ear- marked for the discretionary use of the Chancellor and his Secretary of State outside of any parliamentary control.
The opposition has been arguing for years that a man with Dr. Globke's questionable record does not belong in such a high and sensitive position. Yet whenever criticism has arisen, Dr. Adenauer has gone to great lengths to protect and defend his chief assistant by declaring that he is "indispensable. Her- bert Blankenhorn, who for many years acted as Dr. Ade- nauer's adviser on foreign affairs.
Blanken- horn had faithfully served Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy. Adenauer was being groomed to become the first Chancellor of the Republic, he entrusted the ex-Nazi Blan- kenhorn with the task of organizing a new Foreign Office. Long before the collapse, the Nazi diplomats had made elaborate preparations for a quick comeback.
They organized a special Niederlage defeat section whose task was 45 The Hidden Enemy to work out detailed plans of "how to overcome the catastro- phe. In some countries these diplomats gave all-out support to groups which organized rebellion against lawfully elected govern- ments, as, for example, in Austria, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and Iraq.
They were implicated in kidnappings, the plotting of murder, mass deportation and gassing of Jews, the killing of hostages, and looting of whole countries. Many others, although severely implicated, were never prosecuted. One of these men was Dr. Martin Luther, head of the Deutschland Department, where mass murder, looting, and other crimes were hatched in an almost daily routine. Luther acted in close coopera- tion with the Main Security Office of the SS, and his depart- ment was also "the liaison office with the Ministry of the In- terior" in which Dr.
Hans Globke acted as the Referent for Jewish Affairs. Gerald Reitlinger, in The Final Solution p. The advice was not heeded by Dr. When the Chancellor, in , ordered the establishment of a new For- eign Office, Herbert Blankenhorn presented him with the nucleus of the discredited Ribbentrop group. The Chancellor must have known that Blankenhorn, Ribbentrop's close con- fidant, was himself implicated in the crime of deportation and mass murder. On April 22, , the Swiss newspaper Die Tat reported that in the trial against Rademacher certain docu- ments and a photograph which implicated Blankenhorn had not been introduced in court as evidence although they were in the prosecutor's files.
According to Die Tat, the picture "showed Herr von Blankenhorn in his diplomatic uniform visiting the Warsaw ghetto together with other high Nazis. The uninterrupted attacks by a few democratic papers against the reactivation of the old Ribbentrop group were soon echoed by the Social Democratic opposition in the Bun- destag.
The fact that the old Nazis had infiltrated a depart- ment as sensitive as the Foreign Office became a constant cause of embarrassment to Dr. In the Bundestag debate of October 22, , the Chancellor became so irri- tated by the mounting criticism that he lost his temper and threatened some German newspapers with court proceedings if they did not cease what he termed "unjustified" attacks against certain diplomats.
However, in spite of these threats, a German journalist, Michael Heinze-Mansfeld, continued Bureau IV A 4b, in the Main Security Office, "the hub of the entire spider's web of deportation and massacre. Von Cube proved in a detailed analysis that no fewer than 85 percent of the leading officials in the Bonn Foreign Office had been Nazi party members and had served the Hit- ler cause.
Because of these protests the Bundestag took matters in hand and appointed an investigating committee. After many hearings, concerning only the twenty diplomats named in the Frankfurter Rundschau articles, the committee issued its final report, consisting of a hundred printed pages. The report confirmed the fact that many Ribbentrop diplomats had gained dominating positions in the Bonn Foreign Office be- cause they were able to act as a closely knit organization.
The report stated that the group had placed their members in key positions and that they had done their utmost to whitewash one another by exchanging affidavits — Persilscheine — which were supposed to prove that they had all been "resistance fighters. Werner von Grundherr, Dr. Werner von Bargen, Dr. Kurt Heinburg, and Dr. It recommended that the former Nazi officials, Drs. It was established that the Foreign Office officials had elabo- rately conspired to protect Dr.
Rademacher accused of parti- cipation in the mass killing of Jews in order to prevent the implication of other diplomats. Rademacher, who in one case was clearly proved to have arranged the killing of 1 , Jews in Belgrade, drew a prison sentence of only three years and eight months. The court allowed him to remain free while his appeal was pending, thus creating a welcome oppor- tunity for him to flee. Promptly Rademacher escaped to Argentina, the haven of so many war criminals. There the Nazi periodical German Honor was jubilant and called Rade- macher's escape an "extraordinary feat of rescue from the clutches of the Jewish jackals.
Ade- nauer admitted that 66 percent of the diplomats in higher positions were former Nazis, but, he added, he could "not build up a Foreign Office without relying on such skilled men. The vital Department of Personnel is still dominated by former party members. For many years the director of the official diplomatic School for Foreign Service was the ex-Nazi Dr.
Peter Pfeiffer, a man closely con- nected with numerous conspiratorial affairs. At the end of the Tunisian campaign, in , Dr. Pfeiffer closed his last tele- gram with "Long live the Fuehrer! Albert-Hilger von Scherpenberg, a son-in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, State Secretary, assuming that the public had entirely forgotten a sensational kidnapping case in which this man had been in- volved twenty-five years before. In February the Swiss authorities arrested the jour- nalist Dr.
Hans Wesemann and charged him with the kid- 49 The Hidden Enemy napping of Berthold Jacob, the publisher of an anti-Nazi newsletter, who was then known as a particularly well- informed expert on German secret rearmament. Wesemann, playing the role of an anti-Nazi, had lured Jacob from France to Switzerland, offering him "important information. Under mounting evidence Wesemann finally broke down and ad- mitted several kidnappings for the Gestapo.
Herbert Dittmann, who has been severely implicated by the vast evidence regarding the mass deporta- tion and liquidation of millions of Jews in the East. The Bun- destag report sharply censured him for his constant lying as a witness and declared him no longer fit to be employed in the Foreign Service.
In spite of this verdict, Dr. Ditt- mann was appointed ambassador to Brazil. Since with a brief interrup- tion in the Press Department has been headed by Felix von Eckardt, who during the Nazi rule was one of the most successful script writers on nationalist and Nazi topics in the state-controlled motion picture industry. A Bismarck film written by von Eckardt was chosen by Dr.
Goebbels as "Film of the Nation," an equivalent of the American Oscar. Werner Krueger, a former Nazi who once had been trained in Dr. Under Krueger's rule dozens of former Nazis have taken up important positions in the Press Department. Edmund Forsch- bach, also a former Nazi, acted as Dr. The American newspaperman Theodore Kaghan, who inter- viewed the Chancellor at that time, described Forschbach's nervousness when Nazism was discussed in the interview. Forschbach felt uneasy because it had been revealed in the German press that he "had played a leading role, back in , by lining up German Catholic student organizations behind Hitler.
High Commissioner in Germany, had first-hand knowledge of the conditions in the Bonn Republic. In his articles he described how even those friendly toward Adenauer say that the Chancellor is "too closely surrounded with ex-Nazis. There is no excuse. However, the record showed a number of his ministers either as members of the Nazi party and the SS or as extreme nationalists who had served the Hitler cause in important positions. Gerhard Schroeder, a party mem- ber, served the Nazis as a legal adviser and storm troop leader. As Minister of the Interior he now has control over the police and is responsible for the internal security of the Bonn Re- public.
However, mounting evidence soon revealed that he had been a Nazi collaborator, and in he was removed from office and banned for several years from all political activities. Hans Christoph See- bohm, served the Nazi regime as an economic adviser in Silesia and in occupied Czechoslovakia.
Seebohm is known all over Europe as an ultranationalistic troublemaker. Der Spiegel of March 23, i, published a two-column pro- file which depicted Seebohm as the "prototype of the eternal Nazi. As leader of the Rightist German party, Dr. Seebohm has openly expressed his deep reverence for the swastika and has viciously attacked the Western powers. On September 15, , he addressed a mass meeting of the Sudeten Germans at Stuttgart in which he denounced the "monstrous crime the victors had com- mitted against Germany, Europe and the whole world. Hermann Schaefer, served during the war as an important official in Reichsmarschal Goering's Armaments Office.
Of all his cabinet members, the Minister for Expellees, Dr. Theodor Oberlaender, caused the Chancellor most chagrin. Oberlaender had used the Nazi press to demand the expulsion and ex- 52 Germany Today termination of the Slavic peoples and the rapid colonization of the vast conquered territories by the German master race. Ober- laender with packing the ranks of his ministry with former Nazis. He was blamed for the mass murder of thousands of Jews and Polish intellectuals who had been liquidated in July when a special SS task force under his command occupied the Polish city of Lem- berg Lvov.
The excuse has often been heard that qualified applicants with a solid democratic record were not available. This has been vehemently denied by democratic critics. In the case of the Foreign Office, there was a list of more than a thousand applicants, men of democratic principles with diplomatic and foreign-language experience. Blanken- horn chose to hire his old Ribbentrop associates. The Ministery for Expellees, once headed by Oberlaender, is still known as a haven for former high-ranking Nazis.
The personal assistant to the minister is today Dr. Wolfram, a former SS officer. The fanatical race propagandist Werner Ventzki, ex-mayor of Lodz, serves as director of a department. Head of the press office, Dr. Schlicker, was a storm troop leader. Many ex-Nazis have found shelter in the Ministry of Trans- portation under Dr. Oberlaender was an SS officer and a member of the notori- ous Abwehr. According to Die Zeit of Hamburg, he was an expert "for the treatment of other races" and the political officer of the Einsatz terror Nacht- igall unit.
Oberlaender's unit entered Lemberg on June 30, and remained in the city six days. According to Reitlinger and other sources, 7, people were killed, chiefly between July 2 and 4. Oberlaender does not deny that he was in Lemberg in those days, but says that during his stay "not a single shot was fired" Die Zeit, October 9, The Deutsche Zeitung of April 22, For many years the Ministry of Justice has drawn criticism in the Bundestag.
The courts, with a few notable exceptions, are to a large extent run by former Nazis. It has been charged that hundreds of Hitler's court functionaries are today in im- portant positions, as prosecutors and presiding judges. Mis- carriages of justice and favoritism toward ex-Nazis have be- come so routine that it is necessary to review this situation in a special chapter. The new German Wehrmacht is directed by the young, aggressive Christian Democratic politician Franz-Joseph Strauss, whom Time magazine once labeled "the man to watch.
Josef Rust, a former colleague and intimate of Globke. Die Welt of Hamburg re- ported on September 8, , that "of thirty-eight newly appointed Generals in the Bundeswehr, thirty-one were mem- bers of the General Staff of the old Wehrmacht. Eberhard Taubert, who in attracted attention with his anti-Semitic statements. Theodor Sonnemann who served the Hitler regime as an ideological propagandist for total war in the German high command. In several books Dr. Sonnemann denounced the British as the "arch enemy" and the Jews as the inventors of lies in the atrocity propaganda against the German Reich.
His books were acclaimed in the Nazi press. Globke serves as State Secretary for Agriculture in the Ade- nauer government. Sonnenhol, who joined Hitler's Brown-Shirts and the Nazi party as early as , had a similar career. Sonnenhol became an SS officer attached to von Ribben- trop's diplomatic staff. According to the Frankfurter Rund- schau of November 22, , Dr. Sonnenhol boasted after the war that "it had been an honor to have served as a mem- ber of Hitler's SS.
A few years later Dr. Sonnenhol became the senior adviser to Vice-Chancellor Bluecher in the second Adenauer cabinet. While in this position he wrote a memo- randum in which he advocated that Germany exploit the cold war to the utmost and make sure that no agreement should be reached between the United States and the Soviet bloc. Ac- cording to the Hamburger Echo of March 27, , the Son- nenhol memorandum aroused much criticism in England.
Even in the highest office of the land, that of the President, Nazis occupy positions of trust. The administrative head of the presidential office is a former Nazi official, Dr. The conditions in the administration of the Laender, county districts, and municipalities are even worse. In many of the smaller towns the old Nazi burghermasters have been re-elected. In industry and banking the ex-Nazi Wirtschaftsfuehrer are back in power and position.
The Krupps, Flicks, Rech- bergs, and Reemtsmas have rebuilt and expanded their em- pires, and the Nazi banker Hermann Abs has greater influ- ence with Dr. Adenauer than he ever had under Adolf Hitler. That the Nazis have had a successful comeback in the Bonn Republic has been admitted even in the German press. Un- fortunately, however, the general public in those countries which have aided in Germany's postwar recovery are shock- ingly unaware that the men who once faithfully served Hitler have quietly returned to key positions in the government.
Adenauer's Two Miracles There are two "miracles" which Dr. Adenauer has often named as the foremost achievements of his postwar leader- ship. In talks with foreigners he seldom forgets to mention the fact that Nazism has completely disappeared and that the new Germany rests on a stable, democratic electorate, with the majority of voters flooding his Christian Democratic Union CDU. This is an imposing picture, almost as impres- sive as the Wirtschaftswunder — the economic miracle — which in every national election has turned out to be the Chancel- lor's drawing card.
But what has happened to the more than 20,, people who in voted enthusiastically for Hitler and his national- istic cause? By what device did a "people that elected Hitler and joyously followed him on his mad career become over- night miraculously anti-Totalitarian? Adenauer's Two Miracles 3,, ardent nationalists, chiefly officers, bureaucrats, and veterans of World War I, voting for the German National party under Hugenberg, who at that time had concluded a close alliance with Hitler.
In the March election the Catholic Center party 4,, moved over to the extreme Right, and Herr von Papen engineered the Hitler-Papen- Hugenberg coalition, which then polled nearly 25,, votes. Of these, 17,, were for the Nazi ticket alone. At that time all middle-of-the-road parties had completely disappeared and only the Left with its 12,, votes Social Democrats, 7,,; Communists, 4,, had remained intact. In order to understand what has been going on in the Bonn Republic we must consider briefly the three phases of Germany's postwar political development.
The first period was notable for the systematic sabotage by most parties of the Allied denazification program. The second period was characterized by attempts to use the licensed parties as vehicles for Nazi propaganda, and to bring ex-Nazis into administrative positions. The third period to the present is marked by the quiet and gradual Nazi infiltration as a consequence of secret talks between high-ranking ex-party members and spokesmen of the leading government party, the Christian Democratic Union.
During the two years following Germany's collapse, all political activities were under the strict control of the occupy- ing powers. They licensed the newspapers and decided who was to be allowed to enter politics, first on the local and later on the regional level. The idea then was that the Germans had "to learn democracy. It soon became evident that the German politicians were as shrewd as ever, but that unfortunately 58 Germany Today the Western powers had learned very little from the bitter experience of two world wars.
The third period produced the rapid growth of a Christian Democratic mass party from 7,, to 15,, votes, all within the brief span of eight years. How did this "miracle" come about? Was it the result of a democratic enlightenment campaign conducted by Dr. Globke, and the conservative-Rightist cabinet?
After a severe defeat in a local elec- tion in Bremen, the pro-Adenauer Rheinischer Merkur hoisted the following storm warning on October 12, The decline of the CDU in Northern Germany, which first be- came visible in the state elections of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, has now become alarmingly clear with the election returns from Bremen. The latter fact is the significant hallmark of a development in which nationalistic slogans have created conditions similar to those in the late years of the Weimar Republic.
There is an un- mistakable trend toward the radical Right. This statement shows that the CDU leaders were seriously concerned about the future of the Adenauer coalition. If the Chancellor wanted to stay in power and proceed with his plan for unification of Europe, he would first have to secure a safe continuation of his coalition. Some time in the Ade- nauer high command came to the conclusion that they had to stop any further trend toward the Right and find means by which as many votes as possible could be channeled into Adenauer's CDU.
The most effective way to do this was to 59 Dr. Adenauer's Two Miracles apply the time-honored device of "the stick and the carrot. At the request of the Bonn government the SRP was soon de- clared anticonstitutional and was outlawed by the Federal Court in Karlsruhe. At the same time, liberal use of the "car- rot" was made in order to lure the homeless neo-Nazi voters into the ranks of the CDU. In the state of Lower Saxony all parties scrambled wildly to pick up the almost , votes of the outlawed SRP.
According to press reports, "all parties had opened their arms to embrace the homeless Nazi votes, especially the declining CDU. In Lower Saxony, where the Christian Democrats had polled only 17 percent of the total vote in and had suffered further losses in , the returns suddenly went up to more than 33 percent of the popular vote.
Whereas in previous elections the Chris- tian Democrats could barely gain It was clear that whole blocs of voters had suddenly shifted to the CDU. How such political deals were made possible can best be shown by examining the situation in Schleswig-Holstein. To begin with, this northernmost state, almost exclusively Prot- estant and a stronghold of the Nazis, had been a poor hunt- ing ground for the CDU. Then the neo-Nazi movement was strengthened by the influx of refugees from the lost territories in the East. The Prime Minister of the state was Dr. Walter Bartram, a Nazi who had joined the party in and who, after the war, had become a member of the CDU.
In many towns of Schleswig-Holstein the Nazis had re- covered their old positions. Government officers, former 60 Germany Today party officials, and top-level SS and army officers had banded together in various organizations which wielded a strong influence in the state. They had a large following in every town and village. According to press reports they had devel- oped a state-wide machine which had worked in behalf of the neo-Nazi SRP.
This supposedly non- political organization worked in close contact with a Gau- leiter group in Hamburg connected with the Achenbach- Naumann circle and with the Bruderschaft, a nation-wide network of important Wehrmacht and SS officers. According to the Frankfurter Rundschau, this ex-Nazi organization had "to a considerable extent infiltrated the regional Rightist parties and had thereby gained a great deal of influence.
They did the most logical thing — they joined Dr. Adenauer's Christian Democratic Union. Of course they had the choice of joining one of the three other Rightist parties, but that would only have pro- duced evidence in support of the old charge that they were using the tactic of infiltration, and it could have resulted in the outlawing of another Rightist party. Also there was this important point: The CDU could use organizers, ward leaders, speakers, district leaders, and so on.
Under these circumstances the best solution for the Nazi action groups was to infiltrate the CDU state organiza- tions quietly and gradually. There is little doubt that the weakness of the CDU in 61 Dr. Adenauer's Two Miracles gave the neo-Nazis their great chance. Adenauer's party badly needed the votes, especially in Schleswig-Holstein. Support from every political machine and bailiwick was wel- comed, provided the votes were brought in.