Evolution of memory policy in Germany

Soviet War Memorial in the Treptower Park in Berlin. Photo: Keanu Dölle (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

Inadequate denazification

With the end of the Second World War in May 1945, the division of Germany into zones of occupation, which had been agreed upon by the Allies a year earlier, became effective. In the Potsdam Agreement of August 2nd 1945 the allied victorious powers of Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed on the five capital “Ds” – decentralisation, demilitarisation, democratisation, dismantling and denazification.  The decisions of the Allies were to be the basis for the policy of the Allied Control Council, which was created to implement a common occupation policy in Germany.

The Council’s directives no. 10, 24 and 38 were aimed at punishing the violent Nazi criminals and removing the supporters of the National Socialist apparatus from public positions. However the implementation of the directives turned out to be a problem. While it was possible to agree on court trials against 24 main war criminals (these took place from November 1945 to August 1946 and went down in history as the Nuremberg Trials), the punishment of the lower levels as well as the followers was handled differently in all zones. In the western zones, rulings chambers were set up. They released about half of the accused into society with impunity as followers. In the Soviet occupation zone, the officials of the NSDAP and its organisations were removed from offices and some were interned in special Soviet camps. The overall supervision of denazification in the Soviet occupation zone was carried out directly by the USSR’s secret service – the NKVD. It was also used by the Stalinist authorities to remove some critics of the new regime, including the Social Democrats, from the public sphere. All said, denazification was inadequately enforced both in the western occupation zones and in the Soviet occupation zone. This was especially true with regards to the actual intention of the policy, which was the removal of those who had worked for the National Socialist system.

Collective responsibility

The consequences of the insufficient denazification would become apparent in the first years of the two German states which were founded in 1949 – the Federal Republic of Germany (also known as West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (also known as East Germany). With its founding, the Federal Republic of Germany saw itself as the successor to the National Socialist state, while the German Democratic Republic, as an anti-fascist, socialist state, rejected any connection with the Nazi past. It was thus able to universalise National Socialism as fascism and instrumentally use it in the ideological contest of the Cold War. 

Nevertheless, even as a declared anti-fascist state, East Germany also could not start functioning without the co-operation and expertise of former Nazi-affiliated people. Thus, in the central organ of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands: SED) the famous words of the first secretary, Walter Ulbricht, were often repeated: “It is not so much what the individual did during the Nazi era that matters, but where he stands today.”

The Federal Republic of Germany did not pursue a state-run denazification policy either. Instead it allowed the old elite, especially those who made up the political middle class, to remain in offices and even shape West Germany’s memory politics during the 1950s. Characteristic for the Federal Republic were also tendencies to externalise guilt. The trials which took place in Nuremberg had, as it was interpreted, shown that a small group around Hitler was guilty of war crimes. German citizens were also their victims. This thinking became most evident when war activities, such as the bombings of German cities and the expulsions of Germans from Germany’s pre-war eastern territories after they had been handed over to present-day Poland, created a sense of victimhood among German society. This was accompanied by the demand for a final stroke to National Socialism.

This popular sentiment got counteracted by the political elite, especially from the Social Democratic camp. However it was Konrad Adenauer, the first Federal Chancellor, who defined the “collective responsibility” of the Germans as the recognition of their guilt and duty to make amends. Adenauer faced massive rejection for this utterance in his own bourgeois-conservative camp, but received support from the Social Democratic opposition. As a result, the political elite in West Germany agreed to take on itself and society the burdens of the past, as if it was a kind of mortgage that had to be paid off but that would be postponed many times.

 The East German establishment, on the other hand, even managed to present the GDR as victors in the Second World War, mainly by placing it on the Soviet Union’s side. Thereby, the East German state managed to stay out of the joint liability for the Nazi crimes. It established May 8th, the day of the unconditional surrender of the German Army – the Wehrmacht, as the day of liberation, which became an official holiday and, until 1960, was a day free of work.  In the Federal Republic of Germany, this recognition of the end of the war as Germany’s liberation – and not shame and defeat, as it had often been claimed before – came with the famous 1985 speech of the Federal President, Richard von Weizsäcker, in which he stated that: “May 8th [1945] was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National Socialist regime.”

Never again 

The resistance to the National Socialism was also viewed through contrasting prisms in the two states. In West Germany the military group, around Claus Graf van Staufenberg, initially regarded as traitors, became the focus of attention in memory politics, although with some delay. This was the group that attempted Hitler’s assassination on July 20th 1944. They failed, conspirators were convicted and around 200 people were executed. Yet with this focus on military and conservative resistance groups, others such as those involved in the communist resistance or Jewish resistance were removed from the official canon of memory politics in West Germany.

In the GDR the focus was naturally on the communist resistance. Thus the greatest importance was placed on the Buchenwald concentration camp and its so-called self-liberation. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees of the camp. Even though on April 11th 1945 the camp had been liberated, jointly by the American troops and resistance groups of the International Camp Committee, the East German state strongly emphasised the moment of the prisoners’ self-liberation and played down the role of the US army. There was also no place for the Jewish resistance in the GDR’s memory politics. The reason for this was the thinking, that unlike the communist resistance, this group did not fight against the Nazis.

The German victims of terror were made heroes who brought Hitler down. In the GDR’s interpretation, the communist resistance, which stood on the Red Army’s side, was said to have significantly contributed to the fall of the Nazi regime. Thus the biggest defeat of the workers’ movement – the rise of National Socialism – could still be interpreted as having ended in victory. Comparing the two states, the assessment of the actors of resistance could hardly have been more contradictory. However when it comes to the underexposed perception of the Holocaust, there were astonishing parallels.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, the 1979 broadcast of the American mini-series, Holocaust, which presented the fate of the fictional Weiss family of German Jews, led to a profound recognition of the fate of victims of Nazi tyranny and the Holocaust. As a result, the mission of West Germany’s remembrance policy changed from “Never again war”, coined in the 1950s, to “Never again Auschwitz”.

The German Democratic Republic was also occasionally confronted with the questions of collective guilt and their official attitude towards the Holocaust and the state of Israel. Seemingly, the East German state was always able to respond to them on a very universalist level. It was only shortly before German reunification that the first freely elected Volkskammer, which was the unicameral legislature of the GDR, recognised German guilt for the Holocaust and asked for forgiveness for the hostilities towards Israel after 1945. The latter was particularly evident in 1975 when the GDR voted in favour of the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. The above examples provide evidence that, in the post-war period of the so-called Cold War, the memory cultures of the two German states used victim narratives and images of their enemy mostly to relieve the burden of responsibility for the Second World War.

Consensus and its discontents 

The reunification of the two German states on October 3rd 1990 also brought a change in memory politics. Clearly the communist narrative pursued by the GDR was not compatible with the axiology of the new Federal Republic. However, in the 1990s new interpretations of the National Socialist history started to emerge. This was especially true with regards to some aspects of the German-Soviet war that began on June 22nd 1941, known as the war of annihilation.

This issue was the topic of the 1995 Wehrmacht Exhibition which was prepared by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Titled War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944,the exhibit was instrumental in challenging the myth of the upright Wehrmacht in Germany, but it also met strong discontent. As intended by the organisers, it showed that the German army (Wehrmacht) had participated in the Nazi regime’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, as well as in the Holocaust and the Romani genocide, Porajmos. This meant that the crimes that had been previously attributed to the Schutzstaffel (SS) and high officials of the Nazi regime could now also be attributed to the Wehrmacht and ordinary soldiers.

After this it became increasingly difficult for those responsible for Germany’s memory politics to externalise guilt and to use a victim narrative. The recognition of guilt and “negative remembrance” was reflected in the unveiling of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which took place in Berlin in 2005. Today, within walking distance of this memory site there are also other memorials that commemorate the victims of Nazi crimes, including murdered homosexuals, murdered Sinti and Romani, as well as victims of the Nazi euthanasia programme. The construction of these memorials was based on a consensus on remembrance policy which recognises various groups that were victims of the Nazi regime and acknowledges German guilt for the crimes it committed.

Recently this consensus has been questioned by Germany’s nationalistic and neo-fascist parties. For instance, several MPs from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) spoke out to diminish the level of guilt. The party’s co-founder, Alexander Gauland, even said that “Hitler and the National Socialists are just a bird’s shit in the 1,000 years of successful German history” and suggested that Germans “have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in the two world wars”. His party colleague, Björn Höcke, a civil servant history teacher, was even more drastic in his statements. While referring to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, he said it is a “memorial of shame” in the heart of Berlin and called for a “180-degree turn in [Germany’s] memory policy”.

The above shows that after a period of consensus, the debate on memory policy in Germany is flaring up again. Indeed, 75 years after the demise of the Nazi regime, the long negotiated narratives have been called into question. To counteract this trend, the Federal President, Frank Walter Steinmeier, poignantly said on the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden that: “whoever tries to talk down German injustice; whoever falsifies historical facts against our better judgment, […] we must contradict loud and clear!”

Christoph Meissner is a German historian who works for the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst (Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst) where he curates exhibits related to German-Soviet and German-Russian relations.

Germany, politics of memory, post-war