Nazis at the Watercooler

October 15, 2024
A wide-ranging investigation of the incorporation of former Nazis, including war criminals, into postwar German commerce and government. World War II had barely ended, writes former Associated Press chief correspondent Petty, when German chancellor Konrad Adenauer declared impatiently, "This sniffing around for Nazis has to stop." It did, quickly. As Petty notes, 24 major players in the Third Reich were put on trial "on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity," with 19 convicted and 12 executed. Of lesser figures in the Nazi machine, about 5,000 were convicted in American, British, and French military courts, with about 700 condemned to death. (Thousands died in Soviet hands, but that was another story.) The supposed "denazification" of Germany by Occupation forces was quickly stymied by the desire of "ordinary" Germans to forget about the bad times and get on with it. Couple that with the well-known desire of Western operatives to recruit Germans as allies in the budding Cold War, and the order of the day was to forgive and forget. As Petty writes, this amnesia had shocking dimensions: one war criminal who escaped to Chile and whose funeral, years later, was accompanied by those familiar stiff-armed salutes traveled back to Germany for briefings with federal intelligence agents--who, in turn, were indifferent to whether their colleagues and informants had engaged in mass murder. After decades of silence, German historians have been at work chronicling the collusion of wartime and postwar regimes, discovering, Petty writes, that "the infestation of government offices by former Nazis with seriously compromised backgrounds was worse than had been previously imagined." All this has implications, Petty concludes, in a Europe where nationalist parties are on the rise, in tandem with Trump's America. A sharp-eyed look at a troubling past that still reverberates in modern Germany.

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