Germany was sorry after WWII, but not about Nazism.
Germans were not, even retrospectively, opposed to the national project embodied by the Nazi government. On the key issue, surveys of Germans after WWII showed that 40 percent remained antisemites.
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This is a guest essay written by Kyle Orton, a writer focused on terrorism, national security, religion, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Hannah Arendt was from a Jewish family that fled Germany upon the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
When she returned to Germany in 1949, she “described how [Germans’] generous forthrightness always died the moment she revealed that she was a Jew: ‘There generally followed a brief awkward pause; and after that came … a deluge of stories about how Germans have suffered.’”1
The Allied occupation authorities had been grappling with this for years by then.
The primary sociological fact Allied administrators confronted, and were shocked by, was that Germans saw themselves as among Hitler’s victims. And, as Harald Jähner explained in his book, “Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955,” the main psychological devices upholding this were, on the one hand, a focus on German sufferings during the war and immediately afterwards, and, on the other hand, a complete silence about the Holocaust.
In the explosion of speech and media in cities all across Germany, wrote Jähner, the “one subject … persistently excluded … was the central one: the murder of the European Jews.”
The German attempt to cow Britain into submission with “the Blitz” was repaid by Britain (and the American cousins) firebombing German cities, notably Hamburg and Dresden. In its death throes, the Nazi regime unleashed for the one and only time a genuine terror on sections of the population, inter alia to force Germans to participate in foredoomed last stand: this episode, in particular, was entrenched in German cultural memory and projected backwards as if it represented the entire Nazi period.
In breaking the devil’s pact that started the war, Germany struck first, invading the Soviet Union, but the price was steep once the Soviets had been rescued by the U.S. and Britain, starting with the Red Army raping its way into Germany on a scale with few known precedents.
The Soviets had stolen a large chunk of eastern Poland and in turn annexed to occupied Poland a slice of Germany, which was ethnically cleansed of Germans, sending millions of malnourished and homeless people into a Germany that was in no condition to cope. These “expellees” (Vertriebene) would create a long-lasting strain on Germany’s social order, which at the time they arrived was non-existent, not helped by the Soviet looting of German heavy industry and really everything else under the cover of taking “reparations.”
Germans took to organised theft to counter the dire scarcity, which reached its nadir in the “starvation winter” of 1946 and 1947. Clearing the rubble from Germany’s flattened cities was a herculean task Jähner devotes a whole chapter to. The task was often given early on as a punishment to former Nazis by the Allied occupiers, including, famously, many women. Rubble-clearers officially stopped work in Dresden only in 1958 and their task was actually completed in 1977.
So, the Germans really had suffered, during the war and for two years afterwards. But where memory tends to soften events with distance, the Germans recalled their pain ever-more sharply as time passed, and the context of why these disasters had befallen Germany, what Germans had done (and not done), became ever-more deeply buried.
The corollary of Germans conceiving of themselves as victims was a distinct fuzziness over where blame lay for what had happened. At some level, Germans knew that the Nazi State had started the war and they certainly knew that the Allied occupiers — at least in the American and to a lesser extent British and French zones — regarded them as complicit.
Yet Germans tended to hold “the war itself generally responsible,” as Harald Jähner put it, and contended, in a contemporarily popular phrase, that “the little people on both sides” had been the victims. In doing this, the Germans saw themselves being magnanimous: It allowed them to forgive the Allies for destroying their country, and to work with them on reconstruction.
The Allies made some effort to force the Germans to reckon with what they had done, to put before them the evidence of the death camps, and the American military was under strict orders to treat the Germans coldly. This was based partly an attempt to avoid a repeat of the errors after the Great War — the Germans would be made to understand they had been beaten this time — and partly on an analysis that there had been mass civilian support for the Nazi regime.
The Americans viewed their German charges as fanatics and criminals who would need a long period of re-education (unlike the Soviets, whose Communist theology said the Germans, the working class anyway, were victims of a Nazi “capitalist” power elite).
In the event, the American anti-fraternisation order was not seriously enforced — after a few months, there was a lot of fraternisation between the GIs and the Germans — and the rest of the Americans’ elaborate plans for remaking Germany went the same way. The Americans (and the British) ended up having to collaborate with, and by doing so reinforced, the German victimhood narrative, which could only be done by lifting the burden of guilt off most Germans.
The dubious decisions taken about how to fight the Anti-Nazi War had left half of Europe enslaved by the Soviet Union, and, while the Red Army had been stopped at Berlin, the Revolution was threatening to spread further west.
When German sovereignty was restored in May 1949, the Soviets refused to relinquish their occupation zone, making it into a permanent bridgehead, the “German Democratic Republic” or East Germany, from which they could menace the rest of the European Continent.
With Communism at the gates, the forces of what would become NATO needed to quickly establish a functional Federal Republic (or West Germany) to guard the frontline. This conflicted radically with any notion of doing justice: that would have necessitated executing hundreds of thousands of Germans, disproportionately from the elite, and imprisoning millions more for a very long time.
The only way to get sufficient popular buy-in for a State that had “turned the page” from Nazism was to meet the people where they were, by enshrining the false idea that Germans had been (or felt themselves) “liberated” in 1945, and when it came to the practicalities of staffing such a State, the only people available were steeped in blood.
However, much the Germans had suffered in the war they started and waged with such atrocious methods, the Germans got an extremely light touch of responsibility afterwards. It all began at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945 and 1946 — met in Germany alone with broad “indifference,” Jähner noted.
The modicum of interest the Germans showed towards Nuremberg was that they intuited its real significance. Nuremberg had no value as a vehicle of justice, but it concentrated Germany’s guilt on two-dozen men, whose executions would secure everyone else a free pass.
Germans had already by the time of Nuremberg begun speaking of Nazism as a kind of drug — often simply and generically referred to as “evil” — that had, as it was said at the time, “abused the German capacity for enthusiasm” and other national traits.
This “made it possible even for the most devoted Hitler-worshippers to feel duped rather than guilty,” explained Jähner, adding: “Even the defendants [at Nuremberg] followed this tactic,” with lesser officials claiming “right at the start of the trial [to be] the seduced victims of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels.”
There were other trials within Germany. Some 900,000 National Socialists were brought before a court; 25,000 of them were convicted, including just 1,667 “major offenders” according to Jähner. In subsequent years, investigations were opened into 3.7 million Nazi Party members (out of 8.5 million); about a million reached a courtroom and far less than that were found guilty.
It might be thought Germans were pleased at how minimally they were punished for what they had done. Not so. The main effect of these trials was to increase the German sense of victimhood — and the collective rejection of the Allied-imposed efforts to settle accounts over Nazism.
Jähner documented: “[M]any Germans formerly critical of Hitler’s regime … suddenly made common cause with former Nazis” to protest the denazification programs as an injustice and an affront by hateful foreigners.
Harald Jähner’s dominant theme is that (West) Germans did not feel sorry or guilty for their complicity in the crimes of the Nazi government in the decade and more after Hitler’s demise: Germans felt sorry for themselves as “victims” of Nazism.
The question that hangs over this — and really all discussion of post-war Germany — is one that Jähner approached only allusively: To what degree did Germans feel sorry to have lost the Nazi government, and continue to hold to Nazi ideology?
Jähner did say there were “tens of millions of still devoted Nazis” in Germany after the war, but his focus is how they were able to “integrate themselves into a society that had made a consensus out of anti-fascism, in terms of both its constitution and self-image.” It is hardly fair to criticise someone for a book they did not write, but assessing the success of integration requires some sense of the scale of the problem, and Jähner does provide evidence on this front, if only indirectly.
One thing Jähner pointed to is the public manifestations of Nazism in post-war West Germany, even under the stern gaze of the Allies and with Germans having every self-interest in putting “distance” between themselves and the fallen regime.
In November 1949, Wolfgang Hedler, an Member of Parliament for the German Party, which was stuffed with “former” Nazis, stood up and declared that the “fuss” over the Holocaust had obscured the key matter: “We might be divided on the issue of whether the use of gas to kill the Jews was the right one. There might have been other ways of getting rid of them.”
Hedler was literally thrown out of the Bundestag after being beaten up by two Social Democratic Party deputies and dismissed from his party, but the German Party remained in West Germany’s first governing coalition.
Kielce, Poland, had been home to 24,000 Jews in 1939, a third of the city’s population. In July 1946, after 200 Jews returned home to Kielce from Nazi concentration camps or exile in the Soviet Union, a “blood libel” rumour spread, igniting a pogromist frenzy that murdered forty Jews. Most Jews decided that their time in the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — whose cities Jews had co-constructed and vastly populated — had ended.
Jews took the extraordinarily painful decision to flee via Germany, the citadel of the Nazis until fifteen months earlier. As Jews started arriving in Munich, most of them planning an onward journey to the Holy Land where the struggle to restore the Jewish state was approaching its climax, Germans did not react well.
Jähner quoted from letters German citizens sent to the newspapers saying they were very attached to “the Jews from the old days,” an opinion they had kept remarkably quiet as Munich’s 11,000 Jews were annihilated, leaving only 400 by 1946, most of them highly assimilated and far removed from the Jewish religious world, either Christian converts or Jews in “mixed marriages.”
The Jews one would never know were Jews and the Jews who had been incinerated, those Jews the Bavarians had no objections to, but these Jews, in the flesh and visibly Jewish, they were, said one letter, “the sputum, the yeast, and the scum” who had come from the East “to avoid regular work … and are now spreading themselves raggedly about the place.”
This kind of thing was not limited to the letter-writers in the post-war German newspapers. A polemic in 1952 by Henri Nannen — a pioneer of liberal journalism before the war and a Nazi propagandist during — relating to a personal scandal of Hans Habe, the lead journalist in the American zone, a nearly forgotten figure who did so much to revive the free press in West Germany, included snide barbs about Habe’s Jewish background.
Jähner noted this was “consistent with the striking thoughtlessness with which antisemitic clichés were dragged out, as if the Holocaust had never taken place.”
At one level, the flight of the most visible surviving Nazis — those eligible for prosecution even under the lax Nuremberg terms of guilt — buttressed the German victimhood narrative. Germans in Germany could claim that with the Nazi leaders who had seduced and/or terrorised them off in South America trying to keep the Third Reich alive in German colonies, or working for Arab states so they could continue the war against the Jews, the malignancy had been excised and those remaining in Germany were the regime’s victims.
At another level, the continued zeal of the exiled Nazis increased suspicions. If such a large number of Germans who had the freedom to do so were still flying the swastika, it begged the question what the Germans in Germany would be doing if they could.
Add to that the fact that, even under occupation, as notorious a Nazi war criminal as Josef Mengele was, he found a support system to live in the Federal Republic until 1949, and instances where fanatics in West Germany defied the Allied repression of public Nazism could start to look less like isolated exceptions and more like the tip of an iceberg.
Coming at it from the other direction, there was what did not happen. In addition to finding that Germans considered themselves Nazism’s victims, wrote Jähner, “the second phenomenon that surprised the Allies” was that there was no wave of violence by Germans against Nazi officials: “If [Germans] felt like victims, why did they not take revenge on their tormentors?”
Jähner went on to note that the other source of civil disorder the Allies expected, a massive “Werewolf” resistance, never materialised: “Germans, who had gone on fighting furiously long after the situation had been proven hopeless, were revealed as the tamest of lambs as soon as they had capitulated. … Most of them had dropped their loyalty to the Führer as if flicking a switch — and at the same time wiped clean, at least in their own minds, the whole of the past.”
Jähner left it there, reiterating that Germans retreated into themselves, behind a wall of silence and denial and self-pity about their sufferings.
This omits that hundreds of thousands of German civilians did respond to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ “Werewolf speech” on March 23, 1945 and subsequent radio broadcasts demanding every German fight to the death by doing just that.
In addition, perhaps 100,000 Germans killed themselves in a wave of mass-suicides between January and May 1945, including at least 7,000 confirmed during the Soviet capture of Berlin, because they could not bear to live in a world where the Nazi project had been defeated.
This was before the capitulation and Jähner specified he is referring to afterwards, but all cults are a matter of concentric circles: to have that many Germans willing to self-sacrifice for the Nazis right at the end gives a strong indication of how wide the circle of believers and sympathisers was, and casts grave doubt on the idea that a large numbers of Germans abandoned Nazism in or near May 1945.
As discussed above, Jähner poured scorn on the idea most Germans believed themselves “liberated” in 1945 — or for a long time afterwards — and points out how insistent they were on the non-prosecution of, and the paying of pensions to, Nazis, including the SS killers. Another intriguing piece of evidence Jähner provides is discussing the Heimkehrer (“home-comers”), the German soldiers and intelligence officers — and death squad members and camp guards — returning from the front.
Jähner is most interested in the altered dynamics of the relationships the Heimkehrer came back to — the women more confident and beautiful, thanks to the newly available cosmetics; the men shattered, mentally and physically, in Soviet camps — which led to many of the relationships breaking down.
But there was more: “These relationships carried within them the memory of the Nazi regime’s heyday,” noted Jähner, when Germans were richer and enjoyed luxuries such as never before, thanks to wealth stolen from murdered Jews and conquered States, and extracted from their enslaved populations — when the gas chambers and the killing fields of the East were working at full capacity.
The returning husband felt “humiliated” that this idyll was gone: “doubly responsible for the family’s poverty; first through helping to start the war, and secondly by losing it. … [T]his feeling of failure on a personal level usually weighed heavier than their guilt for Nazi crimes.”
Jähner gave no indication that German women held the crimes of their husbands against them, either: The complaints were about the dullness and angry outbursts of these hollow men.
Art played, as Jähner sketched out, an unusually large role in the American effort to rehabilitate Germans. In 1946, a “General German Art Exhibition” showing nearly 600 works was put on in Dresden in the former Army Museum on Nordplatz. In one of Jähner’s rare uses of opinion poll data — most of his statistics relate to economics and demographics — we learn from the questionnaire given to visitors that 65 percent saw modern and abstract art as “degenerate.”
Not that the questionnaire was needed; visitors swore at the curators and vented about the “lunatic rubbish” on display. In a poll in 1956, two-thirds of Germans preferred “real oil paintings of landscapes” followed by religious-themed art. Even “prints of sad clowns” were more popular on German living-room walls than abstract art.
“Might it be revealed through art that the majority of Germans still had profound sympathies for the defeated Nazi regime?” mused Jähner. He does not venture an answer, yet the truth of it is he need not have relied on any measure so oblique.
Here we come to another omission: The U.S. Army did extensive surveys tracking German public opinion in their zone during the 1945 to 1949 occupation, which are not mentioned in the book at all. At the end of that period, the surveys found, amongst other things:
Hitler had quickly become personally unpopular.
The German consensus — increasing to a stable majority by 1947 — was that National Socialism was a “good idea badly carried out.” Hitler had gone too far.
Majorities believed Danzig, the Sudetenland, and Austria belonged to Germany.
One-third thought “Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race.”
Over one-third rejected the claim that “extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was not necessary for the security of Germans.”
A fifth of Germans believed “only a government with a dictator is able to create a strong nation”; “this war was caused by a conspiracy between the International Bankers and the Communists”; and “the German people were the victims of a conspiracy by other nations.”
Twelve percent flat-out denied Germany had committed any crimes, saying such reports were an “invention of the propaganda of our enemies.” (To underline: This was after Nuremberg and the other trials.)
Two things should be noted about the negative post-war German view of Hitler.
First, it had nothing to with the Holocaust or any other state crimes; he was seen to have failed as a national leader.
Second, when unpacked, Hitler was not quite as unpopular as all that — there was certainly no flicking of a switch against the Führer. Into the mid-1950s, 10 to 15 percent of Germans were completely unreconstructed Führer devotees, regarding Hitler as the greatest statesman of the century and wishing they could vote for a man like him again. Another 22 percent thought Hitler had been an excellent ruler, despite a “few mistakes.”
Simultaneously, nearly half of Germans (48 percent) thought that, “except for the war, Hitler would have been one of Germany’s greatest statesmen,” and one-third of Germans still said this at the end of the 1960s. There was also a persistent body of opinion, hovering at about one-third, which blamed Hitler’s “advisers” for most of what went wrong. Few moved against Hitler while he was in power and it is doubtful Germans would have rejected him had he prevailed.
Ambiguities about Hitler himself to one side, it is clear the ideological pillars of Nazism remained strong within the population after the war. This is hardly surprising: It was those shared pillars that had connected Party and people to begin with. Hitler’s method of rule was as much to release and enable pre-existing German passions, as it was to channel and direct them.
Germans were not, even retrospectively, conceptually opposed to the national project embodied by the Nazi government, least of all to the Imperial program — which was, after all, strategically near-identical to the Kaiser’s — and the Germans had little sympathy for the peoples they had massacred and enslaved putting this project into practice.
On the central issue, surveys of Germans in the American zone in 1949 directly asking about Jews showed that 40 percent of Germans remained committed antisemites and another 20 percent expressed some racial animus; only 20 percent showed little bias. This tallies with the tests of popular German attitudes towards Jews up to 1945 by the Nazi intelligence services.
Germans did not share wholesale the Nazi preoccupation with, or biologically racist view of, Jews, but German antisemitism was powerful even in Weimar times: There was no popular will to defend this disliked minority and considerable active support for expelling Jews from Germany.
German hostility to Jews grew during the process of intensifying anti-Jewish persecution that culminated in genocide, about which there was widespread knowledge and equally widespread moral indifference — at best — while it was going on.
It was the attempt by Germans in the last months of the war, once it was clear the Nazi regime would be defeated, to repress what they knew that triggered the retreat into silence about the “Final Solution” — even in private, and the focus on their own suffering, recasting themselves as Nazism’s victims, the trends Jähner documented so exhaustively.
It was within this framework, though only after Hitler was dead, that Germans began speaking, and eventually feeling, negativity towards the Führer: Hitler came to serve as the Germans’ scapegoat and his death their absolution, the alibi for a nation that utterly rejected any suggestion of collective guilt.
Jähner, Harald. “Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955.” Knopf. 2022.
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Excellent read, Kyle, thank you. Hannah Arendt wrote of the anecdotal post war sleight of hand hatred she witnessed but Jahner did quantitative studies of the German murderer becoming the victim. In answer to someone here in comments who brought up ‘Israel’ which in itself, speaks…
Germany and Germans can never critique Israel. Germany alone brought to the world the systemic art of murder of innocents by beautifully uniformed German men bending over architectural blue prints for gas chambers and crematoria on an opulent desk in a palatial building with Jewish fine art lining the walls studying the end of the Jewish people. Even Stalin recoiled. Germany and Germans alone forever will wear The Holocaust around their necks. The Holocaust will ring through heaven and hell as belonging to Germany. As Dresden was bombed they devised their victimhood. Am Yisrael Chai is the curse upon Germany and Germans. With love from Zion.
Likewise, today the "palestinians" are collectively responsible for hamas and the other genocidal terror gangs.