Exorcising Hitler Read Online Free Page B

could only be suppressed by massive use of force and a range of repressive measures that included hundreds of executions and thousands of long prison sentences. The seventeen million Germans unfortunate enough to find themselves in the Soviet Zone after twelve years of Nazi dictatorship were then seamlessly subjected to more than forty years of a competing brand of totalitarianism, marginally less brutal and at least not racist, but no less disappointingly oppressive for that. Even worse, the new communist bosses went around claiming that, unlike the West German elite, they represented a clean break with the Nazi past and were therefore morally superior.
    Both Cold War versions were somewhat true, or at least not gross distortions. West Germany was not quite the rapidly resuscitated bastion of freedom and tolerance that many presented her as. The framework for some such existed, just as it had been between 1918 and 1933. However, as we shall see, at the time of the foundation of this part-state in 1949, 60 per cent of those polled among its fifty-something-million population still thought that Nazism was a good idea gone wrong – a figure that was actually substantially worse than in earlier, post-war opinion polls. When asked if, were the necessity to arise, they would choose security over freedom of expression, a majority saw security as the greater good. Many also continued to espouse various forms of anti-Semitism.
    Large numbers of Nazis, many of them guilty of crimes against their own people as well as against innocent enemy nationals, went unpunished at the hands of the West German state. Even when proceedings against such malefactors were initiated, they often found protectors within sections of the post-war establishment. The social and cultural focus of West Germany for the first fifteen years or so of its existence was deeply, at times oppressively, conservative.
    The political and cultural revolution of the 1960s, driven mostly by young people who had been barely old enough for kindergarten at the end of the war, affected West Germany more intensely than any other Western country, up to and including America. Suddenly, after twenty years of restoration and reconstruction but relatively little re-evaluation, there were ageing war criminals on trial before West German courts, there was talk of the Holocaust (largely ignored in the 1950s), there was a national debate about the country’s past and where it should be heading. In effect, the debate that might have been had in the years immediately following the German defeat (which many among the occupiers and the fairly small numbers of passionate German anti-Nazis had wanted to have) finally began to take place more than twenty years later. It has continued, and continues to shape the varied, vibrant and tolerant Germany we see in the twenty-first century.
    Not that forms of fascism, many directly based on the Nazi model, have been entirely banished from the new Germany. Denazification, even the self-directed, subtle and long-term kind that ultimately triumphed in Germany, could never be and has never been complete. A substantial minority support exists in the reunited Republic – as it does, to be fair, elsewhere in Europe – for dark, xenophobic fantasies of racial purity and perfect ‘order’. The difference from the 1930s is that the numbers are relatively small, and there is no support for such ideologies within the cultural, political or for that matter the economic elite.
    As for East Germany, for all its pretence of ideological purity, and its claims to have been the only post-war German state to properly cleanse itself of the Nazi infection, there is in fact strong evidence that the Marxist-Leninist spell under which its people were forcibly placed, while outwardly different, was every bit as subtly damaging as West Germany’s hyper-capitalist orgy of forgetting. Perhaps it was worse, because there was no 1960s, no younger generation asking awkward,