New Book Reveals Postwar Germany’s Nazi Party Ties Cover-Up

[steve2470]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/09/new-book-reveals-postwar-germany-s-nazi-party-ties-cover-up.html



A new German book reveals that prominent postwar German leaders hid their Nazi past with the acquiescence of the U.S. government. Liesl Schillinger talks to Malte Herwig about his hunt to reveal the truth—and why so many Germans never owned up to their Nazi Party membership.

For the last seven years, the German journalist Malte Herwig, a reporter at Suddeutsche Zeitung magazine, has arduously, conscientiously tackled the challenge of researching and writing a book about the postwar German government’s “double game,” as he calls it. In Die Flakhelfer (DeutscheVerlags-Anstalt), which comes out in Germany on Monday, he reveals that, for half a century, the German leadership sought to suppress the names of prominent citizens who were Nazi Party members in the Second World War while pretending to seek them, and while simultaneously pursuing the soul-searching process of coming to terms with Germany’s grievous Second World War history—a process Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Herwig finds this behavior troubling. In New York this week he explained the genesis of his book.

In 2006, Herwig was working as a reporter for Der Spiegel when he learned—along with the rest of the world—that Günter Grass, the Nobel-Prize winning author, had been a member of Hitler’s S.S. in the Third Reich. Herwig promptly called Grass for an interview. “I wanted to know from Grass, why did you keep stumm for so long, and why did you then out yourself?” he recalls. “Grass told me that, one morning, while he was in the bathroom shaving, he caught himself whistling the tune of an old Hitler Youth song, “Uns're Fahne Flattert uns Voran,” which is the tune of the Hitlerjugend. He said it made him realize how deeply the Third Reich had impressed itself on him, and he decided, as a writer, that his means of trying to come to terms with this would have to be his writing, so that’s what he did.” Shocked that such an admired postwar figure—an icon of conscience—could have concealed such a defining secret for so long, Herwig went to the Berlin branch of the Bundesarchiv, where files of the Nazi era are kept, to see if he would find other familiar names. What he saw in those files, he writes in Die Flakhelfer, was “a political-cultural pantheon of the German Postwar era.”

“They were the last people you would have expected to be members of the Nazi Party,” Herwig said. The names included “leftists, Communists after the war, very educated, upright democrats.” Growing up in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s, Herwig had “learned about the Holocaust in high school, learned about the Third Reich, learned even about the crimes of the Wehrmacht [Germany’s army in the Second World War],” he said. “I really thought I lived in an enlightened age, and that Germany had come to terms with and owned up to its Nazi past. It was only when I discovered these files that I realized: Wow. There’s a lot of hidden information here that they didn’t tell us about.” He wanted to know, he said, why the names had remained hidden for so long.

[Democracyinkind]

1. In defense of Grass, an excerpt

Genscher, born in 1927, was part of the generation of German boys, born between 1926 and 1928, who were called upon to serve as child soldiers late in the war, manning anti-aircraft guns. They were known as die Flakhelfer—the flak helpers. Herwig makes clear in his book that he has no desire to assign blame, at this late date, to people who joined the Nazi party as adolescents, and who went on after the war to lead “blameless” lives, serving postwar Germany as “artists, scientists, politicians, journalists, lawyers.” “Given that they grew up in a dictatorship, they were ideologically conditioned by it, they were brainwashed. So I think it’s the most natural thing in a way; you would expect brainwashed little kids to join the Party, that doesn’t surprise me.”

What surprises and disturbs him, he said, is when his countrymen refuse to own up to their pasts; whether by claiming, like Genscher, that they did not remember signing up for the Party; or claiming, like one of the eminent Party members Herwig uncovered in 2009, the composer Hans Werner Henze, that they had not signed up at all: that they had somehow been incorporated into the Nazi Party without their knowledge or authorization. Herwig counters, “There were no collective secret inductions of people who didn’t know about it. You, yourself, did have to sign an application form to become a member of the Nazi party.” Many newspaper reporters deplored the release of such news, protesting, Herwig writes in his book, “that [Henze’s] lifelong artistic and political engagement was being reduced to atonement ‘by an unproven allegation.’”

--> Just to point out that Matte Herwig in no way is attacking Günther Grass (as others have so shamefully done over the years). It's been years since anything remotely as exciting as this current discussion has hit the German history scenes. Thank you for the interesting article.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/09/new-book-reveals-postwar-germany-s-nazi-party-ties-cover-up.html

[steve2470]

3. you're very welcome ! nt

[formercia]

2. Some old Nazis never repented

I worked with an ex-Waffen SS Captain who still celebrated *'s Birthday. He was brought to the US under Operation Paperclip. Even though he had been tried and convicted of War Crimes, all had been forgiven and he was given a good job in the US. He used to brag about never having paid his $50,000. fine. All because he had fought on the Eastern Front and the US needed info on the Soviets.

[RainDog]

4. Operation Paperclip really distorted American life

The 1950s and all the cold war b.s. was instigated by claims made by Nazis who were brought to the U.S.

In order to make themselves essential, they helped to continue the war after the war.

[formercia]

5. For the Nazis, the US became their new base of operations.

They drove the Cold War.

[SharonAnn]

6. And Chile, and Argentina, etc. They affected lives and governments in many countries.

[formercia]

7. so true

like a Cancer, Metastasizing, sending out cells to establish new tumors.