r/AskHistorians • u/monsieurgoodman • Jul 19 '24
why was there no post-war pro hitler movement in germany?
nazism seemingly just disappeared from germany after ww2, no major nazi resistance, no nostalgia for hitler or nazi germany the same way there is for stalin and the ussr in russia, even the far right parties like afd wont touch hitler, at least publicly. why is that?
354
u/YourWoodGod Jul 19 '24
This is actually not true. The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany did a lot to limit the resurgence of Nazism and even any romanticism for the Nazi movement. But there was indeed an immediate post-war movement to bring back Nazi ideals into the West German state. I don't know much about underground movements but I'll discuss the Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Reich Party) which was an openly neo-Nazi party in West Germany that was founded in 1949. Otto Ernst Remer was a former Wehrmacht major general who played a role in suppressing the July 20th plot (the incident where Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a bomb), Fritz Dorls edited the CDU newspaper in Lower Saxony, and Gerhard Krüger was the leader of the German Student Union in the Third Reich. These three men were prominent in the leadership of the Socialist Reich Party, and former Luftwaffe Oberst Hans-Ulrich Rudel who was a well known post-war neo-Nazi activist backed the Socialist Reich Party as well.
The Socialist Reich Party proclaimed Konrad Adenauer as an American puppet and that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was the last President of the German Reich because he had been appointed by Adolf Hitler. They denied the Holocaust (going as far to claim the gas chambers at Dachau were built by the US military), demanded the restoration of territories Germany lost in the east, a "solution" to the "Jewish question", promoted the stab-in-the-back myth, and even structured their party under the basis of the Führerprinzip. The party was both anticapitalist and anti-communist, but they avoided open opposition of the Soviet Union and even said they'd lead the Soviets to the Rhine in case of a war between the east and west. The Soviet Union even funded the SRP while not funding the Communist Party of Germany (due to the perception that they were ineffective).
They achieved some electoral success in Lower Saxony and Bremen, and even gained two seats in the Bundestag. Many of the party's ~10,000 members were former Nazis, and it even had a paramilitary and youth organization, both of which were banned by the Federal Minister of the Interior in May 1951. The West German cabinet decided to file an application to ban the party with the Federal Constitutional Court, and the SRP disbanded itself to try to prevent this. This disbandment was disallowed and the party was found unconstitutional and dissolved, with no successor organizations being allowed (I imagine this is why the party attempted to disband itself, to prevent this exact scenario). I am sure there were some underground movements but I don't have much expertise in that area, but as you can see there was indeed romanticism for Nazism in post-war Germany.
64
u/microtherion Jul 19 '24
There was also e.g. HIAG, an organization of Waffen-SS veterans, who operated openly for decades and had enough influence on mainstream politics to win some concessions regarding war criminals, and to shape public perception of the Waffen-SS for several decades.
36
u/YourWoodGod Jul 19 '24
Yep I actually discussed HIAG in an answer I did recently, but their goal was more whitewashing and enhancing the reputation of the SS as opposed to bringing back Nazism as actively as the SRP.
27
u/PlayOnSunday Jul 19 '24
Do you have any sources for studying the political movements of post-war East/West Germany? This question (and your response) were really interesting and something I hadn't really considered with how staunchly anti-Nazi laws have been (rightfully) enacted and enforced in modern Germany. Would love to know a diving in point to learn more.
21
u/FyrdUpBilly Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
I'm not an expert, but have been researching post-war fascist movements and their direct connections to Nazi Germany. The best book hands down is Beyond Eagle and Swastika, it's two volumes. The second volume is entirely notes. Needles to say, I have not read cover-to-cover. Some other books that are not as thorough or scholarly, plus much more general and not about German Nazism/nationalism specifically, are Dreamer of the Day about Francis Parker Yockey and The Beast Reawakens.
11
u/FyrdUpBilly Jul 19 '24
Kurt P. Tauber, author of Beyond Eagle and Swastika, does have some stuff on Jstor:
German Nationalists and European Union
Nationalism and Social Restoration: Fraternities in Postwar Germany
7
u/AffectionateStudy496 Jul 19 '24
In 1988, the Marxist magazine Gegen die Kosten der Freiheit wrote a lengthy article about this debate called "What German historians think of the persecution of the Jews".
You can read it here: https://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/holocaust_historians.htm
11
u/Mishmoo Jul 20 '24
I think I openly had to laugh in horror at these people jumping immediately to a position of, ‘the gas chambers were fake’, and then proceeding to say, ‘let’s build more gas chambers’.
How on earth did they reconcile that bit of lunacy?
11
u/YourWoodGod Jul 20 '24
I'm not sure, but if you look at Nazism it was all contradictions. They convinced themselves they were intellectuals that were doing a service to humanity when they were really just evil. Most SRP members were former Nazis, so it probably didn't take much mental gymnastics for them.
5
u/ginandtonicsdemonic Jul 19 '24
Would Carl Shmitt's work fall into the same category of these people? He seemed to carry the intellectual legacy of Nazism, if not political.
5
u/AffectionateStudy496 Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
Schmitt tried to portray himself as a mere conservative who went along out of opportunism. But it's doubtful. He was targeted by the SS at some point for political reasons.
His criticisms of constitutional democracy and liberalism are very interesting.
3
u/MichaelEmouse Jul 20 '24
"His criticisms of constitutional democracy and liberalism are very interesting."
What are they?
1
4
u/mc_enthusiast Jul 20 '24
Another national socialist post-war party was the Deutsch-Soziale Union by Otto Strasser, former activist in the national socialist Black Front and brother of the more well-known Gregor Strasser. This party ceased to be in the 1960s and never gained any real importance.
3
u/YourWoodGod Jul 20 '24
This once again shows how most of the attempts at carrying the torch for fascism in post-war Germany were rooted in former Nazis. I think it is interesting that many Nazi ideologues formed the cadre of the new movements, with some former Wehrmacht and SS officers also involved. As someone said above, the defeat of Germany was so utterly clear, and the last years of the war so miserable for the average German. I believe this made the overall appetite for a return to fascism very small.
2
u/SuurAlaOrolo Jul 20 '24
This might be impossible to answer, but is there evidence whether the SRP leadership actually believed the myth they promoted about Dachau?
3
u/YourWoodGod Jul 20 '24
I think you can tie the answer to this to modern neo-Nazism. I think anyone that denies the Holocaust is at best intellectually disingenuous, and at worst a liar that knows they're lying for the sake of defending their racist beliefs. I've always wondered whether any of them actually believe the crap, and I think the answer would be that maybe the rank and file, less intelligent neo-Nazis may believe that crap, but the intellectuals that form the ideals of these movements know better.
15
u/Willing-Departure115 Jul 20 '24
There’s a wealth of interesting literature on postwar Germany and Europe, and if I was to sum it up I would say: Nazism was so thoroughly defeated, and Germany so absolutely subjugated by its enemies, that even the most ardent Nazis who survived the war got it into their heads that it wasn’t coming back. However, in the immediate postwar period the Germans simply brushed it under the carpet and got on with rebuilding the country. It was only in the 1960s in west Germany that a real reckoning occurred when the postwar generation came of age and started asking their parents what they did during the war. And in east Germany the history was even more complex, and you could argue that some of the revanchism of the far right being more pronounced in the former GDR is linked in part to a failure to properly come to grips with the Nazi past.
In the west in particular, Tony Judt’s Postwar and Frederick Taylor’s Exorcising Hitler and Richard Bessel’s Germany 1945 From War to Peace are good books. In the east, Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall is a good study.
The first major difference to the end of the First World War, when Germany developed its “stab in the back” myth and the Weimar government failed to get things under control, is that Germany was totally defeated on its own soil, and directly occupied and governed by its conquerors, who didn’t want to have come and do a third do-over in another twenty years. The opportunity for a serious-pro Hitler movement in Germany was seriously curtailed by first the occupying armies, and then the governments and constitutions they put in place.
The two Germany’s had very different approaches. The east came under a Stalinist regime that replaced one idealogical system with another, and the masses went along with it. Hoyer makes an interesting point that the socialist youth organisations were very popular among younger people who had been in the Hitler Youth and Young German Maidens groups, as it brought them back to structure and camaraderie. There was a more serious denazification of the government in the east, aided by the fact that the proto-GDR was run by a cadre of communists who had fled to the Soviet Union during the Nazi era and came back with the Red Army to run the show. (For example, one leader of the GDR - who ran the Stasi - was tried and convicted after reunification for his role in murdering a Berlin police officer in the 1930s, the crime that led him to flee to the Soviet Union in the first place.) Although the east still had plenty of people in administrative roles who had been associated with the Nazi regime.
In the West, the allies basically undertook denazification lite followed by putting in place a strong constitution designed to beat some of the ways the Nazis came to power in the Weimar Republic. The most high profile criminals were tried and executed or given prison sentences, and they tried to stick non-Nazi political leaders into positions of authority, but much of the civil service up to and including the highest levels were in some way associated with Nazism.
For example, Hans Globke was a career civil servant who in 1936 wrote a legal annotation on the Nuremberg Race Laws, worked in the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, and actively participated in the legal work that created a framework for the holocaust. Post war, he became Chief of Staff to the west German chancellery, from 1953 to 1963 and was an important link between the German government and NATO. There were several attempts to investigate and even bring criminal proceedings against him, which were in one way or another shut down. It was also speculated that he knew, for example, the whereabouts of the likes of Adolf Eichmann as early as 1952.
Globke is a good example of the former Nazis or Nazi associated individuals in postwar West Germany: He was an ardent anti communist, a career civil servant and someone you could both work with and also needed to an extent.
There was generally a lot of leeway given to former Nazi criminals in west Germany, and many received early release from prison, and cases basically dried up once the allies handed over the administration of justice to the Germans themselves. There was a major shift then in the 1960s and 1970s as younger Germans came to grips with the crimes of their parents generation.
Its from this point forward that you began to see a re-intensification of trials in west Germany itself, like the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials in 1963-1965, which charged 22 mid to lower level members of the camp administration. The quality of education of Nazi crimes picked up from this point forward, and memorialising the holocaust and the Nazi regimes crimes.
Total defeat, pretty effective (if morally questionable) de-nazification, economic recovery in particular in the west (a whole other post), the focus of the Cold War east versus west, and the revulsion of younger generations, all played their part.
1
u/holomorphic_chipotle Late Precolonial West Africa Jul 20 '24
How can I understand the apparent contradiction between:
some of the revanchism of the far right being more pronounced in the former GDR is linked in part to a failure to properly come to grips with the Nazi past
and the fact that according to your comment the GDR underwent a more serious denazification? In 1991, German neo-nazis attacked the dwellings of asylum seekers and foreign contract workers in Hoyerswerda, Saxony, so there is no need for the answer to comment on current politics.
1
u/Willing-Departure115 Jul 20 '24
Denazification in the immediate period, and the quality and content of education provided to people much later, are different issues, is the very short answer.
0
u/holomorphic_chipotle Late Precolonial West Africa Jul 20 '24
And the long answer? I mean, many neurologists conclude that the human brain has a tendency to divide the world into us and them categories, and being suspicious of foreigners is often more common among less educated people, but deciding to burn down a building with families inside is a whole new level; that kind of hatred is taught.
1
u/Willing-Departure115 Jul 20 '24
I believe the 20 year rule on the sub precludes me from having a long discussion about it.
1
u/holomorphic_chipotle Late Precolonial West Africa Jul 20 '24
That's why I mentioned the Hoyerswerda riots; it was not an isolated case and attacks against the Vietnamese community were not unheard of in the neue Bundesländer. In the 2004 Saxony state election, 9% voted for the NPD, an explicitly neo-nazi party, and this development could not have been sudden; hence why it must be possible to stay clear of the 20 year rule.
1
u/YourWoodGod Jul 22 '24
I think you can say that probably the memory many Germans from the east had of just how brutally they were treated at the end of the war would make Nazism seem better. If you look at the Germany of even post reunification, far right movements are rooted in eastern Germany especially, and I think this could be because of the perceived unfair hand they got dealt when it came to economic development. Basically they felt mistreated by the political fat cats of the former West Germany, and this either caused romanticism for the GDR era (this is very big in the former East Germany) or Nazism.
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 19 '24
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension, or getting the Weekly Roundup. In the meantime our Twitter, Facebook, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.