Exorcising Hitler Read Online Free PDF Page A

often unfair questions of their elders, as there was in West Germany. East Germany claimed to have solved the national problem through communism, but in fact, after 1989, the bacillus of Nazism was found to have survived in far more virulent forms in the so-called ‘German Democratic Republic’ than in its capitalist-democratic competitor state. It is in the East that the neo-Nazis have most of their electoral strongholds, and where, in certain vulnerable towns and cities, they can seriously affect their fellow citizens’ quality of life.
    In modern Germany, there is much talk about what was bad in the past, but at the same time there is also increasing debate about the suffering of Germans in the twentieth century, whether in the bombing of the country’s cities during the Second World War, or in the forced expulsion of millions from ancestral German territories, or under the sometimes harsh, vengeful and often plain incompetent interregnum of the Allied victors that followed defeat. So Jörg Friedrich’s passionate, tendentious 2003 account of wartime bombing, Der Brand (The Fire), for all its flaws, unleashed a cleansing national debate about German victimhood. So, likewise, bestselling works about the brutal ‘population transfer’ from the eastern provinces, most prominently Andreas Kossert’s Kalte Heimat (Cold Homeland, 2008), have made this other facet of German suffering the subject for rational debate rather than simple accusation.
    So far as this book’s core subject matter is concerned, post-war and denazification history have become quite fashionable – particularly since reunification opened the East German archives – enabling scholars to take a more variegated and nuanced view of what was achieved (or not achieved) in freeing Germany from the shadow of Nazism.
    Writers in the former Allied countries, especially Britain and America, have also – in part encouraged by a new flourishing of ‘occupation studies’ in the wake of the Afghan and Iraq wars – taken a long, hard look at what the Allied occupation of Germany actually involved. Books such as Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich have taken an aggressively forensic line, rightly detailing the failures and brutalities, but often failing to explore the unspeakable Nazi occupation policies during the previous six years that helped cause the Allied powers and their individual representatives (down to the most humble, frightened, sometimes angry soldier) to behave as vengefully as they did. More balanced treatments, such as Perry Biddiscombe’s indispensable The Denazification of Germany (interestingly informed by his earlier work on the Nazi Werwolf resistance movement and its offshoots), have, inevitably, also been able to devote limited space to examining the roots and the consequences of the process.
    What is clear from important work such as Biddiscombe’s is that Germany’s experience between 1944 and 1949, roughly the period of post-war denazification, was neither straightforward nor complete. The beginnings of Germany’s journey back to international respectability and prosperity, and eventually even to moral wellbeing – in short, to what passes among the community of nations for normality – were halting, compromised, sometimes brave and noble, sometimes forced or self-serving, and mostly no more than just that: beginnings.
    Like all such human progressions, Germany’s was both aided and hindered by external and chance forces. History was still working away in the background, enigmatic and almost inconceivably complex, even while victors and vanquished alike struggled to find some way of making sense of what had happened and was continuing to happen. These had been truly terrible years and, even with the advent of peace, the misery was by no means over. Many of the things that subsequently happened to all involved were much worse than they had hoped, while others were, especially in the end, much better than expected.
    The story of