A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
am Main, 1959, August 31, 1962, 148, quoted in DGR, “White Supermen,” December 21, 1962, 211.) And so on, ad nauseam, while corporal punishment was only outlawed slowly, state by state, and is still allowed in Bavaria.
IN EAST GERMANY 20,000 Nazi teachers, the overwhelming majority, were dismissed for good. The huge gap was gradually filled, usually after brief courses, by so-called “New Teachers.” Two of my brothers-in-law were among them; one told me with a laugh how he had been signed on as sports teacher because he was an avid soccer player. Before long Geography, then Science, were piled on, with him hardly a week or two ahead of his pupils. Not ideal, but these “New Teachers,” highly dedicated and strongly anti-fascist, remained a basic positive feature in GDR schools. And corporal punishment was strictly forbidden from the start.
In a later section, I will discuss various other aspects and some problems in the GDR schools.
12—Judges, Police, and Gehlen
Democratic German Report let it be widely known that 800 to 1,000 West German judges and prosecutors had once judged or prosecuted for the Nazis, often insisting on death sentences for listening to the BBC, casting doubt on final victory, or helping a fleeing Jew. In 1962, in one ironic episode, the government tried to outlaw the Victims of Nazi Persecution Association (VVN) as a Communist-front organization. The trial had hardly begun when the defense noted that all three presiding judges had been in the SS, the Nazi Party, the stormtroopers, or the Gestapo. The trial was quickly abandoned but led to the discovery that out of forty-nine judges in this third-highest West German court forty had similar backgrounds.
The New Statesman of London remarked, December 7, 1962: “Surely if Dr. Adenauer wants to punish the representatives of those who suffered in the concentration camps he can find somewhere in his Reich one single judge to try their guilt who has not himself been a Nazi.”
Years later, Der Spiegel noted: “In 1953 at least 72% of all Federal Supreme Court judges, Germany’s highest court for criminal and civil law, had had Nazi connections. By 1962, in the criminal division, it reached 80%…. Except for two military court martial chairmen … not a single judge in the Federal Republic has ever been convicted of perversion of justice.”
It was as bad or worse with the police. Der Spiegel noted: “Hardly anyone in law enforcement was untainted by a Nazi past.” The historian Jan Kiepe found that “especially the leadership of the postwar West German police consisted of men who had been active in the police system of the Third Reich and supported its criminal system.” (Beste, Ralf, Bönisch et al., “The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany,” trans. Christopher Sultan, Spiegel Online, March 6, 2012.)
AND HOW WAS it on my side? In East German courtrooms, 80 or 90 percent of all judges, prosecutors and other officials had been Nazi Party members. In 1945, they lost their jobs. To fill the wide gap, schools for judges were set up by December 1945, with thirty to forty students in each province taking six- to eight-month courses, then by 1947 a year-long course. Most were blue- or white-collar workers; at the factory where I worked in 1953 I heard loudspeaker calls for anyone interested to apply for such a school. Becoming a judge was more complicated than becoming a teacher. The university law schools, still conservative, demanded that a proper law degree must remain a requirement, but the new leaders, with the Soviets, overruled them. A number of these young judges were too severe, not only toward Nazis but also toward opponents of the new system, especially in the early years. Close ties with the legal system of the Soviet occupation force led to some tragic results. But there was always a sharp contrast with West German courts, which were run by ex-Nazis who handed down sentences based on thought patterns and even laws of Hitler Germany.
It was similar with the police. Happily, I had little contact with cops except when I had to renew a police stamp on my foreigner’s ID, and later get visas for travel outside the GDR. But, as I learned, police staff had also been cleansed of Nazis. On a lecture tour, I visited a school for police trainees and recall big mural portraits on the two dormitories, artistically amateurish but for me symbolic: the Russian poet Pushkin, partly of African descent, and the German-Jewish Heinrich Heine, whose books were banned by Hitler.
One interesting effect of the change was that, aside from severity in political matters, the number of convictions for felonies decreased from half a million in 1946 to 230,000 in 1950, in part due to settling down after the war, but this was also a sign that both “new cops” and “new judges” were somehow different.
REINHARD GEHLEN WAS a special case. As Hitler’s head of German Arms East, the boss of military espionage against Soviet forces, he obeyed Wehrmacht orders: “All leniency or humanity toward prisoners of war is strictly condemned.” He obtained much of his information by means of torture and hunger; up to three million or more Soviet prisoners of war died of planned starvation. Although a major war criminal, Gehlen used his mass of facts on the Red Army to buy his way free from punishment and was flown to Washington in May 1945 with his filmed notes and six of his Nazi staff to help a newly forming CIA build up an espionage force for a future conflict. Then this mystery man, who wore his dark glasses indoors and outdoors, set up his “Organisation Gehlen” in a walled complex near Munich. President Truman allegedly said: “I don’t care if he screws goats. As long as he helps us we’ll use him.”
In 1956, his unit metamorphosed into the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, the Federal Intelligence Service), a kid sister of the CIA. Gehlen hired men from the Gestapo and Heinrich Himmler’s security service, such as Konrad Fiebig, whose death squad murdered 11,000 Jews in Belarus. When word about good jobs got around, countless thugs of this type were hired but kept out of any spotlight. One British newspaper called them “the Gestapo boys,” but most politicians agreed with Truman. As CIA official Harry Rositzke said about Gehlen: “It was absolutely necessary to use every son of a bitch. The main thing—he was an anti-Communist.” Gehlen replied to any criticism of his hiring practices by pointing out that, in percentage terms, he employed fewer such men “than most cabinet ministries.” His BND also spied (illegally) on “undesirable anti-militarists and leftists” inside Germany. (Joseph C. Goulden, The Dictionary of Espionage: Spyspeak into English, Mineola, NY: Dover, 89–90.)
13—Dr. Hans Globke
The man who secretly arranged for Gehlen’s organization to become the BND was Dr. Hans Globke. A Roman Catholic, he did not join the Nazi Party but supported it even before it gained power, as in his official note to the police: “Efforts by Jews … to alter their names cannot be supported. The fact that they became Christians is no reason for a name change and the argument that this is because of anti-Semitic tendencies … cannot be accepted.” An ambitious legal expert, when Hitler took over he climbed the career ladder to a top job in the Interior Ministry.
Globke co-authored the official legal commentary about degrees of “Jewishness,” based on one’s grandparents, later a question of life or death. In 1935, to “protect the racially homogenous German people from alien blood,” he helped frame laws severely punishing sex or marriage between Jews and Aryans. In 1937, he detailed a law requiring a red “J” on the passports of Jews, hindering escape at Swiss or other borders. In 1939, he helped with a law requiring those with “un-Jewish” given names to add “Israel” or “Sara” as a middle name, visible on house doors, making it easier to find Jews when transports to the annihilation camps began. Globke helped extend these rules to Austria after German occupation, to Czech areas in 1938 and 1939, and in 1941 to Slovakia, a Nazi vassal state. Its Jews were soon on the freight trains to Auschwitz.
After the war, Globke, claiming earlier contacts with anti-Nazi Catholics, was soon cleared. Konrad Adenauer hired him, naming him state secretary (deputy minister) in 1953. During their garden strolls, Globke helped plan strategy, acted as contact man with Bundestag allies, decided who could meet the boss, and oversaw the Party treasury. Above all, he managed appointments of key men and watched over their loyalty. Globke, as the conservative Die Welt noted, “controls the complete personnel policy of the republic and … is in command of the secret service.” This made him “the second most powerful man in the country.” Only a few Social Democrats voiced mild disapproval. Maybe, like J. Edgar Hoover, he kept files on politicians’ dirty pasts, especially their dirty