A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
team saw Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and enjoyed Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Beaver Coat. When were you last at the theater? When are you going again?” With the GDR’s demise this modern complex was split up and sold to five short-lived private firms. Little but empty ruins remain. (Allen Mann [VG], “A Krupp Factory Under Socialism,” DGR, October 14, 1960, 166–67)
9—Nazis and Anti-Nazis
A major aim of DGR was to expose former Nazis still in leadership in West Germany, where the major parties eloquently praised democracy and free elections so long as all those taking part had basically similar goals. But one with very different goals, the Communist Party, was forbidden in 1956, its publications shut down and its leaders arrested. A second rule, quickly learned, was that entrée into the Western community of nations could be achieved by paying compensation to Jewish survivors (if in the West) and, after its birth, paying restitution to Israel and suppressing any and all criticism of its policies. Behind this libertarian “rebirth” and its “economic miracle,” I found that the praise of West Germany for turning over a new leaf was based on well-packaged lies.
Many in the West hated fascism and wanted to create a better Germany. Some U.S. and British officers who themselves fought the Nazis were able to get some of the biggest and worst hanged or locked up, and General Dwight Eisenhower declared shortly after war’s end that National Socialists were nowhere “indispensable.” But many were mysteriously spirited away to South America or Washington, and before long U.S. and British policy was altered. By 1947, with the Soviets no longer seen as allies but as foes, German industrial know-how and military skills were very desirable. In what was called “de-Nazification,” those investigated sought good buddies who testified, perhaps in expectation of return assistance, that they had simply been oh-so-unwilling cogs in all the repression and mass murder and had on one occasion actually helped some Jewish friend or family to get away, or at least expressed a desire to do so. Only a very few unlucky leopards with too many guilty spots, or too few buddies, lost jobs or spent a couple of easy years in prison before being amnestied, to resume their hunt for prey.
A great help in climbing back up was an addendum to Article 131, passed unanimously by the first Bundestag in 1951, which permitted, indeed required, government institutions to fill at least 20 percent of their staffs with people employed there before May 1945, no lower than in their former rank, and excluding only a few who were officially ruled guilty. Full pensions were guaranteed to retirees. For several hundred thousand that meant it was back again to their former elevated status. (Timothy Scott Brown, “West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978,” in Basic Law. i.e. Grundgesetz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 93.)
10—Diplomats
Our eight-page Democratic German Report, to help spoil their return, put facts from GDR research sources into good English and mailed them to all British Labour MPs and many journalists. In 1962 we had our biggest coup, headlined “THE PLAGUE.” (DGR, January 19, 1962, 17–21; March 16, 1962, 20; April 13, 1962, 76; and May 11, 1962, 87.) On a world map we placed a swastika on every country where the West German ambassador had belonged to the Nazi Party. Over fifty were splattered from Santiago to Stockholm, from Washington to Wellington. We added membership numbers and a few details: in 1943 Dr. Ernst-Günther Mohr, then legation counselor, boasted to Berlin that “after 11 months the de-Judification of the Netherlands is almost three-quarters completed.” In 1962 he was ambassador to Switzerland. Our story, often with the map, was picked up in twenty countries, but in West Germany not for two months. Then Der Spiegel finally risked a brief mention, and was promptly, angrily accused by the influential paper Christ und Welt of repeating propaganda from an “obscure and clumsy propaganda sheet,” Peet noted maliciously that neither publication denied a single one of the facts and that the editor of Christ und Welt had himself been a leading Nazi propagandist and SS captain. Dr. Mohr was soon removed, then sent as ambassador to safely fascistic Argentina. (“Berlin Notebook,” DGR, April 13, 1962, 76.)
The West German government tried to respond to jabs and attacks, mostly from Britain, often thanks to facts from our Democratic German Report. They insisted that there were no alternatives and that the GDR leadership was also loaded with Nazis. Bonn’s media connections guaranteed this campaign no little success, above all in the United States, where many accepted West Germany’s voluble regret for past sins and its assertions that East Germany had no regrets for them.
UNTIL THE MID-1970s, thanks to Bonn’s pressure, the GDR was recognized by few countries outside the Eastern Bloc and thus needed few ambassadors. But who were they?
The first GDR ambassador to Poland, with the delicate task of breaking political ice and anti-German feelings, was the famous author and medical doctor Friedrich Wolf, whose taboo-breaking play and film Zyankali (Cyanide), a moving appeal for abortion rights, had shaken up pre-Hitler Germany. Wolf, a Jewish anti-Nazi, had to flee in 1933. His Professor Mamlock, perhaps the first major work about what was to become the Holocaust, premiered in 1934 at Warsaw’s Yiddish Art Theater, then in Tel Aviv, New York, Moscow, and around the non-fascist world. It was filmed in the USSR in 1938 and again in 1961 in the GDR (directed by his son Konrad Wolf).
His successor in Warsaw was Stefan Heymann, who survived Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. As the political situation in Poland grew stormier he was followed by Josef Hegen, known as a hard-liner, perhaps as a result of his past. After fleeing to the USSR and working as a machinist until the war, he parachuted behind Nazi lines, fought as a partisan in Poland till he was captured and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp.
An ambassador to North Vietnam was Eduard Claudius. A mason by trade and active union leader, later a writer, he fled the Nazis and was one of the first to volunteer in Spain. He was wounded, then interned in France and Switzerland where Hermann Hesse helped save him from deportation to Germany. When released, he joined the Garibaldi partisans fighting the Nazis in Italy and later became a popular author in the GDR and, briefly, a diplomat.
Almost all those first ambassadors had been Communists-in-exile, fought in Spain or the Resistance, or been imprisoned. One spent seven years in solitary confinement. Another was one of the “peat bog soldiers” made famous by the great song. One man was beaten so viciously by stormtroopers that he lost an eye. Most were of working-class origin; they had to learn on the job to be diplomats. Not one had been in the fascist Foreign Service. Adenauer once replied to criticism on his appointments: “One cannot build up a Foreign Ministry without giving leading positions to persons with past experience.” The obvious question is: Okay, but what kind of experience? (Hennig Köhler, Adenauer: Politische Biographie, Berlin: Propyläen, 1994, 971–74.)
11—School Days
Schools were even more important than diplomats, and Hitler had paid great attention to them. Most teachers were in the Nazi Party. Renate shuddered at any thought of their brutally sadistic ways.
The French and British armies in West Germany showed relatively little interest in the matter. The Americans did; things were at first tough in the U.S. Zone: 11,310 Nazi-era teachers were dismissed. Then came the big anti-Soviet emphasis and resultant appeasement. In Bavaria, for example, 1,800 fired teachers had been pensioned off or had moved away or died. But 8,820 were back in their schoolrooms by 1951, using textbooks that often skirted any analysis or rejection of the Nazi era. The main labor union newspaper, examining West German schoolbooks in 1960, wrote: “There are even history books which deal with the persecution of the Jews in only one line. The average lies between 8 lines and 15 lines.” (Welt der Arbeit No. 9, 1960, quoted in DGR Notebook, August 31, 1960, 148.)
Some West German schoolbooks offered sentences like these on racism: “Here is what you must know about Africa: European settlers and plantations opened up the continent…. European missionaries tamed the wild Negroes, brought them the great message of Christ’s Kingdom and taught them Christian neighborliness.” (Erdkunde, vol. 2, Ansbach: Prägel Verlag, 1959, quoted in DGR, “White Supermen,” December 21, 1962, 211.) Or: “For centuries the habits and customs of the inhabitants of the West African jungle have been preserved: they have only become somewhat milder with the passage of time. The cruelties that