Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (review)

Norbert Frei's excellent book Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (1996) is finally available in English. The title of the translation, however, is perhaps misleading. While two-thirds of the book do indeed deal with the politics of amnesty and integration, the last third deals with the process whereby West Germany established norms that clearly divided this new state from its Nazi predecessor. The term "Vergangenheitspolitik" is thus three-pronged, not two-pronged.

One must admire the translator, Joel Golb, for rendering Frei's syntactically convoluted style in English. It is unfortunate, however, that Golb adds to Frei's already rather rhetorical prose an elaborateness and literary playfulness of his own. At one point, where Frei uses the impersonal pronoun "man" to refer to the West German churches, Golb replaces it with the overly poetic "churchly shepherds" (p. 125). More serious are the small, but irritating mistakes. May 8, 1945, a key date, is rendered as May 5 (p. 42). Golb's translation states that half the mandates in the Parliamentary Council were held by civil servants (p. 42), whereas the number, according to Frei's original, was more than half (Vergangenheitspolitik, p. 69). Not infrequently, I found it so difficult to follow the translation that I had to refer back to the German, not least because Golb's handling of the legal and political terminology is given to vagueness. All the same, I hope that this translation will reach a large number of readers.

What makes Frei's book important is his introduction of the concept of Vergangenheitspolitik into discourse on the handling of the Nazi past in West Germany. The disadvantage of the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung is that it measures responses to the past in terms of what was or should have been done to face it. There is little doubt that not much was done between 1945 and 1955 (the period studied by Frei) to face the crimes committed under Nazism. But focusing on sins of omission has tended to obscure what the West Germans actually were doing, and very systematically, too: namely beavering away to amnesty former Nazis, reverse Allied-led denazification rulings, reinstate members of the civil service despite their collaboration under Hitler and—last but certainly not least—secure the release of war criminals held in Allied prisons.

Frei begins the first section of his study with a consideration of the two amnesty laws. The first law (1951) benefited those who had committed crimes for which they would have incurred sentences of up to six months in prison or a twelve- month suspended sentence. While most of the 800,000 people who profited from the 1951 amnesty had committed crimes in the confusion of the postwar period, this number also included tens of thousands of Nazi perpetrators as well as the "illegals" who had changed their names after the war—often to escape prosecution for crimes. The second amnesty law (1954) contained a number of clauses that led to the amnestying of Nazi criminals and effectively annulled the rulings of the Spruchgerichte (British denazification proceedings), which had imposed sanctions on former members of those Nazi organizations declared criminal at Nuremberg. In the event, the vast majority of the 400,000 who benefited from the law were not Nazi criminals. But Frei stresses that the consequences of the law were serious, because it helped erode the sense of the need to investigate and prosecute Nazi crime. The number of new legal investigations into such crime dropped to a record low of 183 in 1954, starting to climb again significantly only in the late 1950s.

Frei discusses recommendations to terminate denazification passed by the West German parliament in 1950, according to which those classified in categories III (lesser offenders) and IV (fellow travelers) were rehabilitated and amnestied. The most detailed and disturbing part of this section of the book is the...