Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain

1. Denazification, Neutrality, and European Security after World War II

11 1 denazification, neutrality, and european security after world war ii On September 10, 1945, in Berlin the occupying powers in Germany —France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States—acting as the Allied Control Council (ACC), passed a resolution ordering all Germans who had been officials or intelligence agents of the previous Nazi regime and now found themselves in territories that had been neutral during the war to return to Germany . Furthermore, the ACC requested that the governments in states where such Germans were living deport them to territory under the control of the ACC. By September 22 the ACC’s Directorate of Prisoners of War and Displaced Persons had been given authority to implement this resolution, and it in turn created the Combined Repatriation Executive to act inside occupied Germany and through the embassies of the ACC states in the targeted countries: Afghanistan , Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the international city of Tangiers, and Vatican City. Both the broader ACC policy on obnoxious Germans and its application to Spain had longer histories than a simple housekeeping of postwar issues. Concern about obnoxious Germans grew out of two distinct policies that developed as the war came to a close in Europe. The first of these was denazification, including how to deal with both Nazi war criminals and those who were not technically war criminals but of concern nonetheless. The second was a policy on how to deal with neutral states that, by their actions in a Nazi-dominated continent , had significantly challenged prewar ideas about neutrality and thus bore new responsibility for actions that, while technically neutral, had in practical ways benefited a genocidal regime. Denazification, as defined by Perry Biddiscombe, refers to “the full range of Allied/Soviet reform and punishment measures in oc- Hunting Nazis in Franco’s Spain 12 cupied Germany,” but most often it is used with reference to “the specific liquidation of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) and the elimination of its influence” in government and business. That is the sense in which the term is used here. This more specific meaning grew out of Allied discussions of war crimes and the potential for trials of accused war criminals. The need to prosecute war crimes as an important part of the postwar settlement began in Moscow in October 1943, when three of the Allied powers, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States, met. The Moscow declaration that came out of this meeting stated that war criminals who had committed offenses that crossed national boundaries required some form of Allied trial, as opposed to a national trial. Before long this broad definition had to be made into policy that could be carried out inside occupied Germany. In Washington in 1944, as Frank M. Buscher has emphasized, the debate over the German occupation focused on the role punishment would play. The State Department linked punishment with broader democratization efforts and saw trials as essential; the War Department emphasized the practical need for a short occupation of Germany; and the Treasury Department, led by Henry Morgenthau Jr., proposed harsh terms, including deindustrialization, which eventually became the centerpiece of the Morgenthau Plan. For Morgenthau, trials were not needed for the Nazi leadership, who simply should be shot. A move to remake Germany as a pastoral, deindustrialized country would follow. Morgenthau’s ideas, however, were not entirely embraced. Many others argued for an extensive campaign of reeducation. The emphasis on war-crimes trials developed as part of the plan to reeducate Germans through the use of the justice system. In thinking about trials, however, it soon became clear that the mechanisms of justice also needed to take into account those Nazis who did not technically fit into the category of war criminals defined at Moscow but who nonetheless posed a significant threat to the security of occupying forces and could conceivably be charged with other criminal offenses based on their activities during the war. 13 Denazification, Neutrality, and European Security after World War II An understanding of the situation of other Nazi criminals emerged simultaneously in a number of places. In January 1945 a registry of suspected war criminals, the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS), was created. Based in Paris, this unit soon developed three lists, one for those detained on specific war...