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  • The Respectable Career of Fritz K: The Making and Remaking of a Provincial Nazi Leader by Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh
  • Peter Gengler
Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh; translated by Casey Butterfield. The Respectable Career of Fritz K: The Making and Remaking of a Provincial Nazi Leader. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. xv + 360 pp. ISBN 978-1-78238-593-6, $120.00 (cloth).

With their biography of the Nazi functionary Fritz Kiehn, historians Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh have delivered a formidable study. The product of a decade and a half of research, the work appeared in Germany in 2000, where it unleashed an emotional public debate in the town of Trossingen, Kiehn’s hometown, as inhabitants grappled with the legacy of this honored citizen and the Third Reich. Incorporating this furor into their English edition, Berghoff and Rauh not only provide an astute examination of the biographical continuities and interruptions of a Nazi at the local level, but also how that history continues to reverberate. [End Page 701]

To make their case, the authors’ interdisciplinary approach examines the links between Kiehn and small-town life, regional and national politics, and how history is remembered. Relying on sources from nearly two dozen archives and materials of the Kiehn family, the book is divided along the caesura of 1945. The first portion focuses on Kiehn’s meteoric rise in Trossingen, his early activism and support of Nazism, and his emergence as the “leader of the Württemberg economy” (p. 47). The second half covers the postwar era, including Kiehn’s successful denazification and reemergence as an honored citizen of the community.

Contending with the complexities and motivations of Kiehn is a recurring theme of the book. His intense obsession with social advancement combined with a high tolerance for risk guaranteed economic success in his manufacturing business. Early enthusiastic support of the Nazi Party also paid off, though his corruption and aggressive striving irritated party and local elites, who saw him as a vainglorious parvenu. Nevertheless, Kiehn possessed enough contacts, including Heinrich Himmler, so that he obtained numerous offices and expanded his business through Aryanization and state contracts. Nazism advanced Kiehn financially and politically, though his influence remained regional and even limited to Trossingen.

After 1945 Kiehn faced a number of denazification and legal trials that threatened his standing, and the community of Trossingen briefly saw him as a scapegoat for the disastrous defeat and ensuing hardship. However, the 1950s societal consensus to shroud the Third Reich in silence allowed Kiehn to reemerge as a pillar of the community. Through philanthropy and a shrewd reinvention as a victim of the war and a Nazi activist who wanted only to help “the little man,” Kiehn ensured that his legacy remained largely intact to this day.

Overall, Berghoff and Rauh argue that Kiehn’s evolution from “old fighter” to honored citizen reflects the social and political history of the Federal Republic of Germany. It reveals how some found their way to National Socialism and the movement’s dynamics within a small community. Moreover, Kiehn’s postwar biography demonstrates how Germany was able to transform itself into a Western liberal civil society, at the expense of papering over its dictatorial past.

The authoritative mobilization and judicious analysis of the sources capture all of Kiehn’s paradoxes and contradictions, providing an impressively nuanced investigation of a German industrialist from the collapse of the German Empire to the late Bonn Republic. The careful treatment grants insights into the mentalities of that generation: why they were animated by the promise and opportunities of National Socialism, and how they reinvented themselves after 1945. It is an astute study of what “normal life” looked like in a German town throughout [End Page 702] the twentieth century. Rapacious and unscrupulous opportunism and outright criminality are portrayed side-by-side with generosity and magnanimity. The authors construct a complex portrait that perfectly captures ambivalences, as it should be with a historical examination of what made an “ordinary” Nazi. Readers seeking to understand why Germans could support Hitler only to seamlessly integrate in the postwar period will be well served to ponder the motivations of Kiehn.

The thoughtful analysis and...

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