Exorcising Hitler : The Occupation and Denazification of Germany
By Frederick Taylor. 438 pp. Bloomsbury Press, 2011. $30.
The swift fall of Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s Baathist Party in the spring of 2003 sparked a flurry of interest in the Allied occupation and reconstruction of Germany after World War II. After the collapse of Saddam’s quasi-fascist, oppressive regime, the denazification of postwar Germany and its economic and military reintegration with the West seemed an alluring precedent. The failure of de-Baathification, combined with a deadly insurgency and ongoing instability, revealed the hollowness of the comparison. The status Germany enjoys in the 21st century—a prosperous, peaceful, and enlightened democracy, which has squarely confronted its Nazi past—tends to obscure just how difficult it was to get there. What now seems to have been so easy to accomplish in Germany turned out to be unattainable in Iraq.
British historian Frederick Taylor, author of a superb study of the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, examines the complex story of how the victorious Allied powers—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—approached the task of dealing with defeated Germany, its population, and its future. He employs a combination of sweeping narrative, illuminating anecdotes, and thoughtful perspectives in spinning a fascinating tale.
This is an ambitious book. Although the main narrative focuses on the years 1945–1947, Taylor takes us back into the war years, as Nazi Germany’s leaders confronted the possibility of defeat. He examines the desperate Werwolf movement, designed to create legions of bitter-end fanatics in areas overrun by the Allies. Aside from the assassination of the American-backed mayor of Aachen in March 1945, these groups achieved little. Here also are the debates among Allied policymakers, which pitted supporters of the harsh Morgenthau Plan to “deindustrialize” Germany against those favoring a more pragmatic treatment of the defeated nation. Out of this came a general policy of the five Ds: demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decentralization, and decartelization.
Sometimes the book’s broad scope works against it. Inevitably, Taylor must skate lightly over issues that have themselves merited entire books—the displaced persons problem, the behavior of Soviet forces on German soil, the fate of German women, and the larger debate over German civilians’ status as victims. Sometimes his judgments seem a bit glib. For example, he gives short shrift to the Nuremberg trials, arguing that they were far from serving as a salutary “teaching moment” for civilization, and instead unfolded as a dull spectacle that meant little to the average German—like a boring antitrust case.
In most cases, however, his verdicts are on target: the harsh conditions endured by German POWs in American custody were the result of bad planning and overwhelmed officials, not deliberate and vengeful policy. He explains the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in approaches used by the four powers. While condemning Soviet (and occasionally French) brutality toward Germans, he notes that Nazi behavior in those countries had been far worse. German civilians suffered from malnutrition (the chapter dealing with hunger is one of the most powerful in Taylor’s book), though this was nothing like the Nazi program of planned starvation for their occupied territories.
That said, this book is strongest in its coverage of how policies were implemented. It is, ultimately, a very human story. Soldiers of occupying armies, themselves often victims of Nazi brutality, confronted their complex feelings toward defeated German civilians. Denazification officials attempted to determine who was a war criminal, an opportunistic Nazi “joiner,” or something in between. Anti-Semitism flourished among some Allied occupation officials (including General George S. Patton). Organizers of the Cooperative of American Remittances of Europe, later famous for its CARE packages, balanced charitable impulses with domestic unwillingness to feed the former enemy. Sometimes denazification backfired: the removal of knowledgeable bureaucrats, administrators, and technicians with Nazi pasts led to inefficiency and, in one extreme case, possibly the worst mine disaster in German history.
As American planners in Iraq found, to their chagrin, there is no magic formula for occupation and reform. Even the remaking of Germany was marred by compromise, hypocrisy, atrocities, and inter-Allied clashes. Allied troops remained on German soil for decades, and the war’s end spawned the lengthy Cold War. The journey from “Zero Hour” to today’s Germany was a lengthy one. Historians and policymakers, take note.
Originally published in the April 2012 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
