The problem of neutralizing National Socialism in post-1945 Germany arose early in the reconstruction period while high-echelon Nazi leaders were being brought to their ultimate trial. Reduced to its basic premise, it was a matter of reeducating Germans. In the American, British, and French zones of occupation this lengthy and tortuous process took place as one of mutual interaction between what was called "denazification" and political instruction in the widest sense, including that in schools and universities. Extensions of National Socialism in occupied and later sovereign Germany, or, depending on one's point of view, the rebirth of new Nazisms ("renazification") hence may be regarded as functions of this simple interactive process: To the extent that denazification and instruction were successful, neo-Nazism was doomed to failure; to the extent that they foundered, neo-Nazism was granted a fighting chance.
Formally speaking, the denazification of German society got under way with the trial of top-flight Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. Today most critics agree that from the start too many things went wrong with this complicated series of court-martials to restore confidence in democratic government and, for that matter, the principles of law. With the object of destroying "German militarism and Nazism," the three victorious Allies had decided during the Yalta Conference in February 1945, at the latest, to "bring all war criminals to justice and swift punishment ... wipe out the Nazi party, Nazi laws, organisations and institutions."1 Through the summer and until the fan of that year, the Allies reiterated these objectives, and in the following months they determined five categories of responsibility for the purpose of trying Nazis in special courts. Only people belonging to the first category, "Major Offenders," were arraigned on the benches of Nuremberg for the most publicized of the trials.2 Twenty-two leading Nazis were accused, one in absentia; when judgment was pronounced on 30 September 1946, only three were acquitted.3
As revealed by contemporary public opinion surveys, the great majority of Germans at the time felt that the top Nazi defendants were guilty and that they were fairly and justly dealt with. But a vocal minority charged the Nuremberg judges with judicial one-sidedness. The vanquished had been tried by the victors with no Germans or even neutrals represented in the corona of justices, and "war crimes" committed by the Allies had gone totally unheeded.4
In view of a potential resurgence of Nazism there were far-reaching implications of such feelings. On the one hand, because the trials had been arranged as an Allied monopoly, Germans could henceforth be encouraged to think that Nazism-and its extirpation-was not an indigenous German problem. With German politicians deferring to the Allied Occupation Powers in the years ahead, little care would be taken to police the inner ranks and to be on the lookout for signs of lingering, or indeed new, manifestations of Nazism. On the other hand, the Nuremberg proceedings tended to give rise to cynicism among those Germans who saw one noxious pattern of governance being replaced by another. If the judges themselves were not exemplars of a universal morality, then the indictment of former Nazi leaders was a sham. Stretching this formula somewhat further, one could argue that the Nazi leaders were victims of a travesty of justice and hence largely exonerated. Protest reactions such as this one could certainly clear the path for new forms of German fascism.5
Below the level of the Nuremberg Trials, including subsequent proceedings against criminally responsible special groups such as Nazi physicians, regional and local denazification measures were enacted to ferret out and neutralize lesser Nazis, while at the same time safeguarding a machinery of German internal government and administration that exceeded the immediate purview of the Allied Military Governments.6 Two observations may be made from the vantage point of moral and political reeducation. First, it was the intention of the victors that "denazification" designed as a great cleansing process, would have a salutary effect on the public attitudes of Germans of all walks of life, especially those who were now ensconced in one office or another: bad Nazis were portrayed as bogeymen whose horrible example was never again to be followed. Second, "denazification" itself was to assist in the implementation of novel educational routines, be elevating to positions of authority democratically minded Germans who would act as well-motivated preceptors.7
However, the way in which denazification developed over time not only made a mockery of justice but also, in the end, defeated any broader educational purposes. Although this study is not the place to repeat the oft told details of denazification in the Western zones, several of its more blatant failings should be recapitulated, particularly as they bear on matters of collective mental reconditioning.
In the first place, there were no set criteria as to who qualified as a bona fide Nazi and who did not, and, if a person came under suspicion, which of the four "guilty" categories he or she should be assigned to.8 There were numerous anomalies. At one extreme stood convinced Nazis who had never joined any of the indictable organizations, and at the other there were card- carrying nominal Nazis who were truly opponents of Hitler. It was not uncommon for the former type to go scot free, while the latter lost whatever job he or she had held and subsequently was interned. If at the very beginning of denazification, in the U.S. Zone, everyone who came vaguely under suspicion was affected by the censure, by the end, about 1950, the Germans having taken over from the Allies in 1946, it was hardly the real culprits who had been caught.9 It seemed that somewhere along the way the principle of just punishment for a disreputable past was countermanded by the exigency of need: Inexperienced persons who were placed in responsible posts, though politically untainted, had to give way to former Nazi officials because the latter proved to be indispensable at local and regional levels of bureaucracy.10 When the giant screening was over, all manner of inequities were on record: mass applications by culprits that could not be processed; ever changing criteria of Nazi political activism; delaying tactics to avoid the screening altogether; Germans found to be mendacious, cheating, or squealing; ill-begotten amnesties-by 1950 it was quite a sorry mess.11
Second, denazification lacked credibility to the Germans because not only did the Western and Eastern zonal administrations disagree about its basic concepts and procedures, but the Americans, British, and French differed among themselves, and in the French Zone, to take only one example, there were variations in its execution from Land to Land. Considerable irony lay in the fact that the Russians exculpated the Nazis in their own Zone most quickly and, by Western standards, superficially, by opening to them the ranks of their newly founded Communist institutions. Realistically, the Russians admitted to a need for formerly trained Nazi personnel in building the new socialist society; for them, denazification. had run its course by March 1948.12 The Americans sternly believed in separating the guilty from the innocent; thus, lest they offer quarter undeservedly, they cast their nets the widest, thereby catching at the same time more of the merely nominal followers.13 The British, if more stringent even than the Americans in attempting to sort out the chaff from the wheat and therefore employing strict juridical procedure in indicting only adherents to the truly criminal Nazi organizations, also tended to show greater leniency because they needed precious specialists in the costly administration of the economically valuable but infrastructurally complex Ruhr area.14 Last, the French put no currency at all in denazification as a viable philosophy because they remained thoroughly convinced of the innate fascist nature of Germans. With Nazism an endemic quality of the German Volk, this Volk was surely incapable of reconstruction. Germans could be changed only through "degermanization." But this having been said, the French then proceeded to concentrate on the worst offenders in their Zone, trying them swiftly and expeditiously.15
Such diverging beliefs ran the risk of creating inconsistencies and contradictions that were then open to sarcastic criticism on the part of many Germans. Nazis might be released by the British in their zone and rearrested by the Americans in their jurisdiction.16 Some Germans found it easy to assume employment in the French Zone after eviction from their jobs in the American Sector, in open contravention of a January 1946 Allied Control Council ruling.17 When in August 1947 the Russians sought the support of former middling Nazis, the Americans, near panic, deemed this a danger to the entire denazification program.18 The final Allied denazification record attested to discord rather than unity among the victors: the British Zone boasted the largest population, but carried out fewer than one-eighth of the trials that occurred under the Americans.19 There was no uniform standard. As the West German government official Wolfgang Wittig has recently remarked, "[D]enazification was carried through most deftly by the Americans and most dilatorily by the French."20
Third, a significant number of Germans reacted to this in a mood that was not conducive to the building of democracy but rather to a revival of Nazism. Toward the end, several factors led to the grotesque failure of denazification as a program of reconstruction, an unforeseen byproduct of which was the quasi-rehabilitation of the Nazis themselves. With the Cold War in the offing, Washington sought Germany's support and was ever more ready to forgive and forget, happily backed by capitalist rightwingers at home.21 Rather than feeling enlightened and "reeducated," Germans of all political persuasions, among them leading churchmen like Martin Niemoller, looked upon themselves as the victims of intemperate Allied occupation schemes. On the extreme rightist fringe, there was a new conspiratorial consensus after many of the old-timers had been thrown together behind barbed wire for months or years, depending on the eventual outcome of some amnesty. A new Schicksalsgemeinschaft, they now felt vindicated in their original purpose. The bunglings of denazification, it was obvious to them, had proved the Fiihrer posthumously right.22
The blanket failure of political reeducation through the medium of denazification thus produced, at the end of the 1940s, a peculiar set of psycho- political circumstances in which old-style Nazism was given the chance to flourish once again and new fruits of rightist extremism might be harvested. As Gustav Stolper then put it, "what was initiated as a denazification policy has become the surest, most effective vehicle for re-nazification."23 Indeed, the renewed rise of radical movements on the right after 1945 turned out to be partly the result of Allied policy, which in the very throes of the German catastrophe had specified that Germans be allowed to enter into democratic pursuits. Even though a strong central government had been postulated to counteract the rise of radical rightwing parties, participatory democracy entailed that a full spectrum of political interest groups be tolerated, not excluding the extremists from the right.24
It is true that the German public was split on the issue of Nazism and its possible revival; by far the larger portion of society was tired of the war and Hitler and had, in fact, lost all interest in politics. For years after Berlin's capitulation, the indifference of a "Let-George-Do It" plurality, the Ohne-mich- Bewegung, became a reality of West German political life that flew in the face of the committed democrats.25
This is not to say that the virulence and potential danger to the budding West German democracy posed by the resurrected extreme right was any less important, even though it represented small numbers of the electorate. After 1945 crypto-Nazi and neo-fascist groups mushroomed in the Western zone, until there were 74 political parties in 1952, not counting 33 related non-party organizations.26 Of those, by far the group with the most potential was the Sozialistische Reichspartei (SRP), an immediate successor organization of the NSDAP, which, significantly enough, had originated in a British internment camp.27 After its proscription in October 1952, the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) proliferated.28 If none of the rightwing parties did impressively well in the first federal election of 1949, this was because the rightwing movement per se was too fractured, and a forgiving attitude on the part of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his CDU allowed many old Nazis to hide under its umbrella as well as that of the newly constituted FDP.29 In May 1951, the SRP came closest in its brief history to victory after the important Landtag elections in Lower Saxony, having captured 11 percent of the popular vote.30 But the decline of the rightist parties, in a formal sense, accelerated with the advent of the "economic miracle" late in 1952 (suggesting a positive correlation between socioeconomic stability and democratic politics).31 Under the permissive Adenauer, those parties that had remained, in particular the DRP, finished dismally in the second Bundestag election of 1953.32
Nonetheless, two points are worth noting. First, as is obvious from the above, the disappearance of the rightwing parties was not necessarily tantamount to the disappearance of restorative, reactionary politicians who continued to practice their wiles in the ranks of the bourgeois parties. Thus the seedy minor operators of yore became respectable parliamentarians, as did Theodor Oberlander, Adenauer's notorious Minister of Refugees (1953-60).33 Second, West Germany remained suspect to staunch democrats abroad. Thus in April 1951, at the height of the rightist revival, U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy warned that the threat posed by former Nazi activists was "sinister," and that
... in certain areas of Germany small groups are again trying to spread the evil doctrines, the old slogans and tactics, which brought Germany to ruin and will do so again if they should ever prevail. The German people, through their democratic governments, must be aware of these developments and be prepared to deal effectively with them.34
Such words could be taken as added proof that no real change of heart had occurred in a substantial segment of the population, that "reeducation" was permanently ailing and had not much of a chance in the future.
Quite apart from the semblance or reality of political participation, there is evidence culled from contemporary popular opinion polls that can only corroborate such an impression. In retrospect, it is not certain which of two problems was the greater one, a studied ignorance of the ignoble past or an outright confession in its favor. In the American Zone in 1946, about 57 percent of men and women surveyed were satisfied with denazification, but only 32 percent were in 1948, and 17 percent in 1949. By 1953 there were 40 percent who actually thought denazification harmful.35 Against this background, the increased expressions of pro-Nazi sentiment is hardly surprising. In the Western zone as a whole, 40 percent of persons polled conceded in 1946 that National Socialism had been "a good idea, just not well executed"; while 55 percent said this in 1948.36 Further, between May 1951 and December 1952 the proportion of those who recognized "more good than bad" in Nazism rose from 34 to 44 percent, and in July 1952 a full third of the Federal Republic's citizens still acknowledged some form of admiration for the Fuhrer.37 Distrust of parliamentary democracy was tempered with fears of Communism in the Eastern zone, often needlessly so, because both resulted from the same popular lack of interest in the democratic process. A cross- section of Germans surveyed in a poll in March 1949 indicated that four out of ten eligible voters cared nothing for the foundation of West German democracy, the newly charted Basic Law. There was more than a kernel of truth in what Delbert Clark, an astute observer of West Germany, reported back to his fellow Americans that year, namely, that "democracy" to Germans meant simply "carbonated soft drinks, chewing gum, baseball and anti-Communism."38
As a consequence of a collapsed political culture, the need for reeducation, broadly conceived to incorporate both the political and the intellectual sectors, remained paramount from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. While the older generation posed formidable problems of recalcitrance, suspicion, and apathy, German youth was a more promising source of concentration.
In a setting characterized by physical deprivation, hunger, and disease,39 British and American travelers to the Western zone in the late forties and early fiffies were appalled by the mental condition of the young. Several types were identified who were averse to democracy or totally oblivious to it. There were the unrepentant former Hitler Youths who still thought of Hitler, and Germany at any rate, as great and who questioned the censorious practice of "democracy" that banned former Nazis from the public decision-making forums. Others were lethargic, disenchanted, cynical, and very suspicious of any reconstruction attempt.40 Early in 1946 in Hesse, most of what was thought to be a representative group of German children in their early to middle teens considered a Furher "necessary for Germany."41 In December 1947, of juveniles asked if they were interested in German political parties, 72 percent replied that they were not; among university students alone, 45 percent concurred in this negative opinion.42 Invariably in those early postwar surveys, young people favored Nazism more than older folk.43 Nationalistic, even Nazi youth groups were resurfacing in the late 1940s.44
On the other side there were the contrite, hopeful, and constructive youths, but their number was said to be small. The "searchers" and the "committed ones" stepped forward, ready to discuss the future without giving up what they cherished as the valuable heritage of their historic past. Because they were not personally sure about the recent Nazi trauma, these young men and women submitted "to a slow process of self-examination," painful as the experience was.45
More accurately, of course, young Germans represented a composite of many stereotypes. Stephen Spender writes about Haecker, the fastidious Bonn University law student who in 1945 was a Wehrmacht veteran. While professing to be anti-Nazi and priding himself on his resistance exploits, he told Spender that he was a -nationalist." To persecute the Jews had been a stupid idea. Haecker said:
All the same, race is real. We Germans really do belong to a Nordic stock which is different from and superior to the Southern and, especially, the Eastern peoples. The great mistake of the Nazis was to have obscured and distorted the true racial issue ... by introducing it as the Jewish problem.
Remonstrances by Spender that Belsen and Buchenwald were real, Haecker dismissed summarily: "I don't believe these things happened, not even under the Nazis ... because the things which I have read about are humanly impossible."46
In the course of conversations with young Germans, certain priorities developed in the minds of the Allied educators. Certainly in the long run, the weighty issue of political reconditioning of a people had to be resolved pursuant to thorough reforms at the school and university levels. On the one hand, given a generally unreliable family environment, this was a narrow, technical proposition involving the application of new curricula, the uses of purified textbooks, and the employment of instructors who were patently safe for democracy. But on the other hand, and more important, it meant the recreation of the German educational system from the bottom up, by rendering it less elitist and much more accessible to the underprivileged strata of society, especially at its upper end. This dual-purposed piece of social engineering was to become the prerogative of a handful of Allied specialists like Stephen Spender, who were assisted in local and regional sectors by carefully chosen German personnel.47
In reshaping the primary and secondary school system, the Allied Powers lost no time in declaring that the curricula had to be cleansed of Nazi ideology and that Nazi teachers had to be dismissed. In a curiously explicit directive of May 1946 visual media such as books were said to be indictable, but also "magic lantern slides (including everything intended for children of all ages), the contents of which include Nazi propaganda, including Nazi 'racial' theories and incitements to aggression."48 Without a doubt, teachers were marked as highly suspect civil servants to be scrutinized in the course of denazification; hence not only was the Nazi Teachers' League (NSLB) forbidden, but as many as 65 percent of the Bavarian primary teachers were dismissed by the Military Government during the summer of 1945 and 75 percent of all the teachers in the French Zone.49 Everywhere, public and school libraries were searched for contaminated material, and librarians were also subject to immediate removal.50
However, by the same laws that had allowed the return of many Nazi- tainted officials, whether major or lesser "offenders," to all levels of the bureaucracy within a few years' time, teachers no less than librarians could look forward to some kind of reinstatement by reason of indispensability.51 By the fall of 1945 most of the schools had been reopened, but replacements were scarce because teachers with requisite experience had often been Nazis, if only nominal ones, and the democrats who were remigrants or broken concentration camp inmates were plainly out of touch. Trusted teachers allowed to carry on were badly over age. Youths who might qualify for training were embittered war veterans or recent graduates of one Nazi institution or another, themselves in need of global ideological reorientation. Parochial schools were usually above reproach, but it was feared that some would provide easy refuge for compromised Nazi teachers.52
And so, as the Allies were helping the Germans to refashion their educational system, more and more of the old, questionable teachers were returning, a problem that in the long run proved to be considerably more serious than redressing classroom, textbook, and writing utensil shortages. In Bavaria, by about 1947 at least 85 percent of the dismissed teachers had found their way back into the schools; a little later groups of German teachers from the Soviet Zone fled to the Western Sector, finding immediate employment there, unquestioned and unscreened. In the midst of all those teachers were former Nazi Party comrades.53 They and their democratically minded colleagues were hampered by an insufficient supply of books even in the best of circumstances. In the French Zone the authorities had been most generous, having imported some of the texts from Switzerland, but in the affluent American Zone, only 150 volumes had been published per 1,000 students by the end of 1947.54
The difficulties inherent in inbuing German schools with the spirit of democracy were compounded by certain fundamental differences regarding the social uses of education between the Occupying Powers and even reformist-minded German collaborators. This was especially evident in the American Zone, where the Military Government insisted on liberalizing the educational network by opening up schools, notably Gymnasien, to the lower strata, upgrading teacher training, and reshaping academic subjects to bring them more into line with an all-round civic instruction modeled on what was done in U.S. schools. Rather than grasping the full meaning of "democracy" as imported from the West, however, many Germans tended to cling to pre- Third Reich notions, which the Allies considered to be conservative and nationalist, if not actually fascist in character. Therefore, the Germans were reluctant to agree to a redefinition of the teaching content so as to emphasize social studies and a critical analysis of the most recent history. In the U.S. Zone this struggle was waged until after 1950, when gradually the Germans assumed sovereign control of educational affairs, and the Americans, now merely advisers, withdrew in utter resignation. Consequently, the role model of the autocratic German schoolmaster persisted.55
Decades later, Dr. Hildegard Hamm-Brucher, a sensitive FDP politician and well-versed expert on the cultural problems of her country, carefully defined this failure with the following words:
After this era, which was perhaps too critically named an era of ,reeducation,' no politician dared for years to propose anything which could be construed as approaching the American conception of education.... Under the motto 'Our schools need peace and quiet/ nothing was done for ten years.56
She could not have stated it better. Even though in most German Lander some progress had been made through the institutionalization of political reeducation programs in Gymnasien,57 the educational system in West Germany remained restrictive and potentially undemocratic well beyond the 1950s. It was not helped, so it seemed, by a politically conservative chancellor who took little note of schools and universities.58 Although Adenauer as a democrat was personally without fault, the chancellor's aura inspired the tenacity of right wing publicists and educators like former DRP [German Reich Party] functionary Leonhard Schluter who, as an FDP [Free Democratic Party] candidate, was briefly Minister of Culture in Lower Saxony in 1955, until he was forced to resign.59 in terms of governmental spending on educational institutions, West Germany in 1958-59 ranked at the bottom of the list of major nations.60
The number of profligate right wing teachers may have been relatively low.61 However, what critics thought more serious was the dearth of analytical social science literature, and the vacuity, even spuriousness, of the history instruction texts. The basis for such criticism was the modem democratic assumption that the maturation of the body politic would have to accompany the detached examination of one's own immediate legacy. Indeed, if pressed to name the solitary source of sociopolitical reaction in postwar German classrooms, one would have to point to an overemphasis on the glories of Prussia under Frederick the Great, the medieval German conquest of the Baltic lands, and the heroic campaigns of Otto von Bismarck, an emphasis that contributed significantly to the ignorance about democratic practices, which "humanist" education continued to promote well into the sixties.62
Conversely, there were the characteristic lacunae in the history of the Third Reich and its antecedents. How carelessly old history books were rewritten after 1945, and new ones composed, can be easily demonstrated. Suffice it to point to one example, albeit a prominent one, which involved the immensely popular and widely studied upper-school text produced by the venerable Klett Verlag in Stuttgart, Grundriss der Geschichte. In the fourth edition designed for the highest grades of Gymnasium, as late as 1965 the following is said about the young Hitler and the origins of National Socialism:
Hitler was gifted in a variety of ways, but he was lazy, capricious and without stamina. Full of ideas, he was too flighty to make anything of them. His only passions were reading the papers and politicizing. Although he read much, he did so indiscriminately and unsystematically. In any discussion he would scream as soon as he got agitated and would berate his opponents endlessly. Even in that early period, he was showing his manic tendency toward monologues, as well as a one-sidedness that bordered on the psychopathic.63
This pasage, well representative of the genre, abstracts Hitler from the mass of ordinary Germans by typecasting him as abnormal, as a man possessed; demon-like, was it any wonder that Hitler would seduce the honest Germans? Any social link between those people and the Nazi Fiihrer is denied here, and by implication of such personalized historiography, the Germans are absolved.64
In post-secondary education, university personnel were in principle governed by denazification clauses similar to those applied to school teachers. Subsequent to the banning of overt Nazi professors, especially former members of the Nazi Lecturers' League (NSDB), and the sudden closings of universities, the latter would reopen gradually by late 1945 or early 1946. In strained conditions marked once again by building shortages and a lack of supplies, the famous University of Gottingen in the British Zone was newly functioning on 17 September 1945, and Kiel was welcoming students on board a few ships anchored in the harbor.65
Numerous younger democratic-minded professors returned from the trenches to resume their teaching duties with vigor. They were highly inspired by what seemed to them auspicious circumstances for a solid new beginning. The historian Werner Conze, a Wehrmacht captain in his mid-thirties, came to Gottingen, joining the faculty of philosophy as a junior professor. "The students and I were of one generation," he reminisced later. "We were tied together by the same generational experience. We faced the same problems. . . . An unbending will united us in our determination to start afresh, materially and spiritually speaking."66
A problem of far greater dimensions was the fact that many professors who continued after the war were conservative in disposition and simply too old to invigorate students. Some of the professors were actually in their eighties, with their successors yet to be graduated.67 "Few of those professors retaining their positions could be called open friends of the Allied powers," writes Kurt Tauber caustically.68 Like historian Gerhard Ritter in Freiburg, they related to the autocratic tradition of pre-Weimar days, rather than to the risks suggested by yet another experiment in democracy under the questionable aegis of the Western Allies.69 Exiled professors who saw fit to remigrate to a German university, as did Hans Rothfels from Chicago to Tubingen in the early 1950s, often were representatives of an older school of thought more conversant with the Wilhelmine Empire and unity, rather than with parliamentary democracy and liberty.70
To all intents and purposes, within the first three years after the "German Catastrophe," as the liberal-conservative historian Friedrich Meinecke would call it,71 outright Nazi professors had been removed, the old universities had been reactivated, and new institutions of higher learning in Mainz, Speyer, and West Berlin, based on Western democratic patterns, had been founded.72
But die-hard Nazi professors were soon endangering the higher education system in two significant ways. First, the more militant of the excluded academics organized themselves under the leadership of Dr. Herbert Grabert, a former Wurzburg University instructor, and started to condemn the universities as centers of intolerance and oppression because they had dared, in collusion with the Military Governments, to ostracize "patriotic" colleagues.73 Their offensive lobby, whatever threat it may have posed to teaching and learning in the reconstituted universities, certainly was harmful to the timid democratic beginnings in German society as a whole. Indeed, the group surrounding Grabert, with printing presses and considerable funds at its disposal, in time became the intellectual vanguard of sundry neo-Nazisms of the fiffies and sixties.74
Second, and potentially more lethal, was the fact that professors, who were old Nazis or fellow-travelers, successfully reasserted their biased influence in the classrooms. These were men who had stayed on after May 1945 because they had been overlooked, were actually needed for their expertise by the Allies, or had managed their comebacks as a consequence of relaxed denazification strictures.75
Renegade Nazi professors in all the classic disciplines posed a real problem. "Foreigners find it hard to believe what German scholars are once again lecturing from their chairs," wrote Gottingen jurist Hans Thieme in April 1953, adding that Germans were generally ignored in international scientific ventures.76 Law was a most important field because its teachers had the power either to sharpen or snuff out democratic consciousness. Therefore Nazi or proto-Nazi professors of law were perhaps the most insidious of all. One may refer to Ernst Rudolf Huber, virtually a crown jurist for the Third Reich, who had impressively justified the Fuhrer's will as an encompassing legal precedent. The prewar persecution of the Jews to him was legitimate. Born in 1903, this Nazi party member (May 1933) had been a full professor of law at Kiel, Leipzig, and "Reichsuniversitat" Strassburg between 1933 and 1945. Dismissed by the Allies, he then became a judicial adviser to the Federal Economics Ministry in 1949 before resuming a professorship in Freiburg in 1956 and later changing to Gottingen.77
Huber's colleague Theodor Maunz, born 1901 in Dachau, joined the stormtroopers in 1933 and in 1937 was a full professor of public law in Freiburg.78 While there, he rationalized the discrimination against "racial aliens" and commented on the efficacy of uniting all SS and police forces. Maunz also defined "the Fuhrer's will" as the paramount principle of national governance. Intermittently out of office after 1945, Maunz was made a full professor at the University of Munich in 1952 and even served as Bavarian Minister of Culture for some years, until his forced resignation.79
Similar evidence is obtainable for other fields. Karl-Heinz Pfeffer, born in 1906, was a sociologist at Leipzig in 1933. Having joined the SA in 1933 and the Nazi party in 1937, he advanced gradually until receiving the Berlin chair for geopolitics (Volks- und Landeskunde) in 1943. He became a noted specialist on the "Jewish Question," writing, among other topics, about the Jewish influence on British politics. In 1946 he was already a member of the Akademie ffir Raumforschung and held various other important academic posts until in 1962 he reoccupied a chair in Munster.80
One might also mention Dr. Herbert Jankuhn, who as an SS officer (from 1938 on) catered to Himmler's whims by searching for the remains of Crimean Goths at the height of the Russian campaign, and coincidentally participated in the wholesale pillage of Eastern European museums. A full professor in Rostock by 1941, Jankuhn, after a painful interlude in an American internment camp, eventually came to be professor of prehistory at Gottingen where he is today a highly regarded emeritus.81
Medical scholars were among the most infected by Nazi ideology during the Third Reich, and several of them resurfaced in university chairs after 1945.82 Max Mikorey, a Nazi Party member from 1933 on, was a staff physician and later a lecturer (Dozent) in psychiatry at Munich from 1942 to 1945. An inveterate enemy of Freud, he spoke on a "parasitical life instinct of Jewry" and of "masterpieces of the Jewish seduction technique." This notwithstanding, by 1952 Mikorey was again associate professor of neurology in Munich, training a new generation of would-be physicians.83
Because he had avoided SS membership, Dr. med. Anton Kiesselbach, as an ordinary soldier, evaded capture by the Allies after having assisted Professor August Hirt in mustard gas experiments at Natzweiler concentration camp, during which many inmates perished painfully. After the war Kiesselbach reappeared as a harmless civilian and in 1955, now equipped with two doctorates, moved from Regensburg to the anatomy department of the Univeristy of Dusseldorf, as whose Rektor he served in 1963-1964.84
And last, Professor Werner Catel. As a pediatrician during the Third Reich, he became responsible for the "euthanasia" killing of thousands of allegedly feeble children. In 1949, a Hamburg denazification chamber found nothing wrong with his actions; Catel became Ordinarius in Kiel. Only recently the university considered the establishment of a "Werner Catel Foundation," to be legally entitled to inherit some 200,000 dollars of the deceased Catel's estate. After much deliberation, the case was finally dismissed by the university senate in early 1984.85
All in all, the impact of what might be termed a partial travesty of teaching and of learning in the universities was not a good one on the students, and not constructive for establishing democratic goals within West German society. Despite the creation of prodemocratic networks in the new student subculture,86 rightist tendencies were also developing, until in 1953 the unabashedly neo-Nazi League of German Students (Bund Nationaler Studenten-BNS) sprang to life. At that time, reactionary inclinations in the fraternities, some of which had reintroduced saber fencing, were disconcertingly strong.87 Find ings at the University of Frankfurt in 1961 that only one-third of all students identified with the reigning democratic order had to be interpreted in connection with rising antisernitism in student circles during the 1950s to be properly understood.88
By the end of the Adenauer era, the relative failure of democracy on West German campuses consisted of the inability of the universities to become truly democratic which would have been demonstrated by opening their doors more widely to the children of the lower social strata. As Ralf Dahrendorf and others have critically noted, despite good intentions on the part of the Allies, the proportion of workers' children among university students of the early decades of the Federal Republic was only slightly larger than it had been during the Hitler Period.89 When disillusioned German university students finally began to react violently in the late 1960s, their thrust was directed against the renewed entrenchment of outmoded, even feudal prerogatives that were viewed as anachronisms in an officially-democratic climate.90 In the final analysis, such reentrenchment had been facilitated in equal measure by faulty instruction in the uses of practical, everyday democracy and insufficient enlightenment about the evils of fascism in the recent national past.
As time would show, West Germans, in spite of impressive progress with democracy in a formal sense, were not yet rid of the Nazi syndrome: for the National Democratic Party (NPD), a successor organization of SRP and DRP, was founded in November 1964. It has proven to be the most virulent neo- Nazi party yet.91
NOTES
The research for this paper was facilitated by a generous grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Ottawa.
1. Doc., "Report of the Crimea (Yalta) Conference," 4-11 Feb. 1945, signed Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, in Documents on Germany under Occupation, 1945- 1954, ed. Beate Ruhm von Oppen (London, 1955), p. 5.
2. See the docs. of 2 Aug. and 20 Sept. 1945, and of 12 Oct. 1946, ibid., pp. 43, 77, 168-70.
3. Das Urteil von Nurnberg 1946 (Munich, 1962), p. 299 and passim; Henry Friedlander, "The Trials of the Nazi Criminals: Law, Justice, and History," Dimension 2, no. 1 (1986): 4-5. For background, see also Telford Taylor, Nuremberg Trials: War Crimes and International Law (New York, 1949); Eugene Davidson, The Trial of the Germans: An Account of the Twenty-two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (New York, 1966).
4. Report 16 (7 Aug. 1946) and 33 (18 Dec. 1946) in Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys, 1945-1949, ed. Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt (Urbana, 1970), pp. 93-94, 121-23; Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism Since 1945, 2 vols. (Middletown, 1967) 1:37-40; Richard Hiscocks, Germany Revived: An Appraisal of the Adenauer Era (London, 1966), p. 199.
5. See Manfred Jenke, Die nationale Rechte: Parteien, Politiker, Publizisten (Frankfurt, 1967), p. 9; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:40.
6. On the successor trials, see Friedlander, "The Trials of the Nazi Criminals," pp. 5-
7. That broad tutorial intent is evident from paragraph 2 in doc. dated 12 Jan. 1946, reprinted in Documents on Germany, p. 102. Also see the interpretation in Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:40.
8. Regarding this problem in the Third Reich, see Michael H. Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919-1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 157-65. The classificatory scheme used for denazification was the same as the one used for the Nuremberg Trials: 1. Major offenders; 2. Offenders (activists, militarists, and profiteers); 3. Lesser offenders (probationers); 4. Followers; 5. Persons exonerated. See doc. dated 12 Oct. 1946, in Documents on Germany, p. 170.
9. See paragraph 6 of doc. dated 2 Aug. 1945, in Documents on Germany, p. 43; Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, passim, esp. pp. 23, 62, 152-53, 155-56; Edwin Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich (New York and London, 1980), pp. 70-72; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:28-29, 32; Lord Russell of Liverpool, Return of the Swastika? (New York, 1969), pp. 15, 20; Edward N. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory (Detroit, 1978), pp. 140, 145, 147-48; Hans Woller, "Zur Demokratiebereitschaft in der Provinz des Amerikanischen Besatzungsgebiets: Dokumentation," Vierteljahrshefte ffir Zeitgeschichte 31 (1983): 363-64.
10. Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich, p. 51; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:27, 31.
11. Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich, pp. 68, 73; Liverpool, Return of the Swastika, pp. 16, 19; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:29-33; Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 10; Peterson, American Occupation, p. 150; Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, pp. 489-90, 521, 527, 531, 540-42, 557; Raymond Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany: The British Contribution (London and New York, 1960), p. 13; Wolfgang Wittig, -Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," in Die Freiheit des Anderen: Festschrift ffir Martin Hirsch, ed. Hans Jochen Vogel and others (Baden-Baden, 1981), p. 180; F. Roy Willis, The French in Germany, 1945-1949 (Stanford, 1962), p. 160. For the wider implications of the Nuremberg judgments affecting the Federal Republic well into the 1980s, see Jorg Friedrich, Die kalte Amnestie: NS-Tater in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt, 1985); and Peter Przybylski, Zwischen Galgen und Amnestie: Kriegsverbrecherprozesse im Spiegel von Nurnberg (Berlin [DDR1, 1983).
12. Wittig, "Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," p. 181; Gustav Stolper, German Realities (New York, 1948), pp. 57, 63.
13. Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, passim; Willis, The French, pp. 147-48, 154-55; Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich, p. 66; Wittig, "Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," pp. 165-83.
14. Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, pp. 9-15; Wittig, "Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," p. 181; Willis, The French, p. 148; Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich, pp. 65-66. Also see Gerhard L. Weinberg, "From Confrontation to Cooperation: Germany and the United States, 1933-1949," in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia, 1985) 2:55.
15. Willis, The French, pp. 147-61; Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich, p. 65; Wittig, "Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," pp. 181-82.
16. Peterson, American Occupation, p. 146.
17. Willis, The French, p. 161; paragraph 9 of doc. of 12 Jan. 1946, in Documents on Germany, p. 106.
18. Peterson, American Occupation, p. 152.
19. Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich, p. 66. Also see Furstenau, Entnazifizierung, pp. 44-45; Wittig, -Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," p. 173.
20. Wittig, "Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," p. 182.
21. Peterson, American Occupation, p. 152; Wittig, "Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," p. 180; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:35; Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, pp. 489-90; Woller, "Zur Demokratiebereitschaft," p. 342.
22. Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, pp. 8-9; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:30-31, 34; Willis, The French, p. 162; Peterson, American Occupation, p. 153; Wittig, "Zur Praxis der Entnazifizierung in Bayern," p. 183; Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich, p. 71.
23. Stolper, German Realities, p. 61.
24. See Peter H. Merkl, The Origin of the West German Republic (New York, 1963), p. 5; and the various directives issued by the Allies, particularly the Americans, partially repeated in the famous J. F. Byrnes speech of 6 Sept. 1946: paragraph 9(a) of doc. dated Apr. 1945, in Documents on Germany, p. 19; section XI(40) of doc. dated 20 Sept. 1945, ibid., p. 77; Byrnes's speech, ibid., pp. 156-57.
25. Helen Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany: A Field Study," in Education in Occupied Germany: L'Education de L'Allemagne Occupee, ed. Liddell and others (Paris, 1949), p. 134; Merkl, Origins, pp. 20, 130; Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 7.
26. At federal, regional and local levels. See Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 174. Also see Lorenz Bessel-Lorck and others, National oder Radikal? Der Rechtsradikalismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Mainz, 1966), pp. 80- 81.
27. Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 9.
28. Bessel-Lorck, National oder Radikal?, p. 80.
29. Merkl, Origin, p. 165; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, pp. 199-201; Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, pp. 18-19; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika, 1:797, 804-05.
30. Liverpool, Return of the Swastika, p. 21; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:799.
31. The correlation is suggested in Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 12; Jurgen Willbrand, Kommt Hitler wieder? Rechtsradikalismus in Deutschland (Donauworth, n.d.), p. 27.
32. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:802-04, 806; Willbrand, Kommt Hitler wieder?, pp. 27-28.
33. Erich Stockhorst, Funftausend Kopfe: Wer war was im Dritten Reich (Velbert and Kettwig, 1967), pp. 310-11; Braunbuch: Kriegs- und Naziverbrecher in der Bundesrepublik und in Westberlin (Berlin [DDR], 1968), pp. 312-13. A study favorable to Oberlander was published by Hermann Raschhofer, Der Fall Oberlander: Eerie vergleichende Rechtsanalyse der Verfahren in Pankow und Bonn (Tubingen, 1962). On 19 June 1986, Oberlander was scheduled to receive the Bavarian order, White-Blue Pour le Merite, for services to Bavaria. See Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, 18 June 1986.
34. Extract of speech McCloy, 25 Apr. 1951, in Documents on Germany, p. 563.
35. Peterson, American Occupation, p. 153.
36. Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, p. 486.
37. Figures in Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 77, and Erich Peter Neumann and Elisabeth Noelle, Antworten: Politik im Kraftfeld der Offentlichen Meinung (Allensbach, 1954), p. 29.
38. Quotation according to T. H. Tetens, The New Germany and the Old Nazis (New York, 1961), p. 254. Also see Merkl, Origin, p. 129; Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, p. 486.
39. On this, see only Stolper, German Realities, pp. 54-56.
40. Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, p. 170; Willis, The French, p. 165; Helen Liddell, "Introduction," in Education in Occupied Germany, pp. 18, 20; Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," p. 103; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika, 1:381-84. Also see David Rodnick, Postwar Germans: An Anthropologist's Account (New Haven, 1948), pp. 59-102.
41. Rodnick, Postwar Germans, p. 57.
42. Willis, The French, p. 166. Ten years later it was found that of a representative sample of Frankfurt university students, 9 percent were politically indifferent while 22 percent were for an authoritarian regime. See Jurgen Habermas and others, Student und Politik: Eerie soziologische Untersuchung zum politischen Bewusstsein Frankfurter Studenten (Neuwied and Berlin, 1961), pp. 133, 140-44.
43. Neumann and Noelle, Antworten, p. 29; Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 77; Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, pp. 32-33.
44. Arno Klonne, "Jugenclarbeit 'rechtsaussen'," Politische Studien 9 (1958): 617-25.
45. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:372, 381, 383-84; Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," p. 139 (last quotation).
46. Stephen Spender, European Witness (New York, 1946), pp. 29-33.
47. See doc. of 20 Oct. 1947; extract from McCloy's address, 25 Apr. 1951, in Documents on Germany, pp. 255-56, 563-64; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, pp. 110-11; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika, 1:430-31; Liddell, "Introduction," p. 14.
48. Doc. of 13 May 1946, in Documents on Germany, p. 135.
49. See docs. dated 11 Feb., April, 14 July, and 20 Sept. 1945, ibid., pp. 4-5, 13-21, 40-44, 68-80; Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, pp. 185-86; Willis, The French, pp. 155, 159, 168; Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, pp. 162- 63; Harold Zink, The United States in Germany, 1944-1955 (Westport, 1957), pp. 197-98. See also Gerd Kadelbach, Die mageren Jahre: Tagebuch eines unterfrankischen Landlehrers, 1945146 (Weinheim, 1961), pp. 3-4.
50. Spender, European Witness, pp. 149-55; Peterson, American Occupation, p. 162. But see Kadelbach, Die mageren Jahre, p. 10.
51. See docs. dated 12 Jan. and 12 Oct. 1946, in Documents on Germany, pp. 102- 107, 168-78; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:29.
52. Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," pp. 99-100, 113, 116, 120, 127; Peterson, American Occupation, p. 251; Willis, The French, pp. 168, 171-73; Zink, The United States in Germany, p. 198; Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, pp. 187-88.
53. See Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, pp. 532, 596; Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, p. 164; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, p. 157.
54. In comparison, the French had published 800 books per 1,000 students. See Peterson, American Occupation, p. 161, as well as the following (on shortages of books, classrooms, and materials): Liddell, "Introduction," p. 18; Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," pp. 97, 99, 114, 120, 127, 129; Willis, The French, 168-69; Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, 162-63; Zink, The United States in Germany, pp. 198-99; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, p. 156; Kadelbach, Die mageren Jahre, p. 7.
55. Peterson, American Occupation, pp. 161, 252-57; Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, pp. 159-60, 163, 166-67; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, p. 157; Willis, The French, pp. 169-70; Zink, The United States in Germany, pp. 203, 207; Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," pp. 100, 106, 121. Also see Isa Huelsz, Schulpolitik in Bayern zwischen Demokratisierung und Restauration in den Jahren 1945-1950 (Hamburg, 1970).
56. Hamm-Brucher as quoted in Peterson, American Occupation, p. 257.
57. Thomas Ellwein, Pflegt die deutsche Schule Burgerbewusstsein? Ein Bericht uber die staatsburgerliche Erziehung in den hoheren Schulen der Bundesrepublik (Munich, 1955).
58. Neumann and Noelle, Antworten, p. 85; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, p. 167; Zink, The United States in Germany, p. 210. On Adenauer, see Hiscocks, Germany Revived, p. 180. See also Spender, European Witness, pp. 45-46, 54. Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," p. 140, blames the currency reform of June 1948 for the increasing restrictiveness of the educational system, in as far as sudden impoverishment meant turning one's back on schools.
59. Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, p. 168; Tetens, The New Germany, pp. 157-58; Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 143; Willbrand, Kommt Hitler wieder?, p. 16.
60. Hiscocks, Germany Revived, pp. 168-69.
61. 1 am referring only to the highly publicized affair surrounding the antisernitic high-school teacher Dr. Ludwig Zind, of Offenburg, in 1957-58. See the somewhat dramatized account in Tetens, The New Germany, pp. 3-15. For the general phenomenon, see the evidence presented below, n. 62.
62. See the criticism in Adolf Grote, "Die beschonigte Katastrophe: Lage und Praxis der gegenwartigen deutschen Geschichtsrevision," Deutsche Rundschau 82 (Jan. 1956): 21-26. Also see Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," pp. 99, 129; Zink, The United States in Germany, p. 211; Tauber, Beyond Eagles and Swastika, 1:432-33; Henry Walton, Germany (Guildford and London, 1969), pp. 129-30; Tetens, The New Germany, pp. 221-31. The effect of such history instruction (all school levels) on German youth (1959-1963) is described in Walter Jaide, Eerie neue Generation? Eerie Untersuchung fiber Werthaltungen und Leitbilder der Jugendlichen, 2d ed. (Munich, 1963), pp. 107-11. See also Habermas, Student und Politik, pp. 267-77.
63. Grundriss der Geschichte ffir die Oberstufe der Hoheren Schulen, Ausgabe B: III: Von 1850 bis zur Gegenwart, 4th ed. (Stuttgart, 1965), p. 154.
64. Also see Edgar Weick, "Der Nationalsozialismus in den Geschichtesbuchern der Bundesrepublik und der DDR,- Gestern und Heute 17 (special issue, n.d.): 5, 7, 15.
65. Par. 14(c) of doc. dated Apr. 1945; par. 7 of doc. dated 2 Aug. 1945; appendix of doc. dated 20 Sept. 1945; par. 2 of doc. dated 13 May 1946, in Documents on Germany, pp. 20-21, 43-44, 80, 135; Zink, The United States in Germany, p. 199; Spender, European Witness, p. 159; Willis, The French, pp. 168, 173; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, pp. 156-57; Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern, p. 187; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:967-68; Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich, p. 53; David Phillips, "Die Wiedereroffnung der Universitaten in der britischen Zone: Nationalisfische Gesinnung, Entnazifizierung und das Problem der Zulassung zum Studium," Bildung und Erziehung 36, no. 1 (1983): 35-36.
66. Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, Heidelberg, 12-13 May 1979. Also see the memoirs of the Freiburg medievalist Gerd Tellenbach, Aus erinnerter Zeitgeschichte (Freiburg im. Breisgau, 1981), pp. 118-22, 127-29; and Merkl, Origin, p. 25; and for the medical faculty, Ernst Kretschmer, Gestalten und Gedanken: Erlelmisse, 2d ed. (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 160-61.
67. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:968-69; Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," pp. 101, 116, 136; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, pp. 159-60.
68. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika, 1:173. Also see Spender, European Witness, pp. 21-22; Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," p. 116.
69. For Ritter's unquestionable opposition to the Nazi regime, but also his deeply ingrained conservatism, see his "Der deutsche Professor im 'Dritten Reich'," Die Gegenwart (24 Dec. 1945): 23-26; Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Munich, 1954).
70. See the congenial but on the whole balanced appraisal of Rothfels by his student Werner Conze, "Hans Rothfels," Historische Zeitschrift 237 (1983): 311-60. Georg G. Iggers is much more critical in The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, 2d ed. (Middletown, 1983), p. 318. For background, see HansUlrich Wehler, "Geschichtswissenschaft heute," in Stichworte zur geistigen Situation der Zeit, ed. Jdrgen Habermas, 2 (Frankfurt, 1979): 709-53 (on Rothfels, see p. 721).
71. Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden, 1946).
72. Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," pp. 114, 147; Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, p. 168; Willis, The French, pp. 174-76.
73. Grabert, born 1901, became a Nazi party member in Dec. 1939. In 1937, he offered his journalistic services to the SS, evidently without success. See Berlin Document Center [hereafter cited as BDCJ for Grabert's Nazi membership card and his letter to Himmler, (Tubingen, 4 Mar. 1937.
74. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika, 1:489-90, 532-34; Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, pp. 149-50. See Herbert Grabert's polemic, Hochschullehrer klagen an: Von der Demontage deutscher Wissenschaft, 2d ed. Gottingen 1953); and, in the same vein, Wilhelm Schilling (then mayor of Marburg!), aber die Verantwortung ffir die Demontage deutscher Wissenschaft: Ein Wort zur Resolution der Westdeutschen Rektorenkonferenz 1953 Gottingen 1953). Also see the persuasive arguments against Gravert in Hans Thieme, "Hochschullehrer klagen an," Deutsche Universitdts-Zeitung 8 (7 Apr. 1953): 3-5.
75. See Spender, European Witness, pp. 64-65; Zink, The United States in Germany, p. 199; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:968; David Phillips, Zur Universitfitsreform in der britischen Besatzungzone 1945-1948 (Cologne and Vienna, 1983), pp. 21, 80, 163-64; Konrad H. Jarausch, Deutsche Studenten 1800- 1970 (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 214. For the unique discipline of anthropology, see Karl Saller, Die Rassenlehre des Nationalsozialismus in Wissenschaft und Propaganda (Darmstadt, 1961), pp. 5-6, 58.
76. Thieme, "Hochschullehrer klagen an," p. 5.
77. Ernst Rudolf Huber, Verfassungsrecht des Grossdeutschen Reiches, 2d ed. (Hamburg, 1939), esp. pp. 168-71, 181-85; Rolf Seeliger, Braune Universitdt: Deutsche Hoshschullehrer gestern unde heute: Eerie Dokumentation, 2 vols. (Munich, 1964-1965) 1:31-32; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:970-71; Braunbuch, p. 318; BDC, Nazi Party membership card Huber.
78. While the records show that Maunz applied for Nazi Party membership in May 1937, a membership card for him could not be located. BDC, personal file Maunz.
79. Theodor Maunz, "Die Staatsaufsicht," in Reinhard Hbhn and others, Grundfragen der Rechtsauffassung (Munich, 1938), pp. 47-85, quotations pp. 72, 83; idem, Gestalt und Recht der Polizei (Hamburg, 1943), pp. 28-32; Seeliger, Braune Universitat 1:43-45; Braunbuch, pp. 318, 329-30, 353-54. On Maunz, Huber, and other jurists of the Third Reich, now see also Eberhard Laux, "Fiffirung und Verwaltung in der Rechtslehre des Nationalsozialismus," in Verwaltung contra Menschenftihrung im Staat Hitlers: Studien zum politisch- administrativen System, ed. Dieter Rebentisch and Karl Teppe Gottingen 1986), pp. 33-64.
80. BDC, NSLB membership card Pfeffer; "Gutachten" Freyer, Leipzig, 11 May 1937. See Karl-Heinz Pfeffer, Der englische Krieg-auch ein ftidischer Krieg (Munich, 1943), for instance pp. 10, 13-14; Seeliger, Braune Universitdt 2:42-45; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:610-12.
81. Jankuhn was in the SA from 1933 to 1936 and joined the NSDAP in 1937. See BDC, Party and SS files Jankuhn; Michael H. Kater, Das "Ahnenerbe" der SS 1935-1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart, 1974), passim; Braunbuch, p. 353. In an interview I had with Jankuhn in 1963, the "prehistorian" told me that because of beatings he received from the Americans in a denazification camp, he lost part of his hearing.
82. On the Third Reich background, see Michael H. Kater, "Medizinische Fakultdten und Medizinstudenten: Eerie Skizze," in Arzte im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Fridolf Kudlien (Cologne, 1985), pp. 82-104. The West German historian of medicine Walter Wuttke-Groneberg writes: -[Medical] university teachers retained their chairs-men who were ideological accomplices to say the least ... .. Leistung, Vernichtung, Verwertung: 10berlegungen zur Struktur der Nationalsozialistischen Medizin," in Volk und Gesundheit: Heilen und Vernichten im Nationalsozialismus (Tubingen, 1982), p. 9. About this as a special problem in West German medical education, see the poignant remarks of Ferdinand Sauerbruch's former assistant, Rudolf Nissen, in "Der hippokratische Eid in unserer Zeit," in Antidoron: Edgar Salin zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Erwin von Beckerath and others (Tubingen, 1962), pp. 195-96.
83. Max Mikorey, "Das Judenturn in der Kriminalpsychologie," in Das Judentum in der Rechtswissenschaft, vol. 3: Judentum und Verbrechen (Berlin 1936), pp. 61-82, quotations pp. 67, 79. Also see BDC, Nazi party membership card Mikorey; Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1:971-72; Seeliger, Braune Universitat 1:46-47; Braunbuch, p. 354.
84. Kater, Das "Ahnenerbe" der SS, pp. 248, 255; Hans Schadewaldt, ed., Von der Medizinischen Akademie zur Universitdt Dusseldorf, 1923-1973: Festschrift anldsslich des 50 jdhrigen Jubildums der Griindung der Medizinischen Akademie am 13. Mai 1923 (Berlin, 1973), pp. 13, 138, 146.
85. See Klaus D6rner, "Nationalsozialismus und Lebensvemichtung," Vierte1jahrshefte ffir Zeitgeschichte 15 (1967): 122; Wuttke-Groneberg, "Leistung, Vernichtung, Verwertung," p. 7; Der Spiegel (27 Feb. 1984): 79; and Catel's postwar apologies, Grenzsituationen des Lebens: Beitrag zum Problem der begrenzten Euthanasie (Nuremberg, 1962) and Leben im Widerstreit: Bekenntnis eines Arztes (Nuremberg, 1974); Professor Fridolf Kudlien to author, Kiel, 9 July 1986.
86. jarausch, Deutsche Studenten, pp. 218-22.
87. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1: 435-36, 441-57; Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 138; Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, p. 169; R. B. Tilford and R. J. C. Preece, Federal Germany: Political and Social Order (London, 1969), pp. 76-77. Also see Lutz E. Finke, Gestatte mir Hochachtungsschluck: Bundesdeutschlands korporierte Elite (Hamburg, 1963), pp. 81-113. The activities of the BNS until 1960 are explored in Volker Berghahn, "Right-Wing Radicalism in West Germany's Younger Generation," Journal of Central European Affairs, 22 (1962): 317-36.
88. Habermas, Student und Politik. Also see Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika 1: 380; Jenke, Die nationale Rechte, p. 139; Finke, Gestatte mir Hochachtungsschluck, pp. 105-06.
89. Clara Menck, "Neue Burschenherrlichkeit? Die westdeutsche Nachkriegs- Universitdt und ihre H6rer," Wort und Wahrheit 9 (Feb. 1954): 120; Ralf Dahrendorf, Arbeiterkinder an deutschen Universitdten (Tubingen, 1965); jarausch, Deutsche Studenten, pp. 216-17. Also see Phillips, "Die Wiederer6ffnung der Universitaten in der britischen Zone," pp. 35-36, 46-50; Liddell, "Education in Occupied Germany," p. 137; Hiscocks, Germany Revived, p. 167; Walton, Germany, p. 127.
90. From an establishment point of view, see only Die Universitdt im Verfassungswandel: Bericht aber das Rektorat vom 1. August 1969 bis zum 4. Februar 1970, erstattet Rektor jener Monate, Professor Dr. phil. Werner Conze, im Sommersemester 1970 (appendix to "Ruperto-Carola": Zeitschrift der Vereinigung der Freunde der Studentenschaft der Universitdt Heidelberg e.V. 22 [Heidelberg, June 1970]). A detached interpretation is in jarausch, Deutsche Studenten, pp. 226-41.
91. Geoffrey K. Roberts, West German Politics (London and Basingstoke, 1972), pp. 36-37, 49, 56-57; anon., "Entstehung und Entwicklung der NPD zu einer rechtsradikalen Sammlungspartei," Gestern und Heute 1 Uan. 1966): 1-36; Michael H. Kater, " 'Neo-Nazism': How Dangerous is the NPD?," Canadian Forum 46 (Apr. 1967): 8-11. For the NPD's ramifications on the West German right-extremist scene, see Eike Hermig, "Rechtsextremistische Karrieren von Jugendlichen in der Bundesrepublik," in Auseinandersetzung mit dem Terrorismus-Mdglichkeiten der politischen Bildungsarbeit: Bericht uber ein Seminar ffir Trdger der politischen Bildung (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 75-107.
