INTRODUCTION

The Recruits

If memory were a concert, the Last Judgement of the German past might sound a little like this: ‘Tones of terror from childhood overlap with memories of marching songs and hymns, popular melodies, vulgarities, boozing. The ringing photoflashes from Riefenstahl’s Nazi Nuremberg offend us, glaring ignorance slips from the throes of the fanfare, the stupid harmony of the conformers and followers.’1

With his Requiem, first performed in 1993, the composer Hans Werner Henze wanted to make a stand against this ‘stupid harmony of conformers’. In his memoirs, he depicted himself as an opponent of the Nazi regime, for which he served as a Wehrmacht soldier at 18 years of age. In 2009, while researching in the Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives), I discovered that the truth wasn’t quite so simple: the man who became the modernising father figure of classical music after 1945 had joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) as late as 1944. The discovery of his membership card caused a scandal, but Henze played it down. It must be a ‘feint’ on the part of the Nazis, he claimed, a fake. He alleged that he had been enrolled in the party without his knowledge as part of a collective enrolment arranged as a ‘birthday present’ to Hitler from the Gauleitung, the leadership of the regional branch of the NSDAP. Much of the German media accepted his self-excusing claim without criticism, ignoring the index card or rejecting his NSDAP membership as an ‘unproven allegation’. When the famous composer died in 2012, the obituaries restricted themselves to reproducing his official biography. After all, Henze had long been regarded as ‘an artistic authority beyond all criticism’.2 The idea that he of all people — a man who had always engaged critically with the horrors of the Nazi era — should himself have been a member of Hitler’s party just didn’t fit the picture.

Henze is not the only member of the so-called Flakhelfer generation whose youth in the Third Reich is now appearing in a new light. Ever since the NSDAP membership cards were handed over by the US to the German Federal Archives in 1994, more and more well-known names have surfaced. Politician and artists, academics and journalists, leftist liberals and conservatives. They all have just one thing in common: they grew up in the Third Reich and after the war went on to become prominent intellectuals and leading figures of the young Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). A list of these names conjures up a cultural pantheon of the German post-war era: Martin Walser, Dieter Hildebrandt, Siegfried Lenz, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Horst Ehmke, Erhard Eppler, Hermann Lübbe, Niklas Luhmann, Tankred Dorst, Erich Loest, Peter Boenisch, Wolfgang Iser — in recent years, despite their impeccable post-war careers, a whole generation of father figures have become suspect for having participated in National Socialism before 1945. However, with the exception of Eppler, none of the individuals in question who are still living have ever admitted to signing a membership form. The NSDAP — a club of accidental members?

As more names emerged, the public became confused, while the men under the spotlight clammed up, feeling misunderstood. Their attempts to depict their party membership as having been accidental or unwitting became ever more suspect. In the face of the ‘predominantly unreliable sources and evidence’ available, the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung expressed its hope that, in the case of Hans Werner Henze, the ‘evil spirits’ would soon sink back into obscurity.3 Furthermore, another newspaper stated, the composer simply didn’t deserve to have his life-long artistic and political engagement degraded to some kind of exercise of penance ‘on account of an unproven allegation’.4

It is a new curtain-closing debate, one in which a younger generation is expected to brush aside even the slightest of doubts on the biographical integrity of their role models, and to accept a black-and-white past peopled with evil Nazis and the good founders of the Federal Republic who got rid of them. The idea that even fractured biographies have the potential to be instructive and exemplary simply doesn’t fit into the dogma of these later-born high priests of Vergangenheitsbewältigung — the struggle to come to terms with Germany’s past.

The events that played out among the ranks of the Federal Republic’s intelligentsia carried over into the homes of normal German families: if you believe the stories, Hitler seized power over the Germans in 1933 as quickly and abruptly as he disappeared again in 1945, without any of their own relatives having had anything to do with it. The Third Reich was Hitler and Himmler, Goebbels and Göring. But Granddad wasn’t a Nazi, nor — in light of the events that followed — was there ever any mention of the fact that Grandma had made doe eyes at the Führer along with her friends in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (the NS League of German Girls).

Or have we children and grandchildren of the Flakhelfer — those final eyewitnesses of the Third Reich who, now in their late eighties, grew up in the Nazi dictatorship, were sent to war at 17 and, after the downfall in 1945, helped build the Federal Republic and shape it to the present day — simply not been listening attentively enough? Is it perhaps also down to us if, over 60 years after the war ended, we are still astounded to find out how extensive the entanglements of the Third Reich’s totalitarian system of rule really were?

The great public uproar in Germany over studies into the institutional involvement of the Auswärtiges Amt (the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in the Holocaust, or the Allied interview recordings of German prisoners of war shows just how deep the rift has become between the life experiences of the Flakhelfer and the sanctioned historical understanding of today’s society. This rift is also the only possible explanation for why the NSDAP memberships of prominent citizens of the Federal Republic, such as writer Martin Walser or politician Hans-Dietrich Genscher, were willingly suppressed not just by the individuals in question but others, too, and why such revelations continue to cause controversy.

Since the Goldhagen debate in the 1990s about the wholesale involvement of ‘ordinary Germans’ in the mass slaughter of the Holocaust, rarely has a historical topic been discussed as heatedly in the German public sphere as the question of whether someone could become a member of the NSDAP without their own cooperation and knowledge. It jars with that clear-cut relationship between good and evil that shapes our ‘enlightened’ conception of the history of the Third Reich: white roses and black medals, Stauffenberg and Hitler, resisters and accomplices.

Even today, over six decades after the NSDAP was banned, there are still all kinds of creeping myths about it in Germany that are rooted in the immediate post-war era. In reality, only around 15 per cent of Germans were members of the NSDAP. In this context, it sounds ludicrous to still claim that only force, and never opportunism, played the decisive role in a person’s decision to join the party. Indeed, why would a party that from time to time even imposed enrolment freezes be interested in signing people up without their knowledge? The truth of the matter is that the NSDAP was far more popular than people are willing to admit today. On the one hand, after 1945 no German wanted to claim any involvement with the party; on the other, the myth is still perpetuated that the enrolment of entire half-year groups was carried out in secret.

The American occupying forces knew better, however. By pure chance, a huge treasure trove of information fell into their hands in the autumn of 1945: more than 10 million party membership cards, which were supposed to have been swiftly disposed of in the last days of the Third Reich. An SS commando delivered the 50 tons of Nazi files to a paper mill in Munich in April 1945. But the owner refused to destroy the mountain of documents, and handed the material over to the American military authorities, who then set up the Berlin Document Center. As early as 1947, the Americans were able to establish with the help of those papers that no National Socialist (NS) organisation had ever been collectively transferred into the NSDAP, not even the Hitler Youth or the Bund Deutscher Mädel.

Michael Buddrus, the top authority on the history of the Hitler Youth, established in a report in 2003 that there had been no automatic corporative party enrolment of members of certain cohorts or NS organisations. Any allegations to the contrary, he said, were ‘myths which originated in the attempt to ease the burden of responsibility in the immediate post-war era and which, through frequent rumour-mongering, developed into a willingly perpetuated “common knowledge” which unfortunately bore no resemblance to historical reality’.5

Even the historian Armin Nolzen, an established authority on NSDAP history, was surprised by the debate: ‘Do you know any political party in history which carried out collective enrolment?’ he asked. The collective-enrolment argument was, he asserted, a post-war attempt to fend off the theory of collective guilt. According to Nolzen’s summary of the current state of research, there is no proof of unauthorised enrolment carried out by Hitler Youth leaders. The prerequisite for enrolment in every case was ‘the personally signed enrolment form of each 18-year old youth who they deemed “worthy” of joining the party’ — and, until the very end, that was still a minority of all Hitler Youth members.6 The fact that involvement in Hitler’s party prompts a collective denial from many Germans even today remains just as astonishing as the naivety of the historians and columnists who want to draw a line under the unpleasant debate.

Over the years, I have undertaken research on numerous occasions among the 10 million index cards of the NSDAP’s membership records, and have found a number of eyewitnesses from the time. I have spoken with Hans-Dietrich Genscher about Nazi files, with Günter Grass about the Waffen-SS, and with Martin Walser about the Nazis in Wasserburg. The dramatist Tankred Dorst told me about the morbid character of the young people in the Jungvolklager (youth camps), while Iring Fetscher told me how he succumbed to Goebbels’ seductive demagogy on the ‘People’s Radio’. Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt told me he hadn’t known that the Americans checked the Nazi past of both himself and his entire cabinet (in which two ministers were former NSDAP members) even as late as 1980.

The leading democrats who are the subject of this book were not all Flakhelfer sensu stricto — in other words, they were not all born between 1926 and 1928 and called up as Luftwaffe assistants. The expanded generational term used here includes all Germans born after 1919 whose youth was shaped by the Third Reich. At first glance, the fact that the Nazi past of this group has only been critically explored in recent years is not surprising. Post-1945, all four of the occupying powers decreed youth amnesties for those born after 1919. But then this amnesty was joined by amnesia: the youthful aberrations were forgiven — and forgotten.

This book is not about guilt and accusation, nor about the youthful sins of those who made a significant contribution to the development of a civil post-war society after 1945 and to the success of democracy in the Federal Republic. This book tells the unknown history of the youngest NSDAP members of the Third Reich, from de-Nazification to the present day. It is not about the war criminals, the mass murderers of the Jewish people and ardent National Socialists whose crimes in Germany, although dealt with belatedly, were reviewed from the 1960s onwards with a thoroughness that compensated for lost time. Instead, the focus is on those individuals who — on account of their age — were labelled as ‘Hitler’s last heroes’ and yet at the same time became victims of Nazi propaganda as teenagers. Dictatorship, war, collaboration, perceived or actual opposition to the system, and ultimately its total collapse caused an existential instability among this generation, which many of its members tried to suppress after 1945 through an intensified engagement in the new democracy. They joined Hitler’s party at 17 or 18 years of age — too young to be perpetrators, but too old to escape ties of guilt with the Third Reich. Caught hopelessly in between, they were a generation of young people who regarded themselves as both ‘without ties and entangled’, as the sociologist Heinz Bude writes: ‘Ensnared as children, betrayed as young adults, they retreated, disappointed and insecure but functioning, back into the private and concrete, dedicating themselves quietly and efficiently to the rebuilding of Germany.’7 Without father figures, a common ‘language’ with which to describe their experiences, or history, these ‘deftly adaptable but grimly determined young men’ of the Flakhelfer generation compensated for their existential uncertainty by becoming, in Bude’s view, ‘the de facto, even normative pillar generation of West Germany’s re-emergence’.8

But one decisive aspect must be added to this portrait of a hard-working Flakhelfer elite in post-war Germany. The special engagement of this generation amounts to much more than the quiet economic activity portrayed by Bude in his sociological study Deutsche Karrieren (German Careers), which is based on the success stories of individual managers in the land of the economic miracle. The Flakhelfer also include numerous dedicated democrats who sought a way out of their generation’s lack of language and history by scrubbing away at the moral stigma of the German past and decisively shaping the social discourse of the Federal Republic to this day. The writers Günter Grass and Martin Walser, born in 1927, are still among the most important and prominent voices of German literature. Their contemporary Hans-Dietrich Genscher, after having been a federal minister for decades and playing a significant role in the negotiations for German reunification, still exerts considerable political influence today. And there were many other career trajectories that, although they may have begun in the Hitler Youth, did not lead into the NSDAP. Former Luftwaffe assistant Joseph Ratzinger, for example, became one of the most powerful Catholic theologians since the Second Vatican Council and served as Pope Benedict XVI from 2005 to 2013.

They are the representatives of the old Federal Republic in which they came of age. The fatherless became uber-fathers; those without language and history created a new language and made their own history. These Flakhelfer made a dedicated contribution to the Federal Republic’s acquisition of a new historical identity, the moral core of which was rooted in the memory of Germany’s guilt.

But this new beginning had a price: in order to be able to dedicate themselves to the democratic rebuilding of the Federal Republic, many former Flakhelfer denied and suppressed their own involvement in the Third Reich. They not only distanced themselves from National Socialism, but also formally de-Nazified themselves by dismissing — to this day — their NSDAP membership as a ‘feint’ or a birthday present to Hitler, with the aim of creating the impression they had been involved in the NSDAP without their knowledge.

And so Walser, Genscher, and co. became experts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung, at coming to terms with Germany’s troubled past. They became the nation’s conscience. They knew that they were being self-opinionated in their speeches. And yet even they were suppressing certain significant details of their own pasts in the Third Reich.

It is hard to reproach individuals for having become members of criminal organisations such as the SS (the elite corps of the Nazi Party) or the NSDAP, on a more or less voluntary basis, when they were only 18 years old at the time. Accordingly, this text is not about allocating blame, but about understanding. It is about reconciling the historical witness accounts with the stories in the newspapers. One cannot be understood without the other. Memory is not something to be picked and chosen at will, and that applies to both the survivors and those born afterwards. The fact that the Flakhelfer grew up as a fatherless generation — their fathers either dead or compromised by their participation in the Third Reich — doesn’t make the matter any easier. Perhaps it is only their grandchildren’s generation, with greater chronological and emotional distance, that can draw closer and try to understand them — an impossibility for the children of the Flakhelfer, whose relationship with their parents was characterised by a deep rift.

The story of the Flakhelfer is also one of great secrecy, one which is embarrassing to many people. It reflects the post-war history of the Federal Republic, with its many trade-offs, half-truths, concessions, and ritual adjurations, but also the genuine wish for repentance.

In fact, the Federal Republic to this day maintains that institutional continuity between it and the Third Reich cannot exist. Even in 2011, the German federal government answered a parliamentary enquiry from the democratic socialist party Die Linke with the assertion that institutions of the Federal Republic cannot have a Nazi past on account of the fact that such institutions have only existed since the Republic came into being in 1949: ‘Departments and other institutions of the Federal Republic have no continuity with institutions of the National Socialist dictatorship.’9 This legally correct response ignores the fact that, in numerous ministries and authorities, there was in all probability a considerable continuity in terms of personnel between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic, as recent studies of the Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Police Office), the Auswärtiges Amt, and numerous other authorities show.

The state-decreed memorial anniversaries and events that commemorate the resistance to Hitler and the Holocaust serve just as much as a sign of moral responsibility as the restitution payments to concentration-camp internees and victims of forced labour. But, nearly seven decades after the end of the war, these gestures threaten to become a collective symbolic trade of indulgences if they absolve contemporary Germans from asking critical questions.

For it is not just the numerous Flakhelfer who conceal their involvement in the Nazi Party — the FRG government, too, employed skilful tactics to delay the return of the NSDAP membership files from American possession for decades. The US had wanted to return the much-analysed archive to their German alliance partners back in the 1960s. But in the capital, Bonn, there was the fear that public pressure would then force them to open this Pandora’s box, which contained the names of many of post-war Germany’s leading politicians.

Even in the early 1990s, a senior government official listed in the files as an NSDAP member sat at the cabinet table: Free Democratic Party politician Hans-Dietrich Genscher. For almost two decades, Genscher, as foreign minister, led the department responsible for restitution negotiations with the Americans. As a special favour to Bonn, the US sorted the names of senior German politicians out of the main files to save their Cold War allies from embarrassing revelations. In this manner, the NSDAP files of more than 70 prominent German politicians disappeared into the safe of the American director of the Berlin Document Center (BDC) between the 1960s and 1990s — including Genscher’s. Admittedly, before the return of the documentation the Americans neatly slotted the files back into the main archive. However, the names of the politicians whose Nazi legacies were once hidden away in the safe were supposed to remain a secret forever: the US State Department demanded that all BDC files relating to information requests on individuals were to be destroyed upon their return to the National Archives in Washington.10 It is only thanks to chance that the list of the politicians in question could be reconstructed.

By the 1970s, the Document Center had already become a controversial relic of the occupation era, and one which Stasi spies also took an interest in. At the height of the Cold War, neither the FRG government nor its US allies were able to decide what should be done with the archive. Its return to the Federal Republic — which by then had been financing the archive for a long time — was delayed again and again. When the Bonn government’s hand was forced by a Bundestag (parliamentary) resolution in 1989, Genscher’s emissaries asked the Americans not to take the government’s demand for the immediate return of the NSDAP files literally, and instead to reject it citing technical difficulties. The strategy proved to be successful — the NSDAP files were not handed over to the German Federal Archives until 1994. A few weeks later, the public found out about Genscher’s party membership. Why did it take so long? Why is the shady archival legacy of the NSDAP still being argued over today?

The story of the Flakhelfer — and with it that of the Federal Republic — is inextricably linked to the fascinating history of the NSDAP membership files and the document centre in Berlin, a story which will also be told here.

I spent five years researching the NSDAP membership files in the Federal Archives in Berlin and studying the administrative deeds of the former Berlin Document Center. I was able to rely on the support of the last director of the BDC, a former US government official, whose testimony threw a controversial spotlight on the Nazi files.

At the centre of this book, alongside the (post-) history of the NSDAP index, lie the portraits of the NSDAP’s final members, whom I spoke to about their time in the Nazi Party. It is they — not high-ranking former Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann and Hans Globke —who shaped the Federal Republic after the war, despite the fact that they were indoctrinated by National Socialism early on. But even today, the debate surrounding the guilt and involvement of the German people is still tied to Eichmann and Globke and fetishists of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

In their groundbreaking work The Inability to Mourn: principles of collective behaviour, psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich stated that the undifferentiated view of one’s own actions and others’ suffering was at the root of the German inability to mourn victims and perpetrators. Even today, there are barely any nuances between demonisation and the cult of guilt. And yet there can hardly be a more informative example of entanglement and sin than the Flakhelfer generation, who spent their whole lives processing the experiences of the first 18 years of their existence, decisively shaping the arts, politics, and academia in the Federal Republic of Germany in the process. From their voices arises a musical score of memories, a German requiem. It is a lesson about corruptibility, and about what we can learn from those who were corrupted.