CHAPTER ONE

The Funeral Pyre

The ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ was already teetering towards its demise when, in 1944, the 35-year-old Polish Jew Salmen Gradowski buried a few hastily scribbled pages of his diary not far from Crematorium III in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

As a member of the Sonderkommando — the prisoners forced to work in the crematoria — Gradowski witnessed at first hand the mass murder in the gas chambers. He didn’t survive the camp, but his written account was found after the end of the war. It begins with the words: ‘To the person who discovers this note, please search everywhere, scour through every centimetre of earth. Dozens of documents are buried here, mine and those of others, which can shed light on what happened here. Search so that posterity may find the traces of the millions who were murdered.’1

By the time World War I drew to an end, Germany and large parts of Europe lay in ruins. But not only were the clues about the murdered buried in the smoking funeral pyres of the Third Reich; those about the perpetrators were, too.

The imminent end to their rule did not halt the National Socialists’ desire to destroy; on the contrary, it seemed to spur them on. Until the very end, the downfall was managed with horrifying efficiency: death marches were organised; prisoners, civilians, and deserters were executed; and soldiers were sent to futile deaths.

‘If we go under,’ Goebbels announced at a press conference in March 1945, as if the end were still a possibility rather than a certainty, ‘then the entire German people will go down with us, and in such a glorious way that even in a thousand years, the heroic downfall of the Germans will be at first place in world history.’2

In reality, though, the National Socialists’ trust in their own posthumous reputation was so scant that they had long since begun to erase the evidence of their crimes. Any incriminating documents that hadn’t already been annihilated by Allied bomb attacks were to be destroyed or hidden.

By October 1944, the Reich Minister for Home Affairs had commanded that all important files be destroyed due to the threat of enemy occupation, ‘in particular those of a secret and political nature, and those which could be of significance for the enemy in conducting its warfare’.3

The order to destroy the Nazi bureaucracy came from the highest level, but the destruction was also carried out in individual initiatives by lower-level officials.4 The perpetrators were intent on erasing all proof of their own involvement in the National Socialist mass crime.

But in its attempts to destroy its own tracks, the murderous efficiency of the National Socialist administration failed. The Third Reich left reams of papers behind: from the mountain of files to secret orders, from the fastidiously kept archive to the hastily hidden party-membership book, thousands of tons of written records from the Nazi Reich survived.

After 1945, even millions of ordinary Germans — the followers and accomplices or those who realised late what had been taking place — were intent on getting rid of all the compromising evidence from the Nazi era. In the files of the East German Ministry for State Security, which searched high and low in the living rooms of the ‘Workers’ and Farmers’ State’ for Hitler picture books and other Nazi kitsch, there are lists of confiscated objects found tucked away in secret drawers of old cupboards, in ventilation pipes, cellar crates, between balconies and roof tiles, or cemented into window frames.5 The same would have applied in the West: anyone who had been part of it all, particularly party members, never spoke of it, or pleaded mitigating circumstances when questioned.

A hasty decision

By the spring of 1945, the US Army had reached Munich, and anxiety was growing among the upper ranks of the National Socialist Party. While the remaining men in the German population were summoned into battle by rallying calls, the leaders in Munich organised their own escape.

First, though, an embarrassing legacy needed to be disposed of, one which under no circumstances was to fall into the hands of the victors: the central membership index of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, that orderly catalogue of perpetrators and followers which provided information on millions of party comrades. The card index was still in the administration building of the NSDAP Reich Treasury Minister at Königsplatz, lurking like an explosive device.

Stefan Heym was a war reporter in Munich with the American troops when the city was seized, and later worked his experiences into the novella Eine wahre Geschichte (A True Story). In it, he imagines a scene in which the last conclave of Nazi leaders are looking for a way to quickly dispose of the incriminating material:

‘The card index?’ said someone. ‘Oh yes — the card index …’

Everyone knew precisely which card index was being referred to. Munich, the so-called ‘Capital City of the Movement,’ was home to the extensive card index of the National Socialist Party, an index of seven million party members both at home and abroad, complete with all personal details. Each card held information about the individual’s professional role, official positions, awards, addresses, connections and other relevant remarks. The cards of members who the Gestapo didn’t completely trust were bordered in red. It was a first-class and very useful card index, a true masterpiece of German efficiency. Except, at this moment in time, it was a catastrophe.

‘So what shall we do with it?’ asked the man who had mentioned it in the first place. All those present could imagine what would happen if the card index fell into the enemy’s hands. Because if it was the intention of the Americans, English, French and Russians to rid Germany of all its Nazis, all they would need to do was pay visits to the individuals listed in alphabetical order in the index.

‘Burn it!’ declared the Gauleiter [regional Nazi Party leader] who was leading the meeting. ‘Just throw it in the furnace and be done with it!’

He stood up to leave. He was in a hurry to put some distance between himself and the Capital City of the Movement.

But the man who had posed the question wasn’t satisfied. ‘We can’t burn it,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘Have you ever tried to burn cards that are packed so closely together? They may singe a little around the edges, but they won’t burn.’

‘Then separate them!’

‘Seven million cards?’ asked the man who had been the first to mention the index. He could feel that the others resented him for this; they just wanted to get away, and he was holding them up. But they couldn’t argue with him, because none of them would dare to admit in front of everyone present that they were willing to surrender seven million members of their party to the enemy.

So he persevered: ‘You said that we should separate them and burn the cards individually. Do you have an idea of how long that would take? How long do you think we can hold Munich for?’

The participants of the meeting fidgeted on their chairs and waited for someone to come up with a sensible idea. In the end, a small man stood up. So far he had not said a single word in the meeting, because he was actually very clever and had already organised his escape back when the others were still talking about hedgehog defence positions in Witebsk and Minsk. ‘Why don’t we have them pulped?’ he suggested.

‘Pulped! Yes, of course!’ said the Gauleiter, assuming that the matter was now dealt with.

‘But where?’ said the man who had brought the problem up in the first place. He was stubborn.

‘In a paper mill, you idiot!’

‘I know that a paper mill is where you pulp things. But do you happen to know a paper mill that we still have under our control?’

‘Bring me a Munich address book!’ ordered the Gauleiter. ‘At once!’

The book was brought. Never before had so many perspiring faces leant over a single address book. They found the names and addresses of various paper mills in the suburbs of Munich. But as soon as they checked the addresses against the entries on the tactical map on the wall, they realised that the routes in question had either already been taken by the enemy, or were in the process of being taken.

At long last, they found a small paper mill that was situated in a part of the city that was still relatively secure.6

This is likely to be a fairly accurate depiction of the Nazi leaders’ embarrassing deliberations about what was to be done with the dangerous burden of evidence. But what happened next would exceed the imagination of even the most daring of writers.

The miller of Freimann

On 18 April 1945, a hastily assembled SS convoy left the centre of Munich with its controversial cargo. The heavily armed SS men were responsible for making sure that another several hundred kilograms of debris were piled onto the still smouldering bonfire of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. Himmler’s people needed 20 trucks disguised as civilian transports and several days in order to fetch the membership cards and letters from the fire-resistant safes of the NSDAP Reich Treasury Minister in Königplatz and deliver them to the Josef Wirth paper mill in the Munich suburb of Freimann. There, the files were to be destroyed before the American troops marched in.

But the SS hadn’t reckoned with the paper mill’s owner.7 Hans Huber was no friend of the Nazis. His brother Karl was a neurologist, and had emigrated to the US after 1933 when the new leaders forbade him from practising as a doctor because he had married a Jewish woman. Now Karl lived in New York, and Hans was being ordered to help destroy the secrets of those who had persecuted his brother.8

The miller was an astute man, and soon realised what kind of papers he had piled up under his roof. Before rushing off, the men of the SS commando gave the order, accompanied by the threat of all possible punishments, to destroy the papers at once. But Huber was not prepared to accept any more orders, especially not by April 1945. He decided to hide the files under some other old papers until the SS had withdrawn and the Third Reich had come to an end.9

At the beginning of May, the war was entering its final week when a young Polish Jew following the US Army found out about the transport. Michel Thomas had taken part in the emancipation of Dachau with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the 45th Division, and immediately set off to see the miller of Freimann. ‘At first I thought it might be gold, or other treasures of some kind,’ he later told his biographer, ‘so I took one of the Jeeps and drove to the paper mill. When I arrived, I saw mountains, absolute mountains of papers. The SS had simply unloaded everything, ordered that it be destroyed, then fled again.’10

Thomas pulled a drawer from one of the archive cabinets that had been flung on the heap and fished out one of the cards. It didn’t take him long to realise that these were the membership cards of the NSDAP, and he spent the next few hours clambering over the mountains of files and putting together a selection of the most interesting documents as proof of his discovery. Alongside the party membership cards, the hoard of documents also contained party correspondence, personnel files, and curious Nazi kitsch. Next to a written order signed personally by Himmler, Thomas found an art print depicting the execution of the Württemberg-born court Jew Joseph Süß Oppenheimer in Stuttgart on 4 February 1738, an SS album with watercolours from the Greek campaign, and files from a trial which Hermann Göring brought against Der Stürmer editor Julius Streicher, during which the latter’s paedophiliac penchant for young boys was revealed.11

Before Thomas returned to the 7th US Army headquarters in Munich with the evidence he had gathered, he made sure that a delegation of military police were summoned to guard the mill night and day.12

But if he thought that the Americans would welcome his discovery with open arms, he was mistaken. ‘I took the samples to the military administration and told them I had arranged for guards to watch the mill. Now it was their job to pursue the matter further, because it was outside of my jurisdiction. They said that they would take care of it, but they didn’t.’13

Even when Hans Huber turned up in the office of the American commander of Munich with three sacks full of NSDAP membership cards, they still seemed only vaguely interested in the contents. Whether this was down to the newly established US military administration being overstretched, or to Huber’s inadequate command of English, the result was the same, as it often is with bureaucratic matters: at first, nothing was done at all.

The fact that the occupying forces eventually realised the importance of the files was thanks not least to the persistence of Munich woman Anny Olschewsky, who had been interned in the Dachau concentration camp for eight months. Her Polish father, brother-in-law, and brother had been executed by the Nazis as opponents of the regime. After Munich was liberated, 37-year-old Olschewsky approached the military administration and was employed by the security officer of the 3rd US Army as an assistant on the document search.

She soon chanced upon a hoard of Nazi papers in one of the NSDAP administration buildings. In the summer of 1945, she took two sacks full of Nazi documentation to the office of Major William D. Brown and tried to impress upon her American superiors that this haul couldn’t possibly be everything, that there must be more somewhere.14 When it was established that the sacks came from Hans Huber’s paper mill, where the majority of the files still were, the aggravation caused was considerable: ‘Any idiot’ should have realised the significance of the documents being stored there, complained the archive consultant of the US military government.15 But it took another two months before Major Brown was able to convince his superiors in Berlin and Frankfurt that they had to act quickly.

If one believes Stefan Heym’s True Story, the brave miller was even temporarily taken into custody by the Americans after he received death threats from his fellow countrymen, who feared that membership cards bearing their names might be found under his roof.16

In October 1945, the Americans eventually sent a team of 16 former concentration-camp internees from Dachau to the mill, accompanied by officers of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). There, they set to, separating waste paper from the treasure trove of files. What they discovered in those paper mountains, piled high up to the rooftop, exceeded all their expectations. The central membership index of the NSDAP contained the names of over 8 million party members, along with their membership cards (of which there were more than 10 million due to duplication), personal data, passport pictures, and other documents. Major Brown and his people had, as The New York Times rejoiced, ‘hit the jackpot’.17

The index cards were the crown jewels among the files plundered from the Third Reich by the Allies. They were seen by many as ‘the key for blowing open the NSDAP’s underground activities, for exposing members abroad and for swift de-Nazification’.18 Once the American experts had recognised the importance of their discovery, they quickly turned their attention to evaluating it.

The files were still being stored in Huber’s mill when the leader of the US military administration in Bavaria, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Hensel, shared the first information gleaned from them with The New York Times in October 1945. Many Germans claimed that they had become party members only under duress or even without their own knowledge. After the discovery of the central index, Colonel Hensel left no doubt about what he thought of such statements: ‘These files contradict all the stories that these people were forced into the Nazi Party. They show that all members made an application and were obliged to pass various tests before they were admitted into the party by the Nazis.’19

By the evening of 20 October, the sorting work at the mill was complete. Loaded with 72 postal sacks full of NSDAP membership cards, the last truck left Huber’s mill at sundown, transporting the files back to Munich, where the SS had packed them up just six months earlier.

Their discoverer, Michel Thomas, emigrated to Los Angeles soon after the war and became a successful language teacher, counting Hollywood celebrities such as Barbra Streisand, Grace Kelly, and Woody Allen among his students. The documents that he took from the Freimann paper mill in May 1945 remained in his possession. After his death, the American archivist Robert Wolfe, who himself had fought in World War II as an officer and who was responsible for the looted German military files in the National Archives in Washington for over 40 years after the war, paid tribute to Thomas’s unique discovery: ‘The success that the victorious powers had in punishing war crimes and de-Nazifying Germany was largely attributable to the possession of and access to the Nazi Party’s files, discovered, identified and reported by the CIC agent Michel Thomas.’20

Decades after the end of the war, the NSDAP index would still reveal new names and end many a career that had been newly begun at the zero hour. It would lead to diplomatic incidents and tough restitution negotiations between the conquerors and the conquered. Even today, many still claim that their names were included in those files without them ever having known they had become card-carrying members of the party.

Operation Goldcup

By spring 1945, the American secret service and reconnaissance officers in the entourage of the US Army had advanced into the conquered German regions. The Allied troops managed to secure some important documents even while still on the advance. ‘A genuine race began to reach certain target objects,’ writes the historian Astrid M. Eckert, ‘and such trophies were jealously guarded at the risk of serious diplomatic complications.’21

Since August the previous year, US soldiers had been allowed to collect trophies and souvenirs.22 The members of Operation Goldcup, however, were less interested in Göring’s marshal’s baton or Himmler’s SS dagger. Under the command of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, they were responsible for collecting documents from German government ministries, and had been tasked with seizing the holy grail of any occupying power: in this case, the Nazi bureaucratic memory bank. Whoever possessed the archive also possessed the power of interpretation over history.

For the victors, the looted documents served as a basis for war crimes trials and the de-Nazification process. But they also served the writing of history. Without the sources from the National Socialist administration, it would have been just as impossible to achieve an exact understanding of the perpetrators as it would be to understand the fate of the victims without testimonies like Salmen Gradowski’s diary. Key documents, such as the only surviving minutes from the Wannsee Conference, where the genocide of the Jews was planned on 20 January 1942, were later discovered in the archive that the Allies had already stored away.

Even today, documents are still appearing that shed new light on these dark days of German history. The archival legacy of Nazi rule still occupies Germany, as can be seen from the public debate surrounding the official study of the role of the Auswärtiges Amt (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in the Third Reich, which was commissioned by the former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer in 2005.23 Many important discoveries from the historical record are due in no small part to the collective efforts of the Allied occupiers, begun in the spring of 1945, to protect the documents from annihilation or bring them out from their hiding places into the light of day.

The document hunters compiled lists of their target objects even while they were still on the advance. As soon as the dust from the battle to seize an official building or authority had settled, the combat units of the US Army reported back to the Goldcup agents at base, saying whether they had found important documents on location. The reconnaissance officers had to ensure the safety of the archived documents in the briefest of time frames. If the German officials working in the building in question hadn’t already left by the time the Americans arrived, they were imprisoned and interrogated.

In order to cope with the sheer mass of discovered documents, the occupying forces had no other choice but to put the fox in charge of the henhouse. They had to quickly recruit additional German workers, whose backgrounds were checked with varying degrees of strictness. The Allied directive that Nazis and militarists should be removed from all public authorities as well as positions in culture and the economy also applied to the Ministerial Collection Center, in which the majority of workers were Germans, under the supervision of occupying officers.24 An active Nazi was considered to be someone who had held a post or other verifiable position in an NS organisation, who had been an active follower of the NS ideology, or who had voluntarily supported the NS movement. Anyone who had been awarded Nazi medals was also considered to be suspicious.

Officially speaking, those who had been nominal members of the party did not have anything to fear. Quite the reverse, in fact: the Americans were aware that the ‘removal of certain categories of persons can lead to individual injustices if an investigation reveals that someone who was fired for formal reasons was only a nominal Nazi’.25 However, those who were considered to be nominal and reformed Nazis were still reported to the headquarters of the US armed forces.26

In the summer of 1945, the list of those to be dismissed initially included all NSDAP members or supporters who had joined before 1 May 1937. Even those who had been admitted into the NSDAP at the age of 18 after four years of Hitler Youth membership had to be removed from official roles.27

Admittedly, the officers of the American military government responsible for the dismissal or recruitment of compromised Germans had considerable discretionary powers when it came to deciding what would happen with the individuals the Allies considered to be hostile. Among others, these included nominal party comrades who had joined after 1 May 1937, members of the Waffen-SS (the military arm of the SS), SS candidates, SA members (Nazi storm troopers, or Brownshirts) who had joined after 1 April 1933, as well as non-commissioned Hitler Youth officers, and members who had joined before 25 March 1939. In practice, the decision mostly rested on a short interrogation that lasted just 15 minutes.28

So, from the beginning, the conquerors were reliant on the collaboration of the conquered. Some NS functionaries and Wehrmacht (armed forces) officers believed that they could buy the lenience of the victors by offering information on hidden archive sources and testimonies about administration practices. As early as April 1945, the Americans had drawn up a detailed catalogue of tasks for officials in higher-ranking roles.29 Hitler’s bureaucrats were to take up their service again, but this time for Uncle Sam.

For this purpose, the selected German bureaucrats were immediately placed under the authority of the Allied High Command and control officers on location, provisionally named as doyens, and entrusted with the temporary management of a ministry, department, or authority. Their first task was to compile a complete list of the personnel under their command. In this, members of the SS, Gestapo, and SD (the Reich security service), as well as the names of all NSDAP members, had to be marked with a star.30 The German bureaucrats were not allowed to leave their administration building until they had presented personnel lists and further information, and were responsible with their lives for the documents entrusted to them. They were expressly warned by the American control officers that ‘the deliberate destruction, removal, tampering with or withholding of files or archive materials’ could be punishable with the death penalty.31

A central file-collection point — the Ministerial Collection Center (MCC) — was established at Camp Dentine near Kassel, under American and British leadership. According to a secret memorandum dated 12 June 1945, Lieutenant General James L. Williams, in the name of the later military governor Lucius D. Clay, was in command.32 Files from the Reich ministries and other authorities were to be collected at the MCC in order to facilitate the development and control of the Allied administration of the occupied territory.33

A British diplomat described the MCC as the ‘skeleton of German government authorities’.34 This can be taken in a completely literal sense: the Third Reich had finally sunk into the grave of history, and a new Germany was to arise. The arduous process of evaluating the files was the first step towards the construction of a new German administration.

The task that stood before the American military archivists and their German helpers was an overwhelming one. Within six months, around 1.5 million kilos of files were transported from thousands of discovery sites throughout the Reich to the MCC. There, in the centre of Germany, files piled up from more than a dozen Reich ministries and authorities. The 70,000-volume-strong library of the Auswärtiges Amt was among the documentation to arrive in Kassel, as was the formerly German loot of two chests full of files from the Polish weather bureau. In order to gauge the horrific consequences of Hitler’s war, all you had to do was glance at the 450-ton mountain of documents from the Wehrmacht information office listing soldiers killed in action.35

In the capital, the American military government seized the premises of the Reich postal department in Berlin-Zehlendorf just two days after the war ended. Officially, the building near the Krumme Lanke lake had been declared to be a telephone amplifier location. In reality, it was where employees of the ‘research facility’ in Hermann Göring’s Ministry of Air Travel had been intercepting phone conversations between Berlin and the west of the Reich.36

Now, though, there was radio silence at the large subterranean bunker facility on the Wasserkäfersteig. For the next 50 years, the rustle of secret Nazi files would fill the cellar rooms of the Berlin Document Center, which started its work on 10 May 1945 and would continue for almost half a century.

The black market

The defeated Germans soon realised how important looted documents were to the Allies. Shortly after the war ended, therefore, the illegal trade of Nazi papers began to take off. Given that the breakdown of the four-power administration was already looming, the German file-dealers used the competition between the Russians, Americans, British, and French to their advantage, hawking interesting files to the highest bidders from the four sectors.

‘Many German documents,’ reported a British Royal Air Force officer, ‘can be obtained in exchange for money or goods (coffee, etc) from their “owners”. Only these “owners” know the location of the documents, some of which are in the Russian sector. Some of the documents are regularly peddled in all four sectors of Berlin and sold to the authority that offers the best price.’37 For a certain sum of money, the officer conjectured, a huge range of documents could probably be acquired. The British were not averse to joining in with this game of file Monopoly in the divided city.

Offering archives to the Americans, however, was a more dangerous game, regardless of how they had come into one’s possession. In 1948, the discoverer of the Kaltenbrunner reports, which contained Gestapo information about the alleged conspirators in the Hitler assassination attempt of 20 July 1944, offered his find to the Institute of Research into the National Socialist Era for 200,000 deutschmarks. Yet he was out of luck: not only was the recently formed research institute devoid of any funds, but the US Army also got wind of the unethical offer, immediately seized the bundle of papers, and shipped them to Washington.38

Contrary to American fears, it soon became clear that German file thieves were rarely driven by ideological motives. There was little interest in Nazi-biased literature, but when it came to film and car magazines, some German workers were even prepared to risk their daily hot meal from the US Army soup kitchen.39

American soldiers had a tendency to make off with documents as war booty, too. In 1949, an article in the newspaper Christ und Welt under the promising heading ‘A People with no Yesterday’ criticised with barely concealed indignation the ‘naive greed for souvenirs of the GIs, Tommys, Poilus and Ivans’ who had allegedly impeded the collection and evaluation work of the Allied bureaus. ‘The trade of valuable Reich files is said to have blossomed in America long after the end of the war,’ the article declared.40

Even high-ranking officers were not beyond being overtaken by a sudden desire to acquire Hitler mementoes. General George S. Patton, for example, revealed himself to be particularly cavalier in this regard. After CIC officers found an original copy of the Nuremberg Laws signed by Hitler in the safe of an Eichstätter Bank, they handed it over to Patton, according to their instructions. It seems, however, that the self-confident general didn’t feel personally bound by Eisenhower’s directive that official Nazi documentation was not to be taken for private use. Viewing the document as his personal property, he generously donated it to an American library.41

Individual documents repeatedly vanished from already established collection points, too. This meant that just a few Allied soldiers had the task of searching a large number of German workers. During the examination of files from the German Foreign Office, a researcher from the British Foreign Office established that, among other documents, the last draft of the retreat order given by Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s personally signed response to the withdrawal of his pilots were both missing.

Even Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor Robert Kempner almost fell out of favour with the guardians of the files. For obvious reasons, his office was greatly dependent on the evidence that had been collected by the Allies. And yet it happened again and again that originals lent to Nuremberg were never returned, presumably disappearing into the pockets of employees of the tribunal. ‘Some of these people,’ fumed the British custodian of the German diplomatic files, Lieutenant Colonel Thomson, ‘are more interested in acquiring scoops and souvenirs than in collecting evidence for the trials.’42

The expert archivists of the American military administration knew that prompt action was needed if the loss of further files was to be prevented and the use of currently available objects safeguarded. Between January and February of 1946, the last document treasures made their way back into the former capital of the Third Reich, now-divided Berlin, in eight freight trains with 25 carriages apiece.43

The various pasts of Günther Nollau

Cats, as the saying goes, have nine lives. So, it seems, do some secret-service agents. The young lawyer who sat down at his typewriter in the summer of 1945 and carefully filled out the questionnaire distributed by the mayor of the city of Dresden was no secret agent. But he was to become one of the most powerful in Germany, in fact.

A new life had begun for Saxon-born Günther Nollau that summer, as it had for many of his fellow countrymen, and he intended to help get it off to a good start, beginning with the questionnaire in front of him.

Nothing had changed when it came to his date of birth: 4 June 1911. The birthdays of his parents, wife, and children, and his frequent changes of address due to the turmoil of war, didn’t create any problems for him, either, as he filled in the answers. Under religion, he wrote ‘dissident’.

Then came the difficult questions, the ones which were probing even on paper, and of these there were a great many: Had he ever been a member of the NSDAP? What official roles or leadership positions had he occupied? Had he ever been a member of the SS, SA, HJ, BDM, NSDStB, NSKK, NSFK, or the SD? In which other organisations connected to or led by the NSDAP had he been a member?

These were not simple questions, and they demanded carefully considered responses. Especially the million-dollar question of the post-war era, concerning NSDAP membership. It was a complicated matter; there were things that needed to be explained, elaborated upon. But the questionnaire only allowed half a line for the answer. Nollau thought for a moment, then began to type his view of things: ‘No. However, I was informed in May of 1944 that I had been accepted into the party on the 1.1.42 (transferred from the NSKK). I received neither a membership card nor a party book, and was not duty-bound. Therefore, no membership.’44

This clearly exceeded the framework of the question. But as an experienced criminal defence lawyer, Nollau knew that the truth could seldom be captured with a simple Yes or No.

Once he started to get things off his chest, his responses sped up: He had been a member of the NSKK, the National Socialist Motor Corps, from 1 May 1939, but had never held a leadership role. He had also joined the Volkswohlfahrt (the NS public welfare organisation) and the Rechtswahrerbund (the NS association of German legal professionals), but without ever occupying an official position.

Finally, he was asked whether he still held in his possession any files, card indexes, receipts, money, or other papers from any of the above-named organisations. If he did, the questionnaire cautioned, every object was to be reported immediately to the authorities.

As complicated as the circumstances of Nollau’s party membership were, a simple answer was advisable when it came to incriminating evidence. Relieved, he typed ‘No’.45

The files, in any case, had vanished. There was no reason to believe that a few incriminating papers would have survived the inferno that had claimed entire towns and cities. All of Nollau’s personal documents had been burned on 13 February 1945, the day that Dresden was desolated.

There were more important things for a young family man like him to think about, such as getting hold of food, and the search for shelter or missing family members.

And so the summer of 1945 became a new beginning for the survivors, a zero hour that of course never really existed. War criminals like the concentration-camp doctor Aribert Heim were able to continue practising without any interruption. Ideologues like the SS captain Hans Schwerte were able to declare themselves dead and be resurrected under a new name as democratic citizens of the Federal Republic. And even if these were exceptions, albeit numerous ones, the majority of Germans had still incriminated themselves by turning a blind eye and thereby participating in the Third Reich.

For the followers, too, the seemingly impossible now became possible. Many were not only able to start a new life, but also to retrospectively correct their old one. It is one of the greatest ironies of German post-war history that the de-Nazification process encouraged the misrepresentation and suppression of the past rather than its exploration. The matter-of-fact questionnaires must have seemed like an invitation to rewrite the past and edit events in the hope that there was no proof to the contrary.

In addition, the authorities even made it easy for individuals to rationalise their party membership. On a questionnaire produced by the district court in Saxony, the question relating to NSDAP membership was presented with three possible answers: a) No, b) Yes, with anti-fascist involvement, and c) Only nominally.

Günther Nollau carefully continued to de-Nazify himself as the Third Reich moved further into the past. On a questionnaire for the Police Presidency of Dresden in March 1947, he answered the question relating to party membership with ‘No, just party applicant’.46

Nollau’s ambiguous answers to questions about his NSDAP membership are a prime example of the dichotomous approach to the recent German past. His answers may have extended beyond the intended framework of the questionnaire, but not the framework of what his fellow countrymen reported about their own party membership. Again and again, former party members claimed to have been accepted into the NSDAP without their knowledge — inventing, in some cases, elaborate excuses as to how and why they had joined the party.

In July 1945, Nollau explained his NSDAP membership to the state justice administration of Saxony by saying that during the Third Reich he had been subjected to intense moral pressure that had caused him to join the party. After years of unsuccessful attempts to gain accreditation as a lawyer he had, therefore, reluctantly joined the NSKK and then the party.

But this contrite admission wasn’t enough to secure permission to practise as a lawyer again in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Nollau’s party membership must have seemed like a curse: in the Third Reich he had needed to entangle himself; in the new Germany, he needed to extricate himself.

In fact, NSDAP membership alone would soon be considered to be a venial sin, in both East and West Germany. Basic party members without specific roles were quickly exonerated as followers. And for all those born after 1 January 1919, a youth amnesty eventually came into force in all the occupied zones.

The Soviets placed more value on the significance of personal responsibility than on the existence of a Nazi Party membership book, at least in theory. On 16 August 1947, the highest authority of the Soviet military administration in Germany announced Directive 201, according to which a legal prosecution would only take place if the files revealed proof of ‘personal culpability’.47 For this reason, the ruling powers in Moscow decreed that it was absolutely essential to:

differentiate on the one hand between former active fascists, militarists and persons who are genuinely guilty of war crimes and crimes of other kinds committed by the Hitlerists, and on the other the nominal, non-active fascists who are capable of breaking with the fascist ideology and, together with the democratic ranks of the German people, taking part in the effort to rebuild a peaceful democratic Germany.48

NSDAP members who had solely ‘paid membership fees or taken part in meetings where attendance was compulsory, or those who had exercised insignificant or routine obligations as was required of all members’ were also classified as followers.

The assessment of personal guilt was often incredibly arbitrary, particularly in the Soviet NKVD special camps that were in existence until 1950. However, mere NSDAP membership — subject to the ethical ‘cleansing’ of those involved and a swift avowal of allegiance to the Socialist workers’ and farmers’ state — was not considered an impediment to a career in the SED (the governing Socialist Unity Party) or the Ministry for State Security in the GDR.49

In the decades that followed, the Ministry for State Security continually targeted evidence of personal involvement in war crimes, denunciations, and related information, while a mere party membership was at best a catalyst for the attempted compromising of a West German politician.

The fact that comprehensive de-Nazification was soon called to a halt, even in the Soviet-occupied zone, is down to the new ruling powers’ sobering realisation that there were simply too many former party members across all strata of German society. It was impossible for all of them to be completely neutralised. In the case of East Germany, Directive 201 can be seen as an effective propaganda tool, a peace offering with which the new state could win its own eternal followers. Accordingly, the directive proclaimed that comprehensive arraignment of ‘all former nominal, non-active members of the Nazi Party would only impede the democratic rebuilding of Germany’.50

In the years before the ruling powers came to this pragmatic conclusion, however, young Günther Nollau continued his efforts to rebuild his life. In August 1945, Nollau wrote a long letter to the lawyers’ chamber in Dresden, in which he once again tried to explain the circumstances of his party membership. The seven-page-long confession is a fascinating document. Not only does it reveal the half-hearted, wavering opportunism that led young Germans like Nollau to join the NSDAP, but also, in the shifts between contrite disclosure and skilful concealment, the future secret agent’s true calling: the foggy grey of the intelligence service.

Nollau’s testimony shows how a young lawyer in the Third Reich could be moved to join the party for career reasons, without any particular ideological conviction. Despite his summa-cum-laude doctorate, his licence to practise as a lawyer in the Third Reich was denied for many years on account of the fact that he had not proven his willingness to support the National Socialist state. ‘What was I supposed to do, restrict myself to some bookkeeping position just in order to avoid joining the NSDAP, when their true character wasn’t yet obvious to me back then and my view was based purely on my own stubborn aversion?’51

One day he was allegedly told that, as an NSKK member, he would be transferred along with the young men from the Motor Hitler Youth into the NSDAP. Even though he had already received his accreditation as a lawyer by then, Nollau swiftly complied and signed the application form, considering it too risky to refuse.

In the letter to the lawyers’ chamber, Nollau admitted to probably having paid membership fees at one point, too, although he claimed that he never wore the party insignia. He went on:

To me, the most significant point about my case seems to be that I didn’t join the Party from the outset in order to make things easier for myself, but rather took a chance to see whether I could achieve a position worthy of my education based solely upon my professional achievements. When this proved itself to be impossible, and only after I had sacrificed many years, I decided, albeit with a heavy heart, to make concessions.52

Nollau wouldn’t have been a good defence lawyer if he hadn’t followed up with a reference to bureaucratic circumstances. He had done his homework:

As I ascertained from the NSDAP’s organisation manual, issued by the Reich Organisation Leader in 1943, an individual was only accepted into the party and considered duty bound to it once they had received a membership book issued by the Reich leadership or a membership card (according to pages 6c and 6d of the organisation manual). When I filled out that first questionnaire, I classified myself as a member because I wasn’t yet aware of the differentiation that had been made up until that point.

But it wasn’t over yet. In order to be able to practise as a lawyer in Dresden again, Nollau needed to do more than just de-Nazify himself. He also had to produce proof of his anti-fascist stance in the Third Reich. According to Directive 160 of the Soviet military administration from December 1945, a person could only be exonerated if ‘despite their official membership or application for membership or other external feature, they had not only acted passively, but also, to the best of their abilities, actively put up resistance to the National Socialist dictatorship and suffered the consequences as a result’.53

In pursuit of his exoneration, Nollau claimed that, as a lawyer in Krakow, he had not only represented hundreds of Polish people, but also protected clients from the Gestapo, and freed prisoners from concentration and labour camps. On account of the fact that all the written evidence of this had been lost, Nollau acquired assurances on oath from some acquaintances. With this, he had de-Nazified himself.

However, even in the new Germany they didn’t want to give a former member of the Nazi Party permission to practise as a lawyer that quickly. The justice department had him submit assurances on oath, and fill in questionnaires again and again. On 13 November 1945, Nollau wrote in his new curriculum vitae that he had been transferred from the NSKK to the party, but that he had possessed neither a membership card nor a membership book, and that he had neither been duty bound nor sworn in, and that he was ‘therefore, not a member of the NSDAP’.

His mother declared on oath in a statement that her son had only joined the NSDAP in the end because she, as a war widow, had convinced him to do so by appealing to his sense of duty and gratitude towards her.

Nollau eventually got his licence back, but it was revoked again just a year later by the Justice Ministry of Saxony — after all, in 1945 he himself had admitted that his admission into the party had been authorised. Once again, Nollau set to, writing letters and accounts of his past, and sending them to the Soviet military administration and Saxony’s minister of justice. He had indeed applied to be admitted to the party, he said, but had never been a party member. Eventually his petition was successful: from February 1947, he was allowed to practise again.

For a while, the bureaucratic walk on eggshells regarding party membership seemed to be a thing of the past for Nollau; but then, on 26 February 1949, he was arrested during a visit to a political prison in Dresden. He had brought cake to a client who was being held on suspicion of fascist involvement. After Nollau was released in March 1949, he fled to the West and was hired the following year by the BfV, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in Cologne. There, the versatile lawyer (whose nickname among his colleagues was ‘Dr No’) soon began his steep ascent as an expert in counterintelligence. At the peak of his career, after the exposure of East German agent Günter Guillaume in 1975, Nollau was accused of spying for the East himself, and had to step down as president of the BfV. The newspaper Die Welt wrote of the man who had been a member of the NSDAP, the conservative-liberal, centre-right CDU, and the centre-left SPD: ‘His reputation has been stained brown.’54