CHAPTER TWO

Members Only

The first members of the NSDAP were a railway locksmith and a sports journalist. In 1919, Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer founded the German Workers’ Party. A short while later, the small right-wing extremist organisation renamed itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The party manifesto targeted individuals with the same mishmash of nationalistic philosophies as those who followed other right-wing splinter parties.

‘What made the NSDAP increasingly attractive towards these people was the radicalism with which Adolf Hitler presented its slogans,’ writes historian Mario Wenzel. The party set out to achieve an extensive pervasion of German society, as Hitler made clear in his 1938 Reichenberg speech:

Then a new German youth will rise up, and we are already training them from a very young age for this new State. What they will learn first and foremost is to think in a German way, to act in a German way. And if these boys and girls join our organisations at ten years of age and, as it so often is the first time, feel and experience the fresh air, then four years later they will go from the Jungvolk [the section of the Hitler Youth for boys aged ten to 14] to the Hitler Youth, and there we will keep them for another four years, and after that, instead of handing them back over into the care of our old sires of class and status, we will take them immediately into the party and the workers’ front, to the SA or the SS, to the NSKK and so on … and they will never again be free, not for the rest of their whole lives.2

No German boy or German girl was to escape his clutches. The political sect that began in a haze of beer in Munich soon developed into a ramified mass organisation. By the end of the Third Reich, two-thirds of the German population would be part of its branches and associated societies. However, party membership was a different matter, and the percentage of party members in the German population as a whole was significantly smaller. Those who joined tended to have good reasons to do so.

At the beginning of 1933, there were 1 million members. After the NSDAP seized power, the number climbed to 2.5 million in just a short time. The new members were derided by the ‘old fighters’ (bearers of the Golden Party Badge, with a membership number below 100,000) and the ‘old party comrades’ (who had joined the NSDAP before 30 January 1933) as ‘March violets’, because they had only started to follow Hitler after his clear victory in the March elections of 1933. On 1 May 1933, therefore, the party imposed a membership freeze, which was intermittently lifted thereafter. By the end of the war, there were 8.5 million NSDAP party members.3

This meant that less than 15 per cent of the German population were party members — the NSDAP was intended to be an elite group. But in fact, it was much more popular than is admitted today. ‘With the exception of practising Catholics and the industrial proletariat, the NSDAP found support and members in all strata of society. By the end, their group of supporters represented a more balanced social structure than all the other parties of the Weimar Republic.’4

It is often presumed that Hitler Youth leaders carried out unauthorised enrolments. To do so, they would have needed to fake the signatures on the enrolment forms. But so far there is not one known example of a faked signature by a Hitler Youth leader predating 8 May 1945.

The enrolment procedures for the year groups born in 1926 and 1927 were probably managed in a much more oppressive manner than those for the preceding year groups. Indeed, Armin Nolzen, one of the foremost experts on the subject, refers to the assumption that there was a statutory quota for enrolment from the Hitler Youth and BDM as ‘pure fiction’. But it is also clear that the internal guidelines in individual Hitler Youth districts were abused considerably. According to Nolzen: ‘Certainly the pressure in this area would have continually increased, reaching its peak with the enrolment drive of 1944.’5

Regardless, researchers have found that nothing happened without a personally signed enrolment form. Nor, Nolzen concludes, was there automatic enrolment for any of the Hitler Youth or BDM year groups whose members were accepted into the party between 1937 and 1944: ‘The individual always had the opportunity to decide whether they would sign or not.’6

The fact that members of the Hitler Youth made use of this opportunity is shown in an SD (security service) report from 1943, ‘Recruitment of Youth into the Party’, the authors of which observed among many youths in the Reich an ‘indifference’ and ‘lack of willingness’ to serve the party: ‘Some stayed away from the enrolment ceremony even though they had signed the enrolment form, while others weren’t even invited to the ceremony by their HY leaders. In addition, it was observed that even HY and BDM members who had served for eight years in the NS youth organisation and who were now being summoned by their group leaders to fill in enrolment forms made “impolite comments” and refused to do so.’7

So, clearly it was possible to refuse. It is obvious, of course, that courage was needed to do so, and that a lack of courage is human. But it is remarkable that the long-lasting impact of the Nazi Party leads many Germans to forget and suppress their memories even today. Time and time again, otherwise critical historians and columnists seem to feel the inclination to bring a premature end to the necessary debate.

‘But I de-Nazified myself’

The debate regarding NSDAP membership began where it was least expected: in the Germanists’ ivory tower, usually only of interest to academics themselves. It was in the literary field, specifically, that people started to discuss whether someone could have become a member of the Nazi Party without their own knowledge, as well as how this was to be dealt with after 1945. The catalyst, perhaps unsurprisingly, was supposedly harmless research into the NSDAP card index in the Federal German Archives.

Christoph König, the editor of the three-volume encyclopaedia Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950, which provides information on nearly 1500 Germanist scholars, checked the resumes of those listed for the period of the Third Reich, and where NSDAP membership was cited, mentioned this in the short biographies.8 Long before commissioned historians investigated the history of German ministries and authorities, and offered unequivocal proof of the continuity in personnel between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic, König’s encyclopaedia listed the Nazi connections in the field of German philology, in which former NSDAP members helped one another get back into high-ranking positions after the war. The Goethe researcher Hans Pyritz (1905–1958), for example, had been a member of the SA and the NSDAP, but was regarded as having been ‘exonerated’ by a German de-Nazification court verdict after the end of the war. He later hired Heinz Nicolai (1908–2002), a former party comrade whom he had once promoted to the rank of SS Untersturmführer in the Third Reich, as assistant chair at the University of Hamburg.9

The most notorious case of a ‘new beginning’ in German post-war academia is also listed by König: that of the Germanist Hans Ernst Schneider (1909–1999), who as an SS Hauptsturmführer was section leader in Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff and worked in the SS Ahnenerbe institute, the Nazi’s pseudo-scientific Aryan history research foundation. After the defeat of the regime, he covered up his identity with the help of his SD contacts, had himself declared dead, and remarried his wife under the name of Hans Schwerte. In 1958, he earned a post-doctoral qualification in the recent history of German literature — with his thesis Faust and the Faustian, rather fittingly — and later, in 1965, became a professor at RWTH Aachen University. At the height of his career, believed by others to be a left-liberal, he was promoted to rector of the university, and, after his retirement, was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. When Schwerte’s double identity was revealed in 1995 it caused a scandal; he lost not only his professor title and pension, but also the Federal Cross.

Schwerte’s explanation — ‘But I de-Nazified myself’ — is not devoid of a certain logic. The political theorist Claus Leggewie, commenting on the cases of Schwerte and Günter Grass (who concealed his membership in the Waffen-SS), observed that the retrospective discovery of the crimes of the Third Reich had also ‘silenced those whose personal de-Nazification is believable’.10 After all, the individuals in question genuinely had contributed to defending the fledgling democracy against reactionary forces: ‘They placed their private, political and social existences on new foundations without making their transformations public. They thought they were already doing enough — Grass as a man of letters and public intellectual, Schwerte as the advocate of a “critical” German philology …’11

The publication of the Internationales Germanistenlexikon was preceded by a protracted battle between the editor and the surviving scholars whose careers in academia had begun in the 1940s. Der Spiegel reported that some of these ‘Unroused Nestors’ (senior academics) had tried to put pressure on König and prevent the publication of their NSDAP membership.12

Compared to the approximately one hundred Germanists in older age brackets whose Nazi pasts König revealed in the encyclopaedia, the cases of the ‘aged men who had once let themselves be moved to join the party as callow youths of 18 or 19 years of age’ seemed harmless.13 Or they would have, if it hadn’t been for the persistent denials of the numerous individuals in question, who claimed that they had become Hitler’s party comrades without their own cooperation or knowledge.

The Berlin medievalist Peter Wapnewski claimed not to be able to remember any agreement on his part, and created an entirely new category in the history of political-party research by classifying himself as an ‘unwitting party member’. The Tübingen rhetoric scholar Walter Jens explained that it could be possible that he ‘signed some scrap of paper’, but claimed that with the best will in the world he couldn’t remember having done so, thereby trying to wipe the ‘absurd and petty’ issue from the table.14

‘All my friends in my resistance group were in the SA or the NSDAP,’ claimed 88-year-old Goethe expert Arthur Henkel.15 According to his testimony, he only applied for membership in order to be able to emigrate to Sweden for a teaching role. Henkel’s claims could be interpreted as a desperate attempt to escape the tricky position he found himself in. In just one sentence, his own NSDAP membership, as well as that of his friends, is made into a condition for conspiratorial resistance. However, even after emigrating to Sweden, Henkel continued to dutifully pay his membership fees.

In order to establish legal certainty, König commissioned historian Michael Buddrus from the Munich Institute for Contemporary History to prepare a report to clarify whether someone could have been accepted into the NSDAP without their own knowledge. Buddrus’s verdict was unequivocal: even if enrolment may have taken place under considerable external pressure, it had not been possible to become a member of the NSDAP without one’s own knowledge. There had never been automatic collective enrolment; every membership of Hitler’s party was individual and ‘a result of the enrolment form and attached questionnaire being personally signed by the applicant’.16

There were still membership targets, of course. According to Hitler and Hess, no more than 10 per cent of the population were to become members of the elite NSDAP party, and these were ideally to be recruited from the Hitler Youth. Later, the quota for party enrolment from the Hitler Youth was raised to 30 per cent of each year group, and the enrolment age was reduced to 17. Hitler Youth district leaders did admittedly receive mandatory enrolment quotas, writes Buddrus in his report. However, he continues, ‘we can rule out the possibility that regional leaders, confronted with these, took it upon their own initiative to pass on names to their superiors in order to fulfil their quotas’.

Even the lists containing many hundreds of names that were sent to the NSDAP’s central membership authority from 1942 to 1943 were allegedly checked ‘in each individual case; if, for example, there was no handwritten signed enrolment form attached, then enrolment was refused, even in 1944’.17

In short, the automatic collective enrolment of members from individual year groups never took place. According to Buddrus, such claims were ‘continually perpetuated myths which arose in the exoneration attempts of the immediate post-war era and which, through frequent rumour-mongering, advanced to become willingly collaborative “common knowledge” that bore no resemblance to the historical reality’.18

The American occupying forces had already established by 1947 that no organisation had ever been completely absorbed into the NSDAP in this way. This also applied to the youth organisations, whose members were neither collectively nor automatically transferred. In fact, only a minority of individuals from these groups were put forward for membership of the Nazi Party. As we have seen, the historian Armin Nolzen also states that enrolment applications had to be signed personally by each candidate. After years of intensive research into the NSDAP party archives, he is baffled by the discussions about allegedly unwitting NSDAP memberships. The argument of collective intake was an excuse from the post-war era, he claims, intended to fend off the collective-guilt theory. He also asserts that there was no automatic intake for any of the Hitler Youth year groups whose members were accepted into the party between 1937 and 1944. It was, admittedly, ultimately up to the Hitler Youth unit leaders to decide who was allowed to transfer from their organisation into the party. But a prerequisite in every case was the applicant’s signature on the enrolment form — and the intake amounted to less than 10 per cent of all the Hitler Youth. According to Nolzen, there is not yet ‘any empirical proof whatsoever of HY leaders signing their charges up without their knowledge’.19

For legal reasons, König ultimately decided on the technically correct, albeit cumbersome, formulation that there was no ‘evidence for the handing over of the membership card constitutive for membership (§3, Paragraph 3, NSDAP regulations)’.20 The assessment of the enrolment of 17- and 18-year-olds, however, was a different matter. In his report, Buddrus, too, had written that he could not deduce any defamatory elements with regard to the enrolment of 18- or 19-year-olds into the NSDAP: ‘But in many cases, the later lives of the young individuals in question clearly demonstrated that the youthful delusions, or rather unreasonable demands, which they had been exposed to in the final phase of the Nazi regime resulted in them taking paths in life which proved these indoctrination attempts to have been futile.’21

This is exactly the point: the significance of a corrupted generation’s educational self-emancipation can only be recognised if its precarious beginnings are no longer denied. For therein lies their achievement: pulling themselves, on their own steam, out of the ideological quagmire of their youth. This achievement cannot be properly appreciated if the life stories of those in question are smoothed into biographies of seamless integrity, imputing to them a youth of resistance which was immune to all NS factions and taking on all too literally the myths created later.

Just a single signature

Berlin, in the summer of 1943 — seventy-odd years ago, a human lifespan. The news from all over the Reich was unsatisfactory, even alarming. Reports arrived, ‘according to which party enrolment would be desirable for a considerable number of youths’. When it came to events they were obliged to attend, allegedly they had not ‘been bitten by conviction’, and only a small proportion had a ‘positive and convincing’ perception of the party.22

It was also said that many young people deduced from witnessing ‘mistakes and shortcomings the right to turn their backs on the party’. It even appeared, apparently, that they had ‘deliberately turned down joining the party’. In short, the number of Hitler Youth members who were indifferent to or rejected joining the NSDAP was ‘so great that it could not be overlooked’, warned the security branch of the SS in a secret report for the party leaders on 12 August 1943.

The defeat of the National Socialists’ ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ was already imminent, and Hitler was running out of heroes. A quota was needed. Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann decreed that 30 per cent of young boys from each year group were to be transferred into the NSDAP, and on 11 January 1944 he lowered the intake age for party enrolment from 18 to 17 years. At the beginning of 1944, Reich Youth leader Artur Axmann arranged enrolment ceremonies across all regions, in which selected members of the 1926 and 1927 year groups would be transferred into the NSDAP.

Still children in many ways, the Flakhelfer, labour-service conscripts, and school pupils were dragged into the disastrous machine that was the Third Reich. When the NSDAP membership cards of known figures such as Martin Walser and Dieter Hildebrandt came to light in 2007, a whole generation was suddenly regarded with blanket suspicion. ‘You can have sex without penetration and smoke hash without inhaling — but can you be an unwitting member of the NSDAP?’ asked the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.23 Die Welt even printed a ‘hit list’ of the suspects and posed the question: ‘What will be revealed next?’24 The catalyst for the revelations had been Günter Grass’s 2006 confession that he had been in the Waffen-SS. If even Germany’s most famous living writer had been part of it all, then who else? Who else had forgotten and suppressed the organisations they had enrolled in or been coerced into as a young man?

The names read like a Who’s Who of academia, the arts, politics, and the media: SPD politician Horst Ehmke, journalist Peter Boenisch, sociologist Niklas Luhmann (all born in 1927), philosopher Hermann Lübbe, literary scholar Wolfgang Iser (both born in 1926), as well as the sculptor Günther Oellers and dramatist Tankred Dorst (both born in 1925).

In none of these cases is there evidence of a signed enrolment form. Ehmke, Lübbe, Oellers, and Dorst all told me that they had no recollection of having applied for membership (Boenisch, Luhmann, and Iser are deceased).

Despite the unambiguous findings of researchers Michael Buddrus and Armin Nolzen, who regard party enrolment without individually signed application forms to be improbable, the issue of the NS index cards is still controversial among some historians. ‘It is plausible,’ said historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, that ‘certain Gauleiters gave telephone orders that the HY leaders who were still there should be enrolled’. For those born in 1926 and 1927, enrolment without personal knowledge is possible, he alleged.25

The historian Norbert Frei is another who regards unwitting memberships as being a possibility. In a 2007 interview with Die Zeit he said, ‘Ostensibly, both existed: the strict regimental rhetoric of the enrolment procedure and the sloppy reality of enrolment as it actually took place.’26 Frei went on to give his view of the revelations about the Nazi pasts of Walser and Hildebrandt: ‘This is about something which is just as sad as it is banal, that in the second half of the war 50 per cent of individual Hitler Youth year groups were collectively transferred into the party.’27 When I quoted Frei’s assessment that one could have become a Nazi Party member without one’s knowledge in an article I wrote for the German magazine Stern in 2011, the historian threatened to sue, trying in vain to get a gagging order from the courts. Even today, Frei has not produced any evidence to back up his statement.

Back in 2003, in another article for Die Zeit, Frei had argued in support of his former teacher Martin Broszat (1926–1989), a leading historian of NS research in the Federal Republic and long-standing director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, when it came to light that Broszat, too, had been enticed into becoming an NSDAP member. At the time, Frei regarded it as ‘unlikely that Martin Broszat had known about his enrolment in the party’.28 As evidence, the historian cited Broszat’s application to the University of Leipzig from 1946: ‘In the questionnaire for his admission to study there, he responded to the question “Were you a member of the NSDAP” with No; by making a false statement, he would have been taking a great risk under the political circumstances at the time.’29 But in the face of the numerous falsifications and fibs on record for new careers begun in the post-war era, this argument fails to stand up to scrutiny.

Over the years, I have received many letters in response to my articles on the youngest Nazi Party members, including one from a woman from Erlangen whose father had commenced his studies at the university there in 1947. Attached to the letter were his de-Nazification documents from the University of Erlangen, including a letter from the rector dated 21 November 1947. In the letter, the rector gave ‘some sound advice regarding the completion of future application forms’:

Some of the students who the military government had suspected of deliberately concealing their Nazi Party membership, but whom had then […] been permitted to continue their studies by the University Officer, once again answered the question regarding party membership with No when filling out their personal information forms at the beginning of this semester. In the case of a new inspection, this could lead to renewed difficulties. It could then be difficult to defend the assertion that the person in question was unaware of his enrolment in the party.30

The rector advised his students to answer the question regarding party membership on all future questionnaires not with a Yes or No, but instead to enclose an attached piece of paper stating that ‘they had not discovered anything definite about their enrolment in the Party during the Nazi era, and had first heard about the existence of a membership card in their name in the NSDAP index in 1947, but that according to a notification from the military government of Schweinfurt, there was no documentation in the files of the NSDAP Schweinfurt branch in their name’.31

Armin Nolzen’s analysis of the 1947 publication ‘Who Was a Nazi’, in which the Americans compiled their knowledge about party members and admission processes, and which served as a guidebook for the de-Nazification process, also contradicts Frei’s claim that Broszat and others became unwitting party members:

According to this, early ‘party comrades’ emphasised again and again that their organisations were automatically incorporated into the party and that they had become members against their will. Never, the American processors established, had an organisation been transferred into the NSDAP in this manner. This also applied for the HY and BDM, whose members had been transferred neither collectively nor automatically. On the contrary: only a minority of the members of these youth organisations had been put forward for membership of the party, and every candidate had to sign his enrolment application personally.32

Nor did Frei have any evidence for his allegation that the enrolment procedures had been carried out in a ‘sloppy’ manner. This contradicted the report by Buddrus cited earlier and the findings of both the researchers in the Federal German Archives and the Americans, who spent 50 years studying the NS files.

There are certainly indications that local, lower-ranking NS officials had a tendency to be zealous when it came to the recruitment of Hitler Youth members into the party. In November 1944, the Reich Youth leadership criticised the alleged ‘excess of [the quota by] 50 or even 100 per cent which occurred in some districts with the enrolment of members born in 1926 and 1927’. However, even this does not offer any indication that the Hitler Youth members in question were enrolled in the party without their knowledge.

The name of student Horst Ehmke, for example, is on a list of party applicants including 1895 individuals from the district of Danzig-West Prussia. According to the index card I found in his name, the future justice minister and chief of staff of the chancellery led by Willy Brandt submitted an application to join the NSDAP on 10 February 1944 and was accepted as member number 9842687 on 20 April. ‘I didn’t know I was included on the list,’ Ehmke said to me when we spoke, ‘nor did I make an application.’

The Federal German Archives also hold a letter of response from the NSDAP enrolment office dated 20 May 1944, sent to the auditor general in Danzig. It communicates the issuance of only 1892 membership cards. The applications of three Hitler Youth members were rejected ‘because they each lacked a signature’ — Ehmke’s clearly made it through.

Hermann Lübbe, whose alleged NSDAP membership also became a topic of discussion in 2007, could not remember ever having provided his signature. But nor was he able to rule out the possibility of having done so: ‘I don’t mind if someone says to me that I suppressed the memory,’ the philosopher said to me, ‘but making use of this category of suppression means cutting oneself off from the realisation of how things really were in the Nazi era.’

Clearly many young people acquiesced in what they felt to be a necessity or to societal pressure; many may have seen their enrolment as a bothersome routine matter, and then forgotten about it. Or they may have been pressured into joining after some rousing speech, for example. ‘So, is everyone in agreement? Is anyone against?’ — speaking out would have required more courage than can be expected of the average 16- or 17-year-old.

And herein lies the dilemma at the heart of the debate surrounding the membership cards and signatures: today we are further away than ever from knowing how it really was back then for the generation that built up the Federal Republic after the downfall and which has shaped it until the present day.

The sociologist Heinz Bude wrote that their personal history reflects the history of post-war Germany: ‘They mercifully escaped the contextual guilt of German history and yet still continue to feel their own involvement in it; they are hopelessly stuck between the two.’33

Now the membership cards — cards whose diagnostic value is unclear and which reveal nothing about individual guilt or responsibility or recklessness — are catching up with the Flakhelfer generation. The NS bureaucracy functioned well, it would seem, as it is still delivering its archival legacy right up to the present day.

Horst Ehmke discovered that for himself when, on a visit to the Wehrmacht information office, he was presented with his medical files, which included orally and rectally measured temperature data from a field hospital: ‘That’s the Germans for you, my Prague-born wife said to me. They may destroy the whole world and themselves included,’ Ehmke said. ‘But the files, oral and rectal, they’re all present and correct.’