Burning the Reichstag by Hett Benjamin Carter

Author:Hett, Benjamin Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

8

“PERSIL LETTERS”

THE GESTAPISTS’ TALE

IN HIS CLASSIC AND CONTROVERSIAL The Origins of the Second World War, the late British historian A.J.P. Taylor decried what he called “Nuremberg history”—by which he meant accounts of Nazi Germany written uncritically from the briefs of Nuremberg prosecutors, based upon the evidence they had gathered, and with the prosecutorial zeal they had brought to their work. The resulting narratives, said Taylor, saw careful planning, premeditation, and high efficiency where really there had been only contingency, improvisation, and chaos. He was, of course, correct. However, there is an opposite and equally unreliable kind of historical writing. We might call it “Persil letter history.” It has loomed particularly large in the story of the Reichstag fire.1

Persil letters (Persilscheine) were a phenomenon of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Named for the most popular brand of laundry detergent in Germany (the name “Persil” came from the two main ingredients, perborate and silicate) they were character references that Germans collected for their “denazification” cases. A good Persil letter could launder a person’s brown past and return it to spotless white.

The “denazification” of Germany had been one of the Allies’ main goals, announced in proclamations from the major wartime conferences. At the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945 the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR agreed that the main purposes governing their occupation of Germany would include destroying the National Socialist Party and its affiliated organizations, ensuring “that they are not revived in any form,” and preparing for the “eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis.” To this end, war criminals would be punished and all members of the Nazi Party “who have been more than nominal participants in its activities” would be “removed from public and semi-public office, and from positions of responsibility in important private undertakings.”2

In practice, however, the Allies very quickly found that the goal of removing Nazis from the civil service, the police, courts, schools, and universities clashed head-on with the goal of rebuilding an orderly and peaceful German democracy. To scrutinize the past of every adult German required an unsustainable bureaucratic effort, and no modern society could get by without the officials and professionals who had run the Nazi state. As the Soviet Union began to replace Germany as the Western Allies’ main security concern, enlisting Germans on the Western side became a higher priority than prosecuting them. By March 1946 the Americans had handed denazification over to the Germans themselves, while retaining oversight. The procedure the Americans then devised for denazification in their zone in Germany’s south and southwest was copied, with minor adaptations, in the French and British zones in the west and northwest as well.3

This procedure began with a questionnaire, mandatory for all Germans over the age of eighteen, soon infamous for its 131 questions about the subject’s political past. From the questionnaire a prosecutor would decide who was “affected” by the law, and would bring the cases of affected persons before a tribunal of lay judges nominated by the German political parties.

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