In 1941–1945, Hans Gmelin was adjutant to Hanns Ludin, Nazi proconsul in the Slovakian puppet state; Gmelin served in 1954–1974 as self-professedly democratic mayor of Tübingen, a small university city. Niklas Krawinkel explores Gmelin's life to illuminate issues of responsibility, de-Nazification, and democratization in (West) Germany.

In 1975, Tübingen awarded Gmelin a prestigious honorary citizenship; however, when his connection to the deportations of Slovakian Jews to death camps became known, demands arose for the honor's withdrawal. Tübingen's government voted a grant to investigate Gmelin's actions, which financed Krawinkel's dissertation and this book. That larger project informed Krawinkel's approach: he focuses on Gmelin's relationship to Nazism, his wartime actions, and certain choices as mayor, albeit Krawinkel must rely on indirect sources to establish what Gmelin knew and did in wartime Slovakia.

Born into a conservative family from Württemberg's bureaucratic elite, Gmelin was, from his early-1920s youth, active in sports groups associated with the Stahlhelm, the conservative veterans group. When the SA incorporated his sports groups, he took on SA leadership roles. He later presented his SA roles as only sports leadership, but in 1938 he enthusiastically commanded an SA group that participated violently in Germany's occupation of the Sudetenland. When an SA acquaintance, Hanns Ludin, was appointed proconsul in Slovakia (to represent the Foreign Ministry's broader political considerations against the SS's ideological focus and the Wehrmacht's military focus), he chose Gmelin as an adjutant.

As adjutant, Gmelin did not issue orders, but he advised on policies that were often criminal, including Aryanization and suppressing dissent and partisan activity. He knew the fate of deported Jews. Krawinkel details the policies being pursued (by the Slovak government at Nazi behest and then by German occupation forces) and Gmelin's knowledge. He lacks sources to document the specifics of Gmelin's advice to Lubin. Gmelin did intervene in individual cases, while making clear that such efforts on Jews’ behalf were likely to be unsuccessful. Gmelin was never accused of crimes against humanity but was part of the machinery that generated them. Krawinkel does give a vivid sense of Nazi polycracy in action, by describing clashes between SA and Foreign Ministry personnel on the one hand and SS and later Wehrmacht personnel on the other, as well as personal relationships among German Foreign Ministry personnel in Slovakia and between them and Slovak officials.

Gmelin's de-Nazification was ultimately successful. Interned for over three years, he used his old-boy network to ease his de-Nazification with favorable character references (Persilscheine) from influential people (and later to advance his career). He secured initial classification as “lesser offender,” with two years’ probation, after which he was reclassified as “fellow traveler.” Krawinkel emphasizes that de-Nazification became not a means of establishing responsibility, but of drawing ex-Nazis back into public life as peaceful democratic citizens. Egon Kogon had called for a “right to political error” in having supported Nazism for those who had not committed war crimes and as a means to reintegrate millions of Germans into a new democratic Germany; however, he predicated it on their “drawing the consequences.” Yet, Krawinkel argues, Gmelin and most other 1950s Germans drew no consequences but sought simply to obfuscate their actions in supporting an unspeakably brutal dictatorship. Indeed, he argues, de-Nazification enabled Germans to ignore Nazi racism and the regime's broad support while seeing the Third Reich as a superficial phenomenon that disappeared with defeat. Krawinkel is right to deplore Germans’ failure, for a generation, to deal with Nazism, but he might have explored in what other ways they could have secured both democratization and “truth and reconciliation.”

In Gmelin's first campaign for mayor, in 1954, his Nazi past proved an opportunity, not a burden. He proclaimed that, like many, he had been young and enthusiastic in the early 1930s, in a society devastated by defeat and burdened with economic depression and dysfunctional governance. The Nazis, he said, had “misused” youth's “idealism” to seize power. However, he told voters that he—and implicitly they—had learned from the past. He now recognized that “democratic freedoms and rules are the prerequisite for a flourishing political life.” He won election, a sign, Krawinkel argues, of the way many West Germans explained away, rather than came to terms with, the recent past.

Krawinkel focuses on elements of Gmelin's mayoralty that seem to echo Nazi themes. Krawinkel sees Volksgemeinschaft as inherently exclusionary and Gmelin's references to it as of a piece with his emphasis on ethnos over demos, on a German ethnic/racial community that is transnational and entitled to some of its lost eastern territories. Gmelin rejected as illegitimate student demands to the Tübingen government in the 1960s because municipal government was supposed to be apolitical administration. Gmelin resisted student demonstrations because they interfered with traffic (though, Krawinkel points out, the constitution guaranteed freedom of expression but not smooth traffic flow). And Krawinkel ascribes the liberalization of the 1960s primarily to a generational change, one that replaced people such as Gmelin.

A broader focus might have led to different emphases. Gmelin's preferences for apolitical stances, nation, and Volksgemeinschaft were common among the conservative circles he grew up in before Nazism. Concerns he expressed about demonstrations and the Rechtsstaat were shared, into the 1980s, by the CDU/CSU and younger conservatives. One could explore where his choices reflected traditional conservative, not Nazi, influences. Moreover, he resisted proposals for harsh police interventions against demonstrators. He also was willing to say, in the 1960s, that there were “no illegitimate interests,” a statement strikingly at odds with 1920s and Nazi notions of the Volksgemeinschaft's single Gesamtinteresse. And he said he personally opposed proposed State of Emergency laws, another striking position for a traditional German conservative. He does seem to have changed in various ways that accorded with West Germany's post-1965 pluralist democracy. Further exploration of how he changed and how he stayed the same, from 1925 till 1974, could be illuminating.

Niklas Krawinkel's account provides a solid assessment of Hans Gmelin's activities under the Nazis, leading to the 2018 withdrawal of his honorary citizenship. With a different remit, Krawinkel might have placed Gmelin more broadly within twentieth-century German history.