In May 1955, the local Ulm newspapers reported on a curious lawsuit brought before the labor court.Footnote 1 Earlier that year, authorities had forced the director of the nearby refugee camp to resign upon learning that he had been an SS officer under the Nazi regime. Now the former Nazi, Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, felt he had been unfairly victimized by the regional government and was suing to be reinstated to his post. Far from solving this perceived injustice, the lawsuit instead signaled the end of Fischer-Schweder's postwar rise from door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman to prominent director of a displaced persons camp. In the coming weeks, he lost his lawsuit and, more seriously, allegations regarding his Nazi past surfaced. Once authorities began to investigate, they uncovered a broader web of entanglement, and three years later the case culminated in Fischer-Schweder's conviction along with nine other defendants in one of the largest Nazi trials put before West German courts, the so-called Ulm Einsatzkommando trial of 1958.Footnote 2 Although most scholarship has focused on the legacy of this trial, this article looks at the unusual origins and escalation of the case in order to draw attention to the trial's complex but overlooked relationship with postwar political and social attitudes toward the Nazi past.
To explore this relationship, this article follows the postwar biography of Fischer-Schweder, examining the particular contours of his life and the changing social contexts in which he attempted to reintegrate.Footnote 3 Like many perpetrators in the postwar period, Fischer-Schweder experienced firsthand the changing system of values toward the Nazi past and tried to discern for himself the limits of tolerance in this society. His initial success and ultimate failure in working within the bounds of what was socially and politically acceptable make it possible to chart how these borders shifted in the initial postwar decade. Following his story therefore not only explains the origins of the Ulm trial but also allows us a glimpse into the emerging social and cultural center of West Germany from the vantage of a man who found himself unexpectedly on its margins.
In explaining the origins of the trial through the postwar biography of Fischer-Schweder, this article argues that two core features of 1950s West Germany—political programs of reintegration for former Nazis and a widespread German narrative of victimization—paradoxically served both to enable his rise and facilitate his fall. The beginning of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in many ways signaled the end of the Allied era of Nazi prosecutions. In Jeffrey Herf's formulation, the Adenauer administration faced a choice between “memory and justice or democracy, but not both.”Footnote 4 To forge a stable postwar democracy, the government chose the path of least internal social division by granting amnesties and creating incentives to bring many former Nazis back into the fold.Footnote 5 Widespread support of the reintegration efforts came largely as a result of the dominant narrative of German victimization in the postwar period.Footnote 6 Faced with economic privation, a divided nation, destroyed cities, refugee crises, and other hardships, many Germans found it easy to imagine themselves as victims of both the Nazi regime and the overzealous Allied occupiers. This interpretation of recent history allowed Germans to create what Robert Moeller has termed a “usable past,” one that had the effect of papering over internal social divisions to create cohesion. This victimization narrative, in turn, provided cover for many former Nazis, who now sought refuge under the banner of victim.
These two aspects of postwar society governed Fischer-Schweder's actions. He took advantage of the political opportunities of the amnesty years and used the vocabulary of the victimization narrative to justify his reemergence into public life. But he also miscalculated the flexibility of these political and social frameworks. Although the reintegration efforts of the federal government and the widespread social narrative of victimization guided Fischer-Schweder's postwar rise, they also obscured the incremental changes that were taking place at various levels and that made it increasingly difficult for him to conceal his past. The size of the carrot hid the danger of the stick. By the middle of the 1950s, significant developments had occurred at various levels in German society that were closing down the freedoms and anonymity Nazi criminals enjoyed during the initial postwar decade.Footnote 7 More organizations and bureaucratic options emerged for concerned citizens or investigators eager to inquire into someone's past. Unaware of these developments, Fischer-Schweder overreached, exposed too much of his past, and transgressed the limits of tolerance in postwar society.
By placing the primary focus on the defendant and the origins of the trial, this article attempts to balance current scholarship on the case, which focuses on its legal and political outcomes.Footnote 8 This emphasis on the legacy of Ulm is to a large extent understandable. The case came at a crucial moment and broke with a number of 1950s legal trends. After years of sagging prosecutions in West Germany, this massive trial erupted along the banks of the otherwise conservative town of Ulm.Footnote 9 When the trial resulted in convictions against all ten defendants, this similarly stood in contrast to the vast number of postwar trials that ended in acquittals.Footnote 10 Then, only months after this outcome, the states of West Germany founded a central agency to investigate Nazi crimes and appointed the prosecutor of the Ulm trial as its first president.Footnote 11 Although initially the Ulm trial was interpreted as a sufficient cause for the creation of this central agency, scholarship has since nuanced the relationship between the two.Footnote 12 To the extent that historians have engaged with the origins of the trial, this process is widely understood as a “string of coincidences.”Footnote 13
This article offers a new temporal and individual perspective to historical understandings of the Ulm trial. First, this article emphasizes less the impact of the trial on subsequent reforms in favor of highlighting the influence of postwar society on the trial's origins. While contingency was a factor in launching the investigation, this article highlights the wider social and political variables that facilitated this chain of events.Footnote 14 Second, instead of asking how and why politicians and prosecutors sought to deal with the problem of former Nazis, this article asks how former Nazis interpreted the changing legal and political circumstances of postwar society.Footnote 15 Many voices advocated for different approaches to the Nazi past, and this article explores how these voices were heard and perceived by a former Nazi himself.
The Ex-Nazi Vacuum Cleaner Salesman
Bernhard Fischer-Schweder awoke to a different world in spring 1945. Lying in a hospital bed recovering from wounds sustained in the closing days of World War II, he encountered the disarray that accompanied the collapse of the Third Reich.Footnote 16 While men like him convalesced or sat in POW camps, Germany itself disproportionately possessed two things: women and rubble. The two became core components of the widespread and enduring German embrace of 1945 as a Stunde Null (zero hour) that spoke to the sense of chaos and rupture that had shaken German society. The popular postwar image of the Trümmerfrau (woman of the rubble) clearing the debris of war nurtured a belief that society had been transformed and that the past itself had been erased.Footnote 17 Moreover, the leveling of the urban landscape engendered a belief that the past itself had been erased. The novelty of the concept also served a political end: if Germany was separated from its past, then it might be possible to bracket off the Nazi era and move forward. Politicians were not the only ones who found the notion of total rupture a useful palliative; many Germans with a past to conceal also seized upon the convenient caesura.
One such German was Fischer-Schweder. During those days of recovery he began to consider for the first time in twenty years his future without Nazism. That the Allies would prosecute former Nazis seemed certain, though how widely they would cast the net of culpability remained unclear. Nevertheless, for a Nazi and SS officer as deeply implicated in the Third Reich and its crimes as Fischer-Schweder, he had good reasons to fear this regime change. His 1925 membership in the Nazi party designated him as an “old fighter” (alter Kämpfer), someone attracted to the party early on when it was little more than a thuggish movement of anti-Semitism, racism, and Versailles revisionism. By 1940, he had ascended to the position of police director and SS-Oberführer in the important Baltic city of Memel.Footnote 18 From this post, he would authorize and carry out mass executions of Jewish civilians in the summer months of 1941. Now, confronting a political present deeply hostile to his violent past, this old fighter decided to create himself anew.
Although scars and impaired mobility from his injury became a constant reminder of wartime experience, Fischer-Schweder quickly set about erasing other markings of his life before 1945, embracing his own version of the Stunde Null.Footnote 19 First, he had to find a way to clear denazification. After recovering from his wounds, Fischer-Schweder was automatically interned in an American POW camp in Bavaria. The massive organizational efforts that denazification required meant that individuals were largely trusted to answer forms honestly regarding their past associations with the Nazi regime; little bureaucratic slack existed for investigating and exposing deceit.Footnote 20 For many former SS officers and prominent Nazis, submitting an incomplete or inaccurate form therefore offered the best chance of avoiding an extended stay in an Allied camp.Footnote 21 Fischer-Schweder chose this route. He fabricated a new identity, listing his name as Bernd Fischer and his birth date as February 13, 1904, instead of January 12, 1904. As for his wartime activities, he noted his career in the civil service and stated that he became Police Director in Memel in 1941, absent any mention of his membership and accompanying promotions within the ranks of the SS. On March 5, 1946, the Spruchkammer (denazification court) in Bad Neustadt, a town in southwest Germany not far from Ulm, declared him to be “unaffected” by Nazism.Footnote 22 He rejoined society.
Though his calculated change in name and birth date helped him avoid extended time in a denazification camp, it also forced him to start his career over after the war. Because of his desire to avoid the spotlight and because the Allies had purged the civil service of former Nazis, Fischer-Schweder found himself in a double bind. As a result, he aimed low. For the initial postwar years, Bernhard Fischer-Schweder worked a series of odd jobs as Bernd Fischer. He began first as a clerk in Bad Neustadt before going into business as an independent salesman in 1948.Footnote 23 His foray into self-employment ended poorly, and by January 1952, Fischer-Schweder began work as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman near Stuttgart.Footnote 24 Though he likely found sales less desirable than police work, the position was stable and out of the public eye.
Professionally reborn, Fischer-Schweder also created a new personal life for himself in the postwar era. While recovering in the military hospital he had stopped communicating with his wife, and she learned his whereabouts only by chance.Footnote 25 Though married since 1935, they divorced shortly after the war. Within months of the divorce, he remarried, and the couple soon had a child.Footnote 26 The new family soon settled in southwest Germany, far from the eastern Prussian cities where Fischer-Schweder had spent his life before 1945.
By 1950, Fischer-Schweder's metamorphosis was complete. He had been able to start over in a new city with a new name, new career, and new family. This reintegration path suggests that he believed early on that his past could destroy his postwar life. Although denazification authorities hardly had the capacity to uncover his past on their own, Fischer-Schweder's decisions to deceive them, divorce his wartime spouse, and relocate across Germany indicate that he nevertheless feared such an investigation. Confronted with what he perceived as a direct threat, Fischer-Schweder fled his past.
Just a few years later, however, the basis for many of these fears evaporated. Denazification came to a close, the prosecution of Nazi crimes sharply abated, West Germany gained autonomy, and Chancellor Adenauer took steps to provide amnesty and reintegrate former Nazis. So, as his strategy of reintegration through deception reached its zenith, when it seemed as though his past had been laid to rest, Fischer-Schweder decided to risk it all.
Hidden in Plain Sight
For many West Germans, 1951 was a year of opportunity. In May, the Federal Republic of Germany passed Article 131, an amendment to the Basic Law constitution.Footnote 27 This amendment applied nominally to those holding civil service positions on May 8, 1945—the day of Allied victory over Germany—and who were purged from the ranks by the Allies. Six years after the war, Adenauer felt that denazification procedures had sufficiently dealt with offenders of the Third Reich; now was the time to move forward. Those who had suffered since war's end could be brought back into the fold and fully incorporated as vital members of the new German state. The Bundestag agreed, and the amendment passed with unanimous approval. Former Nazi party members who had cleared denazification were now eligible for reentry, though members of the SS and other elite units remained banned. In all, nearly 350,000 Germans were now eligible to return to the civil service.Footnote 28 New careers opened for many, and opportunists took advantage.
But two years after Article 131 took effect, Bernhard Fischer-Schweder continued to live under his assumed identity. As a former police officer he could now apply to rejoin the civil service, and since Article 131 placed quotas to encourage the hiring of 131-ers, as they were known, his chances of finding a job were excellent. Perhaps unconvinced that his past would remain behind him, Fischer-Schweder avoided the initial rush to reintegration. Meanwhile, thousands of former civil servants gained new employment and began to receive their pensions. Accompanying this rising number of former Nazi party members employed across the public sector was a decline in prosecutions for Nazi-era crimes.Footnote 29 The conclusion of the Allied proceedings, a booming West German economy, and a simmering Cold-War threat meant that for the time being a judicial reconciliation with the past had lost the political imperative of the initial postwar years. These variables transformed West Germany into something of a haven for former Nazis, as the state offered opportunities for reintegration and showed little interest in ongoing prosecutions.Footnote 30 Eventually, the allure offered by Article 131 proved too strong to ignore. Fischer-Schweder wanted financial security more than he feared prosecution, and in 1953 he joined the fray to reintegration.
First, he faced a problem of his own creation: the name and birth date he had been using falsely on papers since 1945. “Bernd Fischer” now needed the résumé of “Bernhard Fischer-Schweder.” To make this happen, he began filing paperwork. He brought the “trivial change” in his birth date to the attention of the local administrators, claiming a clerical error.Footnote 31 Since denazification no longer threatened, the consequences for this admission were limited to a few key strokes noting the change.
He also filed two applications—one for a civil service position in the region of North-Württemberg, the other to qualify for Article 131 status—and here the issue becomes more curious. On the first, he continued to use his falsified information, listing his name as “Bernhard Fischer” and his birth date as “February 13, 1904.”Footnote 32 Yet on the very next day, he filed the second application, and here he gave his name as “Bernhard Fischer-Schweder” and his date of birth as “January 12, 1904.”Footnote 33 A clerical error this was not. Fischer-Schweder either began to use information selectively, depending on the application and audience, or had confused himself with his frequent changes. For the moment, officials failed to discover the discrepancy.
The reemergence of Fischer-Schweder into public life in western Germany began with his second application for reinstatement to the civil service in accordance with Article 131. In addition to his full name and actual birth date, he stated that he was born in Berlin in the borough of Spandau and at the age of twenty received a vocational degree as a technician. His résumé noted he had been a civil servant his entire life, beginning in 1932 when he entered the police force. Fischer-Schweder steadily worked his way up the ranks of the detective division, emerging as superintendent in the eastern German city of Breslau in 1939. By 1940, he had been reassigned to Memel, and in 1941, Fischer-Schweder became director of the police force. According to the application, he saw action in the war from October 1943 to June 1945, which ended in a several week stay at the prisoner of war camp in Linz. Not included on the statement was mention of his Nazi and SS memberships.Footnote 34
Within a few weeks of his application, a routine procedural check turned up the various names Fischer-Schweder had been using since 1945. Asked to clarify, he argued that to avoid “automatic imprisonment in and eventual deportation” to the Soviet Union, he began using the name “Fischer” as early as 1942, when eventual German defeat began to seem likely.Footnote 35 The change, in other words, came not as an attempt to shirk postwar justice, but to avoid the cruelties of life in a Soviet camp. This explanation capitalized not only on Cold-War tensions, but also on a particular West German anxiety over POWs in the Soviet Union. In 1953, there were still nearly 20,000 German POWs in the Soviet east, and many West Germans broadly interpreted their captivity as further evidence of German victimization.Footnote 36 By tapping into this sentiment, Fischer-Schweder's justifications for changing his name won over local officials. They approved his application for reinstatement to the civil service.
Once the Article 131 application was approved, Fischer-Schweder's application for a position in North-Württemberg began to bear fruit. Apart from the use of his assumed name and birth date, the résumé on his application for a civil service position in the district of North-Württemberg was nearly identical to that of the Article 131 form. Given his service as a police director for the substantial city of Memel, he was well qualified. When the application of “Bernhard Fischer” came across their desks in early December, authorities felt that the “experiences of Fischer as a civil servant” seemed the perfect remedy to the “multiple and difficult duties” facing those in charge of the refugee camp situation in Ulm.Footnote 37
Initially intended to hold 2,500 refugees in the postwar period, by 1953 Ulm-Wilhelmsburg overflowed with nearly 3,800 refugees, most German, fleeing the Soviet-dominated east. To this point, the camp had been subsumed as a part of the larger Ulm-Römerstrasse camp, but increasingly the challenges and day-to-day needs of the Wilhelmsburg camp made the need for a separate director apparent. Since the middle of October 1953, officials had allocated funds to make this possible.Footnote 38
On January 18, 1954, the vacuum cleaner salesman from Stuttgart became the camp director in Ulm. As the camp's first director, he encountered a system in disarray. His military background led him to institute a string of disciplined initiatives. Guards now wore brown uniforms, and entry to the camp became limited to the eastern gate, where identification papers were required. He began a physical renovation of the facilities, as many buildings were still in disrepair from wartime aerial bombing raids.Footnote 39 When nearly forty residents fell ill shortly after he took control, he initiated measures to raise health and diet conditions within the camp.Footnote 40 After only a month, Fischer-Schweder was briefly but strongly considered by the regional government to take over leadership of the larger camp near Stuttgart.Footnote 41 Even the local press noted the “fresh air” he brought to the Ulm camp. Fischer-Schweder's “purposeful and energetic” planning had systematically raised the quality of life in the camp.Footnote 42 Encouraged by his successes and confident about his future, Fischer-Schweder moved the family to Ulm later that year.Footnote 43
To this point, Fischer-Schweder seemed to have navigated the postwar situation perfectly. He remained out of sight long enough to avoid serious investigation by the Allies, and now he had reemerged in time to capitalize on a period of amnesties and reintegration efforts by the Adenauer administration. To achieve this postwar arc, though, he had been forced to play a dangerous game with the details of his past. He used false information to clear denazification, but then coupled this denazification with his real name and select details of his wartime experiences to gain readmittance to the civil service under Article 131. When questions did emerge about discrepancies in his personnel record, he invoked the popular victimization narrative and stated that he feared Russian persecution. His dexterity with truth and lies had created a house of cards construction that depended on the situation being viewed from the single angle Fischer-Schweder determined. But now that he had stepped back into public life, he could no longer control his own exposure.
The Fischer-Schweder Controversy
The first indication that Fischer-Schweder had overreached in accepting the Ulm-Wilhelmsburg position came on the day of his greatest success at the camp. At half past seven on the evening of June 26, 1954, the new camp theater would be officially opened to inhabitants and members of the press. The previous day, the local paper showcased the impressive results the camp director had achieved through this conversion of an old horse stable into a cultural center.Footnote 44 As a display of Fischer-Schweder's vision and sensibility, the theater represented his most significant contribution to camp life to date. As such, Fischer-Schweder had camp personnel on high alert through the day to ensure that all went accordingly that evening.Footnote 45
At two o'clock that afternoon, a camp guard named Willy Pallmer noticed a “tall, lanky, and somewhat pale” man loitering outside the camp.Footnote 46 The guard approached, and with little baiting, the man began to speak derisively about camp director Fischer-Schweder. The man stated that Fischer-Schweder had been a member of the SS and threatened that it “would not be long” before Fischer-Schweder was fired from his position. Out of loyalty to his superior, Pallmer quickly submitted a report of the incident. “I consider it necessary to inform you of this, Mr. Fischer,” he wrote, “to protect you from such denunciations.” He added, “I am extremely grieved that there are people who would want to belittle your successes in this camp, where you really have given so much effort and done so much.”Footnote 47
Such loyalty protected Fischer-Schweder for a time, but was to prove insufficient in the coming months. Continued press coverage of the camp and its dynamic director increased the likelihood of an encounter like the one on the perimeter of the camp. He had been too important before the war, too violent during it, and too prominent in his new position to hope to avoid all inquiries into his past. June 26, 1954, did mark a significant day for Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, but far from marking his arrival and heralding a successful reemergence as a civil servant, the day became the high point of his postwar career and the beginning of his downfall.
Initially, it was not the public profile of Fischer-Schweder that caused trouble, but the bizarre paper trail he had left behind. Local officials began to uncover the inconsistencies on his forms. Though he presumably believed that the conflicting birth dates on his applications would never intersect, eventually the twain did meet. By summer 1954 his employers became aware of the discrepancy, raising fresh doubts about his past.Footnote 48 The massive problems facing the Allies and Germany at the end of the war had made it possible for Fischer-Schweder and others to submit false information; the bureaucratic logjam rendered individual verifications highly unlikely. Resources that for political and financial reasons were unavailable to the Allies after the war now existed in 1950s West Germany.Footnote 49 The bureaucratic and organizational infrastructure had been built up substantially, as more groups, organizations, and political agencies existed to assist in the reintegration of Nazis on the one hand and to investigate those who had bypassed denazification channels on the other. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) and the Berlin Document Center were two such agencies.
In 1950, the Federal Republic created the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz to serve as a national agency charged with investigating those whose behavior threatened the integrity of the Basic Law constitution. At first, this charter translated primarily into tracking communists in West Germany, but because of its resources and networks, the agency soon became a central asset for background investigations. As such, North-Württemberg officials wrote first to the Bundesamt when questions about Fischer-Schweder's past arose. In August 1954, the Bundesamt in turn reached out to the Berlin Document Center for information on potential Nazi or SS membership for Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, born January 12, 1904.Footnote 50
The Berlin Document Center had only been fully operational since October 1953 but held millions of captured Nazi documents, including a near-total registry of Nazi and SS membership.Footnote 51 The archive therefore provided the largest extant database for information regarding complicity in the Third Reich. In 1953, the Center remained under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of State. Unlike conventional archives that tend to group documents by provenance, all records there were arranged by name, making it inefficient for those researching a given event or unit, but invaluable for information on individuals. When authorities accessed the archive for information on Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, a thick file emerged and the weight of its implications shattered the postwar identity he had created.
On August 28, 1925, Bernhard Fischer-Schweder had joined the SA—the brute security force for the nascent Nazi party.Footnote 52 Four years later, Fischer-Schweder became a member proper of the Nazi party with the party number of 17,141. Before his service in the SA, this old fighter had been active in the Freikorps, extralegal quasi-armies that continued to fight in the east long after the armistice in World War I was declared. Gaining the rank of Oberführer in the SA, he achieved some prominence within the organization during the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Because of his importance to the SA, Fischer-Schweder was taken into “protective custody” in a concentration camp in 1934 following the Röhm purge, which Hitler had executed as a means of eliminating his rivals and decapitating the leadership of the SA.Footnote 53 After nearly three months, according to Gestapo reports, Fischer-Schweder was released because “proof of his participation in the Röhm revolt could not be found.” Incarceration did little to dim his enthusiasm for Nazism, however, and in 1941 he was promoted to Police Director in Memel, which carried with it SS membership. He remained in the SS thereafter, though he was reassigned after 1942 and served in various Panzer divisions of the Waffen-SS until the injuries he sustained in the closing months of the war.
A series of documents in his file further highlighted the involvement of Fischer-Schweder in the Nazi regime. A 1942 letter from Fischer-Schweder to Reichsführer-SS and Head of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler, thanking Himmler for a birthday gift that he considered “a renewal of the bonds of duty and loyalty” to the state, certainly did not bode well for Fischer-Schweder's post-Nazi future.Footnote 54 Neither did an SS report from March 1943, which detailed his erratic behavior, excessive drinking, and penchant for firing his sidearm indoors. In defense of his domestic marksmanship, he argued at the time that he had been unaware of any regulations against the indoor “misuse of firearms.”Footnote 55 From the perspective of the civil service in 1954, the only thing worse than unknowingly hiring a former SS officer was hiring a reckless, alcoholic SS officer with a poor understanding of both basic firearm safety and the law.
These findings revealed to administrators the full extent of Fischer-Schweder's carefully constructed set of half-truths. He had not lied directly about his service on his résumé: he had indeed risen through the ranks of the civil service from Breslau to the prominent post of Police Director in Memel. The Center findings confirmed these aspects of his record. But Fischer-Schweder's description of his career path had omitted any mention of his parallel ascent through the Nazi hierarchy. Moreover, it obscured the possibility, as investigators would later note, that he had only turned to the civil service after his arrest in 1934, when it became clear to him that his career prospects as a party functionary had leveled off.Footnote 56
By November 1954, the Berlin Document Center findings arrived at the office of the regional government in charge of Fischer-Schweder's employment.Footnote 57 Since he had “hidden his membership in the [Nazi] Party and SS” from the military tribunal in Bad Neustadt, his “unaffected” denazification status was all but invalid, which meant that his hiring under Article 131 was also nullified.Footnote 58 But politically sensitive questions remained. If word got out that the local government had hired an SS officer to run a displaced persons camp, the situation could prove a public relations nightmare.
On November 23, officials called Fischer-Schweder in to discuss the issue. Fischer-Schweder attempted again to use the victimization narrative in his defense. He pointed out that he, too, had suffered under the Nazi regime, having spent several months in a concentration camp in 1934. “I also successfully rejected,” he claimed, “membership in the SS from about 1937 to 1941,” joining in 1941 only because his Memel promotion required it.Footnote 59 As for the self-incriminating postwar lies and falsehoods of this past, he continued the one-time successful excuse of attempting to avoid immediate imprisonment in a Soviet camp.
Two days later, the officials decided to ask Fischer-Schweder to resign in order to keep the scandal quiet. This desire to avoid a public reaction was also fueled by a sense of concern for Fischer-Schweder. As they noted, “Fischer is handicapped, he is married, and he has a child. He would have to go to great lengths to create a new life.”Footnote 60 They reflected positively on his service as the camp director, and though he had forced their hand through his falsehoods, they wished him no long-term ill. To this end, they wrote him a letter of recommendation for future applications, which noted the “care and cultivation” he had shown in his leadership at the camp.Footnote 61 The realization that he had been a member of the SS seemingly posed no inherent moral dilemmas for authorities. Given the narrowly defined concept of perpetrator in this time period, officials looked on Fischer-Schweder as just another individual that Hitler coerced into service. The decision showed that they tacitly accepted his self-image as a victim of the Third Reich. It was not so much Fischer-Schweder's past that cost him his post, but rather that he had lied about this past.
Fischer-Schweder delayed as long as he could, but in the end found no choice but to acquiesce to the demand. On February 2, 1955, under the subject line, “Termination of my employment contract,” he wrote:
I am requesting a release from the terms of my employment of January 1, 1954, in accordance with the required six-week notice of resignation, and in consideration of the fact that from the day of my employment I have not yet taken a vacation.
As for the reason for my resignation, I want to note that an extremely opportune job in industry has been offered to me, which pays considerably more than my current position. In the interest of my family, I would like to take this offer.Footnote 62
He began his vacation several weeks later, and his last official day of employment was to be March 31.Footnote 63 Regarding the supposed “opportune job” he had received, Fischer-Schweder had no such offer. Indeed, he seemed to believe, or hope, that his resignation was contingent upon his ability to find a job in the private sector. Officials agreed to make some general job inquiries on his behalf and accepted his resignation.Footnote 64
Discouragement quickly set in. After a month of rejections from prospective employers, he wrote to the regional government to revoke his resignation and request reinstatement as head of the Ulm-Wilhelmsburg camp.Footnote 65 His letter noted the difficulties inherent in finding a new job at the age of 51 and the injustice being done to him on account of his past affiliations. “Based simply on my upbringing,” he added, “I joined the party at a very young age, not knowing what forms it would later take.”Footnote 66 For what may have been the first time, he was invoking a reworked version of the victimization narrative: not only had he suffered under the Nazis, now he was being unfairly targeted by the Federal Republic. He went on to state that certain individuals would confirm his claims if they gave them the opportunity. But from the perspective of the officials, the matter was closed and Fischer-Schweder no longer had a place at the Ulm camp. On April 13, 1955, he was officially fired from the camp.Footnote 67
Disappointed though Fischer-Schweder must have been to lose his job, the scandal in many ways confirmed his reading of the political climate at that time. His employers terminated his contract once they learned that he had defrauded them on his job application. They made no efforts to pursue a criminal investigation into his past and opted not to file charges of fraud against him. Bureaucratically, his past had caught up to him, in the sense that the lies and mistruths he had spread on paperwork since 1945 had now been revealed, but little in the previous few months suggested to Fischer-Schweder that he had reason to fear prosecution. This, he probably assumed, was as bad as it could get. Indeed, as his next decision would demonstrate, far from making him question his reintegration strategy, his termination from the camp appears to have emboldened him. He felt at home in 1950s West Germany.
A Trial of Patience
Of the range of possible options open to a former SS officer who had lied to his governmental employer about that background, suing the state would seem to rank among the least advisable. Yet this was precisely the course Bernhard Fischer-Schweder pursued when he sued for reinstatement on April 18, 1955. This shockingly public confrontation with the government reveals that he felt that the government had wronged him. His lawsuit had a threefold aim:
1. It will be shown that the resignation of the plaintiff from February 2, 1955, is null;
2. that the employment contract was not ended by summary firing of April 13, 1955;
3. the accused state will be charged with bearing the costs of the lawsuit.Footnote 68
He argued along similar lines to his earlier defenses: he had indeed been a member of the Nazi party, but was not ideologically motivated; he had suffered under the regime; and he had always performed dutifully as a civil servant. In his statement, he went on to say that he had “committed no political crime” and that his “political history as stated here was the full truth.”Footnote 69
His defense relied upon the argument that he had been a victim of the Third Reich. Here he hoped to capitalize on the wider attitude of victimization in West Germany, which assigned the majority of the blame for Nazism to Hitler and his acolytes, thereby diminishing the implications for individuals such as Fischer-Schweder. To help him in this defense, he assembled a range of endorsements from friends and colleagues who spoke glowingly of him, and invoked the language of victimization. One individual, a Dr. Nitschke in Schleswig, noted that Fischer-Schweder had been taken “very much against his will” into the SS.Footnote 70 Another indicated that Fischer-Schweder had aided in the escape of a Jewish man to Prague in the days after Kristallnacht in 1938.Footnote 71 Fischer-Schweder's interpretation of contemporary attitudes led him to believe that he could win his lawsuit against the government if he convinced the court that he suffered under Hitler and even acted against the Nazi regime.
Like much else in 1955, the trial did not go well for Fischer-Schweder. Legally, the court “rejected the suit as unfounded.”Footnote 72 Against his argument that the resignation should be nullified, the court argued that he had hardly been coerced and so the resignation stood. From this, it followed that his firing was moot, stating, “It did not depend on whether the accused state still had the right . . . to terminate the employment on April 13, 1955. At that time the employment contract no longer existed.”Footnote 73 If that was the injury, the insult came when the court saddled Fischer-Schweder with the two-thousand Deutschmark legal costs, not an insignificant sum for the unemployed plaintiff. This outcome revealed that empathy for wartime behavior had its clear limits. Masquerading as a victim of Nazism may have helped him secure a civil service position and even won him the initial understanding of his former employers, but claiming to be a victim of the West German state did not make for a winning legal defense in the Ulm labor court of 1955.
The peculiar contours of this labor trial did not go unnoticed by the public at large. Article 131 had been intended to allow a number of individuals to reenter the civil service; it had not made it a civil right for these individuals to be employed there. This reversal of the situation, in which a former SS officer was suing the government for the right to command a refugee camp, was unusual and therefore newsworthy. Local press commented on the “interesting labor court trial” and the “reemergence” of the SS officer.Footnote 74 A German news wire agency requested “to be informed of the next meeting date” for additional reporting.Footnote 75
Rather than cut his losses and accept the embarrassment of this public reporting and the defeat in the courtroom, Fischer-Schweder responded, strangely, by seeking more public attention: he wrote a letter to the editor. On May 26, 1955, one day after an article about his lawsuit appeared in the press, a brief seven-point statement appeared in the local newspaper, the Ulmer Nachrichten. In addition to summarizing his lawsuit, Fischer-Schweder argued again that he had been a victim of the SS in 1934 and that during the war, “I kept many people—Christians, Jews, Germans, Austrians, and Poles—from harm and mortal danger.” He also used Cold-War tensions to explain his false postwar information, and as to the issue of why he continued to use false information in 1953, he distilled the essence of his postwar integration tactics: “I had no reason to bring up things that I was not asked about.”Footnote 76
With this letter and trial, Fischer-Schweder had finally run up against the limits of tolerance of postwar society. As an individual with substantial wartime secrets to conceal, we might expect Fischer-Schweder of all individuals to function as a barometer for assessing the changing sensibilities toward the Nazi past. Instead, what we see at this moment is a man overly comfortable in mid-1950s German society. With the recent firing, unsuccessful lawsuit, and poor media coverage, he may have felt isolated and unlucky, but not criminal, and certainly he saw no reason to hide. As he would soon realize, however, he had confused political tolerance toward former Nazis with social tolerance for them. While many in society did still distinguish between the horrors of Nazism and the many Germans who were seduced by its appeal, these frivolous lawsuits, condescending letters to the editor, and fraudulent postwar deceptions of a former SS officer destroyed whatever tolerance was left for Fischer-Schweder. He did not realize that through these decisions he would attract the attention of accusers, investigators, and prosecutors.
“He was Satan”
The initial impulses for an investigation of Fischer-Schweder came not from politicians aggrieved of his abuses of the court system or from his former employers embarrassed at being deceived into hiring him. Instead, they arrived in the form of two criminal allegations: one from Fischer-Schweder's former secretary in Memel, the other from his former driver in Memel. On June 13, 1955, the first allegation arrived at the Ulm prosecutor's office.Footnote 77 A cover letter explained that Dr. Ballweg, who was employed at the regional government in South-Baden, had been making a routine inquiry several months earlier pursuant to Fischer-Schweder's application to join the civil service there, which was filed after his initial resignation from the Ulm camp. In the course of this background check, he interviewed Meta Poneleit, Fischer-Schweder's former secretary who now worked under Ballweg. A copy of her statement was enclosed.
Poneleit described briefly her service from 1939–1944 in Memel, before the questions turned to Fischer-Schweder. As reported, she paused before responding, but stated simply, “He was Satan.”Footnote 78 Ballweg pressed for more details. She described Fischer-Schweder as an alcoholic who was uniformly disliked. Asked whether she could think of any specific incidents or illustrative examples, Poneleit recalled the following story: “According to someone in the police service, Fischer went to the Memel ghetto for his pleasure one Sunday. There was a four-meter-wide grave there that had been dug out for shootings. He said to a Jew, ‘If you can jump over this grave and make it successfully to the other side, I will let you live.’ During the leap over the grave, he then shot him.”Footnote 79 Within the week, the Ulm prosecutor opened a preliminary criminal investigation into Fischer-Schweder.
Soon a second set of accusations against him emerged as a result of the press coverage of his lawsuit. Otto Böhnke, who now lived in Ulm but was a native of Memel, came across the peculiar letter to the editor from the former police director of Memel. His memories of Fischer-Schweder as a “150-percent Nazi” did not fit with the claims made in the letter to the editor. Böhnke forwarded these press clippings to Wilhelm Kersten, a former policeman under Fischer-Schweder. Böhnke asked Kersten, “Should we accept this defense of Fischer-Schweder's, which combines poetry and truth? Or would it not be better to at least bring a little of his behavior in Memel to light?”Footnote 80 Several days later, Kersten responded, similarly baffled by Fischer-Schweder's statements.Footnote 81 He expressed surprise at the claim that Fischer-Schweder had been a victim of the SS, writing, “Mr. Fischer had explained to me that he did everything he could to go from the SA to the SS.” Kersten told Böhnke that he had shared the letter to the editor with another former Memel policeman, and upon reading the claims, “He could only shake his head that he [Fischer-Schweder] had supposedly been a friend to Jews and Poles.” According to Kersten, “Fischer-Schweder . . . led the first shooting of some 100 Jews in Garsden.”Footnote 82
The revelation of this shooting prompted Böhnke to pass Kersten's letter on to the Israelitische Kultusvereinigung (Israeli Cultural Association) offices in Stuttgart.Footnote 83 This agency, which represented Jewish interests in southwest Germany, then forwarded the accusations to the Ulm prosecutor on September 12.Footnote 84 In a cover note, the leader of the organization, Josef Warscher wrote, “We are hereby filing a criminal complaint against Mr. Fischer-Schweder.”Footnote 85 The intervention of this document and organization gave added impulse to the investigation and placed greater pressure on the investigators’ shoulders to carry it out successfully.
Taken together, the two statements provided necessary signposts for the investigators. Police in Stuttgart had earlier made some general inquiries into Fischer-Schweder's background, but they did not know whether anything improper had ever taken place, or if it had, when and where any crimes occurred. For example, investigators first questioned Fischer-Schweder's early support for Nazism and his role in the police force in Breslau, turning up nothing criminal.Footnote 86 This outcome conformed to a number of prosecutorial impulses in West Germany at the time, which emphasized crimes taking place against Germans on German soil before the war.Footnote 87 Poneleit's denunciation therefore reoriented the efforts, pointing to a specific crime in a specific place: Memel, 1941.
Even with this new focus, the investigators needed Kersten's revelations to help them ask the right questions. In the three-month window between the arrivals of the two statements, they conducted a number of interviews with members of the Memel police force under Fischer-Schweder, but learned little. There was no mention of mass shootings, nor could any confirm Poneleit's claims about Fischer-Schweder's shooting of Jews in a ghetto. What did emerge was a negative view of Fischer-Schweder as an “exact, militaristic,” and “egomaniacal” individual, who often “disregarded laws and regulations.”Footnote 88 Poneleit's story of Fischer-Schweder as sadist, wantonly murdering for pleasure, proved a hard case to make, but if there had been a mass execution, as Kersten indicated, then others were involved and the net could be drawn more closely around Fischer-Schweder. The scope of the crimes under investigation increased, while the emphasis on Fischer-Schweder as a lone madman diminished, since a mass execution required cooperation and coordination among a range of individuals and groups.
Given their centrality to the origins of the Ulm trial, the Poneleit and Kersten documents are noteworthy for the contempt expressed toward Fischer-Schweder. Both described him as widely disliked, and though one can only surmise the interactions between Poneleit and Fischer-Schweder that led her to call him “Satan,” Kersten acknowledged the sources of his animosity. While on service in Memel, he had unknowingly cited Fischer-Schweder's wife for walking her dog without a leash. Consequently, the police director sentenced him to a fourteen-day prison sentence.Footnote 89 Additionally, Kersten's name had originally been “Kerschies”; he alleged that Fischer-Schweder required him to change it because he had wanted “the members of his office to have German-sounding names.”Footnote 90 Contempt for Fischer-Schweder's character rather than his crimes seems to have motivated both Poneleit and Kersten in their accusations. Significantly, although these allegations were pivotal in sparking the investigation into Fischer-Schweder, the Poneleit claims were never addressed during the trial itself, and Kersten's statements proved so skewed that he would himself be investigated for war crimes.Footnote 91
Although of limited value later during the trial, these statements succeeded in sparking the Fischer-Schweder investigation because of remarkable growth in the social and bureaucratic infrastructure of postwar West Germany. The Kersten statement had arrived thanks to a concerned citizen and a cultural agency that was attuned to the serious criminal implications of Kersten's statement and able to exert pressure on the regional prosecutor's office to act. Both sets of allegations moreover resulted from information that Fischer-Schweder had made available since the end of the war. For all of his efforts to change his name and birth date and to conceal his murderous past, he had never bothered to hide his role as police director in Memel in 1941. By 1955, this information alone was sufficient to trigger Böhnke's letter to Kersten and Ballweg's conversation with Poneleit. These two simple actions uncovered what Fischer-Schweder had kept from the Allies, denazification officials, and government administrators: he had been deeply involved in crimes of the Holocaust.
In sum, the initial moment in the investigation into Fischer-Schweder was no mere chance encounter. Vast personal choices and impersonal structures facilitated the allegations brought by Poneleit and Kersten against Fischer-Schweder, all of which had gone unseen by him, since he had allowed high-level political fashions to dictate his postwar strategy. He had encountered a 1950s political climate that seemed open to allowing the rehabilitation of former Nazis, a process that led him to take on an ever-more public persona, all the while pushing at the limits of what southwestern German officials and citizens would tolerate. It was this imperious and demanding personality that had also earned him the scorn of his former employees in Memel, who showed no compunction over voluntarily accusing him of sadistic war crimes. Meanwhile, a growing number of citizens and organizations were increasingly sensitive to the incomplete judicial process of dealing with Nazi war criminals. All of this occurred within an expanding bureaucratic framework that allowed for more information to be shared more quickly and more accessibly than in the early postwar years.
“In the Name of the Führer”
With the initial allegations against Fischer-Schweder, the next phase in the evolution of the Ulm trial belonged to the investigators and prosecutors, who would eventually transform the investigation of one man into the trial of ten. Initially, investigators had no intention of expanding the case. During the first months of the investigation they focused exclusively on answering one question: “whether Fischer-Schweder carried out the shootings of Jews based on orders from a higher office or on his own initiative.”Footnote 92 They needed to prove that he had committed murder in the strict West German definition of the crime, which required demonstrating a base motive, blood lust, treacherousness, or maliciousness. These categories required the investigators to go beyond the question of whether Fischer-Schweder had carried out massacres. The question of motivation was central. If he had just “followed orders,” investigators could only accuse him of accessory to murder. To prove murder, they had to demonstrate either that he had internalized the base motives of his superiors in carrying out orders or that he had acted on his own in authorizing or transgressing the authorized orders for the executions.Footnote 93
The statement of Werner Schmidt-Hammer on November 9 added clarity to the investigation through his self-incriminating remarks.Footnote 94 The optometrist from Aalen confirmed what many had already alluded to, namely that Garsden was no exception; there had been a number of other shooting sites on the borderlands near Memel. Though he claimed that only partisans were killed, not Jews, Schmidt-Hammer stated that Fischer-Schweder had ordered “the creation of an execution squad [Exekutionskommando] . . . and I was appointed as leader of this squad.”Footnote 95 He went on to describe his role as leader of this execution squad in Garsden, saying that Fischer-Schweder had told him to read out the purpose for the executions before each group was killed. Under the guise of partisan resistance, Schmidt-Hammer declared to the victims, “You are being shot in the name of the Führer on account of attacks against German troops.”Footnote 96 In this way, they died as though enemies of the Reich.
With the Schmidt-Hammer statements, the wrinkles in the case began to get ironed out. Subsequent interviews filled in details, and by mid-December the investigators had amassed information on other shootings carried out between June and August 1941 in Lithuanian towns near Memel, involving estimates of between eight and three hundred victims per execution.Footnote 97 By spring 1956, the investigators were sufficiently convinced that Fischer-Schweder had authorized at least two massacres and volunteered his men to carry them out.Footnote 98 On May 2, 1956, they interrogated Fischer-Schweder, presenting him with the full array of statements against him.
To this point, Fischer-Schweder had been unaware of an investigation into his past. His last encounter with authorities had been his defeat in the labor court, after which he, unable to find another civil service position, took a job selling typewriters.Footnote 99 Confronted with a preponderance of evidence against him, surely he now realized the miscalculations of his postwar strategy. Unable to deny that those killed were Jewish, Fischer-Schweder stated that Garsden “was only inhabited by Jews”; in other words, they were “targeted not as Jews, but as snipers and murderers of German soldiers.”Footnote 100 As for the creation of a shooting squad, Fischer-Schweder argued that the leader of the Stapostelle in Tilsit, Hans-Joachim Böhme had “received orders to take over the assignment of troops” and therefore he had no choice but to make his men available to Böhme.Footnote 101 His defense rested on two principles: first that he was following orders, and second that the victims were shot as resisters, not Jews. His defenses rang hollow, and he was arrested the next day.
In the course of their search for evidence of Fischer-Schweder's criminality, investigators had unexpectedly uncovered a much broader web of entanglement in the crimes along the Lithuanian border regions. Many individuals, including Schmidt-Hammer and Böhme, had been singled out as playing prominent roles in the executions, and no prosecutions for these crimes had ever taken place. In this context, a month after Fischer-Schweder's arrest, the lead prosecutor in Stuttgart, Erich Nellmann, who oversaw ongoing investigations in the region, wrote a memo to the Ulm investigators and prosecutors.Footnote 102 “I have come to believe,” Nellmann stated, “that further extensive investigations are needed . . . [Fischer-Schweder's] defense has shown that the investigations so far were insufficient and they simply will have to be started over from scratch.”Footnote 103 Nellmann went on to cite public pressure for a more extensive prosecution, noting that agencies such as the Israelitische Kultusvereinigung, which had earlier brought Kersten's letter to the Ulm detectives, would not be satisfied with a narrow trial focused only on Fischer-Schweder. This decision transformed the focus of the investigation from a single criminal into an entire crime complex.Footnote 104
Under the oversight of Nellmann's personally appointed prosecutor, Erwin Schüle, the case expanded over the next year.Footnote 105 It was discovered that Fischer-Schweder had acted not alone but as part of an ad hoc execution squad led by Böhme, known as Einsatzkommando Tilsit. During the summer months of 1941, this squad had massacred more than five thousand civilians in at least twenty-two massacres within a twenty-five-kilometer zone of the German-Lithuanian border. In July 1957, the state authorities indicted ten West Germans, including Fischer-Schweder, for taking part in these massacres. During the following summer, these ten stood trial and were all convicted for their part in the crimes.Footnote 106
Nazis on the Margins
According to a 1956 testimony, during the time between Fischer-Schweder's firing from the camp and his arrest, he was traveling through northern Germany and stopped over in Hannover.Footnote 107 While there, he met with Rudolf Diels, the one-time head of the Berlin Gestapo and a former colleague of Fischer-Schweder. As Diels recalled, Fischer-Schweder took the opportunity to complain about the “treatment he received from the Federal Republic.” To Diels's surprise, the old fighter in the Nazi party went on to indicate that “he had himself been a victim of fascism.”Footnote 108 As a Holocaust perpetrator for the Third Reich and defrauder of the West German government, Fischer-Schweder was now spending the twilight of his postwar career trying to convince others that he had been a victim of both states.
This set of statements underscores the central argument in this article regarding the way that Fischer-Schweder misinterpreted the flexibility of the political reintegration programs and the durability of the victimization narrative of the postwar decade. Rather than feeling he had overreached and transgressed the limits of tolerance in society, he instead crafted an autobiography of victimhood at the hands of various regimes. First, he reordered his Nazi past by making his imprisonment by the SS the defining moment in his relationship with the Third Reich, reimagining his twenty-year commitment to Nazi ideology through this three-month experience. Then, to avoid ongoing imprisonment at the end of the war, he was forced to change his name and birth date. In his formulation, if he was a victim of the Nazis, then he couldn't also be a perpetrator, so the Allies had no right to place strictures on him. Thereafter, he interpreted postwar politics as an open-ended string of possibilities and believed he had the social identity as a victim to support his efforts. His lawsuit before the labor court made the views he shared with Diels public: the West German state had wronged him.
The way in which Fischer-Schweder seized on the political opportunities and contorted the victimization narrative revealed the imperfections in both. His manipulation of the reintegration policies demonstrated how easily that system could be and was being abused. And in defense of his abuses, he took a politically and socially expedient narrative that emphasized German victimization at the hands of Hitler, the Allies, and other European nations and turned it against the Federal Republic. In stretching this narrative beyond its intended purposes, he tore holes in its legitimacy. In the end, even former Nazis themselves, such as Diels and Kersten, expressed shock at the infelicitous way he interpreted postwar conditions. As a result, when Fischer-Schweder applied for reinstatement to the civil service in 1953, when he became the camp director of the Ulm refugee camp, and when he sued the local government and wrote letters in the local newspaper, he was both exposing himself to those who wished to see a more complete process of coming to terms with the past and convincing others of how incomplete that process had been.
By interpreting the origins of the Ulm trial as a product of Fischer-Schweder's interactions with postwar society, this article has emphasized the subtle but substantive shifts taking place throughout West Germany in the postwar decade. In particular, the argument is that the Ulm trial emerged from a tension between an individual's behavior and the changing expectations and values of postwar society. He crucially overlooked these changes by assuming stasis in the political and social attitudes toward the Nazi era during the 1950s. But by the time of his arrest, the chaotic conditions that enabled Fischer-Schweder to vanish under the radar in the early days after the war no longer existed. In particular, although critical voices were always present in postwar society, by the time of Fischer-Schweder's arrest, these voices were becoming linked through new institutions and nongovernmental agencies, which facilitated a flow of information and cooperation impossible in the initial postwar years.Footnote 109 Moreover, until these voices became linked, they often went unperceived by individuals such as Fischer-Schweder, who one might have expected to be particularly sensitive to changing attitudes toward the Nazi past. As a result, at the moment Fischer-Schweder was interpreting the climate of West Germany as an ever-expanding circle of possibility, the circle of what was politically and socially acceptable was in fact shrinking, and he found himself on its margins.
