In the second decade of the twenty-first century, as Nazi apologists gain increasing political support across the Federal Republic, Mikkel Dack’s book provides a timely examination of post-World War II efforts to eliminate Nazi ideology from Germany. He focuses on the Fragebogen, a questionnaire that when first compiled by British and American planners in May 1944, “contained seventy-two questions, divided into ten sections, across four pages” (81) and asked Germans to explain their relationship to the recent Nazi past as a prerequisite to acquiring or retaining significant employment. This document, finalized over the course of two 30-minute meetings, became the “engine that drove the denazification machine” (255). Retrospective accounts have often pointed to the Fragebogen and especially Germans’ alleged questionnaire fatigue as a central factor in the victors’ limited success in purging Nazi ideology from German culture and society. Over five clearly organized chapters, Dack examines the origins and deployment of, as well as multifaceted experiences with a survey instrument that, in various forms, came to dominate denazification efforts in all four occupation zones. Ultimately, he describes the Fragebogen as a “bureaucratic catastrophe that helped discredit Nazism” (5) but also finds it “difficult to imagine a different process that would have been more effective” (263).
Dack describes his book as a history “about people not policies (ix) and sees the Fragebogen as a path to access the “everyday denazification” of the title. Rejecting a statistical measure of denazification’s success or failure, Dack instead turns to the Fragebogen itself, recognizing the millions of submissions as a “rich and revealing record of autobiography [….] one of the largest collections of ego-documents related to the national Socialist period” (210). Since up to a third of the postwar population completed a questionnaire, Dack rightly identifies the Fragebogen as a compelling means to access how “regular Germans” (6) or “common German citizens” (17, 228) experienced denazification. In exploring this “coordinated campaign to ideologically disarm the enemy” (24), Dack wrestles with the ambiguity of wartime and postwar definitions of Nazism and the ways that its ideological system manifested in the diversity of people's everyday lives. In the fourth of five chapters, he effectively uses a case study of 118 inhabitants of Hersfeld-Rotenburg, a rural district (Kreis) in the West German state of Hesse, to showcase the evolving practices of denazification from 1945 to 1948. Although he makes a strong case for Hersfeld’s demographic and geographic representativeness (and comprehensive set of archival sources), its relative typicality is largely beside the point. His examination of their experiences allows him to put into question the category of “regular Germans” and to integrate them into his critical assessment of how their stories of postwar victimhood reinforced their efforts to distance themselves from the “real” Nazis.
The book begins its exploration of the Fragebogen’s origins with initial denazification planning in the Research and Analysis Branch of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in late 1943. Despite these US institutional foundations, Dack emphasizes the important role played by refugee German intellectuals in this military-academic collaboration. These planners believed it necessary to involve Germans in their own denazification: “a genuine critique of Nazism and subsequent change of consciousness could only occur voluntarily by the individual German” (52). These planners crafted categories of culpability that extended beyond mere Nazi party membership, identifying “black-gray-white” designations of “active Nazi,” “nominal Nazi,” and “anti-Nazi” (53) that would serve as the foundation for subsequent decisions about mandatory or discretionary non-employment. And these interventions had real consequences for the German population. By June 1946, about 16 percent of job applicants in the US Zone (373,763 of 1,613,000) were denied employment based on the answers they submitted.
These efforts to take concrete steps based on ideological assessments confronted a fundamental contradiction in occupation goals: should occupiers focus on punishment for past crimes or pursue social and economic restoration in the face of wartime devastation? Recognizing that party membership alone was insufficient to determine who was a “real” Nazi, US and British authorities adopted variable determinations of the date at which entry into the NSDAP moved one from the status of “nominal” Nazi. For the British, 1933 remained the date before which party membership made one an “active” Nazi. For the Americans, anyone who joined before 1937 counted as “active,” and their removal from employment was “mandatory” (135). As the scale of those “classified as some sort of ‘nominal Nazi’” continued to grow, “the category’s stigma diminished” (188).
Although authorities drew on a range of sources, including denunciations, Dack emphasizes that denazification was a “paper process” (112). But the investigative bureaucracy on which that process depended emerged only haltingly. The Berlin Document Center, the repository of captured Nazi party records that seemed to offer the means for documentary proof with which to evaluate denazification claims was not fully functional until early 1946. And as a well-chosen photograph (128) makes clear, the mass of files and boxes piled floor to ceiling hardly represented a functional database with which to assess disputed claims. But what did “effective denazification” entail? Dack describes this aspiration as “prevailing community rejection of the regime and its ideology, rendering them culturally taboo and thereby ensuring that Nazism would not reemerge in any meaningful form” (17). But he also describes denazification in practice as a “means to an end,” a process that “blocked honest soul-searching and encouraged a nonlinear process of remembering” (230). He recognizes that Germans used the act of filling out these questionnaires to rehearse performative narratives proclaiming their “ideological innocence” (201). However, since the occupiers were also keen to differentiate between Germans, he notes that the “whitewashing” (256) began with the Allies. They provided a vocabulary of resistance that German civilians rapidly appropriated in their efforts to create individualized, usable pasts.
The victorious Allies recognized Nazism as something “unprecedented” (32) that required decisive eradication efforts; but that undertaking comprised only a few short years. By 1946, most denazification responsibilities passed to German authorities, and this change accelerated a shift away from the punitive underpinnings of the Fragebogen.
Already in early 1948, the Soviets declared the ideological “war on fascism” (9) to be over in their Zone. In April 1951, West Germany’s Law to End Denazification permitted the reemployment of people previously dismissed from their public or private sector jobs.
Perhaps ironically, it was especially when emerging political parties in all Zones recognized the potential benefit of soliciting the former Nazi vote that “denazification settled into a permanent state of near universal condemnation” (176). Acknowledging that democratization was not necessarily aligned with Allies’ declared goal of denazification helps to explain one complicated legacy of this postwar period. Mikkel Dack emphasizes that, at least in the 1950s, there was no process of “renazification” (258), and that marked an important achievement. But the contemporary reprise of Nazi imagery and rhetoric—in Germany and elsewhere—suggests how valuable this book’s reassessment of the Fragebogen’s ambiguous multigenerational legacy is likely to prove.
