Department of History

In the months immediately following the collapse of the National Socialist regime, the four Allied military governments administered a denazification questionnaire, or Fragebogen, to millions of German civilians and returning soldiers as a means to identify Nazi Party members and sympathizers. This self-administered survey, one that dictated employment opportunities in both the private and public sectors, provided the basic personal information for the Allies’ initiatives to deconstruct the Nazi state, establish democratic government, and rebuild Germany’s economic infrastructure. While the American, British, French, and Soviet authorities hoped that this standardized instrument would accurately identify and appropriately categorize Nazi adherents and staunch militarists, many of its questions were ambiguous and misleading, and allowances were made for personal comments, amendments, and supplementary documents, such as third-party testimonials and statements of denunciation.

An analysis of the questionnaires reveals the ways in which denazification facilitated the formation of new postwar German narratives about the political and social culture of the Third Reich. Not only did respondents use the Fragebogen to redefine their personal relationship with the Nazi regime, it indirectly encouraged respondents to establish their identity as victims and resistors, to depict themselves as recipients of extreme hardship, and to distance themselves from the Nazi government and its crimes. This paper explores the influence, consequences, and legacies of the denazification questionnaire and the space that it created for Germans to recreate themselves in the immediate postwar years.

Editors’ summary: Continuing with the theme of non-medicalised psychological responses, and the after effects of war on wider civilian populations, Mikkel Dack here considers what might in the broadest sense be identified as perpetrator trauma. Drawing on largely unexplored archival material, the author considers subjective experiences of denial, victimhood, and low self-esteem among the German civilian population of postwar Germany, and considers the way in which these highly malleable psychological states were gradually shifted towards a consensual view of the war. This is an important and new subject because it begins to consider the ways in which trauma expressed itself and at the same time served political purposes in a postwar era.

The scholarly study of eugenics legislation in Alberta has been seriously limited as concentration has been restricted to the province’s original Sterilization Act, passed in March 1928, and to the political, economic, and social conditions of 1920s Canada. The 1928 Act was of great significance, being the first sterilization law passed in Canada, but it was its 1937 amendment, and the permitting of involuntary sterilizations, that made the Alberta eugenics movement distinct. During the late 1930s, a time when the great majority of regional governments in North America were either decommissioning or disregarding their sterilization laws due to a lack of funding, the discrediting of hereditary science, and an increase in public protest, Alberta expanded its own legislation. Although, similar laws were met with fierce opposition in other provinces and states, this new amendment of 1937 remained largely unopposed in Alberta.

Researcher on why the Act was amended and why resistance to sterilization remained minimal during the 1930s has been based on political and cultural assumptions and not sound evidence; explanations are exaggerated, inaccurate, and misleading. By dismissing the preconceived notions and arguments of the past, we are left with a new grounding from which to build future propositions and a new set of sharpened questions to help determine why the Alberta government, and presumably its people, were willing to support such regressive legislation. By doing so, new theories arise, such as the influential role of individual personalities within the provincial government, the mental state of Alberta immigrants, the definition and diagnosis of “mental deficiency” in Canada, and the means by which political resistance could be expressed in 1930s.

Politically purging and re-educating the entire population of a defeated enemy state was an unorthodox concept in 1943 when the term “denazification” was first used. Never before had a modern military power embarked on or even considered a mission to “ideologically cleanse" the enemy in order to ensure a lasting peace. The vast majority of military government spending and resources for denazification was directed not to the dissolution of the Nazi Party or the prosecution of major war criminals, but to the Fragebogen (questionnaire) and Spruchkammer (denazification board) systems – i.e. the identification and punishment of millions of nominal Nazis. This resulted in an ambitious screening program and the most extensive political purge undertaken in modern times. As experienced by the ordinary German and Austrian citizen, denazification threatened loss of employment and possible civil and criminal penalties.

More than 95,000 Germans and Austrians were convicted of Nazi crimes after the war, 12,500 in occupation courts. However, more than twenty million people were screened by occupation governments for their participation in Nazi activities and of those more than 1.4 million lost their jobs or were refused employment because of their political past. This means that more than a quarter of the German-Austrian population was forced to explain and justify in a questionnaire or in front of a special tribunal their personal relationship with the Nazi regime and to account for their active role or complicity in its actions. The majority of those dismissed, including hundreds of high-ranking Nazi officials, were eventually allowed, after several years of prohibition, to return to their former or desired jobs and to become active politically. But still the reintegration of perpetrators into the wage economy was not always easy for individuals. There was a strong negative social stigma surrounding being identified as a committed Nazi and the consequences of being proscribed from employment dogged the professional lives of former party members for years after they were allowed to presume their occupations. Considering the unrealistic goals of denazification (purging entire countries), the ever-changing nature of its implementation (changing questionnaires, changing governments), and the shifting political priorities of the occupation powers (the raising of the Iron Curtain), any evaluation of the effectiveness of denazification must recognize nuanced interpretations of success and failure. Despite arguable successes and failures, there is no doubt that the “cleanse” had a substantial negative economic and psychological effect on former Nazis and on the bulk of perpetrators of the war and Holocaust machinery.