A friend of mine recently died of Corona. He was 84 years old and a communist from Munich – yes, there is also something like that. Even his parents were communists. Under the Nazis, his father had been sent to a concentration camp for ten years for his convictions, and his mother to a penitentiary. After 1945, the parents remained members of the Communist Party. It was banned in the FRG in 1956. Again the mother came to court. She had survived the Nazis, the prison and the Second World War, only to be convicted again in the FRG by the same judge for the same convictions.
You could laugh if it wasn’t so sad. This madness – a symptom of a whole society – haunted my acquaintances all his life.
No place in post-war Germany without Nazis
“The old Nazis were everywhere in the young Federal Republic,” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung recently. Twenty years ago one was insulted for such a finding as a “malicious leftist”. Today, however, hardly anyone denies that, according to the newspaper. Justice, administration, ministries, universities; Despite the praised denazification, there was no place in post-war Germany without Nazis. The newspaper calls this “a kind of total continuity”. Functional elites did their job and built a state that was committed to democracy. Even the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was so brown “that it still shakes you today”. If you look at accusations of right-wing agitation at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution today, circles close.
At that time, the Allies also turned a blind eye. The emerging Cold War was to blame; the new enemy was communism. To keep that in check, old functional elites were needed. Because, according to former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, they knew exactly where the hare was running. The Nazis were allowed to go there too. Old judges continued to speak justice, and desk felons continued to administer diligently. The look went ahead. True to the motto: fight new enemies instead of looking for old ones in your own ranks.
The real old Nazis remained unmolested
Today, 76 years after the end of the war, 100-year-old old Nazis are on trial and one wonders why today and not then. The answer: It’s about (almost) nothing. They are safe placeholder processes with a symbolic character. They are spread widely in the media and give the appearance of being dealt with. If these trials had been carried out 50 years ago, everyone would have been affected: neighbors, colleagues, bosses – the old Nazis next door. But they often remained unmolested until they ultimately died. That’s how history works too. There is only reappraisal when those in positions of power are no longer harmed.
For my friend, this conflict became the engine of his life. He knew about everyday politics and the difference between law and justice. Nobody, he emphasized, could pretend that the difference was none of their business. He remained a communist and fought for freedom of ideas and against mere phrases of democracy – days before his death he demonstrated against war.
I am not a communist. But I think if someone at 84 protests on the street and is politically active, he has done something right – even if he is insulted as a “malicious leftist” for it.
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