Since the end of World War II, historians and psychologists have investigated the factors that motivated Germans to become Nazis before and during the war. While most studies have focused on the high-level figures who were tried at Nuremberg, much less is known about the hundreds of SS members, party functionaries, and intelligence agents who quietly navigated the transition to postwar life and successfully assimilated into a changed society after the war ended.
In A Nazi Past, German and American scholars examine the lives and careers of men like Hans Globke—who not only escaped punishment for his prominent involvement in formulating the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic legislation, but also forged a successful new political career. They also consider the story of Gestapo employee Gertrud Slottke, who exhibited high productivity and ambition in sending Dutch Jews to Auschwitz but eluded trial for fifteen years. Additionally, the contributors explore how a network of Nazi spies and diplomats who recast their identities in Franco’s Spain, far from the denazification proceedings in Germany.
Previous studies have emphasized how former Nazis hid or downplayed their wartime affiliations and actions as they struggled to invent a new life for themselves after 1945, but this fascinating work shows that many of these individuals actively used their pasts to recast themselves in a democratic, Cold War setting. Based on extensive archival research as well as recently declassified US intelligence, A Nazi Past contributes greatly to our understanding of the postwar politics of memory.
Table des matières
Hans Globke at Nuremberg: Testimony as Rehabilitation, 1948-49
Auditioning for Post-War: Walter Schellenberg, the Allies, and Attempts to Fashion a Usable Past
Bad Nazis and Other Germans: The fate of SS-Einsatzgruppen Commander Martin Sandberger in postwar Germany
Petitions to Franco: Arguments and Identities of Ex-Nazis in the Effort to Avoid Repatriation from Spain, 1945-1950
Siegfried Zoglmann, His Circle of Writers, and the Naumann Affair: a Nazi Propaganda Operation in Postwar Germany
German Diplomats and the Myth of the Two Foreign Offices
Hitler’s Military Elite in Italy and the Question of ‘Decent War
‘I am the Man Who Started the War’: Alfred Naujocks and his Postwar Stories on his ‘Adventures’
A Man with a Wide Horizon: The Postwar Professional Journey of SS Officer Karl Nicolussi-Leck
Revision of Life/History: From National Socialist Co-Perpetrator to Expellee Official, Gertrud Slottke
The Gehlen Organization and the Heinz Felfe Case: The SD, the KGB, and West German Counterintelligence, 1950-1961
A propos de l’auteur
Katrin Paehler is associate professor of history at Illinois State University and a contributor to Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust.
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