“Prioritizing the human and personal aspects:” Rethinking war and death in Germany, 1952-1961
Ten years after American artillery had encamped there to repel the Wehrmacht’s
Ardennes Offensive, Luxembourgers had ample reason to gaze wearily across the Mosel River. Twice in the previous generation, German troops had brought destruction and now the Federal Republic of Germany was creating a new military force. In February 1955, leaders of the
Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge happily concluded that, “the political atmosphere … has largely relaxed,” to the point where they could build a Germany military cemetery near Luxembourg City. Keen to manage their public image, these leaders explained that “[i]f possible, we would like to prevent a storm of German spectators” from flooding across the border to visit, which might have alarmed or at least offended the locals.278 Even though West Germans had by 1952 agreed that older mourning traditions would not be statically preserved into the future, any public mourning event still trod a fine line between acceptance and scandal, a tension summed up in the planning for the Luxembourg cemetery.
Public mourning for the war dead in each Germany was made more challenging by the contemporary post-1945 context. By the mid-1950s, each Germany was building its own new military and moving to ally that new military with NATO in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the East. Besides the call to take up arms only a decade after the German army’s defeat, the new context of the Cold War giving rise to actual violence (as in Korea in 1950) made the prospect of
278 Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, Bundesgeschäftsstelle to alle Landes- und Bezirksverbände, 8
123
rearmamnent more troubling. Furthermore, the possession and readiness to deploy nuclear weapons on both the part of the US and the USSR gave Germans fear that the next war would leave only a charred stretch of land between the superpowers.
These concerns over the nearness of the next war and the greatly increased death toll that would likely follow it corresponded with Germans’ efforts to re-think the ways they had
understood and remembered the human costs of war. The Second World War, like the First, had been a total war, delivering violence already against civilian populations beyond the front lines. The fact that the Second World War, with the key role played there by aerial bombing, had been far deadlier for civilian populations was all the more reason to fear a dynamic toward ever more casualties from war and decreasing prospects that foreign policy objectives could be settled cleanly via military violence. That is, both East and West Germans began to realize that, wherever the next conflict might take place, the war would inevitably reach back home and its effects would be inescapable.
In order to more completely characterize the nature and content of Germans’ collective memory of the Second World War, this chapter will examine the content of public mourning in each Germany but also place these events into their 1950s and early 1960s political, military and cultural contexts. Four questions will guide this chapter: Firstly, how did West Germans divide their attention between collectively remembering the experience of war on one hand and the history of the Nazi dictatorship on the other? Secondly, how did Volkstrauertag designers present the Second World War emotionally or aesthetically? Thirdly, to what extent did East Germans, at a state-level and below at a more local level, imagine and re-imagine the Second World War and its “lessons” for future generations? Fourthly, to what extent were public
124
mourning ceremonies in West Germany products of political concerns relating to the present democratic moment, rather than simply reactions to the discredited fascist past?
Contemplating war in the Federal Republic, 1952-1956
In order to publicly mourn the war dead, West Germans had to collectively remember the war, which meant somehow also publicly discussing the Nazi dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, it was easier for West German civil society- and political leaders to speak with authority about the hardship of war than to credibly claim to have worked to stop the Nazis. While the mid- and late 1950s did not see a protracted and self-critical engagement with Germans’ support for (or at least, passive compliance with) the racist and aggressive policies of the Nazis, 279 this period did
see a conscious effort to re-imagine “war” and the value German society had ascribed to wars and warriors over the past century-and-a-half. The monumental celebration of conflicts across the nineteenth-century and through the First World War had largely emphasized “the dead” as “fallen soldiers,” who were understood as the primary (if not sole) element of the population harmed by war.280 Yet in what was one of many “learning processes”281 enforced upon and then encouraged among West Germans at this time, Volkstrauertag ceremonies increasingly took
279 On Germans’ largely passive attitude toward the Nazi Dictatorship and its crimes during the Third Reich, see Ian
Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, 2008), Detlev J. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven, 1989).
280 On memorialization of dead soldiers after the First World War, see Reinhart Koselleck, “War Memorials:
Identity formations of the Survivors,” in Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Pressner (Stanford, 2002), George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990) and Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Sixth Edition (Cambridge, 2005).
125
measures to include a wider set of non-combatant deaths, as well as non-German deaths, which could no longer be excluded from a meaningful and serious effort to understand and explain war.
Civilians and non-civilians
The West German parliament took a large step in this process of re-conceptualizing war when they enacted the “Law for the Maintenance of War Graves (War Graves Law)” in the spring of 1952. This War Graves Law provided federal funding for the construction of
cemeteries for “the war dead” who were buried inside of (West) German territory, plus the costs of the actual burials, as well as a lump sum for upkeep and maintenance of these graves, with the VDK being assigned as the sole contractor for carrying out these designs.282 This 1952 law expanded upon a similar 1922 measure but, beyond members of regular the armed forces, the 1952 law defined “war graves” as also extending to individuals who died performing
“paramilitary services.”283 Whether “paramilitary” was meant to include Wehrmacht Auxiliaries, German Red Cross, or even SS members, is not clear.284 Nonetheless, the
designation of “war dead,” and thus how the West German public ought to understand the effects of war on their population, now included the battlefield dead, those who died as a result of injuries received in the course of their duties beyond the battlefield, those who died in POW
282 Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, Bundesgeschäftsstelle to alle Landesverbände, Circular
Memorandum Number 37/52, 19 December 1952, VDK A.10-48.
283 Entwurf eines Gesetzes über die Sorge für die Kriegsgräber (Kriegsgräergesetz), BR-Drucks. Nr. 94/52, 1 March,
1952, draft of legislation forwarded with the letter from the Sekretariat of the Bundesrat to the Vertretungen der Länder, 1 March 1952, EZAB 2/2559.
284 The Waffen-SS (“Armed SS”) constituted an armed paramilitary branch as part of the SS (Schutzstaffel, “security
force”), itself formally a wing of the NSDAP. Althought SS soldiers did fight in campaigns with regular Wehrmacht
troops, the SS were all volunteers and explicit members of the Party. Thus SS veterans and families had a different, much more problematic task of explanation and coming to terms with death than regular soldiers.
126
camps, on the return journey home from POW camps, or shortly after their arrival in West Germany after their release form POW camps.285 Thus, West Germans’ legal understanding of the phrase, “war dead,” had by 1952 grown to encompass the larger variety of military- or military-related experiences of war, keeping the military aspect of remembering the Second World War foremost in the public’s mind but simultaneously minimizing the attention given understanding the rise of the Third Reich who launched the war.
The Nazi regime was not entirely absent from the War Graves Law but, when it did appear, it was as an external force that simply enacted suffering on its victims. That is, most legislators (and their constituents) preferred to keep discussion of the Nazi era at arms’ length, with as little critical inquiry or interrogation as possible. This is evident in Section 6 of the law, where the Federal Republic explained its obligation to finance the care of graves of “victims of National Socialism, who on the basis of political, racial, or religious reasons were brought into medical- or detention centers” and subsequently died.286 While a fairly clear reference to Nazi racial, political, and other ideological persecution, this extension of Federal recognition may have been more symbolic that anything, since at least as many major concentration camps were located outside of the 1949 borders of the Federal Republic as those located within, meaning those remains beyond the Oder-Neisse Line or even the Elbe River would have been ineligible for West German recognition and benefits.287 Indeed, the Law went on to enumerate other
285 Entwurf eines Gesetzes über die Sorge für die Kriegsgräber (Kriegsgräergesetz), BR-Drucks. Nr. 94/52, 1 March,
1952, draft of legislation forwarded with the letter from the Sekretariat of the Bundesrat to the Vertretungen der Länder, 1 March 1952, EZAB 2/2559.
286 Ibid.
287 US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Liberation of major Nazi camps, 1944-1945, map, no date,
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?MediaId=381 (accessed November 9, 2012). The Oder-Neisse Line was determined by the Allies to be Germany’s new eastern border with Poland as part of the negotiations in May 1945. The Elbe River formed the inner-German border between West Germany and East Germany.
127
victims of the war also due “war grave” status, who were more likely to be inside of the Federal Republic: “German- and ethnic German resettlers and expellees,” “civilian internnees,”
“transported Germans,” “foreign workers…conscripted into then-current borders of the Reich to work,” and “foreigners cared for by internationally recognized refugee organizations who died in collection camps.”288 So while the West Germans did not completely ignore the Nazi past when it came to public mourning and collective memory, Nazi crimes and violence were largely emphasized only so far as they related to a conceptualization of war as an event encompassing many victims beyond the battlefield.
Whatever the blind sports and silences present in West German collective memory and public mourning, the documentary record does prove that West German leaders were beginning to recognize that, “as opposed to the understanding of the concept of war graves up to now, stemming from the First World War,” the reality of the Second World War, especially the increased scope and intensity of the violence from 1939-1945, meant that the understanding of “war” and its victims must likewise be widened. “War graves are,” in light of these
considerations, “in the future also [to be considered] the graves of civilian victims of the aerial bombing campaign,” too.289 More than that, “the graves of war participants of foreign nations who died as POWs or fell in the Second World War,” as well as “the graves of Germans and foreign civilian persons, who lost their lives through direct consequences of the Second World War” were now designated as “war graves” and considered worthy of state-led public
288 Entwurf eines Gesetzes über die Sorge für die Kriegsgräber (Kriegsgräergesetz), BR-Drucks. Nr. 94/52, 1 March,
1952, draft of legislation forwarded with the letter from the Sekretariat of the Bundesrat to the Vertretungen der Länder, 1 March 1952, EZAB 2/2559.
289 Entwurf eines Gesetzes über die Sorge für die Kriegsgräber (Kriegsgräbergesetz), an earlier draft of legislation
forwarded as Drucksache Nr. 2667 from the office of Der Bundeskanzler, Budnesrepublik Deutschland to the Herrn Präsidenten des Deutschen Bundesrates, 9 October 1951, EZAB 2/2559.
128
mourning.290 The sum of the regulations contained in this law, then, meant that the primary lens through which “war” was presented to the public via gravesites was no longer solely a military or combat-related role. Instead, West Germans were told, at least on the basis of gravesites, that war affected civilians and non-civilians alike.
Tragedy beyond control
The national Volkstrauertag programs in Bonn shared these conclusions about how to understand war’s impact on society. The 1953 national public mourning ceremony featured classical music interspersed with numerous text readings, nearly all of which presented the story of the Second World War through the eyes of survivors grieving for their dead loved ones, rather than by uncritically presenting these combat deaths as evidence of soldiers’ patriotic service and sacrifice. Titles such as, “To the Fallen Soldier,” “Over a Death Notice,” “Dresden 1945,” “Farewell in a POW Camp,” and “Letter of the Greek Bishop Nikolai of Ochrida to a Mother Who Could Not Finder Her Son’s Grave” all suggested that the West German audience was meant to understand war as a sorrowful tragedy, rather than a praiseworthy and enviable experience,291 and that this audience was encouraged to consider the war’s effects on the home front to be just as real and important as the battle front.292
The new emphasis on warfare as a negative experience, as well as the centrality of civilians’ suffering alongside military deaths, was noted by many members of the audience in 1953. “The effect,” wrote one civil servant, “at finding a new approach [Stil]” for organized
290 Entwurf eines Gesetzes über die Sorge für die Kriegsgräber (Kriegsgräergesetz), BR-Drucks. Nr. 94/52, 1
March, 1952, draft of legislation forwarded with the letter from the Sekretariat of the Bundesrat to the Vertretungen der Länder, 1 March 1952, EZAB 2/2559.
291 Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, Auszug aus der Niederschrift über die Vorstandsitzung vom
129
ceremonies like Volkstrauertag “is thoroughly to be welcomed.”293 Not everyone appreciated the diminished role of the soldiers, however, with some critics complaining about a program that “had morphed into a pure civilian – artificial – spirit.”294 Still others believed that the everyman aspect of having no single, prominent political speech made the 1953 Volkstrauertag message more relatable to average listeners, who could reach out and grasp the words from Dresden, from the Hospital Ship on the Baltic, and the long-awaited return from POW camps.295 This turn away from mourning only soldiers, as a way of demonstrating Germans’ priorities when considering war, toward a more pluralistic understanding of death and victims, made
Volkstrauertag in 1953 something different, a chance to “buil[d] a bridge between painful remembrance and warning admonition to the present-day.”296 Quite far removed from the Weimar- and Third Reich-era official mourning holidays, 1953’s Volkstrauertag presented death as undesirable, unglorious, and hopefully something that future generations would not be forced to suffer for pursuit of national interests.
293 Dr. Hüchtling, Min.Rat i. Bds. Wirtschaftsministerium, quoted in Gutachten die dem Volksbund Deutsche
Kriegsgräberfürsorge anlässlich der Feierstunde im Plenarsaal am Volkstrauertag (15. November 1953) aufgrund seiner an die Teilnehmer gerichteten Bitte zugegangen sind, collection of audience reactions to memorial ceremony, no author, no date, VDK A.100-89.
294 Gerhard Graf von Schwerin (privat) Bonn, and Oberst i.G.a.D. von Bonin, Bonn, Bundeskanzleramt, quoted in
Gutachten die dem Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge anlässlich der Feierstunde im Plenarsaal am Volkstrauertag (15. November 1953) aufgrund seiner an die Teilnehmer gerichteten Bitte zugegangen sind, collection of audience reactions to memorial ceremony, no author, no date, VDK A.100-89.
295 Fr. Fiehn, Bonn, Bonner Burschenschaft Sugambria, quoted in Gutachten die dem Volksbund Deutsche
Kriegsgräberfürsorge anlässlich der Feierstunde im Plenarsaal am Volkstrauertag (15. November 1953) aufgrund seiner an die Teilnehmer gerichteten Bitte zugegangen sind, collection of audience reactions to memorial ceremony, no author, no date, VDK A.100-89.
296 Landesgerichtspräsident Dr. Schorn, Bonn, quoted Gutachten die dem Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge
anlässlich der Feierstunde im Plenarsaal am Volkstrauertag (15. November 1953) aufgrund seiner an die Teilnehmer gerichteten Bitte zugegangen sind, collection of audience reactions to memorial ceremony, no author, no date, VDK A.100-89.
130
The leitmotif of war as a terrible, bloody, and ultimately undesirable event also informed the 1954 Volkstrauertag ceremony. That year, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer argued that the casualties of the Second World War, military and civilian, were actually
incentives for West Germans to do all they could to avoid another war, declaring that “[w]e see the burning cities and villages but we hear deep within us the warning cry [mahnende Stimme] of the dead.”297 While his desire for peace was likely sincere, Adenauer’s message seems to rest on the assumption that, if only the Nazis and the military leaders had not tried to settle their political goals with war, then the catastrophic deaths of millions would have been avoided. That is, in his remarks, Adenauer ignored the racial and aggressive character of the Nazi dictatorship, equating Hitler’s agenda to the wars of Kaiser Wilhelm II or even the Iron Chancellor Bismarck, only longer and deadlier in scale.
The discussion of war and its horror did not entirely evade mention of the Nazis’ crimes, however. Gustave Ahlhorn, President of the VDK in 1954, pointed out the Second World War’s unique differences from recent German military history up to 1939, explaining that, not only had more soldiers died by 1945 than in 1918, “also innumerable women, old men and children in small towns” had perished “in the firestorms of the aerial bombing campaign,” or as the unnamed casualties from “the ice storms of the treck” westward, before the approaching Red Army, not to mention those who were killed “in prisons, camps and piled up in Gas ovens.”298 Here Ahlhorn moved beyond indicting “war” as a problem and engaged with the problem of explaining the Third Reich, albeit somewhat indirectly. Nonetheless, mentioning the Nazis in
297 „Mit ganzer Kraft für den Frieden in der Welt!“ Bulletin des Presse- und Informationsamtes der
Bundesregierung, 16 November 1954, Nr. 216/1954, VDK A.100-18.
298 „Zeugnis der grossen Schicksals- und Leidensgemeinschaft unseres Volkes,“ Bulletin des Presse- und
131
passing at least encouraged the West German audience to fill in the missing details themselves while helping reinforce the interpretive point that “war” was explicitly considered a bad thing.
That Ahlhorn at least entertained the notion that more than “peace” was necessary to avoid another fascist dictatorship and return to bloodshed was a departure from the rest of the
Volkstrauertag program in 1954, which featured the premier of a newly written symphony by