Read The File for Free Online Page B

golf.
    I was appalled at the number of prosecutions that began with a denunciation, not by paid Gestapo informers but by ordinary people: a barber, denounced by a customer; a chemist, denounced by his shop assistant; a housekeeper, denounced by her employers; even someone informing on his own brother and a wife accusing her husband. These are all real cases—taken from People’s Court judgments I photocopied at the time. Many of these trials led to a death sentence.
    At the end of the day I would step out into the sunlit streets of leafy Grünewald, sickened by this seemingly endless record of human baseness and cruelty. Often I felt as if I had blood on my own hands. I would go for aswim to wash the blood off. Then I would have a drink at a café and look at the old women gossiping at the next table. What did you do in the war, granny?
    I did not confine myself to the archives. I also talked to the veterans and survivors. There was Albert Speer in Heidelberg, with his well-polished tale of the unpolitical technocrat. There were casual acquaintances, each with an extraordinary personal history: a motor mechanic, for example, whose parents died while he was still a baby on the desperate flight west before the advancing Red Army, so that he knew neither his birthplace nor his birthday—nor his real name, nor his parentage. All that he knew is that he came from somewhere in the Memelland, a once-German territory in what is now Lithuania. Then there were the grand old men of the German resistance to Hitler who met again every year, on the anniversary of the July 20, 1944, bomb plot, in the courtyard of the former Wehrmacht headquarters, where the leader of the plot, Count Stauffenberg, had stood before the firing squad.
    Just before he died, Stauffenberg cried out in defiance
“Es lebe das heilige Deutschland?”
—Long live sacred Germany! Or was it
“Es lebe das geheime Deutschland?”—
Long live secret Germany!—a reference both to the resistance conspiracy and to the semimystical ideas of the poet Stefan George? Stauffenberg’s last words are still disputed. Amid the ghosts of secret Germany I was searching for the answer to a personal question. What is it that makes one person a resistance fighter and another the faithful servant of a dictatorship? This man a Stauffenberg, that a Speer. Today, after years of study, and after knowing personally many resisters and many servants of dictatorships, I am searching still.
    Not just to a professional student of history but to any Englishman living in Germany at this time, and probably to most British newspaper readers, the past was still the most interesting thing about Germany—and “the past” meant essentially the twelve years of Nazism. The great achievements of postwar reconstruction, the civilized democracy and exemplary social market economy presided over by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt: all were greatly admired, but boring. Even the far-left terrorist threat and the strong reaction of the West German state were given their special edge because of the fear, bequeathed by Hitler, that Germany could again be dangerous.
    James was almost as fascinated as I was by the Nazi past, and we worked on several stories together. With Friedrich, our sixty-eighter journalist friend, we observed the trials of the Majdanek concentration-camp guards in Düsseldorf. When an elderly Jewish woman testified that she had been forced as a prisoner to carry canisters of the poison Zyklon B to the gas chambers, a German defense lawyer leaped to his feet demanding her instant arrest—for aiding and abetting murder.
    We also pursued the mysterious case of the then West German president’s youthful membership in the Nazi Party. A distinguished painter, Heinz Troekes, told us how the young Karl Carstens proudly used to wear his Party badge at the artillery school where he was an instructor and Troekes a pupil. But President Carstens continued to win popularity by his knickerbockered rambling