Mikkel Dack

In the wake of World War II, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical program to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, 20 million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by university professors and social scientists, these surveys defined much of the denazification experience and were immensely consequential to the material and emotional recovery of Germans. In Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany, Mikkel Dack draws the curtain to reveal what denazification looked like on the ground and in practice and how the highly criticized vetting program impacted the lives of individual Germans and their families as they recovered from the war. Accessing recently declassified documents, this book challenges traditional interpretations by illustrating the positive elements of the denazification campaign and recounting a more comprehensive history, one of mid-level Allied planners, civil affairs soldiers, and regular German citizens. The Fragebogen functions as a window into this everyday history.

This article addresses the fraught relationship between technology and representations of the Holocaust by examining the ethical dilemmas and opportunistic possibilities of a developing virtual reality tool for teaching and learning. Its focus is a pilot project at Rowan University in New Jersey, entitled the Warsaw Project, which seeks to balance the immersive nature of virtual and augmented realities with best practices, robust student engagement, and historical accuracy. In this article, we illustrate the project origins, scope, and content and share some of the major ethical dilemmas encountered as well as unexpected outcomes. Ultimately, we argue that advanced digital platforms and immersive technologies can, within an appropriate learning environment and when guided by qualified instruction, serve as an effective pedagogical tool and inform students in a way otherwise unachievable through literature and film.

As part of the post-war denazification campaign, as many as 20 million Germans were screened for employment by Allied armies. Applicants were ordered to fill out political questionnaires (Fragebögen) and allowed to justify their membership in Nazi organizations in appended statements. This mandatory act of self-reflection has led to the accumulation of a massive archival repository, likely the largest collection of autobiographical writings about the Third Reich. This article interprets individual and family stories recorded in denazification documents and provides insight into how Germans chose to remember and internalize the National Socialist years. The Fragebogen allowed and even encouraged millions of respondents to rewrite their personal histories and to construct whitewashed identities and accompanying narratives to secure employment. Germans embraced the unique opportunity to cast themselves as resisters and victims of the Nazi regime. These identities remained with them after the dissolution of the denazification project and were carried forward into the post-occupation period.

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.

The scholarly study of eugenics legislation in Alberta has been seriously limited as research has focused on the province’s original Sterilization Act, passed in March 1928, and on the political, social, and economic conditions of the 1920s. Although the 1928 Act was of great significance, being the first sterilization law passed in Canada, it was its 1937 amendment and the permitting of involuntary sterilizations that made the Alberta eugenics movement truly distinct. During the late 1930s, a time when the great majority of regional governments were either decommissioning or disregarding their sterilization laws due to a lack of funding, the discrediting of scientific racism and an increase in public protest, Alberta expanded its own legislation. Although similar laws were met with fierce opposition in other provinces and in the United States, this new amendment of 1937 remained largely unopposed in Alberta. As a result of such narrowly focused research, the explanations for why th...

Amidst a postwar environment of mass destruction and extreme emotional anxiety, German civilians and returning soldiers were forced by the occupying Allied armies, as part of denazification procedures, to write commentaries about their personal experiences living under the National Socialist regime. Between 1945 and 1949, upwards of twenty million Germans were screened by military governments by means of a political questionnaire (Fragebogen), which asked questions about the respondent’s Nazi past and allowed for extended answers and appended documents. Germans wrote at length about their relationship with the regime, their opinion of Nazi politics and social policies, and the experiences of living during a time of dictatorship and war. For most Germans, this was the first instance in which they recorded memories about the Hitler regime. This shared act of self-reflection has led to the accumulation of a massive archival repository that is likely the largest collection of ego-documents from the postwar years and the most valuable collection of autobiographical writings about the Third Reich.

By interpreting written responses in the denazification Fragebögen and borrowing theoretical concepts and models from narrative psychology and memory studies, this paper provides insight into how Germans chose to remember and internalize the National Socialist years. It argues that the Fragebogen program allowed and encouraged millions of respondents to rewrite their personal histories and to construct new whitewashed identities and accompanying narratives to help secure employment and avoid having to face a denazification tribunal. The influence of written narrative on individual memory is substantial and enduring and Germans embraced this unique opportunity to rewrite their personal history. These were the identities that remained with them after the dissolution of the denazification campaigns and the memories that were carried forward into the post-occupation period and integrated into the political cultures of the Federal Republic and Democratic Republic.

Rowan University has been presented with an exciting opportunity to make a profound impact on Holocaust education by engaging in a targeted collaboration with world renowned experts from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and an award-winning filmmaker. By leveraging the capabilities of the Virtual Reality Center at Rowan University, our project team will present a unique and immersive educational experience that will deepen student learning about the Holocaust and generate new knowledge about best practices in teaching about the Holocaust and other hard histories.

This is a collaborative project involving faculty and students of the Rowan Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering. The overall objective of the proposed project is to increase learning by utilizing pedagogies and content combined with Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in order to improve the education of middle and high school students. To explore a historical space in multiple dimensions, both geographically and temporally, and provide students with an experience that traditional in-class teaching methods cannot. In order to do this, students will focus on one critically important space, the Warsaw Ghetto, during the Holocaust, in order to see changes in that space during the rise and fall of the Third Reich. 

This project seeks to address a growing concern that Holocaust education is failing.  Recent research shows that there are large gaps in knowledge among high school students and teachers, regardless of geographic location or the ways in which Holocaust education is structured.  Additionally, we seek to balance the immersive nature of virtual and augmented reality with best practices, strong student engagement, and historical accuracy. The tentative name for the project is: Exploring the Warsaw Ghetto and Ringelblum Archive in Virtual Reality.

Returning from the war in the summer of 1945, Günter Grass described Germany as a “savage country of devastation, death, and pain.” The broken physical landscape left the nation unrecognizable and the traumatized population enunciated a tone of disillusionment and despair. Within this shattered postwar environment, the four occupying Allied armies, as part of denazification efforts, conducted as massive institutional screening and purge campaign. To obtain or retain employment, twenty million German civilians and returning soldiers were required to complete political questionnaires and face denazification tribunals. This individualized experience of forced-reflection and defence was invasive, requiring applicants to provide information about personal ideology, community, family, and moral character, all while under threat of punishment. They were also asked to dwell on experiences of wartime suffering and to consider their own degree of culpability. The popular narrative of German reaction to Allied-administered denazification is that it was painfully bureaucratic, short-sighted, and born out of arrogance and ignorance. It was redundant and a nuisance, a necessary administrative obstacle.

This paper explores challenges the belief that Germans discounted and trivialized denazification; it argues for the emotional gravity of the denazification experience. By examining personal diary entries, questionnaire responses, tribunal statements, and oral interviews, it is shown that Germans understood the authority that denazification possessed and that the screening process generated a wide range of emotional expressions, much more than irritation and resentment. The “ideological cleanse” threatened the lives and livelihood of men and women at a time of extreme vulnerability. It challenged financial security, professional standing, social status, and gender norms and dynamics. Reflecting on war and dictatorship was a trying experience, as was navigating the ambiguous and often-changing features of Allied denazification. Removal and exclusion from employment represented a personal defeat, conjuring emotions of anxiety, fear, embarrassment, and frustration; it was a psychological shock. This paper argues that denazification was an authoritative institution that setup a series of emotional codes in postwar Germany, which in turn had a significant and transformative effect on the emotional condition of the defeated population.

The French denazification campaign in occupied Germany is often heralded by historians as being more reflective in its planning, realistic in its objectives, and ultimately more successful than the other Allied purges. This narrative maintains that French civil affairs officers were more amenable to reeducation and democratization programs and therefore avoided the mass administrative purge that defined denazification efforts in the other western occupation zones. The American denazification campaign is regularly depicted as the prototypical failure—it was too ambitious, far-reaching, and punitive. Similarly, it is professed that the early homogenization of denazification procedures among the Allied nations was superficial and short lived.

My research revisits these popular narratives by exploring French denazification activities and methods used to screen and punish Germans. Its focus is the infamous denazification Fragebogen, the blunt bureaucratic instrument used by all four military governments to identify and categorize Nazi party members and sympathizers. The Fragebogen underpinned nearly all denazification activities and was completed by as many as twenty million German civilians and returning soldiers between 1945 and 1949. Denazification, as experienced on the ground, formally and informally, and carried out by both occupation soldiers and civilian commissions, largely revolved around mundane activities such as filling out forms, completing evaluation sheets, and recording tribunal verdicts. Denazification in the French Zone, and in all other zones, produced an incredible amount of paper. It is important to recognize this simple truth, that the denazification questionnaire was not only an administrative mainstay in the Anglo-American zones; the French and Soviets distributed and processed hundreds of thousands of Fragebögen. Exploring the conception and implementation of the Fragebogenaktion, my paper makes two major claims, one advocates for the bureaucratic homogeneity of denazification activities across the occupied territories, the other isolates French denazification as distinct and exceptional. 

There was a surprising amount of uniformity in denazification mechanics between the French and their Allied counterparts. The Fragebogen was as a common denominator shared by the various ideological purge campaigns during both the military government and German commission phases. During the early months of the occupation, the French relied heavily on the SHAEF-drafted questionnaire and when a unique form was eventually drafted in the fall of 1945, it closely resembled the American survey. Despite the more indulgent and personalized nature of vetting procedures and changing administration, for the duration of the occupation, the Fragebogen acted as the predominant instrument of the screening apparatus. The extensive and consistent use of the Fragebogen in the French zone of occupation is often overlooked, as is the common denazification infrastructure of the Allied partners.

However, French denazification was ultimately much different from the screening campaigns carried out in the American and British zones. The French Military Government used the Fragebogen in a diverse way, its implementation manipulated to conform to the larger vision of a decentralized, education-focused, and individualized denazification campaign. It reflected occupation policy and changed with it. French denazification planners envisioned using the questionnaire for a different purpose than what the Americans and British intended, and the program was implemented with more flexibility and greater allowances. Dozens of “special questionnaires” were drafted to address and accommodate local circumstances, Germans were recruited to review questionnaires, and repatriated refugees, returning POWs, and German youth were required to fill out forms by the thousands. Administrators refused to register the entire zonal population and they allowed questionnaire respondents to continue working in their chosen profession until their file had been processed. These features are unique to the French Fragebogenaktion.

My paper emphasises the point that homogeneity in bureaucratic apparatuses does not necessarily carry over to implementation. The denazification campaign in the French Zone and across all the occupied territories was an experimental undertaking, one that allowed for a considerable amount of administrative flexibility and on-the-ground discrepancy. Denazification is frequently evaluated with zero-sum measures; as a success or failure, as consistent or disorderly, as homogenous across zones or uneven. The Fragebogenaktion challenges such a polarized interpretation.

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.

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.