A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [70]
When separate currencies were established for East and West, the Lehmanns understood what was about to happen and they were worried about it. The scenario was supposed to be a slow evolution toward a democratic socialist state. But if East and West split, the East would instantly be declared the new socialist democratic Germany. Both of the Lehmanns agreed that the Germans were not ready for this. Just a few years earlier, many of them had been Nazis. Now they would be socialists, and for the same reason—it was what the existing power told them to be. But how many of them understood socialism and were really prepared in their minds to embrace a totally new kind of society?
There had never been an East and West Germany. Linguistically and culturally, the division had always been between north and south. But although both sides were Germany, both peoples were German, and the division of East and West was artificial, a mentality of “us” and “them” very quickly took hold on both sides. Contributing to this frame of mind was an 858-mile border that followed no regional lines, no cultural patterns, and lacked all historical logic. Rather, it was defined by guards, barbed wire, and minefields. Still, the small group of Jews who had returned to build the new Germany felt that their German Democratic Republic had a new vision, while the Federal Republic in the West was simply a deplorable continuation of the old Germany—the part that refused to go along with progress.
One East German Jew, expressing a widespread point of view, said, “In West Germany the judges, the police, the civil service, the criminal police, and, once they started rebuilding it, the officers of the Army, were all people who had big jobs in the Nazi party, in the civil service, in the government.” The only inaccurate part of that observation was the word “all.” As the old alliance broke up and the West increasingly came to see the Soviet Union as its principle enemy, it treated Germany's Nazi past with an ever-increasing leniency. The first Bundestag election revealed a significant presence of extreme right-wing voters and political organizations. The American policy of “denazification” had been dropped in preparation for the creation of the West German state. Once created, that state in 1950 declared an amnesty for low-level Nazis. The Soviets had fired 85 percent of the almost 2,500 judges, prosecutors, and lawyers in their sector, and most of them went to the West, where they usually qualified for the 1950 amnesty. Of 11,500 West German judges, an estimated 5,000 had been involved in courts under the Third Reich. In the East, Nazis were also purged from the schools, the railroad, and the post office, and many of these ousted personnel found homes and jobs in the West as well. This fact was given enormous publicity in the East. Then there was the Globke case.
Hans Globke was West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's state secretary of the Chancellery. He had been known as an efficient, loyal administrator both in the Weimar government and in the Third Reich. At the 1935 Nuremberg rally Hitler had announced a new series of laws that gradually stripped Jews of their German citizenship, their right to own shops, their right to attend schools, and their right to mix with non-Jews. It was an important step in the dehumanizing of Jews that would lead to their being hauled off in cattle cars. To give legitimacy to these new laws, legal opinions had to be written, as they would for any other German law. These legal commentaries had been Hans Globke's contribution. Later, still serving in Hitler's government, Globke had proposed forcing all German Jews to take the middle name of Israel or Sarah. The East Germans denounced the Adenauer government for the presence of this. Third Reich figure, but when Globke