War In Europe: The Legacy : ‘We Have to Live With That Legacy’ : Horrors of the Hitler Era Still Haunting Germany

“Adolf Hitler once said that it would take 100 years before anyone would shake hands with the Germans again,” reflected Axel von dem Bussche, a decorated German army officer of World War II. “He was quite aware of what he was doing to us, let alone to everyone else. We have to live with that legacy.”

Here in Berlin, the city from which Hitler ordered his troops to invade Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, one aspect of the war’s legacy is still physically, depressingly visible.

The Potsdamerplatz, once the busiest square in Europe, which brimmed with vehicles, trams, shops and people, is now vacant ground--cut in two by the gray, graffiti-covered Berlin Wall erected in 1961.

In one direction, behind the guard towers, lie the stark, monotonous buildings of East Berlin. Once part of the elegant center of a powerful empire, the eastern sector of Berlin is now the capital of Communist East Germany, part of a truncated state whose division is the bitterest heritage of Nazi Germany’s defeat.

In the other direction spreads glitzy West Berlin, a flashy would-be capital, full of verve and wealth, which nevertheless cannot live down the fact that its postwar status is still legally that of a city occupied by the Western military Allies--the United States, Britain and France--with their patrolling troops in evidence.

As a result of the war, the capital of West Germany shifted to a sleepy Rhineland university community, Bonn, which retains the mien of an overgrown small town. For 40 years, politicians maintained the fiction that Berlin would soon become the capital--hence the second-rate, temporary look of many of Bonn’s public buildings.

Bonn was suggested as the provisional capital by that towering figure of the postwar period, “the Old One”--Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

An anti-Nazi activist in the Hitler era, Adenauer at 73 was for West Germany the right man at the right time: With the Allies’ help in the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, he resisted Soviet pressure to isolate West Berlin, then forged an iron link between Germany and France, burying a historical enmity and firmly embedding the emerging Federal Republic in the Atlantic alliance.

At the same time, the East German Communists fixed their state inside the Soviet Bloc, creating the political fault line between East and West--the Iron Curtain--with the Berlin Wall its most visible symbol.

The war’s residue has kept the two states at loggerheads ever since: The East Germans claim that they, as anti-Nazis, are the true inheritors of the new Germany; the West Germans insist that they, as democrats, carry the Teutonic torch of freedom.

Propelled by desperation and guilt, West Germany started its postwar revival from the rock-bottom point Germans call Stunde Null , or Hour Zero.

“I remember visiting Berlin as young Army officer,” recalled U.S. Ambassador Vernon A. Walters recently. “The place was devastated. I saw a family sitting around their table eating. There was very little food. But they had a bowl of flowers on the table. I thought: ‘Cut flowers! A people who will put flowers on their table will somehow recover.’ ”

With America’s Marshall Plan metaphorically watering the flowers, West Germany recovered more rapidly than anyone could have expected: The economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder , was under way, which led to the production of cars and machine tools and food and fashion wear--and the highest standard of living in the European Community.

During those momentous postwar years under Adenauer, West Germany--in reaction to its Nazi past--not only joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but became its keystone by reinstituting conscription and, despite the qualms of many, raised an armed force of almost 500,000 men, known as the Bundeswehr, which has included officers from Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

Defense Policy Restrictions

But the Bonn government, in a defense-only policy, set strictures that rankle some allies today: Its forces cannot be deployed outside the NATO area and thus, for example, were unable to join other European nations in sending ships to the Persian Gulf to protect oil lanes during the Iran-Iraq War or to join U.N. peacekeeping forces in the Middle East.

The postwar period was accompanied by a revival of the arts, an outpouring by literary and visual artists whose vision was scarred by war and defeat and marked by a deeply pessimistic view of the human condition.

In literature, writers such as Nobel winner Heinrich Boell, Guenter Grass, Bruno Werner and playwright Wolfgang Borchert drew heavily on their experiences and wrote of the war and the postwar period with irony and anger.

American historian Gordon A. Craig says: “They sought always to emphasize the true meaning of what had happened to their country by demonstrating its causes and effects in the lives of real people in real places. Guenter Grass wrote not about National Socialism as a German phenomenon but about what it was actually like in Danzig. . . .”

But when, in 1981, Franz Schoenhuber, leader of the far-right Republicans party, published “I Was There,” his unrepentant book recounting his wartime experiences with the Waffen SS forces, he was fired from his job as a broadcaster with Bavarian television.

No Longer an Obsession

“In recent years,” said Georg Heepe, editor of the Rohwolt publishing house in Hamburg, “the war has ceased to obsess the younger writers who didn’t experience it. But there is continuing interest in a scholarly examination of that period.”

And booksellers report that nonfiction works about the war sell well.

As for Schoenhuber, his views about shucking off guilt over the past are coming back into fashion, and his Republicans have done well at the polls this year--to the consternation of those who fear a resurgence of the extreme right.

Among the most depressing results of the war and the dreadful Holocaust--which saw 6 million European Jews put to death at Nazi hands--is the lack of a vibrant Jewish community here, which in many ways has impoverished West Germany intellectually.

Over the years, the Bonn government has expressed regrets and paid millions of marks in reparations to Israel. When other nations criticized the Jewish state for its uncompromising policies, born of its determination that there will never again be another Holocaust, Germans have had to be extra circumspect. But more recently, it too has sided with other European nations in condemning Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Heinz Galinski, the 76-year-old leader of West Germany’s dwindling 30,000-member Jewish community, was in Berlin on Sept. 1, 1939, and was sent to the notorious Auschwitz camp in Poland, transferred to Buchenwald and then to Bergen-Belsen, where he was freed by British troops in 1945.

“We have never recovered from the events beginning Sept. 1,” he said. “The 55 million deaths in the war have left their wounds in us and our young people. The horrifying memories are still alive in our heads.”

In some ways, West Germany today is still a captive of the war’s legacy. The conventional wisdom holds that it is an “economic giant and a political dwarf,” inhibited from using its power because of guilt over its past.

But this view overlooks the fact that its leaders have made tough decisions on such controversial matters as reforming the currency, creating the Bundeswehr, allowing the United States to station nuclear weapons and later missiles in the country and combatting domestic terrorism in the 1970s.

Further, whenever West Germany does appear to flex its muscles within the European Community or NATO--or suggests a wider role for itself in East-West affairs--Western allies appear to quake.

‘Germany Is Different’

As foreign affairs specialist Angelika Volle put it: “Germany is different from, say, Italy or France or Belgium or Britain, and when its people begin to criticize the Western Alliance for not responding more positively to Soviet unilateral measures, the allies begin to worry.”

In fact, few European countries have produced postwar political leaders of the caliber of Adenauer, Chancellors Ludwig Erhard, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, Berlin Mayor Ernst Reuter, Bavarian State Premier Franz Josef Strauss, Theodor Heuss, the nation’s first president, and current President Richard von Weizsaecker.

Because of Germany’s wartime devastation of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, many German politicians believe that the country has a special role to play in healing the breach between West and East. Brandt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Eastward-looking Ostpolitik , and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher is pursuing his updated version of the same policy--not always to the liking of leaders in Paris, London and Washington.

The postwar kaleidoscope has been closely observed by Countess Marion Doenhoff, who in early 1945 was working the family farm in East Prussia when she decided to flee from the advancing Russians.

She mounted her horse and, with saddle bags containing her personal things, rode for seven weeks, 10 to 12 hours a day in freezing weather, on roads clogged with similar refugees, to stay with relatives in Westphalia.

Chronicled Dramatic Events

Later, as a writer, editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, she chronicled the dramatic events that led a newly democratic West Germany, although divided and with a reduced population of 60 million, to rise from the ashes and become Europe’s economic powerhouse.

“The war taught that everyone was the loser,” Doenhoff, now 80, reflected in her Spartan office in Hamburg. “Britain lost an empire. We lost one-third of our country. European Jewry was wiped out. Every third German prisoner died in the Soviet Union. Every second Russian prisoner died in our hands. There was such bad blood between us. Everyone here was so afraid of communism.

“But I can see an era of peace, a rapprochement between Russia and Germany. The worst is behind us.”

In gazing painfully back, West Germans differ on how to deal intellectually and emotionally with the 12 inexplicable years of Hitler and the unforgivable war and Holocaust.

There are those like Chancellor Helmut Kohl, age 15 when the war ended, who believe that Germany’s guilt has been expiated and that the nation should look only ahead. Kohl set the stage for a furor in 1985 when, in a symbolic attempt to bury the past, he brought President Ronald Reagan to a German military cemetery that included the graves of some SS soldiers. The elite SS, which evolved out of Hitler’s bodyguard troops, also administered the concentration camps, and some of its combat units were accused of atrocities.

‘We Lost Two Wars’

Kohl’s view is shared by Schoenhuber, the right-wing leader who does not apologize for volunteering for the Waffen SS but who adds, “We learned that any kind of racism is deadly. We learned that despite great fighting, we lost two wars, and (we) can’t allow our children to die the same way.”

Some, particularly Jews here and abroad, insist that Germans must face up to the horrific past and continue to acknowledge this guilt.

Others seek to find a middle way between the endless acknowledgement of blame and the freedom for future generations to lift the burden of guilt, a view articulated by President Von Weizsaecker:

“Our young people are not responsible for what happened. But they are responsible for the historical consequences. We must help younger people to understand why it is vital to keep memories alive.”

No public figure in West Germany is more highly regarded than Von Weizsaecker: His family and closest friends in ways personify the war and its legacy.

Elite 9th Regiment

For on that warm Friday, Sept. 1, 50 years ago, the slender, dark-haired, 19-year-old Von Weizsaecker was a grenadier with the elite 9th “Potsdam” Regiment, which assaulted Poland.

His father was Baron Ernst von Weizsaecker, the senior diplomat in the Foreign Ministry, who had helped prepare the duplicitous Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact that cemented Poland’s doom. He was tried at Nuremberg after the war and imprisoned.

With Richard was his older brother, Heinrich, an officer in the regiment who was killed by a Polish bullet on Sept. 2. Accompanying them was a family friend, Von dem Bussche, a professional soldier who, aghast at what he saw in Poland, later volunteered to assassinate Hitler. The planned attempt was aborted when he lost a leg in battle with the Russians.

Von Weizsaecker’s sister, Adelheid, lost her officer husband, Count Botho-Ernst zu Eulenberg, in action on the Russian front--one of the 3.5 million German soldiers killed in the war.

Another brother, Carl Friedrich, was a theoretical physicist at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute who spent the war with scientist Werner Heisenberg vainly trying to develop a German atomic bomb.

‘12 Years of Madness’

Today, at 77 a scientist turned philosopher, Carl Friedrich observed: “Germany was a fairly reasonable country before 1933. We went through 12 years of madness, and we returned to reasonableness in 1945. We have learned that there will never be another Hitler.”

President Von Weizsaecker says Germans, 50 years later, must have “the strength to look truth straight in the eye--without embellishment and without distortion. There is every reason for us to perceive May 8, 1945, (the date of the German surrender) as the end of an aberration in German history, an end bearing seeds of hope for a better future.”

Outside Geneva, where he lives, Von Weizsaecker’s friend and “conscience,” Von dem Bussche, now 70, wounded five times and holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for repeated bravery on the Russian front, said:

“It will take us three or four generations to digest this 12 years of our history. But we have to live with that and its consequences and try to reassure our neighbors--without being restless ourselves.

“This is terribly hard for young people. And I worry about that.”

‘Shocked by the History’

One member of the younger generation, Andrea Hebenstrick, 24, is a recently married student at the University of Bonn. She, like all Germans in high school, has taken history courses on the Nazi period and the war.

“Some students are shocked by the history,” she said, “some bored because they have heard it so much before. I was shocked about the war, and I care about its legacy. We cannot forget the war because the consequences are still with us. But it is hard to live with being responsible for something we didn’t do. People will be talking about the Germans starting the war for 100 years. Sometimes I get angry about this.

“As for the lessons, I’m afraid many have not learned them. Everywhere you look there are wars.”

Defeated Germany 1945 Berlin was put under the administration of American, British, French and Soviet forces. American zone Frankfurt Munich Soviet Zone/Administration Berlin Leipzig Polish Administration Stettin Breslau British Zone Bremen Cologne French Zone Freiburg