Obsessed With its Nazi Past, Germany Misses Neo-Nazis

Nazis are back. In the past year, Switzerland has suffered an international black eye over hoarding Nazi gold; France, under Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, has begun to confront the legacy of the Vichy regime, and Austria has a right-wing candidate, Joerg Haider, who may become chancellor in the ’98 elections. Nowhere, however, has the Nazi past become a more disputed subject than in a reunited Germany.

After traveling to Frankfurt, Berlin, and Munich in December, it becomes clear that the problem in Germany isn’t remembering the past. Museums, exhibitions and memorials on the Nazi era are everywhere. Strange as it may sound, Germany’s difficulty is that it spends too much time reflecting on the past--and not enough time tackling very real Nazi phenomena that have emerged since 1989. In short, memory is substituting for action in Germany.

While public attention is focused on the Holocaust, two things are radically reshaping German society. The first is intellectual. Novelists, journalists and professors have begun to espouse a more nationalistic line, not a Nazi one, but, nonetheless, one that stresses German power and identity and is hostile to foreigners and the United States, in particular. What alarms liberal Germans is that they believe the intellectuals are legitimizing another, far more disturbing trend: the re-emergence of radical neo-Nazis, who have driven foreigners out of many towns in the former East Germany and heavily penetrated the federal army.

Since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, a self-proclaimed “new right” movement of intellectuals, historians and professors who espouse German pride and patriotism has been on the rise. They are deeply anti-American because they see an American-style multicultural society as a threat to Germanness. Above all, whether the topic is World War II or current immigration, this new right hopes to rehabilitate German nationalism by emphasizing communist atrocities to soft-pedal Germany’s own misdeeds. One leading German historian of fascism, Ernst Nolte, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, started a nationwide debate by asserting that Adolf Hitler was only responding to Soviet crimes when he launched an attack on the Soviet Union and set up concentration camps.

What is taking place in Germany is a war of memories. If you think Germany was guilty of a unique crime in seeking to exterminate European Jewry, then the country carries a special stigma that will always separate it from other countries. Hence, Germany has to be more careful about flexing its muscles at home and abroad. But if you’re part of the new right, you have no patience with this notion. Germany is a normal country, like any other, and can assert its own interests without feeling ashamed of its history.

The intellectual and neo-Nazi phenomena came into sharp relief this spring. The Hamburg Institute for Social Research presented an exhibition, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht,” that traveled throughout Germany. The reaction was explosive. The exhibition displayed graphic pictures of ordinary German soldiers, not members of the Waffen-SS, committing heinous crimes against civilians on the Eastern front.

So controversial was the exhibition that the federal Parliament conducted an impassioned debate: Conservative members of the Christian Democratic Party denounced the exhibit, claiming the German army had remained pure from Nazi influence. Atrocities, they said, were confined to the SS. Liberal and leftist politicians, from the Free Democratic Party to the Greens, said this was a myth; the photos were just further evidence of the complicity of German society with the Nazis. Most significantly, neo-Nazis in Germany also protested the exhibition; in Munich, there were almost battles on the streets when several thousand neo-Nazis marched in the city. How much cover were the foes of the exhibit in the press and political parties giving the neo-Nazis by, essentially, voicing the same criticisms?

The neo-Nazi infiltration of the Federal Defense Force, or army, shows that key officials have been aiding these sinister forces. According to the army’s own statistics, the number of neo-Nazi incidents in its own ranks has tripled in the past year. The most prominent case concerns a lawyer and neo-Nazi terrorist named Manfred Roeder. In 1982, Roeder was sentenced to 13 years in prison for participating in an attack that killed two Vietnamese asylum seekers. He got early release for good behavior, but promptly began to agitate again on the neo-Nazi scene. He founded an organization for the “Re-Germanization of East Prussia.” Amazingly, Roeder got money from the Foreign Office for his project. He was also invited by the Hamburg Military Leadership Academy to give an address about bringing back Germans to East Prussia. A festive dinner followed his speech.

The case of Roeder is simply the most glaring sign that the army has a Nazi problem. Some of the recent incidents include soldiers in uniform protesting the exhibition on the German army’s World War II crimes; a self-filmed video of soldiers pretending to rape and execute civilians; two young soldiers in Dresden burning down a house where Italian construction workers lived; a video of a soldier climbing into an oven in imitation of Auschwitz, and soldiers in the former East Germany giving the “Heil Hitler” straight-arm salute. Most recently, it was revealed that when Defense Minister Volker Ruehe visited Croatia, where German soldiers are serving in the peacekeeping forces, the troops started yelling, “Heil Hitler!” Ruehe has claimed these are all isolated cases, but this seems implausible. German officials remain willfully blind to the extent of neo-Nazism in their society.

At the same time, the German government has been foot-dragging when it comes to reparations for survivors of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. The Cold War meant that Germany never had to compensate these survivors. The German government is also enabling big industry to avoid paying funds to former slave laborers. It is hard to see how the government can, even accidentally, hand out funds to a neo-Nazi terrorist such as Roeder and fail to come to an agreement with remaining victims. Now that the Cold War is over, Germany has a moral obligation to make restitution.

When the Berlin Wall came down, it might have looked in Germany as though the Nazi era could finally be retired to the history books. The country was peacefully reunited. It could take its place among the European nations as an equal rather than junior partner. It would serve as the anchor of the United States of Europe.

But the end of the Cold War did not close the question of Nazism. It reopened it. France, Austria and Belgium all have resurgent right-wing movements. Now, Germany is confronting many of the nationalist ghosts it suppressed during the Cold War. To fully exorcise those ghosts, it will have to begin by acknowledging their existence.