Old and Neo
By SARAH WHAT Western German organisation con- tinues to protect the neo-Nazis, the anti- Semites and the surviving members of the Nazi Party? When a second model citizen skipped from Western Germany with the cops a long jump behind him, after elaborate and public arrange- ments for the welfare of his family had been made, by a similar route and to the same place of refuge as one a few weeks before, it was clear that some organising had been done. Eisele, of Buchenwald, is a horror on the grand scale and Zind, the high-school teacher, only a blustering little tavern braggart, but their cases are essen- tially the same. A number of persons helped them with protection, then with money and jobs, and finally with an escape from justice. The two cases are hardly out of the headlines when the Public Prosecutor of the Province of Hesse is suspended from office and charged with making anti-Semitic remarks (technically, 'insulting the dead'). He is closely followed by a couple of rowdies, lawyers from the 'Office of Restitution for the Victims of National Socialism' in Wiesbaden, who had the habit of singing dirty anti-Jewish words to a soldiers' song in the office and used expressions in front of their colleagues which were the commonplace phrases of the Nazi period. For a long time no one reported them because they were known to have the ear of their departmental chief, one Mueller.
One of the two was transferred to another de- partment, after the English style, where his opinions could do no harm, but he continued to work in the Restitution Office just the same until the Provincial Minister of the Interior, perhaps annoyed by this impudence, suspended him altogether from work and ordered a complete inquiry into Mueller's department. A disquieting thing about the more active of these two young men is that he is only thirty-two years old. That means that he first went to school in 1932 and is a product of the Nazi system of education who clearly drew no extra-mural lesson from the fear- ful defeat of Germany, and whom the university under Allied Occupation failed to alert. Depart- mental chief Mueller himself must be getting on in years. But are the Muellers all over Germany encouraging a whole new generation of young officials to follow in their old paths?
lithe Federal Government, and that means the Chancellor, could bring itself to get rid of men whose names figure in the records of the elimination of the Jewish race, it would help local authorities to show more courage with their own, smaller, problem children. Everybody who can read knows that the Secretary of State in the Chancellor's Office is one of two men who wrote the official Preamble to the Nuremberg Laws ,irt 1935. Coming down a little, it is wrong that Himmler's chief of administration can find pub- lishers for his writings nowadays, and even more wrong that his stuff gets published in a periodical devoted to the unification of Europe. That men who have great influence and are responsible for appointments at all levels of public life are known National Socialists makes some people wonder how wise it is to be anti-Nazi.
The people concerned with Dr. Eisele's escape are suspended and under inquiry. So are the Wies- baden Restitution chief, Mueller, and his tweo assistants. The two NC0s, Schubert and Sorge, returned by the Russians recently, are being tried for their crimes at Sachsenhausen. So, last summer, was the punishment-block warder from Buchenwald, Martin Sommer. But where are the men who gave these sergeants their orders? They are not in court.
Many of them are dead; killed in the last rout, or by their own hands, or in Russian camps, or executed. Many are in exile in South America and Egypt. Many live for the rest of their lives with false identities, of whom some at least must be known to their neighbours; like the man who changed his name, married his own wife again and lived in his own house with their children, where every burgher knew him, and who evert became a member of the Bundestag before a chance meeting with one of his victims betrayed him. Many were tried and condemned and later freed. Most of those amnestied were not freed by their countrymen but by the Allies. Eisele, for example, was condemned to death by an SS military tribunal, but the Americans captured him before the sentence was carried out. They, too, condemned him to death, commuted the sentence to life, then to seven years and then released him. Himmler's administration chief, who kept the trains to Auschwitz running when the soldiers at the front were waiting days on end for supplies of food, ammunition and medical stores, is free to write his articles for Nation Europa because the Allies released him after serving only six years of a twenty-five-year sentence, and one year after his trial. That was not the pro-Nazi German underground, that was ourselves.
The woman guard from Ravensbrueck, Mewes, who tortured British women as well as other nationals, was taken into the prison com- mandant's house as nursemaid to his children and later amnestied. But the commandant was not a German; he was a British officer, and she was freed by the British Control Commission.
If the Nazis still have a lot of secret influence in Germany, and they have, the victors had the chance for years to do something about it. We listened to the wrong Germans then, for the wrong reasons. If there is &shadowy State within the State here, living on like an old madman shut away in the attic who terrorises the household, he might catch his death if the attic doors are kept open to the cold winds of publicity. The Federal Government ought to do its part, for in Germany reforms come from the top down; but the real weapons against these shifting shadows are the press and public opinion. The fact that more and more skeletons are brought out from stuffy cup- boards need not frighten us unduly. So long as they go on being brought out:
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