University of California
Nazis after Hitler: An Experiential History of SS Members in the Postwar World, 1950-2010
This study is a social and cultural history of former SS members in postwar West Germany and Austria. Rather than assessing how they evaded justice or probing whether they felt guilty in retrospect for their activities during the Nazi era, it instead asks how former SS men in these two countries understood their role as actors in the democratic present.By working within the tradition of Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, this dissertation reconstructs the experiences and activities of a group of former SS members who lived collective and public lives. Between 1945 and the 1990s, these former SS members established SS civic associations and informal communities. They revealed themselves as former Nazis to Holocaust survivors during encounters in public spaces. They distanced themselves from neo-Nazis and sought to forge political affinities with anti-communist and racial segregationist movements abroad. They created a sprawling cultural infrastructure designed to test legal codes that prohibited the circulation of Nazi symbols. And they wove SS rites and rituals into their private affairs, including their funerals and burials. In other words, they constructed a sub-culture that ensured National Socialism’s residual presence decades after the Third Reich’s demise.Former SS men sustained their sub-culture through three primary mechanisms. First, by embedding it in local communities and built environments, and thus weaving it through the normative routines and institutions of mainstream society. Second, by limiting their sub-culture to the confines of civil society and the cultural sphere and—especially in West Germany—distancing themselves from antidemocratic political movements. And third, by adapting National Socialist ideology to fit the times. They deemphasized the Holocaust and recast National Socialism as an anti-communist and pan-Europeanist project: both ideas that still had political purchase in the Cold War world.By deploying and redeploying these strategies across the second half of the twentieth century, SS men inscribed themselves, as former Nazis, into postwar democratic society. The story of SS afterlives thus lays bare an ineluctable paradox that dogged these two post-fascist democracies: the imperative to curtail fascist reinvigoration, and the imperative to extend liberties to all of its citizens, including to those that still harbored fascist ideologies.