Nazis All The Way Down: The Myth of the Moral Modern Germany

By Katharina Gallant and Zachary Gallant

In Deutschland ist das alltägliche Leben, einschließlich Unternehmen, Verbänden, Kommunalverwaltungen, Parks, Schulen, Kirchen und Medien, immer noch von den Nazi-Verbrechen belastet, die im öffentlichen Bewusstsein nicht anerkannt werden. Das sagen Zachary und Katharina F. Gallant, die die derzeitige deutsche Praxis des Gedenkens an die Verbrechen des Nationalsozialismus kritisieren, weil sie die Stimmen und die Handlungsfähigkeit der Opfergruppen ausgeklammert. In ihrem Buch fordern sie eine "Entnazifizierung 2.0", die darin besteht, das Vermögen der deutschen Unternehmen und Familien zu enteignen, die direkt mit den Naziverbrechen in Verbindung gebracht werden können, um dieses enteignete Kapital zur Bewältigung der dringendsten Katastrophen unserer Zeit einzusetzen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westend Verlag
• Release date: Nov 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9783987910173

Katharina Gallant

Dr. Katharina F. Gallant forscht als Ethnologin und Psychologin zu Interkulturalität und interethnischen Konflikten und legt dabei den Fokus auf die soziale Rolle der jüdischen und der muslimischen Gemeinschaft im sogenannten westlichen Kulturraum, auf die politische Repräsentation von indigenen und afroamerikanischen Minderheiten in Nord- und Lateinamerika sowie im afrikanischen Kontext auf ethnische Konflikte in der Sahel-Region und ihren Zusammenhang mit Ernährungsunsicherheit, unzureichender Governance und Infektionskrankheiten. Zudem war sie von 2019 bis 2021 Mitglied des Unkeler Stadtrates.

Book preview

Cover.jpgLogo Westend Verlag

Ebook Edition

Zachary Gallant Katharina F. Gallant

Nazis All the Way Down

The Myth of the Moral Modern Germany

More about our authors and books:

www.westendverlag.de

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.d-nb.de

The work including all its parts is protected by copyright. Any exploitation is prohibited without the consent of the publisher. This applies especially for duplications, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic systems.

ISBN: 978-3-98791-017-3

© Westend Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt/Main 2023

Umschlaggestaltung: Buchgut, Berlin

Satz: Publikations Atelier, Dreieich

Dedication

The tapestry of Jewish life and peoplehood is rich, it’s not just rabbis, doctors, lawyers and bankers, and it’s not just tragic heroes and righteous victims. This book is dedicated not simply to the survivors, but to the unstoppable. The Nazi Hunters, the rebels like Albert Einstein, Dr. Ruth, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Helga Newmark, Henry Morgentaler, Hannah Arendt, John Slade, Simone Veil, and even Henry Kissinger, Paul Gelb, Max Eisenhardt, and Abba Kovner, and so many others who refused to let the Nazis win and refused to be defined by their victim status.

Zachary Gallant holds an M.A. in International Politics from the University of London’s Goldsmiths College and a Fulbright Scholarship in post-conflict redevelopment in the former Yugoslavia. He has been running antidiscrimination and climate justice projects throughout Germany since 2015, funded by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and by the European Union. He is a former board member of the American Jewish Congress (MD Chapter) and has taught at universities across Europe on identity, ethnicity, migration, economic injustice, and concepts of Jewishness.

Dr. Katharina F. Gallant is a senior researcher at the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn. Her research as an ethnologist and psychologist covers interculturality and interethnic conflict, from the treatment of Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe to the roles of the indigenous and African American minorities in North and Latin America. She has lectured at universities in Germany and Austria on interethnic conflict, interculturality, peaceful coexistence, postmodern society, and development cooperation. She served as a member of the Unkel City Council from 2019 until 2021.

This book started as a simple investigation, but morphed into an ethical examination of Germany as a whole through honest but difficult conversations between Zachary and Katharina, and with numerous ethicists, economists, historians, and humanitarians. In addition to Middle Eastern rabbis, Zachary traces his Jewish roots to shtetls that were wiped out during the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe, as well as to Jews who fled to the United States before the Nazis took power. Katharina can trace her roots both to co-conspirators in the 1944 plot against Hitler, and to generals in the Wehrmacht who led their platoons at exactly those places where Zachary’s ancestors once lived. Jewish perspectives in the book are Zachary’s, as Katharina does not presume to have a voice there, but these specifically Jewish issues have all been discussed with rabbis and other Jewish humanitarians to ensure that they represent a broader Jewish perspective. This book is a loving, peaceful cooperation between these two histories in the hopes of finding a strategy toward a true reconciliation at a higher level. We hope that this end product can be seen as a first step towards a »dialogue in difference« between Jews and Germans, and a first step toward truly overcoming Germany’s overwhelming Nazi legacy.

Contents

Cover

Introduction: Turtles and Nazis

Section I: The Roots of Modern Germany

Everyday Germans

Snowflakes and Avalanches

If You Want to Read the Future, You Have to Leaf Through the Past17

EDEKA

Melitta

Bahlsen

Dr. Oetker

Vorwerk

Tempo

Wishful thinking

Henkel’s Persilschein46

Henkel – A Family in Unkel and Their Profits from the Nazi Era

What Was Denazification, Really?

Were There Any Willing Nazis at All?

The Real McCloy: The Role of the US and UK in Non-Denazification

Eastern Denazification

Reparations – Individual or Structural?

Villains and Heroes

Section II: Memorial Theater

Never Forget193

Aufarbeitung Without the Jews

The International Significance of German Aufarbeitung

What Makes a Jew a Jew?

Societies That Have Begun to Hear Non-Dominant Voices

Nestbeschmutzer ********

Section III: All the Way Down

Municipal Complicity

Brown Foundations

Political Influence342

The New German Nationalism

Who Controls the Past, Controls the Future. Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past:358 The Nazi History of Modern German Publishers

The Reichsbahn Today

Coming Home

Counterargument – Underneath the Turtles?

Artists

Music

Philosophy and Academia

Churches

Science

Sustainability

Hitler as the Only Turtle?

Section IV: Conclusion

How Much Are We Really Talking Here?

Reform as a Moral, not Legal, Obligation

Denazification 2.0 – Germany Saves the World

Acknowledgments

Landmarks

Cover

Table of Contents

Introduction: Turtles and Nazis

The title of this book, Nazis All the Way Down, is a provocative proclamation, so we will start by saying that we have a great deal of love and respect for German colleagues, German family members, German friends, and indeed much of German society, and are not accusing any individual German of Nazism.* When, shortly before this book went to print, a storm damaged our house, the first person who came out to help us, as the storm had barely passed, was our 70-year-old German neighbor in his wooden workmen’s shoes, helping us sort through splintered wood and repair what was salvageable. It didn’t matter to him where we came from, it didn’t matter the color of our skin, hair or eyes: He saw a neighbor in need, and he saw it as his duty to help. Time and again, we have seen our German friends and neighbors put themselves out there for others, German and non-German alike. We’re not talking about the individuals when we talk about Nazis today. It’s the difference between Nazis everywhere!, which would be calling individual Germans Nazis, and Nazis all the way down, which is institutional, systemic.

Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest thinkers of our times, relates in his 1988 work A Brief History of Time the story of an astronomer giving a lecture:

"At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’"¹

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited a similar story in an opinion on a legal case, though in his version the Earth is supported on the back of a tiger, and the tiger in turn is standing on the back of an elephant, and the elephant is standing on a turtle, or indeed, infinite turtles.²

The point of the turtles is this: There is the world we see, the Earth. Under the world we see, there is the world that we know supports the world we see: our institutions; in Scalia’s version: the tiger. Under that is the world we believe we understand; a world we cannot actually see but that we know is there, supporting the institutions that keep our world standing. This underlying world is Scalia’s elephant. And under all that are the turtles, the recursive basis of society, under which nothing else exists.

So, what do turtles have to do with Nazis? Over the past half-century, Germany has gained a global reputation for dealing honestly with the crimes of the Nazi era. This process, generally known as Aufarbeitung, is, on its surface, the systematic working through of history, the admission of individual and systemic guilt for the genocide against the Jews as well as against other individuals (e. g., political enemies) and groups (e. g., Roma and Sinti) whom the Nazi regime sought to eliminate for various reasons. It is the national apology: not just a one-off, not just lip service, but perpetual and eternal. You mean it, and you keep meaning it, forever. Your national actions are, if not governed by, at least ever mindful of your national guilt, pursuing an agenda of Never again committing the same crime against any group. Additionally, you take special care to protect from further harm, in any form, the specific group(s) your nation has previously victimized.

This process, admittedly focused on Jews, has been the social centerpiece of modern Germany; a multi-decade-effort following the ostensible Denazification of Germany at the founding period of the Federal Republic of Germany, the post-Nazi West German state.** It involved public discussion of the role of everyday Germans, as well as non-Nazi-affiliated institutions such as churches and even literary and academic figures, in the rise of the Nazi regime leading to the Holocaust, or Shoah.*** It turned into, through the next generation known as the 68ers, a full political and social review of national privilege and of personal, familial, and national narratives.

Aufarbeitung continues today, with, among other things, brass cobblestones (Stolpersteine) laid in front of the houses where victims of the Shoah lived, upon which are inscribed their names, year of birth, and year and location of death. By 2023, there should be some 100,000 of these stones throughout Europe, the vast majority in Germany.³ This is in addition to the construction of massive Shoah memorials in many cities, over 300 memorials across the country, and the Shoah and the horrors of Nazism being taught in-depth in schools. The theme first enters the mainstream curriculum of German schools in ninth grade (15 to 16 years old) in history, politics, religion/ethics, and even literature classes.⁴ Classes are moreover encouraged to visit former concentration camps to get an up-close understanding of the subject.⁵ However, there is also a movement in favor of teaching about the Shoah as early as fourth grade (ten years old).⁶

Unlike Poland, Croatia, Romania, or even France or the Netherlands, Germany has critically reflected on its Nazi past and created a whole new identity founded on never ever repeating it. By and large, Germany does not seek to be released from this history, which is exceptional among national apologies. The day when the Germans cease to live in the shame of the cold-blooded slaughter of six million Jews due to the simple fact of their ethnic heritage is hard to imagine.

What is exemplary in Germany (though this is unfortunately shifting in the 2020s) is the complete acceptance of that shame, that guilt. Living in the knowledge of the guilt of one’s nation and accepting that guilt not as a burden, but as a responsibility: this is a phenomenon unprecedented elsewhere in the Global North, and it puts a damper on the toxic nationalism that poisons so many countries.

This is how Germany views its own modern, post-1945 identity. This surface exploration is also the reason why many Jewish scholars and activists in the United States promote German Aufarbeitung as a model for dealing with America’s own racist history. This is the world, riding on the tiger. Yet this surface understanding ignores a plethora of factors like international pressures and the racism inherent in Aufarbeitung itself which become evident if we explore a bit deeper to find the elephant. And below the elephant, in certain very important areas, Auf­ar­bei­tung has been actively prevented from taking place, leaving something festering at the root of German society. Although there are many in Germany who take Aufarbeitung to heart and use it to make German society and politics more ethical, this active hindrance of Aufarbeitung at the root level reduces the rest of Aufarbeitung to a hypocritical mask, whitewashing some of history’s most heinous crimes.****  This book will peel away that mask to show what truly lies underneath Germany’s moral modern façade.

Section I: The Roots of Modern Germany

Everyday Germans

We sit comfortably in the dining room of our little house in a small town in the Rhineland at the pretty antique table that has been in our family since the late 1930s. On it are a few cups of steaming coffee, which we quickly bought at the EDEKA supermarket this morning and have now brewed with a filter from the coffee company Melitta. Next to the coffee cups are two bowls of cookies for snacking: for the adults, Butterblätter, the cookies with the beautiful oak leaf shape, and for the children, chocolate-covered Leibniz butter cookies, both from the cookie company Bahlsen. On the table are also two national newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, so that we can get two different perspectives on the news and feel that we’re not being manipulated by any one side. Also on the table is The Big Dr. Oetker Baking Book.***** It’s getting a bit dated, having been published back in 1983, but occasionally we still like to leaf through it when we’re looking for sweet culinary inspiration – which of course we can prepare much more easily today with our Thermomix kitchen machine from Vorwerk – or remember the fragrant Bundt cake that grandma used to bake when we were kids. At the thought of our recently deceased grandmother, a tear rolls down our cheek, which we quickly wipe away with a Tempo-brand tissue.⁷

Follow now the children from this scene, on their way along the town’s cobblestone streets, kept historically accurate by the local historical association, past the sports field where they’ll practice soccer later in the week, kept clean by the sporting association.

On their way down those streets, they pass a bronze plaque dedicated to Jewish fellow citizens which tells the story of the synagogue that was burnt down on November 10, 1938. The children attended the commemorative event at this spot on the anniversary of the pogrom last year, where dozens of residents gathered to tell the stories of the trials and tribulations, and in the end the deaths of the town’s Jews. Residents acknowledge that these crimes were not perpetrated just by top Nazis, but that it was townspeople, neighbors in fact, who actively participated in these crimes or at least willingly let them happen. As one Jewish leader in Germany said, you’re more likely to win the lottery than meet a Jew in Germany, ⁸ and the children have never met a Jew themselves, but through these events and plaques, they know the history of their hometown’s last Jews.

The children then arrive at their school, supported by the local school’s booster club. After school, they stop by to swing on the playground at the newly renovated local park, named for one of the town’s local patrons, before getting on the Deutsche Bahn train to go to choir practice at the church the next town over. After singing, the kids then head home to a house where the parents pay surprisingly low rent to a German couple whose family has owned this home since 1939, and who rents low to make sure that a nice family like theirs can afford it.

It’s a lovely little snapshot of life in a small German town. While this snapshot was inspired by the town where we spent nearly a decade, living just that kind of life, and it’s the town that is the main focus in this book, it could really be any town in western or southern Germany. That scene is the world we see, and it looks innocent enough. Even the focus on the Shoah history here fits, as such plaques and events do play a significant role in modern German life, nearly on par with the visibility of those companies, associations, and institutions mentioned before and after. But of course, the companies mentioned were not chosen arbitrarily.****** Those companies all have a sinister Nazi history, and when the German Federal Republic was founded upon the ruins of Nazi Germany in 1949, the crimes of the Nazi years were not simply erased.

Snowflakes and Avalanches

When we began this research, we truly believed we’d just stumbled upon a singular case of a family who had profited from Nazi crimes, and that we were working to help our local community to deal honestly with the past. Our subject was the family and company Henkel, from whose philanthropy we had personally benefitted. We reached out to famous historians, and some of them, especially Peter Hayes, former Chair of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, responded and ended up guiding our research in ways we’d never expected.

The deeper we dug, the more horrible every aspect became, and the more interconnected. Henkel ended up linked to crimes we’d never considered due to cooperation with other Nazi enterprises and through the trade of assets stolen from Jews, as this book describes. And as we learned which threads to pull, we discovered that companies like Adidas and dozens of others could be linked through correspondence with other companies to some of the most brutal murders committed at Auschwitz.

As we continued to dig, we learned that Henkel wasn’t alone in not having dealt with its history. But what was worse, we discovered that in the numerous cases of companies and families who had commissioned studies about their Nazi crimes and histories, these studies had rarely if ever resulted in a systemic reform or restitution. As we tried to sweep away the snow from the peaks of Mt. Henkel to uncover what we assumed was a single case of failed denazification, those snowflakes landed on other nearby peaks, and they unsettled the pristine landscape there. We originally published these findings as a case study on Henkel,⁹ in which we do our best to untangle the family’s and company’s ties to the Nazi era. While we also attempted to discuss what our findings mean for the place Jews have in Germany today, a more in-depth analysis of the Nazi ties of major players in the German economy was clearly beyond the scope of this case study. Yet looking beyond Henkel was unavoidable and morally necessary. Thus, we left behind the borders of our original case study, allowing for this particular snowball sampling to show the extent of Henkel’s Nazi-related network. In so doing, snowflakes became compacted into snowballs, then into little snowslides, before they all met together to form what could be seen as an avalanche.

We found household supplies like those fabricated by Henkel were connected to other prominent companies in the same field, as well as to companies in food production or household appliances, clothing and footwear, leading companies in mobility, industrial technology, energy technology or logistics, in addition to pharmaceutical giants, the world of publishing, entire supermarket corporations, and core players of the German financial sector – to give just a brief overview. While some of these companies remain family businesses to this day, others have long been turned into stock corporations with little or no involvement of the founding families. Other institutions like renowned banks or federally owned enterprises fall into neither of these two categories. Yet, what unites the snowflakes and snowballs piling up in this book is their link to the Nazi era and the German genocide against the Jews in such a way that the persecution and death of Jews and other minorities allowed these companies to build up a fortune which many of them use to shape German society to this day.

These profits do not stop with the companies mentioned in the following chapters. They are not limited to products, brands, and companies with an obvious German name or entirely German ownership. For the best example we can imagine, we turn to the Thomas Built Bus company. What could be more American than these ubiquitous yellow school buses? Well, Thomas Built Bus company has been owned since 1998¹⁰ by Nazi profiteer company Daimler Trucks.¹¹ According to Thomas Built’s own website, Thomas Built Buses … is the leading manufacturer of school buses in North America, with a 37 % share of the conventional school bus market.¹² Every time a school district in North America needs new buses, there’s a high chance the contract is going to companies associated with Nazi profiteers. Similarly, there is VW, whose origin is directly associated with Hitler’s intention to create a German car for Germans, which heavily relied on forced labor (both Jewish and non-Jewish), and which operated four concentration camps on eight forced-labor camps on its property.¹³ VW owns quintessentially Italian brands Lamborghini and Ducati, as well as Bentley,¹⁴ a cornerstone of British automotive culture, while equally British brands Rolls Royce and Mini Cooper are owned by BMW,¹⁵ the company of Nazi-profiteer Herbert Quandt.¹⁶ It’s not just impossible to avoid engaging with Nazi profiteers in Germany, but also globally.

The Nazi taint is so systemic, once you budge a single case, the rest simply follow. Once you explore one aspect of daily life in Germany, you can’t help but see the traces of the crimes all around you. We recommend reading all the way through, as watching the avalanche develop is breathtaking. We’ve done our best to control the Snowball Effect and keep the narrative organized, despite the abundance of horrible information.

From a short exploration of the Nazi histories of numerous German products, we dig deeper into Henkel and the Henkel family’s local philanthropy. We then explore what Denazification was, and what it wasn’t, and the idea of reparations and whether Germany ever paid them, before shedding light on the mainstream German heroization of war criminal industrialists. Building off of this, we show why Germany’s dealing with its history should not be a model for other countries, how victimized groups are treated not as equals but as tokens of an extinguished people, Germany’s lack of interest in doing better, and examples of countries who have made much greater strides in dealing with their historic crimes.

In the end, we reveal how Nazi money continues to influence German society, from local governments to national political parties, from NGOs to sports teams, from the press to home ownership, and everything in between. We highlight how celebrated aspects of German culture, which at first seem unrelated to the country’s Nazi history, can indeed be linked to this very same part of Germany’s past and we drill down on the actual US Dollar/Euro figure of how much of the German economy is built on Nazi profits, and how this signifies an imbalance in favor of German interests at the expense of the interests of the victims of the Nazis over the past ninety years. And ultimately, we propose a solution, a way to truly remove the Nazi stain from Germany.

Not all themes will interest all readers. Yet all of these themes are interconnected, coming together to create a modern Germany that is still thoroughly tainted by the profits of Nazism and has created a mere façade of historical responsibility, without actually learning from the past. The fact is, the shortcomings of Germany’s Culture of Remembrance has a great deal to teach other countries, and is highly relevant for how other groups deal with