Friday, September 12, 2014

Dealing with Former Nazis in the Soviet Zone (1946)

Both parts of Germany had a problem after the war — what to do with former Nazis.  Dealing with the major figures was easy enough, but what about the millions who had been members of the party or its subsidiaries?  To punish all of them equally would have caused major problems.

East Germany was not yet a separate state and the Communists had not forced the Socialists to merge with them.  This material was issued early in 1946 by the Communist Party of Germany to provide its propagandists with information on how to deal with the situation.

Basically, the argument was to distinguish between activist and nominal members and supporters of the Nazi system.  Those millions who had been part of the Nazi organization but had committed no crimes were to be given an opportunity to prove that they had left Nazism behind.



This was one of a series of such pamphlets.   I include a list at the end of the page for those interested.  This is the only one I have a copy of.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Nazism and Cities

Lyric Hughes Hale has an interesting piece in the Huffington Post titled “The Global Politics of Cities” which uses the German Propaganda Archive to discuss the role of cities.  She notes that Mao Zedong and Hitler both saw cities as places of depravity. She uses an educational poster from the GPA showing the deleterious effects of a growing urban population.

She concludes:
“My bottom line: urbanization is a political process. Most of us are urbanites, and for most of us, urbanization has meant modernization and economic progress. But have we reached a new plateau, a place where we have reached the limits of the economic benefits of urban growth? How will the politics of cities evolve?”