Browsing by Author "Dack, William Mikkel"

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    Questioning the Past: The Fragebogen and Everyday Denazification in Occupied Germany
    (2016-02-03) Dack, William Mikkel; Timm, Annette F.; Dolata, Petra; Pendas, Devin; Biess, Frank; Strzelczyk, Florentine
    This dissertation examines the infamous denazification questionnaires – Fragebögen – that were distributed by the four Allied occupying powers in Germany following the Second World War and designed to identify Nazi party members and sympathizers. These self-administered surveys, alongside the Nuremberg Trials, were the public face of denazification, but in reality the Fragebogen process dwarfed all other activities in scale, expense, and impact. The questionnaires determined what employment opportunities were available for German citizens and provided the basic personal information for the Allies’ initiatives to deconstruct the Nazi state, establish democratic government, and rebuild Germany’s economic infrastructure. Upwards of twenty million civilians and returning soldiers completed one of these forms, making it the largest international survey in history. This study explores the origin, development, and implementation of this innovative – and highly criticized – instrument of denazification in the American, British, French, and Soviet occupation zones, and evaluates its impact on the lives and livelihood of individual Germans as they recovered from and responded to war and dictatorship. This dissertation ultimately describes how the Fragebogen lay at the heart of the postwar campaign to cleanse the German polity of Nazism. It was a highly experimental solution to the problem of denazification, one that was overseen by the military but written and implemented by civilian specialists and academics. Acting as the fundamental underpinning of each of the Allies’ denazification campaigns, the Fragebogen was never a sufficient instrument for the complex task of screening and judging the German population. But still, the questionnaire had a tremendous impact on the economic security, social standing, and emotional wellbeing of individual Germans. The act of completing the form had a psychological effect, allowing and even encouraging respondents to construct politically and morally acceptable narratives regarding their recent lives under the Third Reich and to establish new identities in order to process wartime experiences of violence and loss and to reconsider notions of guilt and accountability. This study explores the origins of this peculiar instrument of denazification, its influence, consequences, and legacies, and the space that it created for Germans to recreate themselves in the immediate postwar years.