Condi Rice Is Wrong About Germany's Werewolves, But Right About Iraq
Toward the end of this grim summer in Iraq, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice compared the attacks on American and British soldiers there to the violence supposedly carried out by diehard Nazi fanatics known as "Werewolves" after 1945. Dr. Rice rightly noted that the period of 1945 to 1947 was a terribly difficult one. Four of the sixty million people killed in the Second World War around the globe were Germans. The German economy had collapsed. Millions of refugees flooded in from the East. Germany's cities and transportation networks were in ruins. Much of the political opposition was dead or in exile.
Before the end of the war, there had been rumors of possible guerilla war by diehard elements of the Nazi regime after the formal end of hostilities. Yet of all the many problems facing the occupying powers, a guerilla war was not one of them. The "Werewolves" had a scary name but no presence and did not become a serious security issue for the occupation. Instead of any heroic last stands, many Nazi leaders became the butt of bitter jokes as their promises of enduring heroism culminated instead in hundreds of suicides. The length and severity of the Second World War itself combined with the severity of Allied occupation made postwar guerilla resistance a fantasy.
Condoleezza Rice is correct in my view to draw on comparisons both between the Nazi regime and the Iraqi regime, as well as to the experience of postwar occupation. The links between European fascism and Nazism of the mid-twentieth century and the blend of nationalism, socialism and anti-Semitism in the Baath regime in Bagdad have generally received much too little attention. For reasons which Kenneth Pollack in The Threatening Storm laid out most convincingly, Saddam did indeed pose a real threat to the Middle East and over time to the United States and Europe. Yet the occupation of post-Baath Iraq is proving more difficult than the optimistic predictions of leading members of the Bush administration, especially those from Vice President Cheney. In these difficult times, it is important to remember that the occupation of Germany, which was far more familiar culturally and socially to the Allies than Iraq, was also very difficult, lasted a long time, suffered setbacks and left much to be desired.
It is important to recall that the Western, not only the Soviet, occupation was in the early years, very harsh. The victors found a sullen, defeated, demoralized and disillusioned population. Visions of revenge that had flourished after World War I were largely absent. In May 1945, the seven million members of the Nazi Party--and their families and friends--had much to hide and many networks and political skills with which to oppose de-Nazification. But after six years of terrible war followed by the full revelations of mass murder in summer 1945, there simply was no will among the Germans to continue fighting the Allies.
Yet the Allies took no chances. Between 1945 and 1949 the Western Allies alone interned 200,000 former members of the Nazi Party, its various organizations and former Nazi government officials. Over 100,000 were indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Of them over 6,000 were convicted and something over 800 death sentences were carried out. The Nazi party was crushed and outlawed and the German state ceased to exist as a national body for the four years of the occupation. The state apparatus, including the diplomatic and military leadership was dissolved and many of its leading officials were indicted and put on trial in the "successor trials" in Nuremberg between 1947 and 1949 which followed the main International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg of fall 1945 to fall 1946.
Four years was too short for those who wanted all the murderers brought to justice but it was long by anyone's standards and certainly longer than Franklin Roosevelt had anticipated during the war. An early return of German sovereignty--as the oh-so-helpful French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin suggested for Iraq this past week--brought with it the prospect of an end to postwar trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The search for justice was bound to be highly unpopular with some segment of the German population. Tensions between democratization and sovereignty, on the one hand, and the search for justice and the truth about the old regime, were enduring features of the postwar occupation of Germany and of the early years of West German democracy.
In the first year or two, none of the occupying powers was eager to restore a German democracy and certainly none had a desire to put "a German face" on the occupation. Before democratization could take place, the Allies wanted to be sure that Nazism had been definitively crushed and that the German people in general understood that this was the case. Given that the German army fought to the bitter end and that the German anti-Nazi resistance was small, late and unsuccessful, the Allies did not romanticize German anti-fascism. Politicians such as Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher and Theodor Heuss prominent in the Weimar era who were not implicated in the Nazi regime emerged first in local elections. But the first national election did not take place until 1949, over four years after the end of the war. As the German historian Norbert Frei has recently pointed out -- see Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past (Columbia University Press, 2002) -- the return of sovereignty to the Germans after 1949 was accompanied by a massive effort by elected West German politicians to bestow amnesty on those accused of war crimes as well as by a refusal at the national level to continue prosecutions for crimes committed by officials of the Nazi regime.
The tension between rapid democratization and the search for justice about the past was a crucial element of postwar West German history and reappeared in the recent post-dictatorial regimes in Serbia, Argentina, Cambodia and South Africa where the forces of the old regime were able to prevent or delay timely trials for past gross violations of human rights. Gangster regimes, such as those of Hitler and Saddam are expert in implicating large numbers of people in crime. While restoration of sovereignty is crucial this should not become a rationale for allowing claims of expertise--often bogus and exaggerated--to prevent judicial reckoning.
The Iraq war of spring 2003 lasted less than two months. It seems that at least some parts of the Iraqi army and secret services avoided combat with the American military and, so it now appears, prepared for postwar guerilla operations. After defeat, and then revelations of the genocide in summer 1945, Nazism and fascism were ideologically exhausted in Europe. No one outside a small lunatic fringe saw Nazism as carrying the torch of history's forward march. Today, most Iraqis appear to feel the same way about Baathism. Yet the brevity of the war has left more of the Baath Party members around to cause trouble. Moreover, of course, Islamic fanaticism is an ideological current which is not at all exhausted in the Middle East and which as Paul Berman has explained so well in Terror and Liberalism now carries the mantle of contemporary totalitarianism. So the emergence of violent attacks on the occupation, as tragic as it is for our soldiers and for the Iraqis as well, should not have come as a surprise.
Those who are pessimistic about a successful democratization of Iraq today should recall that optimism about Germany inside and outside Germany was in short supply, even given awareness of the Germany's previously defeated democratic and liberal traditions. Many doubted that the Germans were capable of elementary decency, not to mention supporting a stable democracy which could keep its armies from attacking its neighbors. Without economic recovery made possible in part by the Marshall Plan, German democratization would not have taken place. Finding the balance between repression of the Nazi past and implementation of policies aimed at economic recovery was time consuming and controversial. Indeed, as I argued in Divided Memory (Harvard University Press, 1997) those who pushed for rapid economic recovery often clashed with those seeking to focus on justice for the crimes of the past. Yet the two goals--economic recovery and legal and moral confrontation with the past--need not be mutally contradictory. Indeed, respect for the rule of law and openess about government policy past and present should be mutually reinforcing trends.
Today, the reconstruction of an Iraqi judiciary and widely publicized trials of leading figures of the old regime are crucial. So too are citizens commissions which aid Iraqis to tell their stories of life under the old regime. Now is the time for collecting testimony and oral histories. If there are Iraqi historians, in exile or in Iraq who were not compromised by participation in the old regime, now is the time for them, in association with the American and British occupation, to document the truth about life under Saddam. The citizens commissions, or Spruchkammern of the occupation years, produced a massive amount of material which compelled Germans to look at who had done what in the past. Such documentation should also include examination of the actions of the Iraqi academic and intellectual establishment under the old regime. Ascertaining degrees of complicity in Germany was difficult, time-consuming and often less than a success. Such periods are a field day for opportunists and cynics. But young people in Germany after 1945 -- as in Iraq today -- deserved the truth about who did what under the old regime.
Finding the right balance of repression of the Old Regime with encouragement of new political forces was difficult in postwar Germany and it is difficult now in Iraq. Postwar Germany witnessed what I've called "multiple restorations" of democratic traditions suppressed by the Nazis. Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and some Free Democrats all found supporters among the allied occupation. Iraq's democrats cannot point to a past era of democracy comparable to the Weimar Republic. Yet democratic and liberal traditions in Germany in 1945, however indigenous their roots were, were able to come back to prominence only because the Allied occupation made sure the Nazism remained crushed and then gave support to the small groups of committed German democrats.
The American led occupation of Iraq can do the same thing. In postwar West Germany (and Japan), fear of Communism and the Soviet Union encouraged joint efforts by the Western Allies in the form of the Marshall Plan and NATO. Today, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and dictatorship in the Middle East needs to concentrate the minds of Germany, Russia and perhaps even the irritating French. Fear of failure is as reasonable a motivation for effort as is hope of success in democratizing Iraq. Success, moreover, is as much in the interest of those powers who opposed the war this past spring as it is in the American interest. The democratization and economic recovery of Iraq is a vital interest of all of these powers as well as of those who seek democratization and peace in the Middle East more broadly.
A firm and powerful occupation in Iraq is essential not only to defeat terror, rebuild and protect the infrastructure, establish elementary law and order, get the electricity turned on and the oil industry back on its feet. Following a very long and very terrible war, the Germans in 1945 were in no mood to continue their lost cause. Following the very short and nowhere near as terrible Iraq war of spring 2003, it is not surprising that a small minority of Iraqis and foreign terrorists are attacking the occupation.
Paul Bremer, the head of the American occupation of Iraq appears to understand the obvious: it is vital that the occupation achieve success in economic reconstruction, everyday security and the demand for truth and justice about the past. Success in the postwar occupation in West Germany entailed the exercise of power to suppress our enemies, encourage our friends and foster the political and economic institutions of a free society. Those today who cast doubt on the ability of Iraqis to accomplish what the Germans with outside help did after World War II have forgotten the depth of fully justified pessimism of spring and summer 1945, inside and outside Germany about the prospects for a better and different Germany. West German democracy in the 1950s failed in important ways to get at the truth about the Nazi past in a timely fashion though the voices calling for looking at the truth square in the eye eventually found a broader audience.
If the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), for all its shortcomings, could emerge from the ruins of the Third Reich, I see no compelling historical reason why over time an Iraq with political democracy and market economics cannot emerge as well. Today, as after 1945, patience and firmness at the helm of American foreign policy were and remain indispensable.