Denazification in the context of "Austria victim theory"

Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (5 January 1876 – 19 April 1967) was a German statesman and politician who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a newly founded Christian democratic party, which became the dominant force in the country under his leadership.

As a devout Catholic, Adenauer was a leading politician of the Catholic Centre Party in the Weimar Republic, serving as Mayor of Cologne (1917–1933) and as president of the Prussian State Council. In the early years of the Federal Republic, he switched focus from denazification to recovery, and led his country to close relations with France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. During his years in power, he worked to restore the West German economy from the destruction of World War II to a central position in Europe with a market-based liberal democracy, stability, international respect and economic prosperity.

Martin Heidegger (German: [ˈmaʁtiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His work covers a range of topics including metaphysics, art, religion, and language.

In April 1933, Heidegger was elected as rector at the University of Freiburg and has been widely criticized for his membership and support for the Nazi Party during his tenure. After World War II, he was dismissed from Freiburg and banned from teaching after denazification hearings at Freiburg. There has been controversy about the relationship between his philosophy and Nazism.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on May 1, 1933, ten days after being elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. A year later, in April 1934, he resigned the Rectorship and stopped taking part in Nazi Party meetings, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until its dismantling at the end of World War II. The denazification hearings immediately after World War II led to Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg, banning him from teaching. In 1949, after several years of investigation, the French military finally classified Heidegger as a Mitläufer or "fellow traveller." The teaching ban was lifted in 1951, and Heidegger was granted emeritus status in 1953, but he was never allowed to resume his philosophy chairmanship.

Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, his attitude towards Jews and his near-total silence about the Holocaust in his writing and teaching after 1945 are highly controversial. The Black Notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941, contain several anti-semitic statements, although they also contain statements where Heidegger appears extremely critical of racial antisemitism. After 1945, Heidegger never published anything about the Holocaust or the extermination camps, and made one sole verbal mention of them, in 1949, whose meaning is disputed among scholars. Heidegger never apologized for anything and is known to have expressed regret once, privately, when he described his rectorship and the related political engagement as "the greatest stupidity of his life" ("die größte Dummheit seines Lebens").

The far-right in Germany (German: rechtsextrem) slowly reorganised itself after the fall of Nazi Germany and the dissolution and subsequent ban of the Nazi Party in 1945. Denazification was carried out in Germany from 1945 to 1949 by the Allied forces of World War II, with an attempt of eliminating Nazism from the country. However, various far-right parties emerged in the post-war period, with varying success. Most parties only lasted a few years before either dissolving or being banned, and explicitly far-right parties rarely gained seats in the Bundestag (West Germany's and now modern Germany's federal parliament) post-WWII until the 2010s. In the communist state of East Germany, open right-wing radicalism was relatively weak until the 1980s. Later, smaller extremist groups formed (e.g. those associated with football violence).

The most successful far-right party in Germany in the immediate post-war period was the Deutsche Rechtspartei (German Right Party), which attracted former Nazis and won five seats in the 1949 West German federal election and held these seats for four years, before losing them in the 1953 West German federal election. At the 2017 German federal election, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won 94 seats and became the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, the first time a far-right party other than the Deutsche Rechtspartei won seats in the Bundestag since the dissolution of the Nazi Party after World War II.

Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany is a 2011 book written by Frederick Taylor that examines the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 and the subsequent Allied occupation of Germany. The book traces the transition from total war to postwar reconstruction, focusing on the military defeat of Nazi Germany, the administrative challenges faced by the occupying powers, and the implementation of denazification policies across the American, British, French, and Soviet zones. The book's title draws on the obsession with Hitler and the people of Germany's veritable worship and mythologization of him as an infallible leader, a fixation that the Allied powers sought to eradicate from the nation's psyche.

Using archival materials that include governmental records and personal testimonies, Taylor explores the immediate postwar conditions of devastation, mass displacement, food scarcity, and social disillusionment and disorientation, as well as the political debates that shaped Allied policy. The work argues that the occupation and denazification efforts of the Allies were uneven, often contradictory processes influenced by competing strategic priorities and the emerging Cold War. Exorcising Hitler situates these developments within the longer trajectory of German political and cultural transformation, interpreting the postwar period as the beginning of a protracted effort to confront the Nazi past and establish a stable democratic society. Scholars reviewing the book have by and large, praised it for its quality and sobering look at post-war sociopolitical developments.

A Mitläufer (German pronunciation: [ˈmɪtˌlɔɪ̯.fɐ], German for "fellow traveller"; plural Mitläufer, feminine Mitläuferin) is a person tied to or passively sympathising with certain social movements, often to those that are prevalent, controversial or radical. In English, the term was most commonly used after World War II, during the denazification hearings in West Germany, to refer to people who were not charged with Nazi crimes but whose involvement with the Nazi Party was considered so significant that they could not be exonerated for the crimes of the Nazi regime.

The West German student movement (German: Westdeutsche Studentenbewegung), sometimes called the 1968 movement in West Germany (German: 1968 Bewegung in Westdeutschland), was a left-wing social movement that consisted of mass student protests in West Germany in 1968. Participants in the movement later came to be known as 68ers. The movement was characterized by the protesting students' rejection of traditionalism and of German political authority which included many former Nazi officials. Student unrest had started in 1967 when student Benno Ohnesorg was fatally shot by a policeman during a protest against the visit of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. The movement is considered to have formally started after the attempted assassination of student activist leader Rudi Dutschke, which sparked various protests across West Germany and gave rise to public opposition. The movement created lasting changes in German culture.