My dissertation analyzes the reception, treatment, and experiences of returning POWs in East and West Germany after World War II. It focuses primarily on the approximately two million POWs who returned from Soviet captivity to East and West Germany during the first postwar decade, the last ones released after Konrad Adenauer's visit to Moscow in September 1955. The title of my dissertation seeks to capture the two major perspectives that I apply to the study of postwar Germany. First, I argue that the ending of the war in East and West Germany was indeed "protracted" in the sense that the issue of returning POWs forced both Germanys to grapple with the war and its immediate consequences during the entire first postwar decade and beyond. Second, my thesis demonstrates that the German-German context crucially shaped the war's protracted ending. By adopting a comparative approach, my project thus contributes to a new narrative of postwar German history in the aftermath of German unification and the end of the Cold War.
Returning POWs from the Soviet Union constituted one of the most important, long-lasting, and highly visible consequences of war and defeat in postwar Germany. In a rather unique fashion, returnees actively experienced violence as soldiers in the war of racial annihilation on the eastern front and passively experienced a different kind of violence as POWs in Soviet captivity.1 Their delayed return from Soviet captivity literally transported these active and passive experiences of violence back to East and West Germany, and ensured the continuing presence of the war and its consequences throughout both societies' formative periods of postwar reconstruction.
These aftereffects of the war have not been a dominant theme in the historiography of postwar Germany. The history of the post-World War II period has often been written as the history of the successful transcendence of the consequences of war and defeat. "Bonn" (and for that matter "East Berlin") did not become "Weimar," and the successful "integration" of former soldiers constituted one hallmark of a postwar success story shared by East and West Germans.2 The contrasts between the post-World War I and post-World War II periods were clearly considerable, and the pacification of displaced groups after 1945 constituted a major achievement in both East and West Germany.3 Still, one aim of this dissertation is to correct the dominant emphasis on overcoming the consequences of the war by highlighting the unresolved fissures and subterranean conflicts that continued to exist in both societies.
By focusing on these lingering consequences of the war, my study also complements such dominant paradigms of postwar historiography as modernization and Americanization for the West, or Stalinization and Sovietization for the East.4 Although these approaches have yielded a host of important new insights, they are less useful in capturing the lingering consequences of the war in both postwar societies. My project thus seeks to augment these perspectives by taking seriously the postwar nature of both German societies after 1945. It analyzes the first postwar decade not only as the fulcrum of a liberal democratic consumer society in the West and a socialist dictatorship in the East but also in light of the shared catastrophe from which both societies emerged.
Returnees from the Soviet Union represented one of the common problems that both German societies needed to face as a result of their shared past. I thus seek to contribute to a genuinely comparative history of the postwar period that would bring into focus the dialectics of "interweaving and demarcation" between East and West Germany.5 In particular my research reveals how East and West German responses to returning POWs were always closely interrelated, and how these responses actually shared surprising structural and functional similarities that were located below the surface of the rhetorical antagonisms of the Cold War
My analysis proceeds on three different levels: It focuses first on official perceptions and representations of returning POWs. The experience of captivity became a central component of East and West German memories of World War II in the context of the Cold War. Second, these official representations translated into actual social and political strategies for returning POWs in both societies. East and West German officials sought to promote the transformation of former soldiers and POWs into East and West German citizens through multifaceted and comprehensive efforts. Third, returnees' own responses to the social and discursive contexts they encountered in East and West Germany reveal basic patterns of consensus, accommodation, and conflict in both societies. By incorporating these different levels of analysis my work can fruitfully combine the political history of reconstruction with the social history of returning POWs and the cultural history of war memories and gender identities.
I
East and West German perceptions of returning POWs from the Soviet Union underwent several crucial shifts during the first postwar decade. These shifts reflected the changing social and political configurations in both societies, and they responded to the symbolic and functional needs arising from the task of reconstructing two devastated societies on antagonistic sides of the Cold War.
During the immediate postwar period, public and private voices in East and West Germany arrived at surprisingly differentiated assessments of the first soldiers returning from the eastern front. Individual Germans demanded the repatriation of POWs according to their involvement with National Socialism, and West German social democratic officials discussed the exchange of antifascist POWs for compromised former Nazi officials.6 This antifascist moment derived largely from the influence of Allied and Soviet occupation authorities. Yet it also reflected an indigenous German response to the former soldiers of Hitler's army that resulted, at least in part, from the population's highly critical assessment of the conduct of the Wehrmacht during the last few months of the war.7
In both postwar societies, however, more collectivist representations of returning POWs gradually displaced these differentiated perceptions and increasingly elided individual distinctions among returning POWs. The onset of mass repatriations of sick and utterly exhausted POWs from the Soviet Union led East and West German officials to portray returning POWs as liminal figures who remained fixed in their passage from soldiers in Hitler's army to postwar citizens.8 Officials in both societies, however, defined returnees' liminality rather differently. West Germans focused almost exclusively on returnees' physical, psychological, and sexual problems, whereas East German officials were primarily concerned with returnees' political and ideological deficiencies.
In the West the effort to determine returnees' individual guilt and responsibility gave way to an overwhelming emphasis on their collective status as victims. By analyzing the responses of local officials, public commentators, and private citizens to returning POWs, my study demonstrates how returnees from the East became a central component of West German "narratives of victimization" from 1946-7 onward.9
An extensive medical and psychological discourse on the returnees' transformation into victims in West German public discourse offers valuable insights for this project. The discussion of the medical and psychological predicaments of returning POWs started on the pages of medical and psychiatric journals but soon extended to welfare agencies, cultural commentators, and government offices. Returnees were diagnosed as suffering from a syndrome that contemporaries termed dystrophy, which primarily referred to the physical and psychological consequences of malnutrition in Soviet captivity. However, returnees also were diagnosed as having psychological symptoms such as apathy, lack of motivation, a reduced ability to perform, and depression.10
In contrast to the extensive literature on trauma after World War I (shell shock) or the growing literature on post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict, this medical and psychiatric literature after World War II has not yet received much attention from historians.11 But the mere existence of this literature well into the late 1950s runs counter to the assumption that the consequences of the war were quickly left behind in the postwar period. This literature, instead, indicated the extent to which war and defeat remained stamped on returnees' minds and bodies long after actual combat had ended.
Although the symptoms described in this literature were undoubtedly real and the suffering of returnees considerable, this medical and psychiatric literature also needs to be historicized. Partly as a result of the numerous personal and conceptual continuities within the medical and psychiatric profession from the Nazi- to the postwar period, dystrophy literature exhibited clear patterns of eugenic thinking as well as of historically specific notions of health and illness. Doctors and psychiatrists continued a longstanding collectivist tradition in German psychiatric medicine that tended to portray individual psychological deficiencies as a threat to the national body at large.12 In particular, writers on the topic of dystrophy showed concern about the alleged destruction of returnees' masculinity, and virtually all contributions to dystrophy emphasized the desexualization of German POWs in Soviet captivity. As a result, returnees exhibited what one observer described as a "eunuch-like lack of sexual desire."13 These issues were negotiated as late as 1957 when the German Society for Sexual Research devoted its annual meeting solely to the theme of "returnee sexuality."14 Participants' keen interest in returnees' sexual deficiencies illuminated the centrality of male sexuality in wider West German confrontations with war and defeat.15
By portraying returnees as deficient and desexualized victims, dystrophy literature served an important function in the West German politics of memory. Dystrophic returnees represented the exact opposite of the former soldiers of Hitler's army, ideal representatives of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). Indeed, West German medical and psychiatric authorities often equated the physical and psychological consequences of Soviet captivity with those of survival in Nazi concentration camps.16 The dystrophy diagnosis thus lent a seemingly objective, scientific quality to the widespread West German equation of German victims with victims of the Germans.
East German perceptions of returning POWs during the early postwar years, by contrast, completely ignored the returnees' physical and psychological problems that so preoccupied their West German counterparts. Instead, East German state and party officials focused almost exclusively on the returnees' alleged political and ideological deficiencies. In fact, the imminent return of hundreds of thousands of former soldiers and POWs to the Eastern Zone prompted almost a sense of panic among East German Communists. As one report by a Communist Party official warned in December 1945, "One million anti-Bolshevists are approaching. The democratic reconstruction is threatened by greatest dangers."17
As in the West, East German perceptions of returnees' liminality were closely linked to notions of deficient masculinity. Unlike in the West, however, the perceived East German crisis of masculinity did not refer to returnees' reproductive functions but rather to their alleged political indifference and apathy that stood in marked contrast to the public visibility and activism of East German women in the years just after the war's end. East German responses to returning POWs thus illuminated a striking reversal of Communist gender stereotypes, which since the 1920s had always held up male revolutionary fervor against female indifference and apathy.18 As in the West, the emphasis on returnees' deficiencies served important, albeit very different functions in East Germany's politics of memory. It enhanced the self-perception of East German Communists as a revolutionary vanguard that was destined to impose an educational dictatorship on a politically immature people.19
Despite the returnees' useful functions for East and West German memories of the war, the emphasis on returnees' liminal status was deeply problematic. Neither as debilitated victims (in the West) nor as unreconstructed fascists (in the East) were returning POWs capable of contributing to the reconstruction of two devastated societies on the forefront of the Cold War. Concurrent with their move into two antagonistic camps, both societies developed more redemptive social and discursive strategies that aimed at transforming returning POWs into East and West German citizens. This shift was more clearly discernible in the East, where it was largely mandated by party authorities. In West Germany, by contrast, responses to returning POWs were formulated by a less homogeneous roster of actors and institutions. Still, the dominant West German emphasis on returnees as victims was gradually tempered by their perception as survivors who would decisively contribute to postwar reconstruction.
I use the term redemptive rather self-consciously here, because East and West German efforts at transforming returnees into postwar citizens were based on notions of pseudoreligious conversions. In the West, the Christian churches actively promoted an interpretation of the returnee experience that closely followed the Christian model of redemption through suffering.20 The emerging returnee associations and public commentators also increasingly replaced the emphasis on the returnee as victim with an image of the returnee as a tough survivor of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, as a strong but gentle father who would transform "incomplete" families into complete ones, as a repository of essentially German values who would provide a counterweight to the encroaching Americanization of West German culture and society.21 These representations became especially apparent in the West German response to the last returning POWs in 1955-6, who were collectively celebrated as heroic survivors of Soviet internment.22 At the same time, both domestic and foreign critics of the enthusiastic reception of the last POWs compelled West German officials to look more closely at the individual pasts of the last returnees. This initiated a renewed legal confrontation with the Nazi past beginning in the late 1950s.23
Official East German responses to returning POWs exhibited a similar shift in emphasis from returnees' liminality to their qualities as East German citizens. With the assumption by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) of dictatorial powers in the Eastern Zone by 1947-8 and the deepening of the German division, East German Communists began to pursue a more offensive strategy toward returnees from the East that emphasized their ideological conversion in Soviet captivity.24 In particular, East German officials concentrated their efforts on returnees who had attended antifascist re-education courses in Soviet captivity. These antifascist activists not only represented an important cadre resource for the SED, they also demonstrated to all East Germans how highly compromised members of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft could become citizens of the antifascist democratic republic. This symbolic function of antifascist returnees became especially apparent in a series of Heimkehrer (returnee) conferences during the summer and fall of 1949, where selected returnees reported about their conversion experience in Soviet captivity. These conferences coincided with the founding of the East German state and represented a constitutive act in the formation of the German Democratic Republic.25
Redemptive narratives of the POW experience were, moreover, part and parcel of what Robert Moeller has called the "remasculinization" of postwar Germany.26 East and West German representations of returnees illuminated new conceptions of masculinity that differed from the militarized masculinity of the Nazi period, as well as from the images of completely emasculated men of the early postwar years. Yet while West German perceptions stressed primarily men's domestic functions as fathers, husbands, and breadwinners within reconstructed families, East German representations highlighted returnees' roles as producers and party activists. Unlike the West German emphasis on men's civilian roles, the SED's militant antifascism also suggested stronger continuities with the traditional link between militarism and masculinity.
Not all returnees to East and West Germany were granted access to redemptive narratives of their experience. In the West, a series of so-called Kameradenschinder (comrade oppressor) trials prosecuted those former POWs who had collaborated with Soviet authorities by assuming official administrative functions or by engaging in antifascist activities in the camps. These trials provided a unique test case for the rule of law and the extent of ideological pluralism in Adenauer's Germany. They were strongly influenced by a powerful anti-Communist bias among the West German judiciary, yet they also revealed a strong tendency to lay to rest any legal confrontation with the past and thus often ended with a dismissal of the case or an acquittal of the defendant.
In the East, the offer for antifascist integration applied only to those POWs who had returned before the end of mass repatriation from the Soviet Union in May 1950. In line with official Soviet policy, East German officials condemned POWs held in the Soviet Union after 1950 as "war criminals." Moreover, returnees from captivity in the West became a target of extensive purges between the late 1940s and early 1950s, even though some of these West returnees had a much stronger antifascist record than returnees from the East. These East German purges represented the functional counterpart to the West German Kameradenschinder trials. Despite the obvious differences between state-sponsored prosecution in the East and trials by an independent judiciary in the West, both the purges and the trials served a common purpose of excising behavior and experiences that could not be incorporated into the new ideological parameters of the Cold War.
Despite their different contexts, East and West German perceptions of returning POWs thus ultimately also exhibited considerable structural similarities. Both German societies universalized memories of the returnee experience for the reconstruction of collective identities on antagonistic sides of the Cold War.27 They did so not by resorting to the largely discredited language of the nation, but rather by employing the more universal languages of Christianity and of antifascism. The West German focus on the returnees' psychological, moral, and religious predicament, moreover, tended to depoliticize and de-ideologize the consequences of a highly ideological war. East German perceptions, in contrast, located the returnee experience within a highly politicized Communist master narrative of antifascism with the Soviet Union at its center. The externalization of the fascist past in the autobiographical narrative of antifascist activists, moreover, mirrored the externalization of the past in the national narrative of the newly formed East German state, which denied all continuities to the Third Reich and projected them onto West Germany.
II
East and West German representations of returning POWs were closely linked to social and political strategies. In West Germany the emphasis on the returnees' status as victims served the dual purpose of exempting returnees from denazification procedures and of legitimizing social policy benefits created for them. In 1948, a specific returnee amnesty excluded from denazification procedures virtually all returnees who had arrived home after May 1947. The dystrophy diagnosis also allowed for the material compensation of psychological trauma among returning POWs by linking psychological deficiencies to somatic causes (for example, malnutrition in Soviet captivity). This practice stood in marked contrast to the post-World War I period, when the German medical establishment had considered psychological trauma as mere "pension neurosis."28 The 1950 Heimkehrergesetz (returnee law) was one of the first laws passed by the new West German parliament and sought to facilitate returnees' adjustment to postwar society. A 1954 law compensated every POW who had returned after 1947 for time spent in captivity. This law was specifically designed not as a social policy measure based on need, but as an entitlement for former POWs. Furthermore, the early 1950s witnessed a dramatic expansion of the bureaucratic category of "returnee," which came to include virtually everybody who had returned from any kind of captivity, including, for example, convicted war criminals who had been interned by the Western allies.29
In contrast to the West, there were no specific social policy measures for returnees in the East. Instead of material compensation, East German communists focused on returnees' political and ideological re-education. By doing so, East German state and party officials exhibited a striking optimism in the possibility of remaking the former soldiers of Hitler's army and Soviet POWs into ideal antifascist citizens. SED officials drew especially on the social transformation of the Wehrmacht during the Third Reich, which had significantly increased the share of soldiers from working and petit bourgeois class backgrounds. According to SED officials, fascist ideology had simply led these returnees astray, and they needed to be "led back to the proletarian class to which the overwhelming majority of them belonged."30
The SED also devoted remarkable organizational and personnel resources to this project. Party officials sought to accompany returning POWs from their entry into the returnee transition camp near Frankfurt an der Oder to their arrival in their home communities. The party also sought to establish specific returnee meetings in every East German local community, intended to facilitate the returnees' entry into the new "antifascist-democratic" order.31 The flipside of the SED's confidence in the antifacist malleability of returnees, however, was chronic concerns about possible outside interference that could undermine the project. The party therefore tried to exclude any rival organizations from involvement in the reception of returning POWs in the Eastern Zone. This was especially true for the welfare organizations of the Christian churches that sought to maintain an active presence in the reception and treatment of returning POWs.32 The gradual exclusion of voluntary and intermediate organizations from the official reception of returning POWs was part and parcel of the destruction of civil society and the establishment of dictatorship in East Germany. SED strategies regarding returning POWs were thus characterized - in Mary Fulbrook's words - by a peculiar mixture of "paternalism and paranoia."33
In the aftermath of the June 1953 uprising the SED's paranoia began to outweigh its paternalism. The return of the last POWs in 1953-4 and 1955-6 prompted the SED to mobilize the entire security apparatus of the East German police state in order to control the return of a few thousand POWs to East German communities.34 The last returnees in particular were subjected to intensive surveillance by the Stasi (state security police) and the regular East German police, which in some cases even lasted until the 1980s.35 Official strategies toward the last returnees thus demonstrated that, by the mid-1950s, the SED itself had lost its earlier confidence in the antifascist redemption of returning POWs and, by extension, all East Germans. Instead, the East German regime increasingly favored coercion and surveillance over ideological persuasion.
III
Finally, I analyze the interrelationship of the official receptions of returning POWs in East and West Germany and the POWs' own perceptions of themselves. Based on oral histories, autobiographies, and subjective testimonies in official sources, this study identifies various patterns by which returnees responded to their encounters with a radically changed homeland. It demonstrates how returnees' homecoming experiences were influenced by the complex interplay of official discursive and social strategies and returnees' own strategies of resistance, acceptance, or appropriation.36
The available evidence suggests that returnees drew primarily on those elements of official perceptions that allowed them to maintain continuity of the self in times of radical historical discontinuity. In the West it was primarily the ideology of anticommunism that allowed for the construction of such continuities.37 But the East German narrative of official antifascism entailed the possibility for continuities as well. Antifascist returnees, for example, could easily incorporate the ideals of militant masculinity that had shaped their socialization in Hitler's army into their new role as socialist "fighters for progress."38
At the same time, many returnees seem to have resented the transformative aspects of their reception in East and West Germany as they were included, for example, in Christian and antifascist conversion narratives.39 And rather than embracing overtly political narratives in giving meaning to their experience, returnees to both postwar societies frequently evoked another concept that seemed distinctly apolitical but also fundamentally German: the concept of Heimat (home or homeland).40 Heinz S., for example, described his homecoming to the East German town of Weimar in the fall of 1946: "These were the houses of peaceful German people, surrounded by gardens in which colorful sunflowers blossomed and ripe fruit hung on the trees. The soft waves of the Oder mountains and the dark green forests greeted us. It was the Heimat that welcomed us."41 Particularly for returnees to the East, Heimat provided a more emotional and less obligating source of identification than the politically charged concept of the antifascist-democratic order. Heimat, moreover, also was a distinctly male fantasy. It promised the illusion of an intact environment with clearly delineated gender roles precisely at a moment when the war and the postwar period had turned gender relations upside down.
Returnees' self-perceptions and homecoming experiences also took shape in the ostensibly apolitical spheres of the workplace and the family. As a result, the political and ideological antagonism between liberal democracy in the West and dictatorship in the East may have lost some of its significance for the returnees' adjustment to postwar society. Instead, both German societies offered returnees the opportunity to realize delayed hopes for upward mobility and social advancement in a period of reconstruction.42 At the same time, the dominant emphasis on performance and productivity in both societies tended to marginalize those returnees who suffered more permanent disorientation or persistent physical or mental impairment. One returnee in West Germany complained to representatives of the Hessian interior ministry that "military service on all fronts and especially the period of captivity" had left him with "physical and psychological traumas that manifest themselves in depression and inferiority complexes.É The new conditions make me face the specter of unemployment. All this is tearing on my nerves."43
Such conflict-ridden individual transitions from war to peace also were often displaced from the public to the private sphere of the family. They were "privatized" and thus did not translate into larger social and political conflicts, as they did after World War I.44 Instead, German families, and German women in particular, seemed to have absorbed much of the tensions and frustrations that resulted from men's difficult adjustment to a devastated and radically changed homeland. This also meant that the consequences of war and defeat remained present within families for an extended period of time and continued to shape relations both between the sexes and between generations.
Whereas the return of the last POWs from the Soviet Union in 1955 signified the end of the public preoccupation with the direct consequences of war and defeat in both postwar societies, the private endings of the war lasted much longer. The generational conflicts of the 1960s, for example, can also be seen at least in part as a repoliticization of previously privatized conflicts. And the periodic eruptions in German public discourse - such as heated debated over an exhibition on the crimes of the German army - illuminate the persistent emotional investment in representations of the war and its consequences. The aftershocks of the protracted ending of World War II thus can be felt up to the present, and the long German postwar history may not yet have come to an end.