A note on denazification, because lots of people have not understood the issue. Meanwhile this BBC report comes to the disturbing conclusion that because neo-Nazis in the Ukraine are a small force, and because they are fighting on the correct side, it all must just be just fine. Part of the problem here is that the attempt to “go and find the Nazis” that would justify the Russian propaganda is to make a massive mistake about what Putin is getting at and its historical reference. The short essay below hopes to explain a little:
The notion of “denazification and demilitarisation” that you see from Putin stems directly from the agreements at Yalta the end of the Second World War. It describes the programme of denazification that would be played out in Germany under allied occupation as ratified in the Potsdam agreements. As most people will know, after the end of WW2, Germany was split up into four territories, controlled by the British, the USA, France, and Russia. What is crucial is that there were both consistencies and inconsistencies about how denazification was practiced in these different territories.
The consistency was pretty straightforward: the allies agreed that they needed the absolute submission of the German population, and they needed to strip it of its sovereignty and army. There was some agreement too that to justify this required the imposition of collective guilt. Then there was an idea that the bureaucracy had to be stripped out and replaced, that the entire population needed re-education etc.
The first, consistent modes of denazification were brutal. They are the justification for Mariupol that Putin is thinking of: they meant the carpet bombing of cities full of civilians until those cities relented. It meant the mass incarceration of the population (well into the hundreds of thousands), and in many cases brutal treatment of them.
Some people here will ask why I am being sympathetic to Nazis. My sense is that being a good anti-Nazi might involve trying to get our heads around some of the disgraces of the process of denazification – to think about its failures. Personally I don’t think the Soviet union continuing to run concentration camps like Sachsenhausen for years after the war, as revenge where tens of thousands of Germans met grizzly deaths, is particularly good example of effective anti-Nazism. Nor so show trials nor show-executions. But these are things that we can argue about.
As I mentioned the other elements of denazification were rather more inconsistent between the different allied occupations. Most included a lot of brutality. The Western powers were rather worse at stripping prominent Nazis out of senior bureaucratic positions. Soviet opinion was that the Western occupations were rather too soft on Nazis, because they were not really committed to anything else (like socialism.)
On all sides the processes of denazification get wrapped up towards the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s, with the establishment of the two German states. Adenauer’s premiership is determined by a turn against denazification into some kind of new sovereignty. And in the East, the programme involved increasingly tightly controlled social measures and bureaucracy within the new DDR. Here the histories really do start to diverge.
Ultimately the accusation from the East is that the processes of recovery in West Germany were a historic compromise between liberalism and fascism. Where once there might have been agreement to simply flatten cities and destroy civilian populations in the service of “denazification”, the West was now pumping money into the Federal republic, because regardless of the threat of fascist resurgence, it was interested in an expanded imperialist interest.
Meanwhile, in the East there was a mixture of a new Stalinist culture, and quite horrific and violent processes of social control. These were aimed not only at fascists, but at lots of people who the Stalinist regime considered enemies, for all sorts of reasons. But nonetheless, the line was that state socialism and social control was an effective antidote to fascism. It certainly had less of the problems that Adorno could see in 1950s West Germany, of “latent fascism” beneath the surface of liberalism.
Today, Putins notion of “denazification and demilitarisation” touches on these wounds: that the programme carried on against Mariupol, on the basis that there are armed fascists there, has its historical basis on the agreement on all sides at the end of WW2 that this was what you were supposed to do with fascists. It touches on the wound that on all sides denazification was unsuccessful: that the relationship between liberalism and fascism remains the unexamined core of ideology in the West; that for all of the promises of the east, the violent and administrative repression of fascism in the Eastern Bloc was just that – a repression. And when that repression came to an end, it released forces of a resurgent far-right, that you can see from ruling Prawo i Sprawiedliwość in Poland, to AfD + Pegida in old DDR territory, to Fidesz in Hungary, to the far right groupings around Svoboda that became Azov Batallion in Ukraine.
More than this, nobody really predicted that middle-European far right nationalism, which for a couple of decades after the fall of the Soviet Union looked like it would remain subcultural, would become a serious electoral force in the second decade of this century. These truly are scary times in this regard. People like the BBC who go soft on it do need to be challenged. But they need to be challenged with a view of the failures of denazification. And with the historical knowledge that the idea that shelling cities into submission in the name of denazification and demilitarisation was also the European way. And they need to confront too the ideological compromise between liberalism and fascism, of which they surely are now one of the greatest proponents. None of this, though, is to justify the brutalities of what Putin is doing in Ukraine. It is the most appalling disgrace, and Russia has truly been the aggressor and needs to be fought back. But more than anything this war must end.