This is an eyewitness report that must have seemed quite disturbing to American magazine readers of 1950; it is an article that announced to the West that there was a resurgence of Nazism springing anew from the rubble of post-war Germany.
Filed from Berlin by the respected American journalist William Shirer (1904 – 1993: author of Berlin Diary
and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
), he read the findings of a German opinion poll revealing that
•A majority of Germans tended to hold that Nazism was good, when properly administered.
•Antisemitism was rapidly assuming its customary spot within the German soul.
•War guilt was largely non-existent and Nazi publications were rolling off the smaller presses with predictable regularity.
Shirer also reported that unrepentant, senior Nazis like Max Amann were getting out of prison, expecting to wield the power they once enjoyed as Hitler's yes-men.
In this article the proud father of Anne Frank, Otto Frank (1889 – 1980), explains that by the late Fifties it seemed more and more teenagers were contacting him to say that very few parents or teachers seemed willing to discuss the Nazi years in Germany. These inquiries were too often dismissed as bothersome or simply brushed away with hasty answers like, "The Nazis built the Autobahns".
Otto Frank points out that this was not always the case, and goes on to recall that there existed a more sympathetic and regretful Germany for at least a decade after the war. Yet, in 1960 he sensed that there existed a subtle movement to whitewash Hitler; a battle was being waged for the mind of this teenage generation:
"It is being fought largely between the guilt-ridden older generation responsible for Hitler and a middle generation, too young to have been deeply involved with Nazism, but old enough to have fought and been hurt by the war."
Suggested Reading: A German Generation
