Why Not Everyman?

DENAZIFICATION by Constantine Fitz-Gibbon. 222 pages. Norton. $6.95.

Constantine FitzGibbon gets his loudest polemic laughs from dead trends and left leftovers. A translator-novelist-critic of Irish and American descent and European education, he now lives in Ireland. His novel When the Kissing Had to Stop, a political cautionary tale of a Russian takeover from a fellow-traveling British government, made him a bogeyman to left-leaning intellectuals. It also won him a Communist Party accolade--"fascist hyena."

In Denazification, FitzGibbon, who served as an intelligence officer in Europe during World War II, has dug up the corpse of the "1,000-year Reich" and considers how Kiesinger's Germany could have risen from its grave--a Babbitt out of Buchenwald. He discusses Allied punishment of war crimes, which was limited to a handful of the worst offenders. But his main concern, as the title implies, is denazification, the broader program of combined punishment and re-education variously applied to hundreds of thousands of Germans by the occupying powers. His book raises questions of conscience which, though they can never be satisfactorily settled, will perplex society and individuals as long as men are bound in loyalty to states that may commit crimes.

Count Me Out. In 1945 there was an Allied consensus--which no longer exists--on the doctrine of collective guilt, that all Germans shared the blame not only for the war but for Nazi atrocities as well. Like the denazification program itself, FitzGibbon starts from that consensus, and with the feeling that at the time "it would not have been possible, either psychologically or politically, simply to ignore the monstrous crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich." How just or justified the Allied judgment was seems to FitzGibbon far less clear. "Theologically," he observes, " 'collective guilt' must be a meaningless term since there is no such thing as 'collective soul.'" He adds: "Legally, it makes more sense: accomplices are also found guilty in courts of law."

FitzGibbon accepts as sound the plebiscites that gave Hitler up to 99% Ja. But if all Germans were guilty, he seems to wonder, why should countless individuals be singled out for punishment? If Eichmann, why not Everyman?

Such absolutist considerations had little to do with the actual proceedings against the Nazis, both for war crimes and denazification in general. These were, as FitzGibbon notes, much tainted by expediency and confusion. In practical terms, too, their results have been mixed. Ironically, some of the criminals of Auschwitz got off "extremely lightly" because the rules of evidence, which the Nazis had scrapped, had been reimposed in the name of justice by the Allies. Most Nazis were soon issued their Persilscheine ("whitewash slips," a name derived from a brand of soap powder). Modern Germany is run by the Persils and former members of another swiftly exonerated group, the Mussnazis (Nazis by necessity). Sad to say, the minority of truly non-Hitlerite Germans have taken little part in the life of West Germany from 1945 until today. "Ohne mich" ("Count me out") was, and is. their slogan, and their withdrawal represents an active personal judgment on the corruption of most of their countrymen. The postwar emigration of many such Germans, says FitzGibbon, represents a permanent loss to Germany. The reproach of the count-me-outers, alas, has not kept the convicted German war criminals--including SS General Kurt ("Panzer") Meyer, found responsible for the murder of Canadian prisoners of war--from becoming heroes to extremist groups in the post-Hitlerian Reich.

Reprisals and Regicides. Has our age been harsher and more painstaking in its corrective reprisals than others that have seen fanatically fought wars and revolutions?' At the level of immediate outrage and intent, yes; in ultimate results, no. Taking a long view, FitzGibbon compares the performance of the Allied occupying powers with those of the English after the Stuart Restoration, Americans after Appomattox, and the European victors of Waterloo. In each case national character and historical tradition shaped policy. In 1660 the English Crown granted general amnesty, except for the clergymen, to all but a few of the Cromwellian regicides, although republican soldiers (allowing for technological limitations) had behaved nearly as atrociously toward the Irish as Hitler's armies in non-German Europe. Neither Robert E. Lee nor any other Southern leader was charged with war crimes (although Jefferson Davis was confined in a fort for two years). After Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington, the real master of "liberated" France, was ordered to arrest Napoleonic Marshal Soult; the Duke asked him to dinner. Talleyrand, a busy Napoleonic executive, became the Bourbon King's loyal minister.

The debacle of Hitler's Reich and the Allied mopping-up operation can make for depressing reading. Unhappily. FitzGibbon's book will probably find few readers from the one group in the U.S. that could profit most from its perspectives--the more violent and mostly youthful would-be revolutionaries who fail to see that indulging in millennial fantasies of total cauterizing power is likely to be followed by immediate realities of sheer hell.

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