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nation had voted Hitler into office in 1933 and followed him obed–
iently thereafter . It is hard to imagine how Churchill and Roosevelt
might have called for the unconditional surrender of Hitler and left it
at that .
In Dregger' s glossing over of the past , Churchill and Roosevelt
make the German nation into the hostage of Hitler. Hans Momm–
sen , writing in the
Merkur ,
describes this sort of "Hitlerismus " as
the "emergency lie . " Since Hitler had obtained a monopoly of na–
tional identification, any renunciation of the Hitler cult at the time
was open to interpretation as antinational. Furthermore , the moral
burden of important conservative leadership groups is denied by the
representation of complex domestic and foreign policy decisions "as
simple derivatives of the omnipotent will of the national leader."
This view of the past first gives all responsibility to Hitler and then ,
in Dregger's version, blames the Versailles Treaty for making Hitler
possible, and Churchill and Roosevelt for confusing Germany with
Hitler. But the responsibility of the German nation cannot be con–
jured away. From the millions who belonged to the Nazi party , to
those in the civil service and other public institutions, to those in a
variety of private organizations , there existed within Germany what
Hannah Arendt called an "almost ubiquitous complicity" in the
Nazi crimes.
As a complement to blaming everything that happened inside
Germany on Hitler, another technique of dealing with the Nazi
period now current in West Germany is to examine the regrettable
or, better yet, culpable actions of non-Germans during this era. The
discovery of Kurt Waldheim's activities as a Wehrmacht intelligence
officer offered an excellent opportunity to employ this technique . It
surely did not hurt that Germans and Austrians tend to be critical of
one another anyway: Germans consider Austrians to be lazy in–
habitants of a sleepy Alpine republic ; Austrians find Germans
overbearing . All the more reason to engage in a detailed exposition
of the Austrian participation in the Third Reich. As the revelations
about Waldheim accumulated, the
Schadenfreude,
or malicious joy ,
was scarcely to be missed in Germany.
Der Spiegel's
cover devoted to' 'the Waldheim case " featured an
enormous dark arm in a Nazi salute looming over the Alps . The ac–
companying headline was: "Austria ' s Quiet Fascism . " The article
in
Der Spiegel
improves on former Austrian Chancellor Bruno
Kreisky ' s comment that Waldheim built his entire life on a lie by
terming Austria's relationship to its own Nazi past a similar lie . The
