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beliefs in the dignity and
value
of every individual. He did not examine
the role of Christianity in the history of European anti-Semitism.
Therefore, Adenauer pursued a strategy of democratization-by the
integration of former and hopefully disillusioned followers of Nazism. As
early as the spring of 1946, when the major Nuremberg trial was still going
on and thousands of suspects had yet to be charged, in his election speech–
es Adenauer repeatedly told audiences that "we finally should leave in
peace the followers, those who did not oppress others, who did not enrich
themselves, and who broke no laws." For him, liberal democracy could not
be established against the will of the majority. More accurately, he did not
want to risk offending those who could make the difference between elec–
toral victory and defeat. Equating the fortunes of the Christian Democratic
Union with the fate of democracy per se, Adenauer's strategy de facto
vetoed the aggressive postwar judicial procedures of the West German
"amnesty lobby."
Within these limits, Adenauer clearly favored restitution payments to
Jewish survivors and to the state of Israel. Yet he also restored pension
rights to former members of the Wehrmacht and Nazi regime, and urged
American High Commissioner John
J.
McCloy to grant amnesty and
leniency to those who had already been convicted of crimes by the Allies.
He gave priori ty to the integration of ex-Nazi Germans over justice. When
in 1959 Theodor Adorno said that repression of the Nazi past was less the
product of unconscious processes or deficient memory than "the product
of an all-too-wide-awake consciousness," he captured the actual practices
of the Adenauer years. "In the house of the hangman," he continued, "it
is best not to talk about the rope." Then, the winners in national elections
opposed a vigorous program of justice for past crimes and supported pre–
mature and undeserved amnesty. The tension between justice and early
democratization is a major theme of postwar West German history. But
daring more democracy with an electorate unwilling to demand justice
meant attaining less justice.
On the margins of this era of reticence, silence, and judicial delay, the
distinctive way of remembering the crimes of the Nazi past began as an
elite tradition that sounded a soft dissonant note. Theodor Heuss used the
office of President of the Federal Republic and its freedom from the pres–
sures of electoral struggles for power to remember Nazi crimes publicly,
and to define the office as a repository of the nation's conscience and
memory. To his critics, he was the cultured veneer of the Adenauer
restoration, and an advocate of eloquent memory separated from political–
ly consequential justice. Yet in speeches about German history and
extensive private correspondence with Jewish survivors, resistance veter–
ans, and West German and foreign intellectuals, Heuss began an elite
