And this is where you fall at the first fence. "Denazification" was only one of several principles articulated in 1945 alongside demilitarisation, democratisation and decentralisation, known as the four "D"s.
Denazification went hand in hand with an American - and Soviet - critique of the old elites and their complicity in the actions of the Nazis, which quite conspicuously shaped the successor Nuremberg NMT trials in particular, with trials of industrialists and generals ranking much higher in priority, resources and attention than the SS cases.
The entire trials programs both inside occupied Germany, i.e. the British, US, French and Soviet zonal trials, the start of West and East German trials for crimes of Germans against Germans, and outside it, i.e. the extraditions to western and east European states which had been occupied by the Germans, were significantly bigger than "Nuremberg", while denazification was even bigger still, affecting really substantial numbers.
The trials ebbed quite quickly due to the onset of the Cold War and a campaign of criticism to trash them, and ensure pardons, resulting also in extensive reversals of denazification in West Germany after 1949, the release of convicted war criminals by the occupying powers and other European states (with only a few exceptions in later decades, i.e. Hess and the Breda Four being more or less the only convicts imprisoned for forty years). Demilitarisation was reversed with rearmament, which gave West Germans more leverage and ensured early release for convicted generals but also others (von Manstein - 1953, Martin Sandberger - death sentence commuted to life, was one of only four left imprisoned in Landsberg in 1957, released May 1958).
Accordingly the 'core' of the Holocaust was a rather small fraction of the overall trials program and denazification schemes.
The British and Americans demonstrably pursued crimes against their own servicemen quite vigorously, which mirrors the actions of Commonwealth states in Europe and Asia - the Canadians prosecuting Hitlerjugend Division members for killing Canadian POWs, Australians and others prosecuting Japanese officers for POW killings. The Americans prosecuted the lynchings of 'terror fliers', downed USAAF bomber crews, quite extensively.
The British and Americans then prosecuted crimes in the KZs in their zones or which they'd liberated (like Buchenwald) or had personnel from (like the British and Ravensbrueck), with the British also chasing Gestapo crimes, prisons and crimes against foreign workers. SS officers involved in the Final Solution in Poland were not infrequently executed for smaller-scale crimes in Germany.
The Dutch, Belgians, Danes, French, Yugoslavs, Czechoslovaks, and Poles had quite a lot of bones to pick with the Germans they extradited. While they certainly did prosecute Germans for involvement in persecuting and deporting Jews, these were alongside crimes against non-Jews. A study has calculated that about 30% of Polish requests for extraditions concerned crimes against Jews. The majority of the most prominent defendants in the Polish NTN trials were facing extensive charges regarding both Poles and Jews: this would certainly include the Auschwitz SS and other KZ personnel, since the KZs in Poland really did kill quite a lot of Poles as well. Gauleiter Greiser was charged with genocide against Poles as well as the extermination of the Jews.
Proportionately, captured KZ personnel likely stood the greatest chance of being prosecuted in the 1940s, either inside Germany (zonal trials) or after extradition to Poland. This was still a relative minority of the KZ guard force and staff. The numbers and the camps involved meant that the Final Solution wasn't exactly front and centre in many of these cases, especially the British trials after the Belsen trial, or the US Dachau Tribunal cases.
What did the Allies do with the captured German records and regarding WWII? The pattern here fits with the major charges at Nuremberg and with the general consensus around preventing a resurgence of German irredentism and German militarism, but also the onset of the Cold War. The US Army encouraged German generals and officers to write their own accounts of the war and tolerated them giving the German POV.
Official histories were being written on the war, with the US even writing some of the earliest histories of the Eastern Front, such as The German Campaign in Russia: Planning and Operations 1940-1942 published in March 1955. This tradition continued within Army-related military history centres until after the end of the Cold War (Earl Ziemke and David Glantz).
The British had captured the German Foreign Office archive and microfilmed it very early on, the Americans made use of this archive in the NMT trials, but there was also a project to publish German diplomatic documents, also in translation, which began in the 1950s (Documents on German Foreign Policy). There were historians employed within the British Foreign Office for this purpose.
So we see that the
official historicisation of WWII and the Third Reich focused on diplomacy and the war - on the classic genres of international and military history. The US and British main efforts were in documenting and justifying their own war efforts, with masses more researchers employed for this purpose in official histories.
Behind the scenes, both British and US intelligence had made sure to interrogate German intelligence officers from 1945 onwards, not just to reconstruct the secret war but also to figure out methods and eventually, this transitioned into the use of some German intelligence officers as sources, with overlaps with the Gehlen organisation and eventual BND by the 1950s. The now released files from MI5 and the OSS/CIA also show especially American monitoring but also use of East European exiles, including Ukrainian nationalists and Croatian Ustashe, with lots of references in passing to involvement in mass killings and the Einsatzgruppen.
Several key intelligence players were able to publish their memoirs, however tendentious they might have been, quite early: Walter Schellenberg and Wilhelm Hoettl being quite prominent, but not forgetting Otto Skorzeny's quite early 1950 memoir for commando exploits.
The Cold War thus significantly shaped how the history of the war was viewed in the 1950s, including how the captured German records were used after being microfilmed and when they were being restituted.
German generals profited from the writing exercises for the Foreign Military Studies programs to publish their memoirs but also a lot of operational histories about all aspects of the war, but inevitably about the Eastern Front (e.g. the Wehrmacht im Kampf series). They often wrote with an eye for 'lessons learned' in the event of an East-West confrontation. The translations of key memoirs became best-sellers in the English-speaking world (especially Guderian and Manstein's memoirs), despite being quite apologetic or denying Army involvement in crimes. The 'clean Wehrmacht' myth arose quite quickly despite the 1940s trials, and persisted for decades.
Meanwhile, some officials involved in Nazi Ostpolitik emphasised the mistakes made by German occupation policies (Peter Kleist, Fabian Schlabrendorff, Hans von Herwarth) while the theme was explored by journalist-authors (Juergen Thorwald). It also received attention from US researchers. This is quite palpable in Alexander Dallin's German Rule in Russia (1957), a massive tome based on archival files and unpublished Nuremberg documents in the main. The US also commissioned several studies of Soviet partisan warfare with an eye for communist guerrilla tactics, both in the 1950s and into the Vietnam era: Dixon/Heilbrunn, Communist Guerrilla Warfare (1957) and the Soviet Partisans in World War II project (1964). The latter was edited by the main US expert on Ukrainian nationalism, John Armstrong, who published his study in 1955. The actual project dated back to 1950-56, as is clear from this finding guide of the 'War Documentation Project' at Columbia University, the 1964 publication was in effect a declassification of reports for internal use:
https://findingaids.library.columbia.ed ... ul-4078124
This was happening at the same time as Soviet studies were receiving substantial investment, with early works exploiting fortuitious captures like the Smolensk Party archive, used by Merle Fainsod in Smolensk under Soviet Rule (1958), following How Russia Is Ruled (1953).
There were quite large numbers of WWII emigres from the Soviet Union who escaped west and evaded repatriation, so from the prewar Soviet Union as well as the western borderlands (Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonians, including nationalists and collaborators). The Cold War imperative to learn as much about the USSR as possible led to things like the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (1949-51), with 700 interviews of displaced persons and refugees. One can search this collection and come across accounts of the German occupation, including off-hand references to the extermination of Soviet Jews. Ukrainian nationalist publications in exile started propagating legends of
rescuing Jews instead of murdering them in the late 1940s/early 1950s. The upheavals of war as well as releases from the GULag and exile meant a growing number of memoirs by Polish Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans appeared through the late 1940s and 1950s on Soviet captivity.
German-Soviet relations were addressed in explicit official publications of documents on the Nazi-Soviet pact era, and in Gerhard Weinberg's Germany and the Soviet Union 1939-1941 (1954).
If one considers publications and also dissertations in English through the 1950s to the early 1960s, the Cold War drew more attention to the German-Soviet war and German occupation of the Soviet Union than to Poland. The earliest uses of the captured German records and NMT trials included some exceptions to this, but not many. Robert Koehl's RKFDV (1957) and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) were the major exceptions, but both also discussed the Germans in the Soviet Union. Hilberg really was almost entirely on his own in US academia, in the first 15 years after the war, in focusing on the persecution and murder of European Jews.
British academia was much smaller in this era, and Gerald Reitlinger the main early researcher using the British copies of Nuremberg materials and other sources available in the UK for the Holocaust. It's striking, however, that he went with the general trend by following up The Final Solution (1953) with a study of German occupation policy in the Soviet Union, The House Built on Sand (1960).
By the 1960s, the captured German records taken to the United States and then microfilmed (with some gaps) in the 1950s had been restituted to West Germany, the German Foreign Office archive microfilmed mostly by the British was restituted between 1956-1958. The Soviets also restituted a significant amount of archival material in relatively quick order, a 4000 file collection of Reich Chancellery files was in the DDR archives in Potsdam by 1955. The Soviets held back more in the special archive in Moscow and in the military archive in Podolsk, but these collections really do include a lot on the war in general.
It isn't very probable that the conscripts, clerks and junior archivists who processed the captured German records, or even the legal researchers in the brief IMT-NMT phase (1945-49) necessarily knew what they "had" to weed out, since this first search missed so many incriminating documents about Nazi crimes not used in the 1940s trials. The second wave of the microfilming of German records by the American Historical Association and related projects with German documents in the 1950s (Columbia University was involved in the War Documentation Project from 1950-1956, the Hoover Institution at Stanford ended up with smaller separate collections) was contending with a true mass of material, and in an analogue era, a totally perfect weeding-out is wholly improbable.
In 1945-1960, the main languages for actual Holocaust research as we'd now consider it were Polish and Yiddish, with Hebrew only slowly catching up. The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland (CZKH) published the greatest number of works in the 1940s, some remained in Poland to form the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, these also had access to various Polish-captured and archived collections (like the Lodz ghetto records). Polish (non-Jewish) war crimes investigators published some of the earlier studies about Auschwitz and Aktion Reinhardt. Most of the CZKH researchers emigrated within a few years and then wrote extensively in Yiddish, also contributing to or editing many memorial books. Mark L. Smith's The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust (2019) and Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (2012) summarise many of these developments, and also show how countries like France with the CDJC and Leon Poliakov fit into the picture. There was only some overlap with the mainline Hilberg approach using the captured German records: Hilberg did make use of collections of captured German documents which had ended up at YIVO in New York.
The 'Yiddish historians' - including Nachman Blumental, Joseph Kermish, Mark Dworzecki, Philip Friedman and Isaiah Trunk - did publish in English to a limited extent, but more so later on, and many works plus parallel memoirs appeared only much later in translation. Isaiah Trunk's Judenrat (1972) was when this strand of research began to be integrated into standard English etc language studies. Trunk's history of the Lodz ghetto (which could draw on extensive contemporary Jewish council and German ghetto administration records) was published in Yiddish in 1962 and only translated to English in 2006. His 1948 history of ZALfJ in the Wartheland remains only in Yiddish. A three volume memoir series of Majdanek and Skarzysko-Kamienna by Mordechai Strigler was published in Yiddish between 1947 and 1950, and was translated to German between 2016 and 2019. The yizkor book translation project at jewishgen.org has been going since the 1990s and has by now translated hundreds of memorial books, including contributions from the "Yiddish historians".
Quite a few memorial books and memoirs in Yiddish were published in this first postwar period (1945-1960) in Latin America, with a lot published in Buenos Aires in Argentina.
Also in Latin America and in Argentina among other countries were more than a few former Nazis who had escaped down the ratline. The network there even published a journal, Der Weg, copies of which made it to West Germany, which published some of the earliest denials of the Holocaust in the first half of the 1940s. But despite the former Nazi exiles including SS men who had served in the camps (Franz Stangl, notably, but also Josef Mengele) and in the occupied east (Ludolf von Alvensleben), none of the denials saw fit to argue for 'resettlement' or 'transit'.
If this had really been German policy, it should have been mentioned spontaneously in the 1940s and 1950s, starting with the many denazification proceedings when veterans of the occupation had to account for their actions and spin them in the best light, but at the latest by the 1950s when Nazis in exile - whether in Latin America or Egypt and Syria - could have surely produced something to explain away the Bad Thing, safely away from the clutches of Allied interrogators.
This is where Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2011) is so devastating to 'revisionist' fantasies. Willem Sassen, a Dutch SS war correspondent, very much wanted to solicit a firm denial of the Holocaust from Adolf Eichmann; the interviews he conducted in 1956 were started with this in mind. Stangneth notes that several other SS officers are heard on the tapes, identifying Ludolf von Alvensleben as one of them. The 'circle' worked with what they called "enemy literature", specifically Leon Poliakov and Josef Wulf's Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (1955), which included a length essay by Dieter Wisliceny from after Nuremberg on the evolution of the 'Final Solution', and the German edition of Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Solution, which had appeared in 1956 and was audibly being referenced in the interviews. The project failed when Eichmann affirmed the extermination of the Jews in the end, rather than working out a coherent legend or denial.
From 1958, the renewed investigation of National Socialist crimes kicked off by the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial and the establishment of the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg meant tens of thousands of Germans who had served in the east were interviewed as witnesses - many as bystanders for what they knew about what might have happened in the towns they were stationed in, many also about the overall orchestration of the Final Solution and its implementation. The West German detectives and magistrates did not and could not have used significant coercion, while the veterans' circles and networks did coordinate testimonies to deflect and deny, but once again without anyone confirming 'resettlement' at the arrival end. The deflections could be rather unconvincing or contradictory, such as Karl Wolff admitting accompanying Himmler at an execution in Minsk in August 1941 (which he was interviewed about for The World at War in 1973) but trying to claim that the Jews deported to Treblinka mentioned in documents he had produced went to the Lublin district. A high proportion including other SS generals (e.g. Koppe, HSSPF in the Warthegau) however confirmed mass murder.
The next 15 years (1961-1975) were thus the fourth chance Germans had to come up with a properly convincing legend, including the war years when the first news of extermination appeared (1942-May 1945), the immediate postwar years (1945-49), and the 1950s.
They whiffed every single time.
