Volume 56, Issue 1

The 1970s and 1980s bring about a fundamental change in political priorities for the Federal Republic of Germany. The “Limits to Growth” become apparent, security policy gains new significance, educational expansion reaches its limits. Environmental, nature and monument protection become more important. The party system also changes: The Free Democratic Party loses its character as the tipper of the scale, the Greens enter the field as a new movement; from this time on, the two major parties irrevocably exhibit the status of structural minorities – even if the two share a distinct head start over their smaller competitors, unlike during the Weimar Republic. The article investigates how the Federal Republic reacted to these challenges on the basis of different examples (economic growth, the development of the responsibilities of the state, educational policy, language and zeitgeist).

The forefront of German science was institutionalised in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG) until 1945. Therefore the KWG is especially suitable for the analysis of the relations between science and politics during the “Third Reich” in general. Contrary to the interpretation favoured by contemporaries after 1945 as well as some historians, the history of the KWG during the Nazi dictatorship was no struggle for survival. Measured by the usual criteria, it looks rather like a “success story”. The article investigates the most important areas of activity of the General Administration (GV) of the KWG – especially during the era of General Secretary Ernst Telschow beginning in 1937 – and also deals with the central question of the integration of the KWG into the Nazi system.

The Military Jurisdiction Decree handed out by the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) on the 13th of May, 1941 was contrary to international law and formed the reference order for the German conduct of the war against the Soviet Union. This incisive “Führer decree” permitted executions of “enemy civilians” without trial as well as collective reprisals against whole communities and thereby created the pseudo-legal foundations for the occupational terror imposed by German forces in the conquered Soviet territories. In his article, Römer first describes how this felonious order was received by the commanding agencies of the Eastern Army before the beginning of the campaign, disclosing a widely diversified spectrum of reactions. The diverging reception of the decree however had little effect on the fact that most of the commanders obediently announced the order to their troops and thereby set its implementation in motion.

To be qualified as a German “refugee” or “expellee” in Germany after 1945 was never an honorary title. The long-established inhabitants of Western or Central Germany resented the 12 million newcomers who had been driven out of their own home regions in East Germany or Eastern Europe by Allied force. Also, both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic tried to control the economically deprived and psychologically shocked refugees by creating new interpretative notions: The term “resettler” (Umsiedler), which had been superimposed by the Soviet Military Administration for communist East Germany as early as 1945, played down the violence and terror aspects of the real flight and expulsion acts, emphasized the National Socialist causes of the “resettlement” and stipulated that the fast integration into a “new homeland” west of the Oder-Neisse border was inevitable. Diametrically opposed to this communist interpretation was the notion of the West German term “expellee” (Vertriebener), which focused on the events of 1944/45 (and not their Nazi prehistory) and the forcible aspects of the expulsion. While the communist SED regime terminated its integrative social policy for the “resettlers” as early as 1952/53, the West German “Vertriebenenpolitik” established a long-term social policy by means of “Lastenausgleich”. Core elements of a new interpretation – pushed by leftist intellectuals, but even from within the Christian churches – superseded the older revisionist notion of Vertriebenenpolitik, but also marginalised “Vertriebenen”-identity.