What sort of treatment, professionally speaking, was given to German academics whose credentials were earned during the Nazi era?

There was generally very little retribution for German faculty and although there was a denazification process, very few academics lost their jobs despite clear evidence of their support for the regime or being member of the NSDAP. The reasons for membership within the party was of course highly variable. But some German researchers and academics joined the NSDAP out of genuine conviction and repackaged their ideas to fit within the new regime. A number of landscape architects and agronomists like Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann and Konrad Meyer would become involved in the SS's plan to remake the East into a verdant garden for Aryan settlers once it had been cleared of racial inferiors. Other academics and scientists joined out of a larger process called by later historians self-coordination in which individuals gradually adjusted preexisting mores to fit within the context of National Socialism because of the state's soft pressure . A number of younger researchers tended to join the party as it greatly improved their chances at achieving their Habilitation (a step higher than PhD which opens up a position in the professorate- German university structure is very complex) as the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund (NSDB-National Socialist German Lecturers League) vetted candidates for their position. Diechman's studies of biology have found that NSDAP membership greatly benefited career advancement and crossing this important hurdle in German academia. Still others were ambivalent about joining the NSDAP and would emphasize this ambivalence postwar to contend they were just apolitical intellectuals who were academics first, and patriots second. Wernher von Braun famously fit within this category and would swear in an affidavit that he only joined the SS to facilitate his rocket research.

Part of the problem with denazification was that it was very hard to pin these individuals to direct and specific crimes. Meyer is a specific case in point, his work with the SS landed him in the RuSHA trial and he was convicted of being a member of the SS, the court acquitted him of all charges, saying:

simply by virtue of his position as chief of planning, the prosecution would have the Tribunal assume that Meyer was the person responsible for all planning and, consequently, the drastic actions taken must have had their origin in his planning. The difficulty with such an assumption is that there is no proof to support it. He is charged, for instance, with such criminal activities as kidnapping alien children, abortions on Eastern workers, and hampering the reproduction of enemy nationals. Yet in thousands of pages of documentary and oral evidence, there is not a single syllable of evidence even remotely connecting him with any of these activities.

Meyer's paper trail leading back to the SS and its genocidal projects was pretty obvious, one just had to really look at a library to see his long list of SS-affiliated publications, but he went on to become a member of the University of Hanover and relatively prestigious academic in the FRG. Other academics weathered denazification relatively unscathed.

One of the underlying reasons for this was that academics possessed a great deal of social capital within Germany, both East and West and possessed a skillsset that the occupation authorities needed. In the latter case, reestablishing the German university system was one of the early Cold War priorities for the occupation as a sign that their zone was achieving a return to normalcy. Although there was an earlier pressure to purge the university system, many within the professoriate were able to use the denazification process to spin their role in the Third Reich as fundamentally apolitical. For example, Eugen Fehrle, who joined the NSDAP in 1931and was an active member of Heidelberg's philosophy faculty and produced a lot of Volkisch writings, would claim in his 1947 affidavit that:

My activities within the Party, my struggle within it, and ultimately my opposition cannot be judged in a purely political sense, but must, by my way of thinking, be connected with my research and thinking on folklore. This was and remained in a certain sense unpolitical.

The tribunals initially convicted Fehrle of being an activist, but he was later able to appeal his status down to a lesser offender and although he would not teach again, the Baden Culture Ministry granted him the status of emeritus at Heidelberg despite being one a highly public advocate for the NSDAP at the university during the Third Reich. The clannish nature of German academia (which to be fair, is not unique to Germany) helped this process as many academics would provide testimony during the denazification tribunals to support their colleagues' contentions that they were apolitical intellectuals. The overworked tribunals, which were largely staffed with German personnel, were unable to really properly investigate these claims very thoroughly.

The one real level of ostracism was that in areas which were seen as especially connected to German crimes, German academics were ostracized by the international academic community. For example, Deichmann has found that German participation in international conferences on genetics sharply declined in the immediate postwar generation through the 1960s. Very few geneticists who were active in Germany during the Third Reich were invited to join the faculty and research institutes of other countries such as the Pasteur Institute during this period. While these biologists had little problem finding employment in German academia, they had more trouble marketing their skills abroad.

Sources

Deichmann, Ute. Biologists under Hitler. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Remy, Steven P. The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Schafft, Gretchen Engle. From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004.