Although the reactions of individual families of POWs would naturally vary quite widely, the return of POWs in the Soviet Union was one of the cornerstones of the early Adenauer government and it made conscious efforts to keep the issue alive during first decade of the FRG. The state sponsored various days of remembrance and other ceremonies to keep this issue alive. When the Soviet news agency TASS announced on 5 May 1950 that there were only 13,536 German POWs left in the USSR, Adenauer himself interrupted a Bundestag debate to protest that the Soviets had not accounted for the fate of 1.5 million POWs. This position that there was a vast shadow army of POWs found much support in the FRG because the Third Reich had kept the number of MIAs and other casualties deliberately vague.

Adenauer's policy meshed well with his larger policy of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastering the past) which was a selective memory of participation in the crimes of National Socialism. The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) assumption was that the German people as a whole were themselves victims of the Third Reich and its crimes were the result of Hitler and a cabal of a few collaborators. This fed into the larger public perception that fighting men of the Wehrmacht were themselves victims and had fought a clean war. This sanitized vision of the armed forces was not just limited to Adenauer's government. OMGUS surveys of Nuremberg trials noted that while many Germans in the American zone approved of trying the "Golden Pheasants" of the NSDAP, a number took umbrage at trying Wehrmacht officers. Their continued captivity of German soldiers added yet another layer into this victimization narrative. There were many stories in the FRG press about the Communist maltreatment of these men and this gelled well with the strident anti-communism of the FRG political establishment.

This narrative of victimization filtered out into the press and popular culture of the early FRG. There were a number of advice columns and other press articles about "re-manning" the returning POWs after their captivity. This spoke to a major concern that somehow these men had lost fundamental components of their masculinity and would need to recover it to adjust to postwar society. Other depictions of the plight of the POWs were more prosaic. Novels and films like Der Artz von Stalingrad, Taiga, and Der Teufel spielte Balalaika showed the struggle to survive in the camps and sidestepped their actions during the war. With the obvious exceptions for the rule of drama, this fiction genre portrayed the Soviets as largely indifferent to human suffering. Press reports of returning Stalingrad POWs sometimes spoke of their regeneration upon reentering German soil. One account from the Hamburg paper Die Welt spoke of one Stalingrad veteran politely kissing a woman's hand on the train station, showing that he "was not a barbarian or a slave and [he was] unbowed and unchanged." Another Stalingrad veteran confided to a reporter that hugging a German child helped to restore his humanity.

One of the darker sides to this narrative of martyrdom was that the FRG sought to prosecute German POWs that were Kameradenschinder (torturers of their comrades). The FRG conducted some one hundred trials of POWs between 1948 and 1956. These trials sometimes went beyond holding individuals responsible for their actions. One witness for the prosecution of a Stalingrad camp claimed he testified because of "the worldwide dangers of communism," and it was imperative to "observe and eliminate such unscrupulous mercenaries of communism."

The position of POWs in the GDR often was just as politicized. Returning German soldiers into East Germany were expected to be be openly candid about their responsibility for fascism, regardless of their actual individual culpability, and avow their commitment to their new found brotherhood with the Soviet Union. This often entailed a demasculanization wherein the returnee would have to hew to a script where their experience with the Soviets showed how tiny and insignificant the Third Reich was in comparison. Despite this difference, there was some congruity with the FRG over the response to defeat within the GDR. On 30 January speech at the Volkskammer Wilhelm Adam, a delegate of the NDPP (a political group associated with Wehrmacht veterans) and a Stalingrad POW claimed that all German soldiers were Stalingraders since their suffering and privations had allowed them to be renewed with a greater self-awareness. Adam's topos of victimization to suit political ends, albeit one with a greater acknowledgement of German crimes, mirrored that of his counterparts in the FRG as he would later in his speech attack Truman's "bestial" army in Korea that was the heir to Hitler. Not all of these POWs would countenance this script like Adam and the SED kept the former POWs under close Stasi supervision and internal memoranda noted that many veterans still harbored fascist beliefs.

Although it is tempting, and too a degree, quite justified, to view these exculpatory narratives as self-serving and highly selective, it is important to remember an important component of Vergangenheitsbewältigung entailed an acceptance of democracy and an explicit rejection of National Socialism. Veterans like Hans-Ulrich Rudel or Otto-Ernst Remer that transgressed the line by openly justifying the prior regime found themselves ostracized from mainstream politics within the FRG. The narratives of victimization and renewal served to help facilitate a return to normalcy for many veterans.

Sources

Biess, Frank. Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Moeller, Robert G. War Stories The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Niven, William John. Germans As Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.