Part I

While the SS became the institutional face of the Third Reich's barbarism and inhumanity, it was an incredibly diverse organization composed of career civil servants amalgamated into the SS, young professionals who gravitated to the NSDAP, youthful volunteers to a self-styled military elite, and old Kampfers from the movement's early days. As such, it is very difficult to extrapolate a complete picture of their activities postwar, but as a whole, a good many members of the SS managed to reintegrate themselves back into German society, despite the Allied powers branding the SS a criminal organization.

Two of the first major hurdles for a return to normalcy for an SS member was to navigate the denazification courts in the Allied occupation zones and Allied war crimes tribunals. While a number of senior SS officials and those associated with the German-based camp system (because captured immediately by the advancing Allies) could not escape the latter, the chaotic situation in postwar Germany meant that a number of SS men could go into hiding under false names. Other SS men were able to exploit loopholes in the overburdened denazification system to either have themselves cleared as a Mitläufer (followers) and pay a fine for membership in the SS, which in the inflationary period of the occupation could be quite easy to pay off. A fair number of SS veterans who spent the immediate aftermath of the war under Allied detention were able to have that detention used as time served for their prison sentence, which was the case with Emil Berndorff, the head of protective custody of the RSHA. Berndorff had been put into a camp in December 1945, a 1947 denazification court sentenced him to five years, of which his detention counted towards the sentence, and he was freed in 1950 and a Berlin prosecutor expunged his criminal record in 1955 and he continued his life until he was brought to trial in a West German court for his RSHA activities in 1967.

The late 1960s RSHA trials often fell apart on both procedural grounds and matters dealing with statutes of limitations, and Berndorff's was dismissed. This was of a piece with other investigations of the SS; while direct participants of war crimes like the Einsatzgruppen had actual crimes which they could be charged with, the courts had much greater problems with charging "paper-pushers" like Berndorff. The Allied military tribunals had already had great trouble with punishing these types of crimes. Konrad Meyer, for example, was a prominent agricultural scientist, SS lieutenant general, and Humboldt University chair for agricultural and farming policy and was one of top minds behind the SS's Generalplan Ost to remake the East into a Germanic landscape. Meyer and other members of RSHA were brought before the NMT in 1948/49, but he was acquitted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Tribunal’s summary judgement for Meyer outlines the difficulty of prosecuting these individuals:

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.

In short, while Meyer provided both the rational and end-vision for a radical restructuring of the East for a racially-based resettlement, he let others do the deeds that would enable this vision to take place. Although the Tribunal found Meyer guilty of being a member of the SS, this was a small barrier for his reentry into German society. Meyer joined some of his fellow Generalplan Ost compatriots at the University of Hanover and had a somewhat distinguished low-key academic career in the Federal Republic.

The larger process of reintegration of former members of these hitherto criminal organizations took place amidst a context of amnesties and selective forgetting of the Nazi past. In the FRG, both the Adenauer government and the US High Commission pushed for a general amnesty for convicted prisoners, with HICOG chief James McCloy commuting nine of the Einsatzgruppen’s death sentences in 1951 and leading a general movement to reduce the sentences of many convicted war criminals. “Amnesty-fever” of the 1950 saw a much larger scale pardon process and a restoration of SS members’ civil rights. Heydrich’s widow famously was able to litigate in the FRG courts the right for her access to her husband’s pension, which because he was a general killed in action, was quite large. Career civil servants, often police, whose departments were integrated into the SS were able to argue that they were forced into the organization and should be reinstated. By the 1950s, many of the members of RHSA’s Office V (Criminal Police) had been reinstated and had managed to become part of the FRG’s police system. A number of other SS officials likewise were able to find a role within the resurgent FRG state and economy. Hanns Martin Schleyer, an early joiner of the NSDAP and SS (1933) and lower-level officer climbed the corporate ladder to become the president of two very powerful German industrial organizations. Hans Rössner, who worked for the SD to ensure that German intellectual life was preserved its Volksgesundheit became the director of the prestigious publisher Piper Verlag. Ironically for a man whose duties including purging out ideologically impurities from German arts and letters, Rössner was involved in Piper’s German-publication of Hannah Arendt and pushed back on her manuscript’s dedication to Rosa Luxemburg and overemphasis upon the word Jew in the subtitle of her biography of Rahel Varnhagen. For those ambitious young professionals who gravitated towards the SS, the amnesia that came with amnesty allowed them to selectively edit their biographies in ways that omitted their deeds under the SS.