Although the details and parameters varied between the Allies, the decision to liquidate all NSDAP-affiliated organizations had coalesced before any Allied troops had occupied German territory. In September 1944, the Civil Affairs Division (CAD), an American civilian agency tasked with planning for the occupation, issued a supplement to SHAEF's Handbook for military government. CAD's third proviso outlined the formal disestablishment of the NSDAP, stating:

The Nazi Party and all subsidiary organizations shall be dissolved. The administrative machinery of certain dissolved Nazi organizations may be used when necessary to provide certain essential functions as relief, health, and sanitation.

The September addenda were part of a larger consensus among Allied planners that the reform of Germany required more than just a purging of top-level Party personnel and leaders. JCS 1067, the blueprint for the American occupation flatly declared these organizations formally dissolved by Allied fiat. Such concord transected the Allies and one of the major provisos of the Potsdam Declaration in August 1945 was an announcement that the NSDAP and its organs had been liquidated. The subsequent Allied Control Council, a form of collective leadership between the four Allied military governments, issued a series of directives that defined the scale and prohibitions of the former Party. Organizations like the SS became branded as criminal organizations and membership constituted punishment ranging from fines and a loss of civil rights for a probationary period to facing Allied tribunals for war crimes.

Decrees are one thing, and implementing them is another. For many Germans on the ground, the disestablishment of NSDAP organizations was not done by Allied accord, but by many top Nazis either fleeing their posts or committing suicide with the advance of Allied troops. One of the ironies of the war's terminal stages, and one that fed into Germans' postwar narratives of victimization, was that various Party organizations often turned on the civilian population while they were in the process of self-destruction. Party officials simultaneously prepared to save their own skin or escape justice while meting out capital punishments for shirking or other forms of surrender. By April 1945, the various Party apparatus was a headless snake that often disintegrated of its own accord, rendering some of the Allied decrees moot.

The Party was much more than its leadership though, and the various Allied denazification procedures were designed to screen out potential NSDAP loyalists for the new Germany. These procedures varied by occupation zone and largely failed by their own standards. Part of the problem had to do with the structure of denazification itself. The various tribunals and courts were largely run by vetted German staff and Fragebogen (questionnaires) also relied upon self-reported political activity. The denazification tribunals were often understaffed and by delegating to locals, it ensured that local patronage and social networks meant that connected individuals could evade the strictures of denazification. The various denazification procedures also were not set up to investigate professionals or other groups "coordinated" into the state and political apparatus of the Third Reich. The interzonal boundaries as well as the mobile civilian population meant that applicants could move into different zones for a more favorable absolution of their activities. The endemic corruption and incompetence of denazification also meant that many Germans resented a system that allowed the big fish through while the minnows fried. But part of the problem with denazification also stemmed from the Allied military governments. The emerging Cold War as well as the pragmatic need to get Germany running again meant most military governors made denazification a much lower priority and ignored their shortcomings. The result was that the phrase Persilschein had become something of a black joke in Germany by 1947, signifying a shallow and cosmetic washing away of a Nazi past (to explain the joke- Persil is a German laundry detergent that could wash the brown out).

So there was a curious situation in both Germanies by 1950. Although many Nazi organizations had been dissolved and a few of its leaders were dead or in jail, many of the personnel that staffed these organizations had more or less returned to society. One egregious example was that FRG intelligence agencies often used SS and RSHA veterans as freelancers and later full-blown members of the intelligence community. Membership in the Party was seldom a barrier to professional career advancement, especially in the FRG. The GDR often prided itself on having no former Nazis in positions of power like Hans Globke (Adenauer's right-hand man and author of the Nuremberg Laws), but there were a considerable number of former Party officials in the lower- and mid-level professions. The GDR's MfS knew of these individuals' pasts and used it to blackmail them as inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial collaborator/IM) to spy on the wider population in the 1950s. Thus while organizations like the SS had been dissolved, a good chunk of their membership remained intact and alive.

Sources

Hayse, Michael R. Recasting West German Elites: Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse between Nazism and Democracy, 1945-1955. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003.

Tent, James F. Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Vogt, Timothy R. Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany: Brandenburg, 1945-1948. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2000.

Ziemke, Earl F. The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany: 1944-1946. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1975.