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6 April 2022

What the Nazis did next

Danny Orbach’s intriguing book Fugitives details how former Third Reich officers sold their services to the West – and turned up the heat of the Cold War.

By William Boyd

A couple of years ago I was writing a six-part, Cold War spy-thriller for television that was set in Berlin in 1961, during the summer months before the Berlin Wall suddenly divided the city on Sunday 13 August. In one scene the protagonist, a British spy, visits an old-soldiers’ club while trying to track down an ex-Wehrmacht officer. Unthinkingly, I wrote something like: “CUT TO – a group of elderly men in their 60s.” Then, I thought, no – that’s far too old. In 1961 the Second World War had only been over for 16 years. These “old soldiers” would barely be middle-aged. It was an intriguing thought-experiment and it made me reconsider the whole immediate postwar demographic of Germany.

In the 1960s, let alone the 1950s, any German male in his thirties or forties could easily be assumed to have participated in the German war effort to one degree or another – whether as honest citizens, soldiers or more sordid, evil apparatchiks. What happened to all those survivors of the defeated and demobilised German armed forces? What happened to the former members of the SD, the SS and the Gestapo? Very few were captured, tried and punished. Most – it stands to reason – quietly blended back in to postwar German society. It is estimated that at the end of the conflict in 1945 the Nazi party had around 8.5 million members. Only a tiny percentage were hunted down and prosecuted. What happened to the millions of others?

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