FDP poster, Munich, 1949

FDP poster

Video Gebärdensprache

Audio Text

This poster was part of the 1948 election campaign for the first West German Bundestag by the FDP – the Free Democratic Party.

The term ‘Entnazifizierung’ – ‘denazification’ – describes, in brief, the efforts by the Allies in the post-war years to remove the perpetrators and thus the Nazi ideology from German society and its public life. Initially, the conditions for such a process seemed to be favourable. At the end of the war, much of Germany’s population blamed decision-makers in the Nazi state, the Nazi organisations and not least in the SS for what had happened. Many now saw precisely these people as guilty – for the suffering during the war, the many nights of bombing, and for hunger, deportations and expulsions – and wanted them punished.

The atmosphere changed when the Allies began to require each adult to give an individual account of their own involvement in the regime. In the American zone of occupation, a questionnaire was used to establish where each person had lived, worked, and fought, and to which organisations people had belonged. With that, a time of denial and repression began. Empathy for those who had suffered persecution was in short supply. Instead, there was growing sympathy for the perpetrators, some of whom were imprisoned in Germany or still held in war captivity. Only a minority continued to warn of the need to learn from history to ensure such events could never happen again.