Von der Säuberung" zum Generalpardon: Die Entnazifizierung der westdeutschen Wirtschaft

Immediately following World War II, the allied occupational powers started a process of "denazifying" West German business in more or less the same way as the political and administrative apparatus. Initial approaches to solve the task by a radical purge of highly incriminated company managers soon gave way to more extensive investigations of party members and Nazi sympathizers also on lower ranks. Denazification escalated into bureaucratic mass procedures and finally ended up in various forms of amnesty and pardon in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A key feature in this process was the successively growing participation of German actors like various commissions, chambers of commerce and the companies themselves. On the one hand, comprehensive investigation and punishment under a re-installed rule of law had to rely upon cooperation of German actors and their expertise on the reality of the Nazi past; on the other hand, the integration of business itself into denazification procedures allowed company managers to benefit from informational advantages. Focussing the interaction between denazification authorities and business in the three West German zones of occupation, the article argues that under the general conditions of economic reconstruction and democratization the degeneration from purge to pardon was hardly avoidable, but that nevertheless the effects of temporary punishments should not be underestimated.