IN THE wake of Holocaust Memorial Day, it is perhaps useful to be reminded that Germany’s Nazi past is far from overcome. 

Since German unification, over 30 years ago, there has been a deliberate and ongoing attempt to rewrite history, with the GDR portrayed as the twin evil of Nazism. 

There has been a largely successful attempt to prettify the reputation of the Federal Republic as the country that came to terms with its Nazi past, confronting and dealing with the evil of that period. 

The GDR, on the other hand, has been demonised as a state that did not confront Germany’s Nazi past but simply imposed another totalitarian system on its population.  

The fact is, though, that the GDR successfully eradicated top Nazis and countered Nazi indoctrination. 

In the West, apart from a few of the most culpable, tens of thousands of Nazis were given their jobs back not long after the war ended. 

While in the former GDR thousands of academics were removed from their positions by people with a Nazi past; Marxists were not to be tolerated in the new Germany.

The way the GDR was treated reflected that Nazi legacy and the residual hatred of the West German elite for communists and Marxists.

Some felt after unification in 1990 that there would be a light of hope for better times beyond state socialism and market radicalism. 

The implosion of state socialism in central and eastern Europe opened up a huge space for social-ecological and democratic change but the opportunity was squandered. 

The case of Professor Wilhelm Krelle case is perhaps an extreme example of the brutal dismantling of the GDR that took place in 1990 but it is symptomatic of the way the rulers of a now united Germany treated the former GDR. 

Krelle was made chairman of the structural and appointment committee for the “renewal” of the faculty of economics at Humboldt University and as its new dean, following unification. 

In this role, he was responsible for the dismissal of 90 per cent of all those who worked there as academics. 

Of the total of 782 professors at Humboldt University, 644, or 82.6 per cent, lost their jobs. 

Among them were many with high international reputations. A study from 2016 found that of a total of 1,099 leadership positions examined in east Germany, only 249, ie only 23 per cent, were held by East Germans — 26 years after East Germany became part of the Federal Republic. 

This process, though, happened in all institutions, factories and public bodies in the eastern Germany. 

The power elites of the old Federal Republic imposed their will throughout the territory of the former GDR. 

An entire generation of GDR citizens had their qualifications devalued or disregarded in what was termed “changing of the elite.” This was a witch-hunt in McCarthyite style.

At first glance, Prof Krelle’s academic reputation might have made him seem a suitable candidate for “liberating” GDR economists from some of their dogmas. 

Krelle (1916-2004) was a Rockefeller fellow at Harvard and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he held a professorship in Bonn, held six honorary doctorate titles and was the recipient of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. 

But what had been carefully hidden from public view was that Krelle also had other “qualifications” — a career in Hitler’s Wehrmacht and the SS. 

From August 5 1944, after attending the War Academy and serving as a cadre of the elite Fuhrer Reserve, Krelle was assigned to the general staff of the XIII SS Army Corps with the rank of major. 

He was responsible, among other things, for counterintelligence and for tracking down deserters and fighting partisans.

Previously, Krelle had belonged to the notorious 164th Infantry Division of the XXX Army Corps, which was involved in war crimes such as massacres of defenceless civilians in Greece. 

From August 1943, he was the highest-ranking officer after the divisional commander in the 305th Infantry Division of the LXXXVI Army Corps. 

This man was then given the moral authority for weeding out GDR academics.

Krelle had always denied having been a member of the SS, asserting that he had been “commandeered” there from the Wehrmacht, not “transferred” with his consent. 

When students at Berlin’s Humboldt University tracked down his war record in the mid-1990s and made it public, the university senate felt compelled to set up a committee of inquiry. 

It concluded that, “Prof Krelle was transferred to a general command of the Waffen-SS in August 1944 without having left the Wehrmacht, and that he was almost certainly not a member of the SS.” 

This is not only splitting hairs, but a denial of the truth. 

An order given by Krelle on January 26 1945, shortly before the end of the war, stands as clear evidence of his views: “The German task of protecting European culture from the Asiatic steppes is now coming to the fore once again … against the flood of a Bolshevik advance stand German units offering fierce resistance … fulfilling their duty, as demanded by the Reichsführer in his new year’s message.”

Today, Bjorn Hocke, a leader of the extreme right-wing party, Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD), laments the “brutal displacement of Germans from their ancestral settlement territories” by the “onrushing Asians,” the “Africanisation of Europe” and by Islamists, and he calls for getting rid of the “official compulsion to remember” the victims of Hitler’s Germany, which is developing into “downright national self-hatred.”

SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Krelle who, in formulating his daily orders, proved himself to be an ardent Hitler supporter, found 170 academics in the Humbold University’s economics faculty unacceptable in a democratic German state because they had not “distanced themselves from the GDR system.” 

In his inaugural speech as founding dean of the new faculty of economics, he insisted that “no Marxist will set foot over the threshold of this institution as long as I am in charge.”

It is an insult to all the many victims of Nazism that such a man was allowed to make moral judgments about GDR academics.

Dr Hans Schmidt was one of those lecturers who, although widely respected in both east and west, was dismissed by Krelle from his job at the Humboldt. 

The progressive author Daniela Dahn wrote that “Schmidt could not bear the fact that the historical roots of that anti-communism, which had been the guiding principle behind the liquidation of GDR institutions, remained completely hidden. 

“By jumping from the 13th floor of his apartment building, Schmidt, who had long been severely disabled, took his own life.”

Even after Krelle’s hidden record became public, the management of the Humboldt University saw no reason to deny him the honorary doctorate awarded in recognition of his services to the free-market reformulation of economics at the university. 

With thanks to Jurgen Rambaum, whose book Der Fall Wilhelm Krelle (The Case of Wilhelm Krelle) and the article by Prof Dieter Klein in the German newspaper Neues Deutschland (January 25 2021).