CHAPTER 5
DRAINING THE POISON
Nations are not only physically damaged by war, occupation, or dictatorship but are morally corrupted too. Political legitimacy is lost. Civic sense is corroded by cynicism. Those who do well in tyrannies are often the least savory and most easily corrupted people. Those who carry most legitimacy, when the transition comes, are very often the most marginal while dictatorship lasts. In World War II this came down to the small number of men and women who joined the active resistance, perilously in countries under occupation, more safely in London, where the various “free” governments continued their pro forma existence in exile.
Resistance, quite deliberately romanticized after the war, played a tiny role in the military defeat of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Violent acts of rebellion, followed by vicious reprisals against innocent citizens, frequently caused more trouble than they were worth, hence the common resentment among more cautious people towards the heroic figures whose actions led to even more savage repression. Of course, resistance has a symbolic value, as a demonstration that all is not lost, that the tyranny can be dented. But the real importance of resistance becomes clear only once the fighting is over. That some people stood firm against all the odds provides a heroic story to societies poisoned by collaboration or simple acquiescence in murderous regimes. Restoration of democracy rests on such stories, for they help to rebuild a sense not just of civic morale but also of political legitimacy for postwar governments. They are the foundation myths of national revival in postwar Europe.
In parts of central and eastern Europe the role of the resistance was more complicated, because there were two tyrannies to resist. Those who saw Stalin as the main enemy sometimes collaborated with the Germans. The most famous resistance hero in Ukraine was Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. When Ukraine finally became independent (1991) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was built up as the father of the fatherland, a kind of Ukrainian George Washington. Bandera statues were erected all over the place, along with Bandera monuments, Bandera shrines, and Bandera museums. But Bandera is hardly a unifying hero, for he came from western Ukraine, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Russian Orthodox eastern Ukraine, Bandera is still regarded as a fascist for siding with the Nazis in 1941. Bandera’s nationalists were also responsible for murdering roughly forty thousand Poles in 1944. The hero himself, after having declared independence from the Germans as well as the Soviets, was in a Nazi concentration camp when this happened. In 1959, living in exile in Munich, he was murdered by an agent of the Soviet KGB.
Things were less complicated in western Europe. The heroic myth was especially important in a country like France, whose bureaucracy, police forces, judiciary, industrial elites, and even many artists and writers were all deeply compromised by the collaborationist regime in Vichy. When General de Gaulle made his defiant radio broadcast from London on June 18, 1940, he was unknown to most people in France. The great father figure of the French patrie was still Marshal Pétain. Few people even heard de Gaulle on the radio declaiming in his halting, but strangely moving delivery: “Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.”
There was, in fact, little resistance in France during the first few years of the war. But de Gaulle came back to France in 1944 as the undisputed symbol of national rectitude, walking tall, in his uniform, at the head of French troops “liberating” Paris after the Allies had overwhelmed the Germans in Normandy. He was actually shot at by pro-Nazi snipers, but he marched on as though nothing was amiss. And so this seemingly untouchable figure was able to form a provisional government until the first postwar elections in October 1945, a government still manned by many Vichyistes and at odds with resistance groups, often led by communists, who distrusted de Gaulle’s aims with some reason, just as he, with equal reason, distrusted theirs. But General de Gaulle bore the proud face of resistance, and so his leadership was regarded as legitimate. He was the man to lift his nation from moral bankruptcy.
Germany and Japan had no heroic symbols or leaders to build on (although something like a heroic myth of “anti-fascism” was cooked up in the communist zone of eastern Germany). The officers who had tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, and paid with their lives, were not yet regarded as heroes by most Germans. And since many of them came from the Prussian military aristocracy, they would have been associated by non-Germans, and many Germans too, with a militarist tradition (“Prussianism”) that was widely blamed for the war. There were some Japanese who had resisted the wartime regime, but they were mostly communists or radical leftists who had spent the war in prison. Opponents of Hitler’s Reich and Japan’s Imperial government had by and large kept their thoughts to themselves, or, in the case of Germany, fled abroad.
But there were some active resisters in Germany, tiny groups of people who risked their lives in almost total isolation. One of them was Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist who joined the “Uncle Emil” resistance group in Berlin. She and her courageous friends had hidden Jews and others from Nazi persecution and secretly distributed anti-Nazi leaflets. Few people who did this kind of thing managed to stay alive. There were certainly not enough people like Andreas-Friedrich to create a national myth of resistance. Yet, once the fighting was over and danger was gone, people still felt a need for some kind of moral redemption. On May 15, 1945, barely surviving in the Russian-occupied ruins of Berlin, Andreas-Friedrich wrote the following words in her diary:
Everywhere feverish political activity. As if there were a rush to make up for twelve years’ lost time. “Antifascist” groups are shooting up like mushrooms. Banners and posters. Notices and signs. At every streetcorner some political group has been formed . . . Not all of these anti-Hitler groups can look back at a long struggle. With some of them resistance began only as Hitler’s ended.1
Although not quite so blatant, similar hypocrisy could be observed in countries liberated from German occupation. But heroic narratives, even in those countries, let alone in Germany or Japan, were not enough to cope with moral collapse. For a postwar order to gain legitimacy, there had to be a purge in the ranks of Nazis, Japanese militarists, and their collaborators. The people responsible for the war, the dictatorships, persecution, slave labor, and mass murder, had to go. But where to start? How to go about it? How to define guilt? Was complicity enough reason to be purged? How to find the guilty? And what were the limits? If every German official who had been a Nazi, or worked with the Nazis, were to be purged, German society, already in tatters, might easily have disintegrated. There had been too many. In Japan, a complete purge of the wartime bureaucracy and political establishment would have left very few Japanese with either the knowledge or the skill to keep a country on the verge of starvation going. Yet something had to happen to make people feel that justice was done.
The oldest and simplest solution to a society gone wrong—apart from just killing the wrongdoers—is banishment. This was suggested by a conservative Christian senator in Belgium when wondering what to do with former collaborators: “If there really is no place in our country to reintegrate these people, wouldn’t it be possible to let them go somewhere else? . . . There are countries, in Latin America, for example, where they could start new lives.”2 This option was indeed taken, albeit secretly, by a number of Nazi mass murderers, but it was hardly a viable government policy. And the idea of expelling all the collaborators of Europe, let alone all the Nazis in Germany, to Latin America was fanciful.
Nevertheless, at the July 1945 conference in Potsdam, the Soviet, British, and American leaders agreed that something radical had to be done to cleanse the defeated nations of their poisonous legacies and rebuild them as democracies that would never go to war again. Both Germany and Japan would be “demilitarized,” and “democratized.” Nazi organizations and police forces would be banned, naturally, but also “all military organizations and all clubs and associations which serve to keep alive the military tradition in Germany.” And, as part of German democratization, “all members of the Nazi party who have been more than nominal participants in its activities and all other persons hostile to Allied purposes shall be removed from public and semipublic office and from positions of responsibility in important private undertakings.”
Where the Soviets and their Western allies differed, of course, was on their idea of what constituted democracy. The other thing left unclear was the distinction, if there was any, between having been a Nazi or a “militarist,” and being “hostile to Allied purposes.” One can, after all, imagine a former Nazi who was quite prepared to work for Allied purposes, or a former anti-Nazi who fiercely disagreed with Allied policies—a communist, say, in the Western zones, or a liberal democrat in the Soviet zone. How to go about the purges also depended on how one viewed the German catastrophe. On this there was more agreement among the great powers. Prussian militarism, or Prussianism, was seen as the main problem; that is what needed to be uprooted. That this was somewhat off the mark became common knowledge only later.
The wording on Japan in Potsdam was a little different: “There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world.”
This, too, was a bit vague and indeed misleading. Is there such a thing as “responsible militarism”? And who exactly had misled whom? General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP), who was for the time being the highest authority in Japan, did not accept Emperor Hirohito’s offer to take responsibility for the war. SCAP, the acronym by which MacArthur was generally known, was convinced that the emperor was needed to avoid chaos, so he was exempted from any guilt.
As the most powerful man in Japan, as well as a consciously contrived great white father figure, MacArthur received many letters from Japanese citizens, some addressing him with a bizarre reverence. The Supreme Commander’s intention was to play the all-powerful shogun to the symbolic Japanese emperor. In a way, however, it was as if he had become a sacred figure himself. “Dear Sir,” went one letter, “when I think of the generous measures Your Excellency has taken instead of exacting vengeance, I am struck with reverent awe as if I were in the presence of God.”3
To many Japanese during the war, the emperor had been a sacred figure. But not to Japanese of a liberal or leftist bent. One letter writer to SCAP, possibly a Christian, wondered why the emperor had not been arrested as a war criminal: “To achieve true legal justice and human righteousness without shame before the world and before God, we ask you to strictly punish the present emperor as a war criminal. If you leave the emperor untouched simply to manipulate the people, then I believe that all the well-meaning policies of the Allied forces will come to naught after you leave.”4
But there were other letters too, which warned of dire consequences should the emperor be touched: “This would obviously bring about the world’s greatest tragedy. It would succeed only after the complete annihilation of the eighty-million Yamato [Japanese] people.”5 The phrase “Yamato” suggests an unreconstructed nationalist. MacArthur decided that this was the type of voice he should heed. As a result, the emperor, in whose name every wartime act, including the most atrocious, was committed, was supposedly “misled” himself. To depart from this narrative in public could lead to serious trouble, and on occasion still can.*
Since Japan had had no equivalent of the Nazi Party, let alone a Hitler, or a coup d’état comparable to what happened in Germany in 1933, instead “militarism,” “ultranationalism,” even “feudalism” were the poisonous weeds that needed to be eradicated. And so, in the words of a U.S. military directive: “Persons who have been active exponents of militarism and militant nationalism will be removed and excluded from public office and from any other positions of public and private responsibility.”6 When it came to propagandists, war criminals, and military leaders, this would be a fairly straightforward enterprise, but it would prove far more challenging to purge the bureaucrats, whose careers went back long before the Pacific War, or businessmen and industrialists who had certainly cooperated with and benefited from Japan’s wartime governments, but in many cases could not be described as militarists or ultranationalists.
The idea that one can cut out “militarism,” “feudalism,” or “Prussianism,” as though they were cancer cells in a human organism, had a wider appeal among Allied officials on the left than among conservatives. This was true also of Germans, Japanese, and citizens in former occupied countries. Since the left, including the communists, had played a dominant role in the resistance in many countries, leftist members of the resistance insisted that postwar societies should be shaped according to their wishes. To them, 1945 was the perfect opportunity for a final reckoning with the military, financial, and political establishments which had collaborated with fascism.
General MacArthur, although a conservative Republican himself, was surrounded in the early years of the Japanese occupation by idealistic lawyers and New Deal reformers who strongly pushed for purges as part of their efforts to democratize Japan. They were not experts with prewar ties to the Japanese elites. There was, in their view, no special need for cultural expertise. Any country could be remade into a democracy, provided it was equipped with the right constitution and helped along by setting up independent trade unions and other progressive measures. The early purges in Japan were supervised by such figures as Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kades, a New Dealer working in SCAP’s Government Section. His boss was Brigadier General Courtney Whitney, a former lawyer in Manila who had the same taste for bombastic rhetoric as his beloved boss: “MacArthur’s philosophy, without precedent in the annals of military occupations of the past, will live as a standard and a challenge to military occupations of the future.”7 Their enemy in SCAP’s byzantine Tokyo court was Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief.
MacArthur liked to refer to Willoughby, born in Germany as Karl von Tscheppe und Weidenbach, as “my pet fascist.” With good reason. A hunting man with a soft voice, silky manners, and a nasty temper, Willoughby had a tendency to see Jewish and communist conspiracies everywhere, including inside the U.S. military administration itself. The French ambassador, too, fell under his suspicion because he happened to have a Russian name. Willoughby enjoyed warmer relations with the conservative courtiers around Emperor Hirohito than with SCAP’s New Dealers. After his retirement in the 1950s, Willoughby moved to Madrid to advise General Francisco Franco, a man he much admired. However, since he was formally in charge of the occupation police, it was Willoughby’s duty to see to the dismissal of public figures he privately approved of. After listening to one of Willoughby’s interminable rants against the purges, Whitney remarked: “I submit that anyone who is so opposed to a program is the wrong man to implement it.”8 And that, it turned out, was that, at least for the time being.
In Germany, the main thinker behind the purges of former Nazis was Franz Neumann, a Marxist who ended up working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Neumann was a Jewish refugee from Germany, where he had made a name before the war as a political theorist and labor lawyer. During his exile in the U.S., he prepared a denazification guide for the U.S. government together with Herbert Marcuse, one of several refugee Marxist scholars associated with the Frankfurt School. The Third Reich, according to their thesis, was a typical case of “totalitarian monopolistic capitalism.”9 Behind the Nazi movement stood the industrialists. Persecution of the Jews had been a maneuver to deflect popular discontent about monopoly capitalism.
Neumann, backed by the top military boss in the American zone, General Lucius Clay, helped to devise the notorious Fragebogen (questionnaire), the 131-point survey every German adult was required to fill out. On the basis of these detailed questions on past affiliations and sympathies, it was hoped, the U.S. military would be able to establish the guilt or innocence of at least twenty-three million people. A typical question would be: “Have you or any members of your family taken possession of property or assets stolen from others on the grounds of faith or race?” Another question concerned membership of university fraternities, as though these had been part of the Nazi apparatus instead of being banned after 1935. In truth, of course, answers were rarely honest. Submissions of the documents were postponed, sometimes forever. Endless appeals were launched. The Allies lacked sufficient staff, or knowledge, to assess the documents. Few Americans even spoke German, let alone read it. An already overwhelmed military administration, formally in charge of rebuilding democracy in Germany, was even further stretched by a new “Law No. 8,” which became effective on December 1.
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, the former resister in Berlin, made a note of this law in her diary, with approval:
Three weeks ago the first measures were taken against Party members. Elimination of all Nazis from prominent positions in industry and commerce. Exclusion of Party members from cultural occupations. Former NSDAP members may only be employed as workers.10
Andreas-Friedrich was sympathetic to the idea of putting old Nazis to work at clearing rubble and other unpleasant menial tasks. But hers was an uncommon perspective, it seems. She recorded what she heard people saying around her: “Unbelievable, this terror! Outrageous, this latest injustice. They can’t put twenty percent of the population under special law.” To which she responded in the privacy of her diary: “But they can! Have they [the Germans] forgotten how easily it can be done? Has it escaped them that these special laws are almost identical to those of eight years ago against the Jews?”11
There was no sympathy for the protesting Germans from her. But the parallel she drew was part of the problem. Excluding people from society under a Nazi regime is one thing, but to do so in order to rebuild a democracy is an altogether trickier proposition. Besides, a simple admission of Party membership did not mean very much. Some 140,000 people lost their jobs, but many were petty officials and opportunists who had joined the Nazis out of fear or ambition, while bigger and more culpable figures remained untouched: the businessmen who didn’t bother to join the Party, but made millions from plundered Jewish assets; the bankers who hoarded gold from the teeth of murdered Jews; the professors who promoted noxious racial theories; the lawyers and judges who meticulously followed the decrees of Hitler’s Reich, prosecuting men and women for subverting the Nazi state or committing “racial shame” by falling in love with someone of an “inferior race.”
Theodor Heuss had been a liberal journalist and politician before the war, and though not an active resister, he had loathed the Nazis. Heuss was the kind of German the Allies felt they could trust. In 1945, the Americans appointed him as Culture Minister of Baden-Württemberg. One of Heuss’s problems was the lack of capable schoolteachers to wean the young from twelve years of Nazi propaganda. His task was made more difficult by the purges. In a desperate letter to the Military Administration, he wrote that in his view only between 10 to 15 percent of the people dismissed in the purges had been convinced Nazis. But so many teachers had been fired that children were being deprived of an education. It would not be difficult, he argued, “to scrape away the brown veneer” from older teachers, educated before the Third Reich, and “reawaken their powers of good.” He begged the authorities for their confidence: “We promise to deliver the teachers from Nazism and to make them agents of new and better ideas, enabling them to educate youth in the right spirit.”12 He was turned down.
Carl Zuckmayer, who returned to Germany from his American exile to write a report for the U.S. War Department, argued that the American purges were so clumsy, and so often missed the real targets, that there was a danger of denazification leading to renazification. German conservatives saw denazification as a socialist plot. They believed that the Allied authorities deliberately favored German radicals, who were keen to purge every city and town of anyone who could be tarred with the fascist brush. Zuckmayer tells a joke he heard in Austria about a man who went to the local police station to have his name registered. Why would he want to do that? asked the policeman. Because I’m a Nazi, replied the man. Then you should have registered with us a year ago, said the officer. To which the man replied: A year ago I was not yet a Nazi.13
By the time this joke went the rounds, much of the task of sifting ex-Nazis from the supposedly innocent had been handed over, out of sheer necessity, to German committees. This move was formalized in the “Law for Liberation from National-Socialism and Militarism.” It turned into a farce. German politicians had little enthusiasm for further purges. Purging committees, supposedly peopled by radical revolutionaries, were in fact often filled with former Nazis. Catholic priests warned that it was sinful for Germans to offer damaging evidence against their compatriots. Local bigwigs who had made fortunes during the Third Reich paid their way out of trouble, often by producing some pathetic survivor of Nazi persecution as a favorable witness. The key word of this period, starting in 1946, was Persilschein, Persil being a “whitewashing” laundry detergent. Countless ex-Nazis received their Persil document washing out every speck of brown dirt from their recent past. Certificates showing that one had been a former prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp could be bought on the black market; not cheap at twenty-five thousand deutsche marks, but affordable to many a former SS officer.
Things were little better in the eastern half of Germany, despite communist claims that the purges in the “democratic zone” had been a great success. In the late spring of 1945, the kind of German “antifascist” committees described by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich were put in charge of the purges. They were disbanded in the early summer when the German Communist Party (KPD) took over. In theory, purges were indeed more rigorous than in the Western zones. The foundation myth of the German Democratic Republic, after all, would be its proud history of “antifascism”; this was the “better Germany,” the Germany of resistance. Yet this myth was muddled by the assumption of German collective guilt, of a deep-seated Teutonic disease, which obsessed the communists. Some of their own rhetoric seems to have been infected by this German virus. The KPD demanded the total “liquidation” of the remnants of the Hitler regime.14 In one Brandenburg town, ex-Nazis were forced to pin swastikas onto their clothes. There was much talk of severe punishment. The district magistrate of another locality warned: “The Nazis will be handled the same way they handled us, that is: hard. We will force the slackers to work and if need be stick them in a camp . . . By next year we want a Germany purged of Nazis [Nazirein].”15
Still, despite all these hard measures, the purges were almost as inadequate in eastern Germany as they were in the “capitalist zones.” Distinctions between “active” and “nominal” Nazis were supposed to be enforced, but often proved to be elusive. The Soviets soon grew tired of this distinction and ordered all former Nazi Party members to be dismissed from government posts, a task to be concluded in a few months—an impossibility, of course. They didn’t trust the Germans to handle the purges anyway, and never gave them proper guidelines. There was indeed reason for distrust in this matter. Many Germans refused to cooperate because it soon turned out that too much purging would lead to a collapse in education, social services, or any semblance of economic recovery. And so, Germans in Leipzig and Dresden, as much as in Munich or Cologne, found excuses to reinstate ex-Nazis in their old jobs, or shield ex-Nazis from prosecution. Even the Soviet authorities connived in this, when purges threatened to upset production quotas in factories under their control. Most “small” Nazis were comfortably absorbed into the Communist Party, whose authoritarian ways they would not have found unfamiliar. Files were kept on the more important former Nazis in case they should turn out to be troublesome.
The dilemma was the same in all zones. You couldn’t really gut the German elites, however distasteful they may have been, and hope to rebuild the country at the same time, no matter whether that country was to be a communist or a capitalist one. Very quickly the Allies saw economic recovery as a more important aim than restoring a sense of justice, albeit for opposite reasons. The Soviets wanted to rebuild their “antifascist” Germany as a buffer against capitalist imperialism; the United States, Britain, and their allies needed “their” Germany as a democratic bastion against communism.
General Patton’s views in 1945 on denazification and former Nazis—that “this Nazi thing is just like a Democratic and Republican election fight” and that “we will need these people”—were historically crude and, so far as his own career was concerned, expressed too soon. Eisenhower had to fire him as military governor of Bavaria. But he was indiscreet rather than eccentric in his opinions. A year after Germany’s defeat and the initial purges, most American officials took Patton’s view. The British, in particular, had found the American keenness to punish the Germans ridiculous and counterproductive from the beginning. Con O’Neill, a Foreign Office official with total contempt for what he called “low-level zealots,” had this to say about Law No. 8’s stipulation excluding all Nazi Party members from anything but menial work: “As an example of systematic and meticulous imbecility, it would be hard to beat.”16
The story of Hermann Josef Abs is instructive. Compared to other businessmen and industrialists, his crimes as a banker during the Third Reich might appear to be minor. Unlike Alfried Krupp, say, he did not employ women and children to be worked to death as slaves. Nor was he a personal friend of Himmler’s, like Friedrich Flick, whose coal and steel empire was a particularly brutal exploiter of concentration camp labor. Abs wasn’t even a Nazi Party member and SS officer, as were Wilhelm Zangen, chairman of Mannesmann in Düsseldorff, or Otto Ohlendorff, economic bureaucrat and leader of a murder squad in Ukraine.
Abs never got his own hands dirty. As a native Rhinelander he felt nothing but disdain for the Prussian military spirit. A suave Catholic Anglophile with fluent English who had worked for Jewish banks before the war and been a good friend of Sigmund Warburg, Abs would most probably never have had anything to do with the Nazis if he hadn’t happened to be a highly ambitious German technocrat in the 1930s. But Abs was a director of the Deutsche Bank, and had enriched his concern by “Aryanizing” Jewish firms. Apart from handling Hitler’s private account, Abs was also the banker for companies such as Siemens, Krupp, and I.G. Farben, which built vast slave camps around Auschwitz. Abs may not have acted out of vulgar ideological zeal. In fact, he almost certainly didn’t. But without men like Abs, Hitler’s criminal enterprise would have been a great deal less efficient.
When Abs was bundled into a British jeep after being found at the house of an aristocratic friend in June 1945, he feared the worst. Instead of finding himself in jail, however, he was ushered into one of the few hotels in Hamburg left standing, where his old friend from the City of London, a banker named Charles Dunston, greeted him with great warmth. Dunston had done business in Germany before the war, and rather admired the uniformed strutting of the Nazi movement. “It was like old times,” Dunston recalled about their friendly reunion. “I didn’t ask him about the war. It didn’t matter.” Abs excused his appearance, explaining the lack of proper shaving gear. But he looked just the same to Dunston: “Not a hair out of place. I immediately asked him whether he would help us rebuild the German banking system. Happily he agreed.”17
Things did not go entirely as planned. The Americans, despite British protestations, still insisted that Abs should be arrested as a suspected war criminal. But once he was locked up in jail, Abs refused to give the British further financial advice unless he were released. It took the British three months to convince the U.S. authorities to let him go.
Alfried Krupp, who met his American captors in the hall of his country estate in Essen with the words “This is my house, what are you doing here?” was put on trial in Nuremberg. As was the industrialist Friedrich Flick. When the British came to arrest Baron Georg von Schnitzler, director of I.G. Farben, responsible for slave labor in Auschwitz, among other things, he greeted them suavely, dressed in a golfing outfit cut from the finest Scottish tweed. It was such a pleasure, he declared, to be free once more to resume his old friendships with Lord X and Lord Y, as well as the Du Ponts of Wilmington, Delaware. They were such wonderful friends and it had been most painful to be cut off from them in the last few years.18 He was sentenced to five years for “plunder and spoliation.” Schnitzler returned to business and society after one year. Krupp was sentenced to twelve years for slave labor, and served three. Flick, too, was released from the comfort of Landsberg Prison after serving three years of his seven-year sentence. During his time in captivity, Flick had sought and received financial advice from Hermann Abs, who went on to take a leading role in the reconstruction of West Germany, sitting on the boards of the Deutsche Bank, Daimler-Benz, and Lufthansa, among many other companies. When control of the Krupp company was transferred to a foundation in the 1960s, one of the main supervisors of this transaction was Hermann Abs.