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"In the wake of the Second World War, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical programme to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, twenty million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans in positions of influence who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by idealistic university professors and social scientists, these surveys came to define much of the denazification experience and were immensely consequential to the material and emotional recovery of Germans. In Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany, Mikkel Dack draws the curtain to reveal what denazification looked like on the ground and in practice and how the highly criticised vetting programme impacted the lives of individual Germans and their families as they recovered from dictatorship and war. Accessing recently declassified documents, this book challenges traditional interpretations by recounting a more comprehensive history of denazification, one of mid-level planners, civil affairs soldiers, and regular German citizens. The Fragebogen functions as a window into this everyday history"--

In the wake of the Second World War, the victorious Allied armies distributed twenty million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, to anxious Germans who hoped to prove their non-Nazi status and gain employment. This grassroots history illuminates the Allied screening campaign and provides a comprehensive history of denazification.

As part of the post-war denazification campaign, as many as 20 million
Germans were screened for employment by Allied armies. Applicants
were ordered to fill out political questionnaires (Fragebögen) and allowed to justify their membership in Nazi organizations in appended statements. This mandatory act of self-reflection has led to the accumulation of a massive archival repository, likely the largest collection of autobiographical writings about the Third Reich. This article interprets individual and family stories recorded in denazification documents and provides insight into how Germans chose to remember and internalize the National Socialist years. The Fragebögen allowed and even encouraged millions of respondents to rewrite their personal histories and to construct whitewashed identities and accompanying narratives to secure employment. Germans embraced the unique opportunity to cast themselves as resisters and victims of the Nazi regime. These identities remained with them after the dissolution of the denazification project and were carried forward into the post-occupation period.

During the closing months of the Second World War, as the Red Army advanced on Berlin, a series of violent crimes swept across the Eastern Front. Soviet soldiers brutalized the German civilians they encountered, conducting a vengeful campaign of torture, rape, and murder. Despite the severity of these crimes, the attention that this topic has drawn from the academic community has been minimal. Due to political and social attitudes, including the widely accepted belief that the Germans were the sole perpetrators of war crimes, this imperative topic was relegated to a footnote of scholarly and public interest. The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era of historical analysis, as Soviet and East German archives were opened and scholarly research encouraged. In light of this amendment in attitude, recent historians have undertaken valuable reassessments, developed constructive arguments, and formulated insightful questions, questions which have since dominated this area of study and have initiated further analysis. Such questions include: Why did these crimes occur and why were they of such a brutal nature? How are "Nazi victims" to be perceived? And, how should blame and responsibility for such atrocities be dealt with? Although these questions have helped to advance the study of this once neglected topic there is still much room for scholarly expansion.