Ordinary people, extraordinary times: classifying Nazis and anti-Nazis in America-occupied Germany

How do institutions classify collaborators and resisters of fascistic regimes? How do they do so especially during unsettled and turbulent times? Drawing on more than 100 biographies collected in the American Occupied Zone after World War II as part of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS’) efforts to de-nazify the German communication sector, the study illustrated the considerations that were made in differentiating between Germans. The effort to create a classification system was led by an American psychiatrist at Columbia university, who, through a series of interviews, created the category of ‘Anti-Nazis’ - meaning non-Jewish Germans who could have affiliated with the Nazi regime and nevertheless stood against it – to stand in contrast with that of the Nazi. Ori showed the factors that had the most impact in the classification process included not only political affiliations and actions during the war, but Freudian personality assessments and upbringing. The findings shed light on the complexities of classifying responses to fascistic regimes in post-war contexts.

 

Ori Gilboa is a Ph.D. Student at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, with a collaborative specialization in Jewish Studies. She is interested in the social processes of political violence and atrocities, with a particular focus on their aftermath. Her current research concerns institutional categorizations of political threats during unsettled times.