Race and Antifascist Memory Politics in East Germany, 1945–49

As communist policymakers took power in the Soviet Occupied Zone of Germany, one of the first orders of the day was to rehabilitate those who had been targeted by Nazi oppression. If the moral imperative to make amends for Nazism was clear, the way to go about it raised a variety of questions. Who deserved recognition as a victim, and what form should that recognition take? Most scholars have focused on communism’s class-colored ideological lens to explain why officials in did not recognize the special suffering of Jews under Nazism. As these scholars show, because communist ideology understood fascism primarily in terms of class rather than race, Jews as a group did not receive commensurate recognition for the racial persecution they endured.

This paper shows that, ironically, the East German Communist Party (SED) reserved such recognition not for Jews but for Sorbs, a small, Slavic-speaking minority. Sorbs did suffer under Nazi racism, but they of course did not experience the same level of persecution as Jews. Yet Sorbs, rather than Jews, became the beneficiaries of the SED’s early postwar efforts to atone for’s racist past. By comparing discourses over Jews and Sorbs in the immediate postwar period, this paper recasts the scholarly assumption that communist ideology led the SED to play down Nazi racism. Early postwar communists did focus on Nazi racism, but their efforts to make amends for’s racist past focused on Nazi anti-Slavic measures more than on anti-Semitism. Pragmatic, transnational Cold War concerns, more than ideology, help explain a policy that would diminish the suffering of a group that so clearly was the main target of Nazi genocide.