Loyalties Reconfigured: Treason, Cold War Mobilization, and Public Security in Postwar Germany

The Cold War division of Germany prompted the realignment of political loyalties along ideological lines. Underneath this process, however, legacies of the Nazi period governed the ideological mobilization of East and West German societies. While the Socialist Unity Party (SED) hunted traitors in its own ranks and former Nazi party members, public security frameworks in the early Federal Republic outlawed communist beliefs in the tradition of anti-Bolshevik mobilization during the Second World War. This paper explores how political elites in both German states forged new parameters of loyalty to the state. In this process, resistance to the Third Reich became inscribed with starkly differing political meanings during the immediate postwar years. In the Federal Republic, conservatives branded social democrats and communists who had worked against the Nazis a danger to public security. Using the first amendment to the penal code in 1951, the redrafted West German treason paragraph targeted opponents of the Third Reich. They were now seen as Moscow's fifth column. In the emerging German Democratic Republic (GDR), the SED leadership unleashed a hunt for traitors as well. The inner circle of SED leaders, who had spent the war in Moscow, viewed communists who had worked underground against the Third Reich with suspicion. In enforcing party discipline and solidifying the grip of the SED on the GDR, many former underground communists faced accusations of having informed against their comrades. The ideological division of Germany soon added another threat to these wartime legacies. The specter of espionage accelerated the implementation of harsh treason legislation in both states and disciplined both societies along Cold War front lines. By exploring how notions of treason were instrumentalized to forge wartime loyalties into postwar political allegiances, this paper argues that resistance was called into question as a source of postwar legitimacy in divided Germany.