SS Veteran Associations and the Discontents of West German Democracy

This paper examines the relationship between civic associations and fascist ideologies in postwar West Germany. In the 1950s, a vast associational culture flourished, instituted in large part as a means of reverse-engineering fascist social structures. Following neo-Tocquevillian models that positioned a strong yet independent civil society as a bulwark against authoritarianism, and in recognition of the Nazis’ formation of the People’s Community (Volksgemeinschaft) via the dissolution of associations (Vereine), liberal intellectuals, politicians, and civilians lionized associations as a bedrock of democratization, and as a bulwark against fascist reinvigoration. But this interpretation of civil society as a safeguard against Nazism was complicated by the proliferation of Nazi veteran associations in the postwar era. Beginning in the 1950s, former SS members banded together to form a constellation of local, national, and even international veteran Vereine. These SS organizations, numbering more than four dozen, served a twofold purpose: to help SS men establish a means to a livelihood, and to forge a continuous sense of self across the threshold of defeat in WWII. By focusing on the place of SS veteran associations in postwar West Germany and Austria, this paper evaluates the threat that Nazi associations posed to West German democracy. Did the presence of SS associations threaten or bolster German denazification and democratization? I conclude that the integration of SS veteran organizations into mainstream associational culture precluded SS veterans from embracing a revanchist political agenda that sought to dismantle democratic institutions and reinstitute a fascist state. However, the accommodation of SS veterans’ organizations also meant allowing SS members to have a visible, continuous presence in the postwar public sphere. The Nazi past, in other words, came to have an embodied and persistent place in everyday West German life.