Denazification was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War. It was carried out by removing those who had been Nazi Party or SS members from positions of power and influence, by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with Nazism, and by trying prominent Nazis for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials of 1946. The program of denazification was launched after the end of the war and was solidified by the Potsdam Agreement in August 1945. The term denazification was first coined as a legal term in 1943 by the U.S. Pentagon, intended to be applied in a narrow sense with reference to the post-war German legal system. However, it later took on a broader meaning.
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
was a Norwegian newspaper editor, a politician with the Norwegian Labour Party, and Nazi concentration camp survivor. He served as the 26th prime minister of Norway from 1971 to 1972 and again from 1973 to 1976. He was president of the Nordic Council in 1978.
Horst Sindermann was a Communist German politician and one of the leaders of East Germany. He became Chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1973, but in 1976 he became President of the Volkskammer, the only member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany to hold the post.
Mittelbau-Dora was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany, for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners.
Antonín Zápotocký was a Czech communist politician and statesman who served as the prime minister of Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1953 and the president of Czechoslovakia from 1953 to 1957.
Braunbuch — Kriegs- und Naziverbrecher in der Bundesrepublik: Staat - Wirtschaft - Verwaltung - Armee - Justiz - Wissenschaft is a book written by Albert Norden in 1965. In this book Norden claimed that 1,800 politicians and other prominents in West Germany held prominent positions in Germany prior to 1945.
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners throughout World War II. Prominent prisoners included Joseph Stalin's oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; assassin Herschel Grynszpan; Paul Reynaud, the penultimate prime minister of the French Third Republic; Francisco Largo Caballero, prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War; the wife and children of the crown prince of Bavaria; Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera; and several enemy soldiers and political dissidents.
Olga Benário Prestes was a German-Brazilian communist militant executed by Nazi Germany.
Marcel Paul was a French trade unionist and communist politician. He was also a Nazi concentration camp survivor and later served as a member of the French parliament.
As with many Soviet-allied countries prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the government of the former German Democratic Republic applied censorship during its existence from 1949 to 1990. The censorship was practised through a hierarchical but unofficial censorship apparatus, ultimately controlled by the ruling party (SED). Through censorship, the socialist point of view on society was ensured in all forms of literature, arts, culture and public communication. Due to the lack of an official censorship apparatus, censorship was applied locally in a highly structured and institutionalized manner under the control of the SED.
Neues Deutschland is a left-wing German daily newspaper, headquartered in Berlin.
Erich Mückenberger was a German socialist politician. He began his political career in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) when the East German branches of SPD and the Communist Party of Germany merged after the Second World War. Mückenberger was one of the most high-ranking former Social Democrats in the German Democratic Republic and held several positions in the SED.
After the end of World War II Germany was separated into nation-states. Each nation-state was governed by a different country because officials could not agree on peace terms. The Soviet Union had claimed the eastern portion of the country. In 1947, the "German People's Congress for Unity and Just Peace" met in Berlin. The Congress was to take the demands of all the occupied zones, and create a peace treaty which would enact a centralized German government. In order to have their nation-state properly represented, the Soviets created the German Democratic Republic in 1949 when they officially approved their constitution in May.
Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. Eighty-five percent were from other races and cultures. More than 80% were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave labor by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
Pyotr Andreievitch Abrasimov was a Soviet war hero and politician who became a career diplomat. He served his country as ambassador successively in China, France, Poland and East Germany.
Olga Körner was a German political activist and a co-founder of the proletarian women's movement in Dresden. Between 1930 and 1933 she sat as a member of the national parliament ("Reichstag").
Rosa Jochmann was an Austrian resistance activist and Ravensbrück concentration camp survivor who became a politician (SPÖ).
Käthe Niederkirchner was a German Communist resistance activist who was fatally shot by Nazi paramilitaries on the night of 27/28 September 1944 at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Hermann Carl Hagen was a German banker, bank archivist, and economist who was murdered during the Holocaust at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
