After the People's Community: The Formation of SS Communities in 1950s West Germany and Austria

This paper argues that the 1950’s represented a transitional moment for former National-Socialists living in West Germany and Austria, as they grappled with the Third Reich’s dissolution, and tried to accommodate themselves to a world predicated on liberal democratic principles anathema to the Nazi project. One of the primary ways in which former SS men navigated this transition was through the formation of communities and networks on the basis of their shared identity as former National-Socialists. These SS organizations—numbering over three dozen in West Germany and Austria alone—represented an attempt by former SS members to forge an intimate, local community in which they could feel immersed on a quotidian basis, while also situating themselves within an impersonal and global network of SS members living across the world. Former SS members turned to these communities and networks in the 1950s, in their search for normality, that is, in order to rebuild their material (mostly bourgeois) lives, and reintegrate into mainstream postwar society. At the same time, former SS men also designed their communities to furnish a rarified space—a kind of protected universe—that in their minds stood above and alongside the people and institutions of “mainstream” West German and Austrian society. An exploration of SS experience within these communities should bring into sharper focus the integration, or alternatively the dissolution, of certain National-Socialist institutions and mentalities within the context of the postwar liberal democratic order, in addition to appraising former National-Socialists’ relative embrace of liberal democracy in the decade after the Third Reich’s collapse.