Funding: Alfred Landecker Stiftung
After 1945, the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, VVN) was the largest organization of former Nazi persecutees in Germany; in its framework various groups represented their goals and demands. As tensions between East and West increased in the wake of the emerging Cold War, the VVN quickly lost its backing in politics and society, many members resigned, and the Communists became a dominant force. Occupational bans and prohibition proceedings followed, and the State Security cracked down on the association with all its force. In the GDR, the VVN became a victim of the late Stalinist and anti-Semitic party purges – and was dissolved in 1953. Despite the completely different political constellations, organized Nazi persecutees in both East and West Germany experienced being treated as disruptive factors in post-Nazi societies.
In West Germany, the VVN was both a victim and an actor of the conflict between the two Germanys from 1950 onward. But it also remained an audible antagonist of the Federal Republic’s politics of the past. The image of the anti-fascist resistance and the Nazi persecutees popularized by the VVN concealed the experiences of the Holocaust; at the same time, the VVN was one of the few forces to address the anti-Semitism still prevalent in German society.
The aim of the research project is to provide an empirically informed account of the history of the VVN, its impacts on German (memory) politics, and its political environment, which was shaped by the Cold War. The study focusses on the first postwar decades until the end of the 1960s. It examines how the conflicts of the Cold War and the disputes over the Nazi past interacted and what this meant for the formerly persecuted and the memory of Nazi crimes in Germany. An approach based on the history of memory and of experience will be combined with an analysis of political and social conditions.
