Germany is no example for ex-dictatorships

Timothy Garton Ash's claim that Germany sets an example of how to deal with the aftermath of a dictatorship is absurd ( Comment , 17 March). Indeed, he admits that de-nazification "stopped abruptly" when West Germany became independent. It was worse than that: the Adenauer government had a deliberate policy of rehiring Nazis who had been purged by the allied occupation authorities. The vast majority of German war criminals got away with it, and drew comfortable pensions for their crimes. Companies like Krupp that had been the engine of the Third Reich were equally important in the Federal Republic. Garton Ash ignores the most obvious difference between the postwar German situation and those now arising: unpopular dictators are now being overthrown by their own people. Hitler was very popular with the Germans (probably more so than Churchill with the British) and was overthrown by foreign conquest. Those war criminals who were punished were condemned by allied military courts, not by West German ones. "Victors' justice" was surely preferable to accomplices' justice. John Wilson London • Timothy Garton Ash's amnesia about the way West Germany dealt with its Nazi past is astounding. Hitler's chief of counterinsurgency became the Federal Republic's top intelligence agent; Nazi generals like Speidel and Kissinger continued to serve in the top echelons of the army; leading judges, doctors and academics who served the Nazis with ardent commitment continued in their former posts, while those who had fought the fascists were often persecuted, had their pensions docked and were treated as lepers. The present orchestrated campaign against the GDR state security forces has more to do with extirpating any remaining "nostalgia" for the GDR and of the idea of an alternative to capitalism than it does with a desire to overcome the past. John Green London