How Franz Alfred Six gets off scot-free
By Catrien Spijkerman and Sien Doreleijers
Franz Alfred Six used to be a high-ranking Nazi but barely gets punished for his actions. When the war is over, Germany needs to be purged from Nazism, but priorities quickly shift when a new enemy emerges. Due to this twist of fate, Six suddenly proves very useful.
‘Six is a clever man, one of the biggest swines in this entire trial.’ This description comes from the chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trial in Nuremberg. In that postwar trial, 24 leaders of the Nazi death squads (Einsatzgruppen) are tried for the mass murder of more than a million Jews and other civilians in Eastern Europe. Franz Alfred Six is one of those leaders. The chief prosecutor would later say that he had more respect for those who at least admitted to their crimes. ‘Six, on the other hand, said: “Who? Me? They murdered Jews? I had no idea.”’
As a high-ranking Nazi, Franz Alfred Six always manages to lie low. Time and again, he gets off scot-free. In Nuremberg, the judges determine that he had indeed been in command of a death squad and that he knew what his unit did. However, there is no evidence of him actually giving the orders or of him being personally involved in specific murders. He is sentenced to twenty years in prison, a mild sentence compared to most of his colleagues. All 24 suspects on trial are found guilty; fourteen receive the death penalty and two are passed a life sentence.
What to do with the Nazis?
War is over, but that doesn’t mean evil has suddenly disappeared. The Allies want to denazify Germany as quickly as possible, and everything associated with Nazism is to be purged. It is relatively easy to revoke Nazi laws, scrub away swastikas, change street names, and tear up books. But what to do with the Nazis themselves? You don’t just throw some 8.5 million former members of the NSDAP in prison, not to mention the millions of others who co-operated with or obeyed the regime.
It doesn’t take long for the Allies to leave it up to the Germans themselves. In special committees, former resistance fighters, trade unionists and other Germans judge their fellow citizens. They put them into five categories, ranging from ‘major offender’ to ‘conformist’ or ‘exonerated.’ People frantically try to obtain a certificate of clearance, popularly nicknamed a Persilschein (Persil certificate), after the detergent. Many suspects give exculpatory statements about others, hoping they will do the same for them in return. The vast majority of those under investigation end up in the second-lightest category, the one of the conformists.
Germans who used to work for the regime are dismissed en masse. But in a society that needs to be rebuilt, that also causes problems, because who will be left to do the actual work? And how severe should their punishment be? Acting too harshly might lead to large groups being isolated from society and creating the risk of them radicalising all over again. Acting too leniently on the other hand, might cause a sense of injustice, weakening trust in the fledgling democracy.
Nazi friends
Priorities of the Allies soon shift away from denazification, when a new enemy emerges. The Western Allies, led by the US, are concerned about the growing influence of the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe. The US is in urgent need of people who know Eastern Europe and have contacts there. The fact that many of them have a Nazi past is now of less importance. Not long after, the CIA employs a certain Reinhard Gehlen for example, a former general of the Third Reich’s army who specialized in intelligence on the Soviet Union during the war.
Six is exactly what the CIA needs. During his time with the Nazis, he gained extensive experience in making propaganda and gathering intelligence. On top of that, he still has a lot of connections in Eastern Europe. Through some lobbying by old Nazi friends and most likely the CIA as well, Six is released early. Of his twenty-year prison sentence, he serves only six. He gets a job at the marketing department of Porsche, but that is merely a cover to avoid drawing attention. Meanwhile, Six works for Gehlen’s team and advises him on how to influence West German media. He also helps Nazis in Eastern Europe to obtain false passports and new identities in order for them to assist the CIA as spies in the fight against communism.
Oblivion
More than sixty years later, it is still not exactly clear what Six did after the war. Some of the information about him in American archives remains classified until today. What is clear though, is that despite all the atrocities on his conscience, he always managed to keep a low profile. Even when summoned to the trial in Israel against the infamous Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s, Six managed to stay under the radar. Eichmann was one of the key minds behind the Holocaust, and Six had worked closely with him in the late 1930s and even supervised him. Fearing his arrest Six does not go to Israel, but gives a statement in Germany instead. In it, he claims not to have been aware of the fact he had been the boss of a ruthless villain.
Ten years later, Six publishes a book on marketing at a university founded by one of his old Nazi friends, but after that he fades into oblivion forever. Even the date of his death is not entirely certain.
