Remains of the Nazi Days: Honoring Adolf (2024)

Globalization critics brought the issue to light last Friday. Since then the dusty documents in the city council archive have taken on a new significance. Mayor Hartmut Polzin wishes one of those papers would read "revoked." But there's no time or money for the thorough search of the archives which might get the council off the hook before the G8 summit.

How can a German city neglect something as politically explosive as a tribute to the Nazi dictator for so long? The mayor says that the official assumption had been that Hitler's honorary citizenship expired with his death in 1945, so it was considered a closed case. Legal experts have their doubts, however.

Now local politicians want to show the world that they are serious about tackling their past. A city council debate on the topic has been scheduled for April 2. "We need to bring this issue to an end," says state parliament member Henning von Storch and adds: "I hope that the meeting will send a clear signal."

Over 4,000 cities awarded the despot the title on his 44th birthday on April 20, 1933. Such was the run on citizenships that his Nazi Party imposed a ban on accepting the tribute later that year, says Schulz. It was lifted again five years later when Austria and parts of the Czech Republic then known as the Sudetenland were annexed.

Seven years later, the situation changed again: with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, having Hitler as an honorary citizen suddenly became taboo. Most cities -- like Berlin for example -- immediately rescinded it.

But in other places, the remains of the Nazi days lasted much longer. The city council in Aschersleben where Schulz works is such an example: it only got around to officially renouncing Hitler's honorary citizenship last year.

Like Bad Doberan, Aschersleben is located in what was the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), a fact which partly explains the city's bureaucratic amnesia: As the GDR considered itself an explicitly anti-fascist state, it didn't consider itself related politically or legally to the preceding Third Reich. So strong was the sense of a new beginning that nobody in Aschersleben even bothered to check for links with the town's Nazi past.

The topic came only up when a contemporary witness enquired about the city's relationship with Hitler in the 1980s. Local archivists searched through old documents and discovered that the dictator was still listed as a freeman of the city -- but nothing was done about it. "Nobody was scandalized by the findings, nobody really cared." says Schulz, "The overall sentiment was that this had nothing to do with us any more, so there was no need to rescind the title."

It was only last year that the issue became pressing. In January 2006, the neighboring town of Bitterfeld became involved in a media scandal after it listed Hitler among its honorary citizens on the official city Web site. After much public criticism, Bitterfeld quickly removed the dictator from its home page and honor list -- and pressure came on to Aschersleben to do the same.

Aschersleben finally closed the case in March 2006 with an official city council divestiture. Seventy-three years after the city had awarded the honorary citizenship to the dictator for his "achievements to the national rebirth of the German fatherland," it revoked it on the basis of his "contribution to the unparalleled genocide against European Jews and the war of extermination against the international community."

There may be many other similar cases due to the sheer number of honorary citizenships for Hitler, thinks Klaus Hesse, a historian and exhibition curator at Topography of Terror, a Berlin foundation devoted to documenting National Socialism and post-Nazi Germany.