Books: Why Not Everyman?

DENAZIFICATION by Constantine Fitz-Gibbon. 222 pages. Norton. $6.95.

Constantine FitzGibbon gets his loudest polemic laughs from dead trends and left leftovers. A translator-novelist-critic of Irish and American descent and European education, he now lives in Ireland. His novel When the Kissing Had to Stop, a political cautionary tale of a Russian takeover from a fellow-traveling British government, made him a bogeyman to left-leaning intellectuals. It also won him a Communist Party accolade—"fascist hyena."

In Denazification, FitzGibbon, who served as an intelligence officer in Europe during World War II, has dug up the corpse of the "1,000-year Reich" and considers how Kiesinger's Germany could have risen from its grave—a Babbitt out of Buchenwald. He discusses Allied punishment of war crimes, which was limited to a handful of the worst offenders. But his main concern, as the title implies, is denazification, the broader program of combined punishment and re-education variously applied to hundreds of thousands of Germans by the occupying powers. His book raises questions of conscience which, though they can never be satisfactorily settled, will perplex society and individuals as long as men are bound in loyalty to states that may commit crimes.

Count Me Out. In 1945 there was an Allied consensus—which no longer exists—on the doctrine of collective guilt, that all Germans shared the blame not only for the war but for Nazi atrocities as well. Like the denazification program itself, FitzGibbon starts from that consensus, and with the feeling that at the time "it would not have been possible, either psychologically or politically, simply to ignore the monstrous crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich." How just or justified the Allied judgment was seems to FitzGibbon far less clear. "Theologically," he observes, " 'collective guilt' must be a meaningless term since there is no such thing as 'collective soul.'" He adds: "Legally, it makes more sense: accomplices are also found guilty in courts of law."

FitzGibbon accepts as sound the plebiscites that gave Hitler up to 99% Ja. But if all Germans were guilty, he seems to wonder, why should countless individuals be singled out for punishment? If Eichmann, why not Everyman?