FRAGEBOGEN (525 pp.) — Ernst von Salomon—Doubleday ($6).
The biggest bestseller in postwar Germany is a well-written but viciously anti-American autobiography of a convicted murderer. The book: Fragebogen (The Questionnaire). The author: Ernst von Salomon, veteran of the roughneck Free Corps, which terrorized Germany after World War I and provided a recruitment pool for the Nazi SA and SS. The book has sold more than 250,000 copies in West Germany (the U.S. equivalent of about 750,000 copies). Published in Britain last April, it shocked reviewers of all political shades. American readers will also be shocked—and probably fascinated.
Passionately Passive. In 1922 Ernst von Salomon was an accomplice in the murder of Germany's moderate Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and became a hero to Hitler's followers. Von Salomon was sent to prison for five years, thus making his place in the National Socialist Valhalla secure. Yet, after he was released, he managed to stay out of the Nazi Party, while holding down a cushy job in the Nazi propaganda machine. He even managed to live with his Jewish mistress to the very end of World War II. From such a monstrous clever fellow it is reasonable to expect a monstrous clever book, and Ernst von Salomon has written it.
It is written in the form of answers to the 131 questions put to Nazis and suspected Nazis by the Allied Military Government. This somewhat naive effort to separate the good Germans from the bad gives Von Salomon the chance to spill his autobiography into a melodramatic mold.
It also gives him a chance to write a slanted version of German history from 1918 to 1946, and to heap scorn on the Americans who imprisoned him for some months at the end of the war.
In effect, Von Salomon claims to have shied away from the Nazis because he despised them. Their goals were not so bad, though their excesses were perhaps unfortunate; Hitler sometimes struck him as being loathsome and Goebbels and Goring as too ridiculous and vulgar. He would not join them—he was never, apparently, convinced of their ultimate success—but neither did he feel that he wanted to speak against them. He decided to be a spectator. He saw many of his friends hunted down by the Nazis, realized sooner than most that Germany was being led to destruction, but from the first he remained passive: "I'm not an accepter, I'm a passionately involved observer." Observer von Salomon managed to stay out of uniform even when much older men were being called up. The former Free Corps machine gunner passed his physical easily. But when the examining officer asked worriedly if by chance he was a Jew, Von Salomon answered calmly: No, but a murderer. Military bureaucracy even under the Nazis boggled at commissioning a man with such qualifications.
But the impasse was broken to everyone's satisfaction: Von Salomon was ordered to Propaganda Boss Joseph Goebbels' movie industry as a writer for the duration.
U.S. Guttersnipes? Von Salomon is not content with trying to exonerate himself.