The role of Soviet Antifa schools in creating East Germany’s ruling class is well-documented.
The role of Western re-education camps in creating West Germany’s ruling class is deliberately forgotten.
Why?
Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing’s book makes this stunning observation: “The role of the Antifa students of the Soviet Union in forming the ruling class of the DDR is well known, the influence of the prisoner-of-war camps in the West remains shrouded in darkness. Yet there is more than one parallel between the two.”
Read that again. The Western camps had parallel functions to Soviet Antifa schools. But their history has been “shrouded in darkness.”
This is the story of the “Camp Elite”—German POWs who underwent “moral conversion” in Allied camps and returned to Germany as the Western occupation’s psychological vanguard.
The Forbidden Parallel
Everyone knows about Soviet Antifa schools. German POWs were selected for intensive indoctrination, trained in Marxist-Leninist theory, and returned to Germany as the DDR’s founding cadre. Ulbricht, Pieck, and the others openly acknowledged their Soviet training. The history is documented, studied, and used as evidence of Communist totalitarianism.
But mention Western re-education camps and you encounter a wall of denial. “That’s Soviet propaganda.” “The West didn’t do that.” “You’re conflating different things.” Or most often: silence.
Yet the book documents something remarkable: Western camps produced a parallel elite—and they became West Germany’s moral and political leadership.
The Three Groups: Reactionaries, Opportunists, and Converts
Theologian Helmut Gollwitzer, a key figure in West Germany’s “moral opposition,” described the social structure in Allied POW camps in his 1951 report on Soviet camps:
Three groups emerged in the camps. First were the “Reactionaries”—those who resisted all Allied influence attempts. They maintained loyalty to Germany, rejected collective guilt, and refused psychological manipulation. The camps couldn’t break them. Second were the “New Marxists,” those who opportunistically adjusted to whatever the captors wanted. They’d mouth any formula, adopt any position, to gain favor or early release. Survival shape-shifters who bent with every wind.
But it was the third group that mattered most: those who sought “mastery of guilt and atonement” and believed they’d found the right path in a synthesis of Christianity and Marxism. This third group—the converts—became the “Camp Elite.”
The book notes that Hans Werner Richter’s novel “The Defeated” (set in an American camp) shows the exact same three-way division: the “unrepentant,” the “quick adjusters,” and those “searching for a new morality” trying to navigate between “the Scylla of unteachability and the Charybdis of quick adjustment.”
The same pattern in American, British, French, and Soviet camps. Almost as if it was… coordinated.
The Conversion Experience: Creating Believers
The book provides a detailed account from Erich Lüth (later Press Chief of Hamburg Senate and leader of “Peace with Israel” campaign) of his “conversion experience” in the Italian POW camp Ghedi.
Lüth’s conversion, expressed in speeches he later published, began with this realization: “We were reckless on the wrong front—and are now punished with thunderclaps—because we violated justice in our innermost being!”
The “thunderclaps” signal repentance and conversion. The old self must be stripped away. “We were mass, dull and blind—and more childish than children. We fought a thousand times against conscience. We loaded guilt onto our shoulders. Yes, we groaned and suffered patiently—and stumbled in unrecognized obstacles.” But conversion leads to rebirth: “The wind fills the cloth of countless tents—in which we rest in hot nights. We now feel the breath of other worlds—and gradually mature for better action.”
This is religious conversion language. Not political re-education—psychological transformation.
The “Lonely Ones”: Pre-Converted Elite
Some POWs entered camps already converted. These “Lonely Ones” (die Einsamen) had rejected Germany before capture.
Walter von Cube (later Chief Editor of Bavarian Broadcasting) addressed fellow POWs in the French camp at Montelimar: “When the swastika flag flew on Mount Elbrus, when courses in Negro languages were held in Berlin, when people spoke of the Netherlands’ return to the Reich, we were banished to our private sanctuary… we found ourselves in often agonizing loneliness, even within the circle of manifold opposition.”
The “Lonely Ones” distinguished themselves by the “touchstone of hatred” toward Hitler—not just opposing his policies, but wishing for his defeat by foreign powers.
This required rejecting what von Cube called the “sacrosanct, never-examined national feeling” shared by both supporters and opponents of Hitler.
Philosopher Karl Jaspers (another “Lonely One”) admitted in his autobiography that he had “desired the Allied invasion of Germany since 1933 and hoped for it since 1936.”
He justified this by elevating “morality” above “politics”: “The principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of a state is the cloak for tolerating injustice.”
The intervention had to be against his own people. This created what the book calls “a second expulsion from paradise”—making them permanently “Lonely” even when their confession later found wide acceptance.
These pre-converted elites needed no camp re-education. They entered as missionaries.
The American System: Fort Getty’s “Retort”
After Germany’s surrender freed Americans from Geneva Convention constraints and fear of German retaliation, they launched major re-education at Camp Fort Getty (Rhode Island).
The selection criteria were revealing. Former true-believer Nazis who openly acknowledged their past faith were preferred, while those who joined the NSDAP for career reasons were considered useless. Why? True believers could undergo dramatic conversion. Opportunists would just fake it.
Alfred Andersch (participant, reported 1947) noted the program’s center was “the exhaustive analysis of the Weimar Republic and the causes of its failure, as performed in the years of emigration by a number of young German political scientists.”
These studies produced “several hundred mentally mobile men” who formed in Germany the “vanguard of that part of the people” who (by 1947) watched the Federal Republic’s development “with ever-stronger rejection.”
Fort Getty was also headquarters of the POW journal “Der Ruf” (The Call), edited by Hans Werner Richter, Erich Kuby, Alfred Andersch, and Carl August Weber. This editorial team was transported to Germany in 1945-46—a ready-made propaganda apparatus.
Andersch later described Germany’s “germ-free air” at Fort Getty versus the “not at all germ-free air of post-war Germany.”
The “retort” (Retorte) of Fort Getty worked. In Germany’s contaminated environment, it failed.
But the seeds were planted.
The Camp Elite’s Mission: Changing Reality to Match the Standard
The book, Charakterwäsche, makes a devastating observation about these converts: “Torn from active life and normal professional careers, many prisoners fell into the well of self-contemplation, and some never got their life-ship floating again. A moral faith, such as would hardly have emerged in the workings of modern life, was taken home behind barbed wire as the fruit of self-examination and as a standard for future political experience. There they discovered that reality did not correspond to the standard. But instead of changing the standard, they demanded the change of reality.”
This is the key. The camps created men with standards formed in psychological isolation—and when they returned to find Germany didn’t match those standards, they declared war on German reality.
The book notes: “The morality of our sentiment-politicians is not innate. It broke through in a concrete experience, usually a conversion experience. Their moral thinking consists in the fact that they can no longer separate themselves from the glory of their moment of enlightenment and believe they must lift Germany to the level of their inner experience.”
The Camp Elite became Germany’s conscience-police—not despite their camp conversions, but because of them.
Group 47: The Camp Elite’s Institutional Base
When the Military Government banned Der Ruf in 1947 (after 16 issues), Hans Werner Richter and his team attempted to get a license for a satire magazine called “Skorpion” (Scorpion).
The license was denied for “Nihilism.”
In September 1947, Richter called former Ruf collaborators to Bannwaldsee near Füssen. With no magazine to publish in, they read aloud and critiqued each other’s work.
Group 47 was born.
Over the following years, Group 47 made West German literary life a “closed shop” and brought literature “rather unanimously into opposition.” The group created concentric circles of influence. There was the “Grünwald Circle,” a self-appointed “democratic fire brigade” that opposed the Bundeswehr in 1956. There was the “Club of Republican Publicists.” And there were changing circles of declaration signers, like those who emerged during the Spiegel Crisis.
Rolf Schroers described Group 47’s power structure: “Group 47 is Richter himself, expanded by the currently relevant guests and the names of potentially desired ones who respect him as legislative, executive, and judicial power: thus a shielded private space of highest public effectiveness is created, having which against you is compensated by nothing comparable.”
Group 47 became a “flourishing mutual insurance”—and many joined who knew Fort Getty only by hearsay.
The Camp Elite had built an institutional base.
The British System: The Suppressed History
While the book focuses heavily on American camps, it references British operations through citations to Henry Faulk’s “Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in Großbritannien (Reeducation)” (München 1970) and Kurt Jürgensen’s “British Occupation Policy and the Problem of the Reeducation of Germany” (History 68, 1983).
Why is so little written about British camps?
Because the British system was more sophisticated and more successful than the American system—and therefore more dangerous to acknowledge.
The most famous British re-education facility was Wilton Park (Camp 300), established in 1946 near Beaconsfield. It was run by Heinz Koeppler, a German-Jewish refugee.
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Wilton Park’s method was subtle and sophisticated. There was no overt coercion, unlike Bad Orb’s psychiatric screening. Instead of lectures, there were seminar-style discussions. Socratic questioning led participants to “discover” approved conclusions. Programs lasted weeks or months, not days, and focused on “democratic leadership” training.
Graduates returned to Germany and occupied positions in education, politics, the civil service, media, and cultural institutions. The British perfected what the Americans started: creating a self-perpetuating elite that believed in its own righteousness.
The Geneva Convention Problem
All of this violated the Geneva Convention:
Article 34: “Private beliefs and religious practices shall be respected.”
Article 38: “Prisoners of war shall be permitted complete freedom in the performance of their religious duties… provided that they do not interfere with the normal execution of military operations.”
Nowhere does the Geneva Convention authorize psychological screening, “re-education” programs, ideological conversion attempts, psychiatric evaluation for cultural production, or moral transformation campaigns. Every Allied camp program violated international law. Which is why they’re “shrouded in darkness.”
Three Years After: The Illegal Detention
The Geneva Convention requires:
Article 118: “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.”
When did hostilities cease? May 8, 1945.
When were the last German POWs released from British camps? 1948.
THREE YEARS after the war ended.
Why the delay?
Because re-education takes time. You can’t break and remake a man’s worldview in weeks. The longer programs were more effective—but entirely illegal.
The Soviets held German POWs until 1955—universally condemned as a war crime.
The Western Allies held POWs until 1948—and it’s barely mentioned.
The “Graduates” Who Became Leaders
The book notes that the Camp Elite’s influence on West Germany’s development has been deliberately obscured—in stark contrast to the well-documented role of Soviet Antifa school graduates in East Germany.
But we can trace some connections. From American camps came Hans Werner Richter, founder of Group 47 and kingmaker of West German literature. Walter von Cube became Chief Editor of Bavarian Broadcasting. Erich Lüth became Press Chief of the Hamburg Senate and led the “Peace with Israel” campaign. From the “conversion experience” generally came Helmut Gollwitzer, the leading theologian and moral voice, along with numerous intellectuals, journalists, and academics who became opinion shapers.
Why is this genealogy incomplete?
Because unlike East Germany—where Soviet training was openly acknowledged—West Germany’s Camp Elite could never admit their formation process.
Admitting it would reveal the parallel to Soviet methods.
The Soviet Parallel: Why It Matters
The book makes the comparison explicit. In Soviet camps: “The Soviet Russians had prisoners swing with all turns of the party line; the Americans exchanged overnight after German capitulation the maintenance of military discipline for a revenge and re-education policy (‘collective guilt, salt herring, and American history’).”
Same goal. Different aesthetics. The Soviet Antifa schools conducted overt Marxist-Leninist indoctrination under clear party discipline. They engaged in explicit political training and openly acknowledged Soviet control. Their graduates entered the DDR as known agents. The Western re-education camps, by contrast, spoke of “moral renewal” and “democratic values.” They employed psychological conversion and guilt induction through “Socratic” questioning and self-discovery. Their role was denied or minimized after the war, and their graduates entered the Federal Republic as independent moral authorities.
The Soviet method was cruder but more honest. The Western method was more sophisticated—and therefore more insidious.
The Morality Trap
The book identifies the crucial difference between the “Reactionaries” and the converts: “The ‘Reactionaries’ and those who quickly adjusted were similar in that they could not be overly surprised by the shifts in Allied policy, since individual situations appeared to them less as an expression of moral obligation than as circumstances that had to be accepted as they were.”
The converts, however, “applied the yardstick of moral expectation everywhere and were naturally as disappointed by conditions in Allied camps as later by developments at home.”
This is the trap.
Once you accept that morality transcends politics, that principles override circumstances, that conscience supersedes nation—you become permanently dissatisfied with reality.
And permanently useful to anyone who can deploy moral rhetoric.
The Camp Elite returned to Germany morally armed but politically neutered. They had standards without power—making them perfect tools for those who had power but needed moral cover.
The “Triumph of the True Partisans of the World”
Von Cube’s formula for the “Lonely Ones” was explicit:
The “touchstone of hatred” (toward Hitler) was the wish for “the triumph of the true partisans… of the world” (i.e., Roosevelt and Stalin).
What prevented this wish? An “sacrosanct, never-examined national feeling” shared by both Nazi supporters and opponents.
Translation: True moral purity required rejecting German national interest entirely.
This mentality—formed in POW camps—became the foundation of post-war German political culture.
The book observes: “That this recognition is now timely and familiar to every high school graduate easily deceives about the fact that the bonds binding one to the fatherland, ‘which though thin as air are strong as iron chains’ (Edmund Burke), had then still to be broken through an inner decision. Only since the nation abruptly disappeared from everyone’s life in 1945 through external influence does it require no conversion and no inner effort for the individual to renounce it.”
The Camp Elite made the first break.
Subsequent generations inherited the brokenness without understanding its origin.
The Unanswered Questions
If Allied POW camps conducted systematic psychological indoctrination, created a “moral elite” parallel to Soviet Antifa schools, violated the Geneva Convention, held prisoners three years after war’s end, produced graduates who became West German opinion leaders, and used methods parallel to Soviet techniques—then why is this history “shrouded in darkness”?
Why can we name every Soviet Antifa school graduate in the DDR government but not track Western re-education camp graduates in the Federal Republic? Why is acknowledging Soviet methods considered proof of their evil while acknowledging Western methods is considered Soviet propaganda? And if both systems produced ruling elites through POW indoctrination, what does that say about the moral distinction between East and West?
The Modern Echo: From Camps to Campuses
The Camp Elite’s mentality didn’t stay in Germany. It metastasized across the Western world. The pattern is unmistakable. In the POW camps, there was physical isolation from normal society, intensive moral re-education, guilt induction and confession, rejection of national identity, and the “conversion experience” as credential. Moral standards were elevated above political reality, and graduates became opinion leaders. Now, in universities and institutions, we see intellectual isolation from dissent, intensive “diversity training,” “privilege” confession rituals, rejection of Western identity, and “awakening” as credential. “Justice” trumps practical considerations, and graduates become HR directors, teachers, and journalists.
The Camp Elite’s psychology became the template for modern elite formation.
The Final Question
The book ends the Camp Elite section with this observation about their literary work: “Those who had no opportunity for conversion in the camps and loneliness could catch up on what they’d missed in the years between capitulation and currency reform. That was at least the idea. But what succeeded excellently in the ‘retort’ of Fort Getty failed in the ‘not at all germ-free air of post-war Germany’ (Alfred Andersch).”
Why did it fail in Germany’s contaminated air?
Because reality kept intruding.
Germans had to rebuild, feed families, restart businesses, navigate occupation, deal with millions of refugees.
The Camp Elite’s abstract morality couldn’t compete with concrete survival.
But they never gave up. They retreated to their institutional bases in Group 47’s literary circles, in Bavarian Broadcasting and other media organizations, in universities and schools, in church academies, and in publishing houses. From these fortified positions, they waged a 60-year cultural war to make Germany conform to their camp-formed conscience.
And in 1968, they finally got reinforcements.
This article draws on Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing’s chapter “Die Camp-Elite” in “Charakterwäsche,” supplemented by citations to Henry Faulk’s “Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in Großbritannien (Reeducation)” and Kurt Jürgensen’s work on British occupation policy. The deliberate suppression of this history—acknowledged by Schrenck-Notzing himself—makes complete documentation impossible. The gaps in the record are themselves evidence of the phenomenon.
