A DEMON-HAUNTED LAND

Of witch trials, quack medicine, and millenarian terrors in the ashes of the Third Reich.

Given the fiery end of Hitler’s regime and the firebombing of Dresden and other cities, it’s understandable that ordinary Germans might have been apocalypse-minded in 1945. That was still true in 1949, writes history professor Black in this sometimes circuitous but well-paced account, four years after the Allied occupation and the division of the country into East and West Germany. In the wave of denazification that immediately followed surrender, old grudges surfaced in accusations of witchcraft and conspiracy theories. At the time, writes the author, German newspapers and kaffeeklatsches alike were also rife with rumors of the end of the world—not so far-fetched given the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War—and with revisitations of the old Norse stories of Ragnarok. Against this backdrop came one of Black’s principal subjects, a Danziger who changed his name from a Polish antecedent to the German Gröning—and who signed up for the Nazi Party years before the annexation, suggesting that he was looking forward to a comfortable life under Hitler. Instead, he grifted his way across the postwar landscape, engaging in a form of faith healing that yielded a string of faux miracles—but also a negligent homicide or two. (One of Gröning's tools, not surprisingly, was tin foil.) The German courts eventually restrained “Gröning the Wunderdoktor” from practicing medicine without a license along about the time he died and he and his victims were forgotten. Other memorable figures Black examines include a crusader who “had a way of popping up almost anywhere that witchcraft accusations surfaced” in a country where pharmacies still sold magical potions with names such as “devil’s dung” until legally ordered to use “ordinary German names.”

Though of specialized interest, an eye-opening look into a corner of postwar history that seems more medieval than modern.