It Just Happened

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.

According to him, no one was to blame for what happened in Germany. It just happened, and no one was responsible but "the times." Nazism was pretty much like anything else: "Perhaps all that can be done is to describe it as a phenomenon, as a byproduct of life, and like life to be immeasurable by any standard and equally shapeless." As for democracy, "I do not know what it is ... But I fear that Hit ler's assertion -- that his ideological concept was the democratic concept -- will prove a hard one to refute." If he is not the former Nazis' favorite postwar writer, he should be.

For more than 100 pages, under the questionnaire heading "Remarks," Von Salomon pours out his hatred on Americans. Describing U.S. -run detention camps (those who worked in them will find them hard to recognize), he maintains that he was beaten and starved by sadistic U.S.

soldiers who got fun out of shooting at aged prisoners and watching female prisoners humiliated. He lashes into U.S.

"guttersnipes" until they begin to seem suspiciously like the Nazis.

There are in Von Salomon reflections of the things that made Hitler possible in Germany -- moral color blindness, a dangerous half-intelligence that can rationalize even the most monstrous side of any case, self-pity mixed with arrogant self-righteousness. Yet it is clear that Von Salomon does not speak for all Germans, and it is hard to believe that he speaks even for an alarming or significant minority of them. There is a kind of totality, a rotten radiance about his cynicism which is rare in the worst of times or men.

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