GERMAN FOREIGN ministry diplomats were complicit in the Holocaust and helped Nazi-era war criminals escape justice after the 1945, a new report has found.
A 880-page historical report to be published this week documents the Nazi-era foreign ministry’s involvement in the extermination of Jews – and the attempts of West German diplomats to portray the Nazi-era ministry as a stronghold of resistance.
"The [Nazi] foreign ministry was a criminal organisation," said Dr Eckart Conze, one of four historians who worked on the report, The Ministry and the Past. "After 1945 there was a high level of personnel continuity with severely burdened diplomats." He cites as an example a 1941 expenses claim form that diplomat Franz Rademacher filed on return from a trip to Belgrade. Asked to explain the reason for the trip, Mr Rademacher wrote: "Extermination of Jews in Belgrade." "Everyone in the ministry, right down to the bookkeepers, know what was happening," said Dr Conze. "The diplomats were in the picture at all times on Jewish policy and actively involved."
German diplomats were closely involved in the persecution and deportation of Jews, the historians found. All new diplomats after 1938 visited the Dachau concentration camp, near Munich. Even those in far-flung postings felt involved in the so-called “Jewish question”. Documents show that the idea to add the letter “J” to all passports of Jews came from a German diplomat posted in Manchuria.
The complicity continued after the war, the historians say. Nazi diplomats returned to their old jobs in the new West German ministry, kept out former Nazi-critical colleagues and even used official channels to assist on-the-run colleagues. The “Central Protection Office”, founded in 1953 to offer legal support to prisoners of war, was used to inform “war criminals about existing arrest warrants and warned them about travelling to relevant countries”.
One beneficiary of this system was Klaus Barbie, the notorious “Butcher of Lyon”, who remained on the run until 1983.
The ground-breaking report was commissioned by former foreign minister Joschka Fischer arising from the so-called “obituary affair” of 2003.
It began when the ministry’s internal newsletter printed an obituary of a former diplomat that failed to mention his involvement in mass executions in occupied Prague. As a result, Mr Fischer banned the magazine from printing obituaries in the future of former diplomats who had been Nazis. A year later, the minister came under attack from retired diplomats when, in line with the new rules, no obituary appeared of a West German ambassador to Nato who had been a member of the SS and the Nazi Party.
Ahead of publication of the 880-page report, Mr Fischer expressed satisfaction yesterday that elderly diplomats who attacked him “now have the obituary they deserve”.
"The more I read of the report, the more sick I became," Mr Fischer told the Frankfurter Allgemeinenewspaper. "The sentence that shocked me the most described how the co-operation between the foreign ministry and the [SS] was so close that the boundaries became fluid." The historians found documentation that throws new light on the role of Ernst von Weizsäcker, state secretary in the foreign ministry and father of later West German president Richard von Weizsäcker.
“The Jews will have to leave Germany, otherwise they will, one way or the other, be simply confronted with their own destruction,” Mr von Weizsäcker reportedly told a Swiss ambassador in 1938.
Mr von Weizsäcker was ambassador to Switzerland when Thomas Mann wrote a Nazi-critical newspaper article in a Swiss newspaper. In a report to Berlin, the ambassador recommended the writer be stripped of his citizenship.