COMMENT: Sub­stan­ti­at­ing much of what I’ve been say­ing about the post­war role of Third Reich alumni in the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many, Der Spiegel has set forth infor­ma­tion about many of the Nazis shap­ing the insti­tu­tions of the Fed­eral Republic.

I would note that, as refresh­ing as it is to see the Ger­man gov­ern­ment and main­stream press finally con­fronting this issue, the story is “mod­i­fied lim­ited hangout.”

Sev­eral con­sid­er­a­tions in this regard:

• Dis­cussing the 1953 coup attempt by for­mer Goebbels aid Werner Nau­mann, the arti­cle is obliquely dis­mis­sive of its significance.
• Nowhere does the story men­tion the “fuehringsring”–the Nazi under­ground con­trol infra­struc­ture that admin­is­tered the post­war Ger­man gov­ern­ment from its seat in Madrid.
• In ref­er­ence to the Nau­mann coup attempt, the arti­cle men­tions noth­ing about the roles of Kon­rad Ade­nauer, Hans Globke and other ele­ments of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment in pre­vent­ing any pros­e­cu­tion of the coup plotters.
• Of course, there is no men­tion of the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work or its influ­ence in post­war Germany.
• There is no men­tion of Ade­nauer eco­nom­ics min­is­ter and suc­ces­sor Lud­wig Erhard, or his work with the SS-controlled Kleine Arbeit­skreis in plan­ning the post­war Ger­man economy.
• And there most assuredly is no men­tion of how the con­tem­po­rary Ger­man “democ­racy” is ful­fill­ing the Reich’s agenda by real­iz­ing the goals of a German-controlled Euro­pean eco­nomic union, by real­iz­ing the fuehringsring’s strat­a­gem of employ­ing the ver­triebene groups as vehi­cles for the “drang nach osten,” by insti­tut­ing the Greek neo-Nazi party as a gov­ern­men­tal entity to admin­is­ter aus­ter­ity, or the house his­to­rian of Ger­man media giant Ber­tels­mann (pub­lisher for the SS dur­ing the war) Dirk Bavendamm’s assess­ment that World War II was started by U.S. impe­ri­al­ism, Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt and Jew­ish con­trol of the United States and its media!

“From Dic­ta­tor­ship to Democ­racy: the Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Ger­many” by Ralf Beste, Georg Bonisch, Thomas Darn­staedt, Jan Fried­mann, Michael Frohlings­dorf and Klaus Wiegrefe; Der Spiegel; 3/6/2012.

After World War II, West Ger­many rapidly made the tran­si­tion from mur­der­ous dic­ta­tor­ship to model democ­racy. Or did it? New doc­u­ments reveal just how many offi­cials from the Nazi regime found new jobs in Bonn. A sur­pris­ing num­ber were cho­sen for senior gov­ern­ment positions. . . .

. . . The doc­u­ment revealed that Chan­cel­lor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a mem­ber of the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Demo­c­ra­tic Union (CDU) who gov­erned Ger­many from 1966 to 1969, had been a mem­ber of the Nazi Party ever since Adolf Hitler seized power. Accord­ing to the Inte­rior Min­istry list, Ger­man Pres­i­dent Wal­ter Scheel, a mem­ber of the business-friendly Free Demo­c­ra­tic Party (FDP) who was in office from 1974 to 1979, had been a Nazi Party mem­ber “from 1941 or 1942.”

The list names min­is­ters of all polit­i­cal stripes and from a wide range of social back­grounds. Some, like left­ist Social Demo­c­ra­tic Party (SPD) mas­ter­mind Erhard Eppler (Min­is­ter of Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion), did not become Nazi Party mem­bers until the end (at 17, in Eppler’s case). Oth­ers, like con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Social Union (CSU) agi­ta­tor Richard Jaeger (Min­is­ter of Jus­tice), had been part of Hitler’s para­mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tion, the SA (since 1933, in Jaeger’s case). Even FDP lumi­nary Hans-Dietrich Gen­scher (first inte­rior min­is­ter and later for­eign min­is­ter), who denies to this day that he know­ingly joined the Nazi Party, is listed as a Nazi Party member.

Accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment list, for­mer SPD Finance Min­is­ter Karl Schiller was in the SA, while his fel­low cab­i­net min­is­ter Horst Ehmke was a Nazi Party mem­ber, as were (“pre­sum­ably,” the list notes) for­mer SPD Labor Min­is­ter Her­bert Ehren­berg and Hans Leussink, a for­mer edu­ca­tion min­is­ter with no party affil­i­a­tion. On the con­ser­v­a­tive side, the report names sev­eral for­mer Nazi Party mem­bers, includ­ing for­mer CDU For­eign Min­is­ter Ger­hard Schröder and for­mer CDU Min­is­ter for Dis­placed Per­sons Theodor Ober­län­der, as well as for­mer CSU Post and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Min­is­ter Richard Stücklen and for­mer CSU Inte­rior Min­is­ter Friedrich Zimmermann. . . .

. . . . How many Nazis took part in the rebuild­ing of the gov­ern­ment after World War II? How much influ­ence did the sur­viv­ing sup­port­ers of the Nazi dic­ta­tor­ship have on the estab­lish­ment and oper­a­tion of Germany’s first func­tion­ing democracy?

Offi­cials at the Inte­rior Min­istry, the source of the most recent gov­ern­ment doc­u­ment, have issued an EU-wide call for assis­tance in address­ing Germany’s Nazi past. His­to­ri­ans from the west­ern city of Bochum are now por­ing over old files from the Fed­eral Office for the Pro­tec­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion (BfV) which stretch for about 500 meters (1,640 feet) to deter­mine how many of the Nazi dictatorship’s helpers hid under the coat­tails of the domes­tic intel­li­gence ser­vice in the early years of the Fed­eral Repub­lic — and how this could have happened. . . .

. . . In truth, it wasn’t just a few implanted Nazis who par­tic­i­pated in the Holo­caust through the so-called Juden­referat (Jew­ish Depart­ment). In fact, the entire min­istry imple­mented the polit­i­cal dic­tates of the rogue regime with the prac­ticed effec­tive­ness of a func­tion­ing gov­ern­ment agency. The For­eign Min­istry was “part of this mon­strous dic­ta­tor­ship, and it per­formed its duties,” says Nor­bert Frei, a his­to­rian from the east­ern Ger­man city of Jena and one of the authors of the study. . . .

. . . The restora­tion of the old elites also had con­se­quences for for­eign pol­icy, which vet­eran diplo­mats still deny to this day. Old Nazis were usu­ally sent to posts in South Amer­ica and Arab coun­tries, where they shaped the image of the sup­pos­edly new repub­lic. The diplo­mats repeat­edly took steps to pro­tect Nazis hid­ing abroad and accused war crim­i­nals from persecution.

In the 1950s, the Ger­man embassy in Buenos Aires unques­tion­ingly issued travel doc­u­ments to the fam­ily of Adolf Eich­mann, one of the key orga­niz­ers of the Holo­caust, for a trip to Ger­many. No one both­ered to draw any con­clu­sions about Eichmann’s whereabouts.

As SPIEGEL revealed in 1968, the main legal pro­tec­tion office at the For­eign Min­istry even devel­oped into a “warn­ing ser­vice” for old Nazis. With the help of the Red Cross, the diplo­mats informed about 800 Ger­mans and Aus­tri­ans that they should avoid trav­el­ing to France, because they had been con­victed of war crimes there and could run into “difficulties.” . . . .

. . . The chan­cel­lor, for his part, entrusted him­self and his chan­cellery to Hans Globke, a for­mer offi­cial in Hitler’s inte­rior min­istry and one of the authors of the Nurem­berg race laws. The man Ade­nauer once called “my dear Herr Globke” was the most pow­er­ful gov­ern­ment offi­cial in Ger­many for a time, even though any­one who wanted to know could eas­ily con­sult the abom­inable lawyer’s anti-Semitic con­coc­tions. He was respon­si­ble for the manda­tory assign­ment of the first names Israel and Sara to Jews in Nazi Ger­many. The abil­ity to quickly iden­tify some­one as a Jew was one of the pre­con­di­tions of the Holocaust.

Globke was the most capa­ble civil ser­vant that the new coun­try believed it had at its dis­posal. Part of his com­pe­tence had to do with the pre­ci­sion with which he once dis­tin­guished among dif­fer­ent clas­si­fi­ca­tions of Jews: “The three-eighths Jew, who has one fully Jew­ish and one half-Jewish grand­par­ent, is con­sid­ered a cross­breed with one fully Jew­ish grand­par­ent, while the five-eighths Jews with two fully Jew­ish grand­par­ents and one half-Jewish grand­par­ent is con­sid­ered a cross­breed with two fully Jew­ish grand­par­ents.” With the same Pruss­ian bureaucrat’s sense of per­fec­tion, Globke also devel­oped Adenauer’s cen­ter of power, the Fed­eral Chan­cellery at Schaum­burg Palace. . . .

. . . Saevecke embarked on a career in law enforce­ment at the BKA. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1929, when it was still very small, and even­tu­ally reached the rank of Haupt­sturm­führer in the SS. While with the SS, Saevecke orga­nized forced labor oper­a­tions involv­ing Tunisian Jews and ran the Milan office of the secu­rity police, where he was respon­si­ble for hun­dreds of executions.

After the war, the senior offi­cial openly described him­self as a “for­mer old National Social­ist.” He remained staunchly true to his world­view. As a CIA con­tact noted, Saevecke would “lit­er­ally stop at noth­ing to sup­press the com­mu­nist move­ment, against which he has felt an ele­men­tary hatred since the 1920s.” While with the BKA, Saevecke was in charge of the police effort sur­round­ing the 1962 SPIEGEL scan­dal, before going into retirement. . . .

. . . . Roughly 80 per­cent of the judges and pros­e­cu­tors who had served Hitler’s regime of ter­ror until May 8 were soon dis­pens­ing jus­tice once again — but this time in the young Fed­eral Repub­lic. “Per­haps there is truly evi­dence,” wrote Nazi expert Jörg Friedrich, “that a con­sti­tu­tional state can stand on a judi­cial mass grave.” . . .

. . . Now the halls of jus­tice were even staffed with judges who had once served on the Nazis’ People’s Court (Volks­gericht­shof), which was set up in 1934 to han­dle “polit­i­cal offenses” and became noto­ri­ous for the fre­quency, arbi­trari­ness and sever­ity of its pun­ish­ments. Nev­er­the­less, the civil­ian courts han­dling the de-Nazification process merely clas­si­fied them as “hangers-on.” In 1953, at least 72 per­cent of judges on the Fed­eral Supreme Court, Germany’s high­est court for crim­i­nal and civil law, had for­mer Nazi con­nec­tions. The num­ber increased to 79 per­cent by 1956 and, in the crim­i­nal divi­sion, it was at 80 per­cent by 1962. . . .

When the British wire­tapped a group of for­mer Nazis sur­round­ing Werner Nau­mann, the for­mer deputy of Nazi Pro­pa­ganda Min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels, they gained the impres­sion that the ex-Nazis were infil­trat­ing the FDP in North Rhine-Westphalia. On the night of Jan. 14, 1953, British mil­i­tary police offi­cers sur­rounded the houses in the west­ern and north­ern cities of Solin­gen, Düs­sel­dorf and Ham­burg where the Nazi con­spir­a­tors were stay­ing and arrested them. The next morn­ing, the occu­py­ing power informed an aston­ished pub­lic that the Nazis had been pur­su­ing “plans to regain power in West Germany.”

In ret­ro­spect, the threat was prob­a­bly not as great as the British por­trayed it, and the case against Nau­mann and his asso­ciates was dropped. But the episode illus­trates how seri­ously the occu­piers took the situation. . . .