A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe by David A. Messenger & Katrin Paehler

Author:David A. Messenger & Katrin Paehler [Messenger, David A. & Paehler, Katrin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2015-04-28T22:00:00+00:00

A diplomat who questioned the story of the two foreign offices: Fritz von Twardowski. PA AA, Bildsammlung.

A diplomat who questioned the story of the two foreign offices: Rudolf Holzhausen. PA AA, Bildsammlung.

Nonetheless, the new West German Foreign Office founded in 1951 officially endorsed the story of the two foreign ministries and the minimal guilt thesis. For example, in 1967 the Auswärtiges Amt informed the Federal Justice Ministry that Luther and his “Jewish expert” Franz Rademacher, both brought into the ministry by Ribbentrop, had been the first to make Jewish affairs an instrument of Nazi racial and anti-Semitic policies.84 In a last major public statement in 1978, the Foreign Office published a brochure entitled Foreign Policy Today (Außenpolitik heute) that said “the [Auswärtiges Amt] offered a tenacious and temporizing resistance to the plans of the [National Socialist] rulers, without however being able to prevent the worst. The office long remained an ‘unpolitical’ administration [Behörde] and was considered a site of opposition by the National Socialists.”85

However, the Auswärtiges Amt could not ignore new developments in historical research beginning in the late 1970s. In 1978, Christopher Browning published his landmark book on Referat III D of the Abteilung Deutschland and its role in the Holocaust, to be followed in 1987 by Hans-Jürgen Döscher’s investigation of the role of the NSDAP and the SS in the Foreign Office.86 By this time considerable doubt had also been cast on Weizsäcker’s role as a resistance figure.87 It is also worth bearing in mind that in 1977 lawyers associated with the Central Investigation Center for Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg announced that all active investigations against Foreign Office personnel concerning their role in the Holocaust had ended.88 This fact plus the simple passage of time probably permitted a more open historical discussion for the ministry’s current and former employees, even if the 2004 “Obituary Affair [Nachruf-Affäre]” and its aftermath clearly indicated that no consensus existed within these circles about how to interpret their ministry’s role during the Third Reich.89

In any event, by the time of its 125th anniversary in 1995, the ministry had moved toward a more balanced and realistic official history. Ludwig Biewer of the Political Archive wrote:

The low number of active resistance fighters from the foreign service demonstrates that the Auswärtiges Amt between 1933 and 1945 was no hotbed [Hort] of resistance against the brown tyranny, but it was just as little a National Socialist institution [Behörde] ruled by the SS. The truth lies somewhere in the middle: among the German diplomats there were a few convinced opponents of National Socialism and a few fanatical adherents of this ideology. Alongside them however [were] a considerable number of fellow travelers and those who were indifferent, and also people who wanted and had to come to terms [with it] somehow. In this respect the foreign service was not better but also not worse than other Germans.90

Notably, this new interpretation maintained the strict distinction between the career diplomats (the “foreign service”) and the Nazi outsiders, a distinction that the

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