KIESINGER, A YOUNG lawyer, joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933. He was nearly thirty. His membership card, which he would keep until Hitler’s fall, bore the number 2633930.
As a student, he belonged to Catholic organizations, but, from 1933 onward, he sought to join his Catholic activism to Hitler’s policies. Apparently, his conscience as a Christian was able to accommodate the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism.
In August 1940, the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop appointed Kiesinger to the political broadcasting department as an “auxiliary scientist.” This thirty-six-year-old legal expert gradually became the assistant director of the political broadcasting department. Kiesinger’s position in the AA (Auswärtiges Amt—the Foreign Office) also facilitated his delicate role as an intermediary between the perpetually warring ministries of Ribbentrop (AA) and Goebbels (Propaganda).
Kiesinger owed his job to Martin Luther, a Foreign Office undersecretary. A committed Nazi, Luther had been brought into the Foreign Office by Ribbentrop to inject a pro-Hitler spirit that it had been missing. In order to carry out this task, Ribbentrop had formed the “Germany” Department under Luther’s direction. The involvement of Nazi Party members in foreign affairs effectively meant working with Himmler, as the SS had become the only guarantee of the implementation of Nazi ideology. During the trial of high-ranking Nazis at Nuremberg, another Foreign Office undersecretary, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, said of the “Germany” Department, “They created their own subdepartments for cases that had nothing to do with the Foreign Office, such as racial politics, Jewish affairs, police issues, and so on.” Kiesinger’s colleagues in the Foreign Office were not classic diplomatic types but party members, and SS members in particular.
The decree of September 8, 1939, made Ribbentrop, rather than Goebbels, responsible for foreign propaganda, which used transmitters broadcasting from Germany or occupied territories. The department was also supposed to influence or guide foreign radio stations and, if need be, acquire them so that they could broadcast Nazi ideas.
Kiesinger quickly rose through the ranks of this organization, the Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung, which had about two hundred employees in Berlin itself and as many more beyond the Reich. In 1941, Kiesinger was appointed head of Service B, one of the department’s two general affairs organizations. He was in charge of the planning and control of guidelines for German radio’s foreign propaganda and the restructuring of all propaganda initiatives. As well, he had to coordinate the work of eleven different transmitting offices.
Kiesinger also censored all radio shows to be broadcast abroad. So from 1941 on, he was responsible for the content of Nazi radio programs broadcast in foreign countries. That same year, he joined Interradio. This huge broadcasting company, founded by Goebbels and Ribbentrop, was dedicated to conveying Nazi propaganda abroad. On behalf of the Foreign Office, Kiesinger held a ten-million-reichsmark share in Interradio. He was also responsible for liaising between the Foreign Office and Interradio: if the broadcaster’s departments did not apply the directives passed on to them by the regional services of his department, he had the power to force them to obey. Interradio employed seven hundred people, two hundred of them working for the Sonderdienst Seehaus, which monitored foreign radio programs.
Interradio’s policy objectives were set out in a document dated November 5, 1941: “Foreign transmitters owned by Germany or influenced by them are, first of all, under the direction of central services in Berlin, an instrument of war in the service of culture, science, and the German economy, and should also actively support the Reich’s greater political designs.”
So the executives at Interradio were not merely citizens fulfilling their duty as combatants in the civil sector of a country at war, but also the future architects of the new Europe ruled by Hitler.
In 1943, Kiesinger was made assistant manager of the political broadcasting department while continuing to run Service B and becoming the manager of Service A, the second general service. In this way, he became one of the driving forces behind the Nazis’ foreign propaganda broadcasts. He was the only man to work in every area, political and administrative, of this extraordinary spiderweb. Kiesinger found himself the all-powerful assistant to SS-Standartenführer Rühle and rubbed shoulders with the new director of the culture department, SS-Brigadeführer Franz Six, just back from Russia, where, as head of the Einsatzgruppen—special death squads—he had overseen the liquidation of thousands of Jews.
During the summer of 1943, Kiesinger made the acquaintance of one of Six’s department heads, Dr. Ernst Achenbach, who had returned from a three-year stint in France, where he was at the heart of the Kollaboration policy.
When it came to the crucial issue of the Jewish question, Kiesinger took particular care. Obviously, he did not comment on the oppressive measures used against Jews or the Final Solution, but he did stir up anti-Semitic feeling throughout the world. Of course, he had to act appropriately, without making any crudely inaccurate statements.
One of Kiesinger’s colleagues, Ernst Otto Dörries, did not understand this method and denounced him to the SS, who kept the letter in his dossier. Kiesinger’s concern with striking the right tone in order to optimize the effectiveness of the Nazis’ propaganda, however, was shared by the “Germany” Department, the Foreign Office, and the SS.
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IN ADDITION TO broadcasts, Kiesinger’s department was in charge of disseminating anti-Jewish propaganda to foreign countries via the radio staff at the various German embassies. One of the tasks that Kiesinger carried out particularly well was spreading hatred for the Jews, despite the fact that he pretended not to know what was happening to the Jews in the extermination camps. But he did know. He received “secret” reports on a daily and weekly basis. As part of his job, Kiesinger would have been well aware of the Endlösung, the Final Solution of the “Jewish problem.”
And from January 1942, Kiesinger could have heard or read Thomas Mann, who addressed the German people via the BBC and revealed the truth about the concentration camps:
January 1942: “The news may seem unbelievable, but my source is good. Four hundred young Dutch Jews were deported to Germany to be experimented on with toxic gases … They all died.”
September 1942: “We have now reached the point of annihilation: the insane decision to completely exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.”
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IN NOVEMBER 1944, Goebbels enthusiastically agreed to Hans Fritzsche’s proposal to bring Kiesinger into the Propaganda Ministry and entrust him with an important position.
Kiesinger, of course, was not a sadistic executioner himself. But the man who incites the sadism of others, who defames a people whom he knows is doomed to destruction, is guilty to an exceptional degree of an exceptional crime.
In May 1945, Kiesinger was taken prisoner by the U.S. Army. After seventeen months of incarceration, he was released at the start of the Cold War and “denazified” by a committee that included his own father-in-law, which nonetheless classified him in the category of Nazis unfit to exercise any political activity. When Kiesinger decided to run for office in Baden-Württemberg, he was obliged to go before his father-in-law’s denazification committee once again. After that, his denazification file rather opportunely disappeared.
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KURT GEORG KIESINGER, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, lied. He claimed that he joined the Nazi Party only because he hoped, like many other Catholics, to redirect the movement “from within” toward Christian ideals. He stated that, after the bloody elimination of the SA, or storm troopers, in 1934’s Night of the Long Knives, he realized the true nature of Nazism and broke off relations with the Nazis. He specified that he was just a lowly “scientific employee” at the Foreign Office, without any responsibilities.
None of his claims stood up to close scrutiny.