ON MARCH 30, 1970, the Süddeutsche Zeitung announced that Ernst Achenbach, a deputy for the liberal FDP (Free Democratic Party), was a candidate to succeed Fritz Hellwig as the German member of the European Commission in Brussels and that he would soon be officially appointed to that post by the West German government. I had already come across this Achenbach in my research into Kiesinger. In my files, I found a note dated June 28, 1940, from the Foreign Office’s cultural department. Addressed to the German ambassador in Paris, this note specifies that the embassy’s secretary, Dr. Achenbach, will be responsible for the political content of German broadcasts in occupied France.
And then I came across another familiar name—Dr. Sonnenhol, the head of that department. Only a few weeks before, the West German president, Dr. Heinemann, had personally intervened to block his nomination as foreign secretary due to the fact that his role had been more policelike than diplomatic during the years 1943 to 1944. So maybe it would be possible to block Achenbach in the same way?
According to Der Spiegel, Achenbach’s candidacy for this post was the result of a deal made just after the September 1969 elections between Walter Scheel, leader of the liberal FDP, and the right wing of Achenbach’s party. It was one of the conditions imposed by the right for their support in Willy Brandt’s appointment as chancellor. Having become foreign minister in the new government, Scheel had sent an emissary to Paris to smooth the former Nazi’s path. “If the French agree,” he said, “then the Dutch and the others will follow.”
I was under no illusions. This path-smoothing exercise had been performed very craftily: a few witness statements about Achenbach’s kindness, a few reminders of his pro-French statements over recent years, the highlighting of his position as vice president of the Franco-German parliamentary group, his perfect command of the French language … it was possible to make him look like the ideal candidate.
But beneath this façade lay the reality of his past, and it was up to us to expose it. So it was that Serge and I visited the CDJC once again …
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WE DID NOT find many files on Achenbach there, only a protest from the Resistance when Achenbach entered the European Parliament a few years earlier. That pamphlet repeatedly described Achenbach as a “Nazi diplomat,” but there were no details. Fifteen hours of determined research enabled us to write, on the night of April 1, a six-page note, in French and German, which formed the basis for my open letter to Achenbach published in the Frankfurter Rundschau three days later: “Dear sir, I believe that your activity under the Third Reich, your convictions at that time, your role at Nuremberg and in the Naumann affair make you unfit to represent the Federal Republic of Germany in Europe.”
In that letter, I revealed previously unpublished details of Achenbach’s career in France. A Nazi Party member from 1937, Achenbach had been part of the German embassy in Paris just before the war, where he worked as a political adviser to the ambassador Otto Abetz. In his statement to the French intelligence agency on November 22, 1945, Abetz declared, “The embassy’s most important section was the political section led by Mr. Achenbach.” In Nuremberg, on August 23, 1947, Schleier, the embassy’s number two, admitted that the most important political issues, notably those concerning Franco-German collaboration, were dealt with by Abetz and Achenbach.
Too often, we tend to imagine the German diplomats under Hitler as distinguished gentlemen attempting to soften the extremism of the Gestapo. This is completely false. The embassy leaders, like those of the Gestapo, were highly educated men in their early thirties. When the center of gravity shifted from the embassy toward the Gestapo, SS leaders like Helmut Knochen and Herbert Hagen smoothly replaced Abetz and Achenbach in their role as decision-makers on Nazi policies in France.
This was the same Achenbach who, on August 13, 1940, put the finishing touches to Germany’s absolute control of French newspapers, radio, cinema, publishing, and theater. The same Achenbach who had a front-row seat for the meeting between Hitler and Pétain.
The German embassy was behind the first racial discrimination measures in France. It constantly pressured the Vichy government to adopt legislation in compliance with the racist Nuremberg Laws. It was one of the first instigators of definitive liquidation via deportation to the East. It was the Gestapo’s strongest supporter in the conception and application of anti-Jewish measures on French territory, working hard to remove the diplomatic obstacles preventing the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department from detaining or deporting such and such a category of foreign Jews and trying repeatedly to overcome the Italian authorities’ reluctance to persecute the Jews in their zone of occupation.
On February 28, 1941, Achenbach attended a meeting, in the company of Abetz, Achenbach’s subordinate Theo Zeitschel, and SS-Obersturmführer Theodor Dannecker, head of the Sicherheitspolizei, the Sipo-SD’s service IV-J, which led to the creation of the ominously efficient General Commission on the Jewish Question, the official mouthpiece of the Vichy regime.
The embassy’s political section was remorselessly hostile to Jews in France. This was demonstrated during the first deportation: a convoy of a thousand French Jews arrested in retaliation for attacks on Wehrmacht soldiers. Martin Luther, the Foreign Office undersecretary, cabled the German embassy in Paris on March 11, 1942: Heydrich had given him details of the plan “to transfer the one thousand Jews arrested in Paris on December 12, 1941, to the Auschwitz concentration camp. These are all Jews of French nationality. I would be grateful if you would let me know if you have any objections to the execution of this action.” It was Achenbach’s political section that, via his subordinate Nostitz, formulated the very brief and fateful response that same day, under the heading “Secret”: “No objection to the planned action against the Jews.”
On March 18, 1942, the embassy’s political section expressed its satisfaction at the appointment of a high-ranking SS member as the head of the German police in France, “which will have favorable consequences for the Final Solution of the Jewish problem.” A little later, when it became mandatory for Jews to wear a yellow star on their chests, there was a propaganda campaign of leaflets and posters. The embassy took part in this with a poster containing the words: “The Jew kills in the shadows. To know him, we must mark him.”
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ON AUGUST 26, 1942, a member of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department wrote a note following a phone call from SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Hagen, who worked directly for SS general Karl Oberg, the “Butcher of Paris.” Hagen said that Achenbach had called him because he wanted to be kept updated on the exact details regarding the deportation of stateless Jews. Achenbach had to provide a report on the situation to the Foreign Office in Berlin.
In 1971, Ernst Achenbach was Herbert Hagen’s lawyer. The pair of them are connected by their complicity in the anti-Jewish actions in Paris.
In 1943, Achenbach returned to Berlin, where he worked in the Foreign Office under Franz Six. He ran two sections in the cultural policy department. It was at this point that Achenbach got to know an assistant manager working in a neighboring department; like his, that department was renowned for giving positions to young, intelligent, efficient Nazi activists rather than career diplomats. The name of that assistant manager was, of course, Kurt Georg Kiesinger.
Even after 1945, Achenbach did not give up. In 1953, he was implicated in the Naumann plot, where he played an active role liaising between Goebbels’s former propaganda undersecretary and major industrial corporations in the Ruhr. Achenbach’s objective, thwarted at the time by the British government, was to infiltrate Nazis in all West Germany’s political parties, so that they could return to power through democratic means.
That same year, Achenbach wrote an introduction for a book by Abetz, who was in prison in France at the time: “Can we seriously talk about the Franco-German entente if one of the main combatants in the vanguard of that entente, the Reich’s ambassador in Paris during the war, is still behind bars? Nothing better demonstrates the moral grandeur of that man who, despite the injustices committed against him, still and always asks his German friends to hold true to the ideal of the Franco-German entente.”
It is interesting to compare this text with another document signed by Abetz on July 2, 1942, which reveals the true “moral grandeur” of Nazi diplomats:
The information from Berlin that the Hungarian government has now agreed that the measures applied to the Jews here [in France] should be extended to stateless Hungarian Jews has been brought to the awareness of the SD’s Jewish affairs secretary. The embassy salutes this development … Last, concerning the deportation of forty thousand Jews to the camp in Auschwitz, the embassy replied as follows:
In principle, the embassy has no objection to the deportation of forty thousand Jews to the camp in Auschwitz. From a psychological standpoint, the impression will be more effective for the majority of the French population if the evacuation measures are initially aimed only at foreign Jews and apply to French Jews only if the number of foreign Jews is insufficient for the required contingent. Such a measure does not in any way indicate that French Jews should be given a privileged status, as obviously in the course of the purification of Jews from all European countries, the French Jews must also be eliminated.
The photocopies of all these documents were already in my possession. Serge had quit his job at Continental Grain three months earlier, and we were living on his unemployment compensation. This money rapidly disappeared as we put coins into the photocopier in the post office, and I had the impression that we were dropping our entire family budget into an infernal slot machine.
But we felt compelled to do it, as we were—to our despair—the only ones who would act in the way that circumstances demanded: quickly, with a lot of hard work and the necessary funds.
Once the dossier was complete, I set about distributing it. To politicians, first of all: I sent a copy to the president of the European Commission, to the foreign ministers of Holland, Italy, and Luxembourg, to Willy Brandt, and to the prime ministers of Belgium and Great Britain. In Paris, I went to the Élysée Palace, where an assistant took possession of the dossier with the promise that it would be closely examined. A few months later, the French foreign minister wrote to me about Achenbach, in response to a letter in which I asked him to exclude the former Nazi from the Franco-German parliamentary group: “I will take the opportunities I am given to express the feeling we both share.” But politicians only act if the press kicks up a stink. To make the press take notice, two main conditions must be met: first, they must have a dossier in their hands; then you must create an event that will enable the journalists to publish their point of view. A political editor once gave me this cynical advice: “Shove Achenbach out of a window, and I’ll publish his dossier.”
On April 4, I spent all day doing the tour of international press agencies, French daily newspapers, and representatives of the biggest European newspapers. Not only did I give them the dossier, but I talked to them about it: I had to persuade them to read it rather than just dumping it in a drawer.
A few days before this, we came to a decision. There was an association of EEC employees who were former Resistance fighters and concentration camp prisoners, and its leaders would go to see journalists in Brussels, dossier in hand, and convince them of their argument. This plan was executed perfectly. On April 6, the AFP (Agence France-Presse, the third-biggest news agency in the world) transmitted the news of the association’s protest throughout its global network, specifying that its dossier contained a document “in which the Germany deputy proposed the arrest and deportation of two thousand Jews.”
After articles appeared in Le Figaro and Le Monde, I set in motion our plan to internationalize the story. I sent a telegram requesting meetings with the Dutch foreign minister, the Belgian prime minister, the president of the European Commission, and the German government’s spokesman. Accordingly, in the space of twenty-four hours, press agencies in Holland, Belgium, and Germany sent dispatches, all repeating the same information: that there were hostile reactions to Achenbach in view of a dossier on the diplomat’s Nazi past. When the European newspapers received three dispatches on the same subject on the same day, they would realize that something big was happening, and they would give the story more space.
While I flew to Holland, Serge went to Brussels to meet with EEC employees who wanted to know more about the dossier. Arno went with him, as my mother-in-law wasn’t free to look after him. Naturally, that was the day Arno suddenly started suffering with a toothache. So Serge, while discussing these serious matters, had to rub our son’s gums with a special gel to keep him from drowning out their conversation with his moans and cries. I reached Brussels in the early afternoon and took over the care of Arno, while Serge handled the day’s photocopying.
On April 9, the international press reacted as we had hoped. There were articles in Die Welt and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, while Il Messaggero in Italy ran the headline “Shock and Outrage in Brussels: Nazi Criminal Applies for EEC Position.”
Back in Paris the next day, we continued our research.
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THE CRUX OF the Achenbach case was its single most spectacular document: the famous telegram signed by Achenbach himself, sent from Paris on February 15, 1943, to the Foreign Office in Berlin:
On February 13, 1943, around 9:10 p.m., Lieutenant Colonel Winkler and Major Nussbaum of the general staff of the Third Detachment of the Luftwaffe were shot from behind while they were walking from their office to the Louvre hotel in Paris […] Lieutenant Colonel Winkler was hit by three bullets and Major Nussbaum by two. They both died that night after being taken to the hospital. […]
As an initial retaliation, the plan is for two thousand Jews to be deported to the East.
Achenbach
This document seemed to amplify Achenbach’s direct responsibility for the retaliatory measures. Knowing how the Nazi machine worked in occupied Paris, I assumed that the decision Achenbach mentioned in this telegram had not been made by him and that he was simply passing on information that had been given to him. If he told the press this, he would have appeared as the victim of a conspiracy. Thankfully, Achenbach had already defended himself publicly over this document when it was first published in 1953. The FDP deputy, under scrutiny at the time over his involvement in the Naumann affair, had explained himself in an open letter. But instead of simply claiming that he was only passing on information, Achenbach went further. “General Heinrich von Stülpnagel only asked for this telegram to be sent to Berlin in order to avoid the execution of hostages in retaliation. I transmitted the message and covered Stülpnagel.” In Der Spiegel, Achenbach added, “We had to make a lot of noise and, thanks to that, all went well.” In other words, all went well, and the Jews were not deported.
This was the version that Achenbach tried to give the press on April 11 and 12. But why had this accomplished lawyer waited so long to respond to my allegations? He could have sued me for defamation after the publication of my open letter. Instead, he took refuge in silence.
Now, returning to the 1953 defense, he claimed that his telegram was merely a bluff, that the two thousand Jews had never been arrested or deported. So, in fact, this telegram might even be regarded as an act of resistance!
We had to prove that this deportation measure, supposedly suggested as a bluff, had not only been planned but carried out. For three days, we dug deep into the archives, sometimes following leads that ended nowhere and sometimes chancing upon documents that had previously gone unnoticed by historians.
It was through this investigation that we were able to really understand the mechanisms of the Sipo-SD—the umbrella organization combining the Gestapo (the secret state police) and the Kripo (the criminal police)—something that would prove extremely useful to us when we later went after Nazi criminals such as Lischka and Hagen.
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THE EMBASSY’S POLICY regarding the selection of hostages to be shot in retaliation for attacks on Germans was decided by Abetz and his political adviser Achenbach. According to them, it was best, in the interests of the German people, to avoid the idea that the French were rebelling against collaboration. Abetz advised taking Jews and Communists hostage.
When Abetz was informed that the embassy’s proposed measures had been approved by the Führer, he is reported to have said, “These measures correspond with the principles set out in my written report of December 7, chapter 4.”
After that, the embassy took part in writing communiqués to Berlin about the bloody retaliations. Among these, I found a twelve-page report by Achenbach dated March 17, 1943, that featured dozens and dozens of names of those who were shot.
But what became of the “two thousand Jews” for whom all went well, according to Achenbach? On February 23, 1943, SS-Obersturmbannführer Kurt Lischka, the Kommandeur of the Sipo-SD in Paris, informed his counterpart in Brussels that “I told the chief of police in Paris that, in retaliation for the killings, two thousand Jewish men aged between sixteen and sixty-five must be arrested and transferred to the Jewish camp at Drancy.” The next day, Röthke, head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department in France, reported to Lischka on his meeting with Thomas Sauts, from the chief of police’s office: “Sauts replied that the arrest of two thousand Jews […] has begun. More than fifteen hundred Jews aged sixteen to sixty-five have already been detained in the two zones.”
A report by the French Federation of Jewish Organizations confirms the arrest of foreign Jews aged sixteen to sixty-five in the former free zone, their roundup at the Gurs camp, and their transfer to Drancy on February 26 and March 2, 1943.
Those two convoys were sent to the extermination camp in Sobibor, where the two thousand deportees were immediately murdered, with the exception of two groups of about fifty younger men, who were sent to the neighboring camp of Maidanek. In 1945, only four survivors remained from convoy 50 and six from convoy 51.
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OUR INVESTIGATION WAS conclusive. Achenbach had lied; he had even attempted to claim credit for an act of resistance when the truth was that he had taken part in a decision, made by Kurt Lischka the day after the attack on the German soldiers, that led to the arrest, deportation, and extermination of two thousand Jews in the space of less than a month.
We sent our conclusions to Brussels. On April 11, the German commissioner, Wilhelm Haferkamp, published a statement making clear that, if Achenbach were appointed, he would resign.
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ALTHOUGH ACHENBACH TRIED to cling to his promised position after that, the battle was over. Professor Dahrendorf was appointed to the European Commission in his stead. On May 29, when Dahrendorf’s position was made official, the government began its search for someone to succeed him as parliamentary undersecretary in the Foreign Office.
Eager for revenge, Achenbach resurfaced: he informally applied for this job. Thankfully, we had kept a photocopy of a “secret” document dated February 11, 1943; the signatory of this note to SS-Obersturmbannführer Röthke had not been identified. As we had an example of Achenbach’s signature in our possession, we had no difficulty in recognizing it at the bottom of this document, which gave the necessary diplomatic green light to the Gestapo for “the application of anti-Jewish measures in the new occupied zone.”
On the morning of May 30, I arrived in Bonn with about a hundred photocopies of this document and a similar number of a press release in which I summarized the story of the two thousand deported Jews. I distributed these documents to the press and to the relevant government departments, and then immediately returned to Paris. On June 1, 1970, Karl Moersch was appointed as Dahrendorf’s successor. Achenbach’s consolation prize was a position as the FDP’s parliamentary spokesman on foreign policy.
I have never met or even seen Ernst Achenbach.