CHAPTER FIVE

In Mr Simon’s Safe

On 17 September 1987, Daniel Simon, the director of the Berlin Document Center, was expecting an important visitor. US ambassador Richard Burt and his deputy James Dobbins were on their way. After the two men arrived and had been taken on a tour of the archive, Simon brought them to his office. When they were on their own, Burt enquired into the state of return negotiations with the Germans. Simon told the visitors that both sides had agreed the handover could only take place once all the documents had been recorded on microfilm. The Interior Ministry in Bonn had already authorised the necessary funds to pay for the microfilming. But payment would only be made once an official agreement had been reached.

The ambassador nodded, but Dobbins seemed to be unsatisfied. They had already been negotiating with the West German government for years, he explained impatiently. ‘Why don’t we just tell the Germans they’ll get the files as soon as we’ve finished filming, and be done with it?’ Simon replied that no one knew what the situation would be like in five years — ‘You chaps in Bonn and Washington can probably judge that better than I can.’ The ambassador concurred and indicated that there were more diplomatic implications than were immediately apparent.

Then the two visitors started talking about a delicate matter. They had heard of a ‘special list’, they said — could they see it? The director went to the safe in the corner of his office, took out a document, and set it down on his desk. ‘Incredible,’ the ambassador murmured, as his eyes glided across the names of more than 70 leading German politicians who had all been members of the NSDAP. Even Dobbins could hardly believe his eyes.

From Konrad Adenauer’s cabinet to Helmut Kohl’s, former members of the NSDAP had sat at the table in every German government since the war. Under chancellor Willy Brandt alone, 12 former Nazis served as ministers.1

Simon had arranged for the list to be drawn up under conditions of strict secrecy for internal use, and had the NSDAP membership cards of the individuals in question removed from the main card file in order to keep them separately in his safe. Only Don Koblitz, the legal adviser to the American embassy, had a copy.

By the time the visitors said goodbye an hour later, Simon had convinced them that a return of the Nazi files would have devastating consequences for German politics. The director sat back down behind his desk and began to write a memo to the American envoy in Berlin: ‘I think the list has made it clear to you that the Document Center is a political millstone around the neck of the Federal Republic.’2

The memo from the director of the BDC and the ominous ‘special list’ are now in the National Archive in Washington. Information about the Nazi pasts of top German politicians was considered so controversial that US envoy Harry Gilmore replied by return of post that no copy should be made available to ambassador Burt and James Dobbins unless they explicitly asked for it.

For the Americans, the files were primarily a diplomatic problem. Again and again, other secret services — as well as journalists, academics, and private individuals — tried to get hold of the information contained within. But the Americans weren’t interested in bothering their West German ally in the Cold War with revelations about the Nazi pasts of their political staff. The special list existed so that questions about specific people could be checked, but no information was to be issued to third parties. From the early 1960s until 1991, the Americans repeatedly took the names of prominent German politicians out of the main card file and locked them in the safe of the BDC director. Under the leadership of Daniel Simon alone, the files of around 50 people were secured in this way.3

The noteworthy thing is that the staff with Nazi pasts came from the middle of the political spectrum — 27 members of the CDU/CSU, 25 SPD members, nine FDP politicians. Only the Republican Franz Schönbuber was regarded as being on the far right.4 Apart from politicians, men like Wolfgang A. Mommsen (president of the Federal Archives), Helmut Schlesinger (president of the Bundesbank), and Klaus Bremm (general inspector of the Bundeswehr) were named in the files, as well as the director and several members of staff at the headquarters of the State Justice Administrations in Ludwigsburg, which dealt with the prosecution of Nazi criminals.5

But the file cards removed by the Americans represented only the tip of the iceberg. The actual number of people with Nazi pasts in German offices and parliaments was considerably higher. Even in the 1960s, former members of the Nazi Party were probably in the majority in these circles. It is only today that the degree of repression over the decades is becoming clear.

‘Destroy upon termination’

This kind of research is only possible today thanks to the Nazi files that were administrated for almost 50 years by the Americans in the Berlin Document Center. But even after their return to the Germans, the question of whose Nazi files had been examined by whom during the US administration was to remain unanswered. According to a list drawn up by the US State Department in the early 1990s, most of the files made their way to the shredder before they could be handed over. Under the heading ‘Records of the Berlin Document Center’, the State Department decreed in December 1991 that the files of the visa and rogatory letters departments, lists of checked names, and private dossiers should be destroyed: ‘Destroy upon termination of US. administration of the BDC.’6

But in many cases the archives were not disposed of, and are still in the National Archive in Washington, as evidenced by the signature of a National Archives member of staff made in the margin of a list some time around 1997. The staff member had been producing a finding aid for the BDC files and, in the process, comparing the list with the holdings available in the National Archives. It is not always possible to tell from these handwritten notes what happened, and when, to the documents in question during the crucial years between 1991 and 1997. For example, the personal files (‘file summaries’) produced by BDC staff on 5 x 7 inch file cards were ‘obviously’ — to quote the marginal note — destroyed in the Document Center. Dozens of archive boxes full of requests and correspondence, on the other hand, were in fact catalogued. These include comprehensive lists of NSDAP members in Germany and all over the world compiled by BDC staff after the war, as well as an incomplete list of party applicants, including only names beginning with the letters I–K, M, and P–R.

Given the fragmentary nature of the surviving applications, which is clearly down to the availability of original files found by the US Army in 1945, it hardly seems surprising that no applications could be found from Genscher, Wellershoff, Walser, and others. And given that applications were the precondition for party membership, we may assume that they were lost or destroyed at the end of the war.

But it seems contradictory that the Americans should treat the information as top secret if suspected NSDAP membership — as Genscher was quick to assert — had happened without members’ knowledge and was therefore insignificant.

In fact, there is much to suggest that the American custodians of the BDC — who, after decades of continuous archive work, were more familiar with the Nazi Party documents than anyone else and considered supposedly unwitting membership to be a fabrication — correctly assessed the controversial nature of the files and made access particularly difficult as a result.

The application forms and personal files in the BDC archives don’t just confirm that America was in the know about the Nazi pasts of top German politicians from early on. They also show how discreet the Americans were for decades in their treatment of controversial information regarding their German allies. The hope that many German politicians had of being ‘safe from snooping’ in the Nazi files was in fact realised under American management. While the German public didn’t find out about the NSDAP membership of president Walter Scheel until the end of his time in office, BDC staff had discovered his membership card as early as 1954. The year before, Scheel had been elected to the Bundestag and subjected to a routine investigation.7 When Scheel became minister of economic cooperation in Konrad Adenauer’s cabinet in 1961, his NSDAP membership card was requested once again.

The existence of his NSDAP membership card didn’t stop Scheel from presenting himself as a sleuth in his soapbox speeches. As foreign minister, he announced in a document celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Auswärtiges Amt (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) that he was going to launch an investigation into the history of the ministry during the Third Reich.8

In the end, he neglected not only to put this planned investigation into action, but also to reveal his own past in the Third Reich. It only became public in 1978 when Scheel, by then head of state, was accused of being a member of Hitler’s party.

The reference to the president’s NSDAP membership came from an ex-member of Scheel’s own party, the former FDP chairman Erich Mende. He had switched to the CDU in October 1970, but was clearly still well informed about the NDSAP membership of his former fellow party members.9 Like Scheel, Hans-Dietrich Genscher had also learned from a party colleague in 1970 that there was an NSDAP membership card in his name in the BDC.

It wasn’t until November 1978 (when the NSDAP membership of Karl Carstens came to light as he prepared to stand as the CDU’s presidential candidate) that Scheel decided to take the bull by the horns, and admitted in a strangely convoluted declaration that he, too, had been a member of the NSDAP from 1942 on. He couldn’t remember whether he himself had made the membership application, he alleged, but his membership had been suspended during military service. ‘Walter Scheel couldn’t have given the country a bigger surprise,’ Die Zeit commented in amazement.10

With his preposterous excuse, the FDP politician paved the way for all the others who wanted to play down their NSDAP membership over the decades that followed. The more often the fairytale of unwitting party membership was repeated, mantra-like, the more the people involved believed it. When Scheel was asked about his NSDAP membership in an interview in 2010, he roundly denied it: ‘From the day Germany and Frankfurt declared war on one another until the end of the war I was a Luftwaffe soldier. And as a Wehrmacht soldier [translator’s note: in this context, the Luftwaffe is taken to be part of the Wehrmacht] one was forbidden to be a member of the NSDAP. Besides, NSDAP membership would have been out of the question as far as I was concerned.’11

In reality, soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht had been granted permission to be party members since conscription was introduced in 1935, but their membership was only suspended during their period of active service. It also casts a telling light on the self-exonerating claims made by younger members of the NSDAP when Scheel, who was born in 1919, suggests that he never made a membership application, and had thus unwittingly joined Hitler’s party. Even for those born in 1926–27, no evidence whatsoever has been produced for collective membership without the knowledge of those involved. On the other hand, the cases of Scheel and many others show that from the 1970s onwards it was possible even for older Germans to spread the fairytale of unwitting party membership without subjecting themselves to public mockery.

No more de-Nazification!

The attempts by former NSDAP members to exonerate themselves during the 1970s fell on fertile ground not least because — in spite of the new boom in public Vergangenheitsbewältigung — there was a consensus among the representatives of all political parties not to call for a resumption of the de-Nazification process. That consensus dated back to the time of post-war reconstruction, and didn’t just involve pragmatists like Chancellor Adenauer (quoted as saying you don’t throw away dirty water until you get in fresh). The first head of the SPD, Kurt Schumacher, had himself argued for the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of former members of the Waffen-SS, as long as they had not been found guilty of war crimes.12 The political trench burned between Germans by communism and by National Socialism was bridged in 1966 at the cabinet table of the Great Coalition, at which the former communist Herbert Wehner and the one-time emigrant Willy Brandt sat side by side with former NSDAP members Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU), Gerhard Schröder (CDU), and Karl Schiller (SPD).

When Walter Scheel’s National Socialist past was made public in 1978, the newspapers reported that Hans-Dietrich Genscher wasn’t the only one to leap to his friend’s defence. Willy Brandt also backed Scheel, while chancellor Helmut Schmidt and opposition leader Helmut Kohl spoke out publicly against a ‘new de-Nazification’.13

Admittedly, Germany had embarked on the long journey into Vergangenheitsbewältigung from the 1960s onwards: from the Auschwitz trials, through the American series Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, and Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech on 5 May 1985, to the Wehrmacht exhibitions of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sixty-five years after the end of the war, the latter led to the establishment of historical commissions. But as long as the political reality of the Federal Republic was determined by people who had lived through the Third Reich, there was a wide consensus beyond party boundaries that it was time to look to the future. The fact that the Nazi pasts of politicians such as Scheel and Carstens become known at all was not because a critical democratic public was crying out for historical enlightenment. Until 1994, the Americans, for fear of ‘abuse’, ensured that the representatives of such a public — journalists and academics — had no access to sensitive information about senior German politicians.

American and German authorities as well as the government offices of friendly states did, on the other hand, receive information. Some international organisations such as the Jewish Claims Conference, the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance in Vienna, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center could apply for information about individuals if legal proceedings had been instituted against them.14

In 1985, when the former SS major and convicted war criminal Walter Reder was released from prison in Italy and returned to Austria, the deputy editor-in-chief of the Vienna Wochenpresse received personal documents about Reder from the Document Center via the US Embassy, including lists of SS decorations, and assessments of Reder and his career.15 Reder’s return sparked a scandal: on his arrival in the country, the war criminal was greeted with a handshake by the Austrian defence minister, the far-right FPÖ politician Friedhelm Frischenschlager. By releasing information about Reder’s SS career in the Third Reich, the American ensured that his crimes — and his courting by members of the government at the time — launched one of the first big public debates about Austria’s Nazi past. In general, however, no information was released about people against whom, to the knowledge of the BDC administrators, there was no evidence.16

A difficult burden

The Americans did everything they could to prevent a new process of de-Nazification. The political task was simple: information about Nazi war criminals could be issued, but the small secrets of big national politicians were something else — in the 1980s they were still to be protected. ‘While we support the legitimate pursuit of Nazi war criminals,’ reads an internal memo from the US representation in Berlin, dated 9 September 1986, ‘in our view it cannot be justified in anyone’s interest or with regard to the private sphere of the individuals in question for us to grant access to journalists and others so that they can go fishing.’17

Behind this political target lay the strategic motivation of protecting important political allies in the Cold War against potentially damaging scandals. After all, the Americans still had a vivid memory of the astonishingly accurately researched ‘Brown Book’ of GDR propaganda, which had attracted a great deal of media attention by unmasking many of the pillars of West German law and politics as former Nazis. The secret memos that went back and forth between the State Department in Washington, the US delegation in Berlin, and various BDC directors in the 1970s and 1980s confirm the impression that the Americans weren’t interested in helping to unmask ‘ordinary National Socialists’: ‘To be branded a Nazi is a burden from which one can only cleanse oneself with great difficulty’, it says in the internal memo mentioned above. ‘We don’t want to encourage sensationalist reporting, which would be very likely in the case of open access regulation.’18 The restrictive caution with which the Americans governed access to the archive even in the 1980s reveals once again that the gentlemen of the Document Center knew very well that they were sitting on 50 tons of political explosives that could still go off at any moment.

The Americans had tried to give most of the captured files back to their rightful owners shortly after the war. As early as 1952, the US government had decided to give most of these files back to West Germany — with the exception of those documents ‘which glorified the Nazi regime or had the character of propaganda, or which concerned the administration, the personnel and the functioning of organisations of the NSDAP, unless their return would not endanger democratic life in the Federal Republic’.19

A year later the US Army put control of the Document Center into civilian hands, and from then on the archive was run under the auspices of the State Department, represented by the US mission in Berlin. At the time, between 40 and 60 German members of staff worked in the archive under the direction of the Americans.20 After the Federal Republic reacquired state sovereignty in 1955, the files of the Foreign Office, the Reich Chancellery, and factual files without direct reference to individuals were returned to Germany from the holdings of the BDC. After 1962, the BDC represented above all a personal archive that was regularly consulted by Allied and German authorities on official matters: war crimes tribunals, de-Nazification, pension claims, and state honours.21

In 1968, a ‘National Archives Liaison Committee’ was appointed, which included three American historians who were to advise the West German National Archive on the return of the BDC files. As US senator George McGovern revealed a year later, at that point they were already considering the return of the files to Germany, ‘as they were files of German provenance’.22 The condition was that the complete holdings were first to be filmed, and the original files had to be made accessible to bona fide academics even after they were handed over. The microfilming of the documents was also in line with the fundamental conditions that applied to the return of other German files confiscated by the US.

In 1969, the microfilming of the files of SS officers, the People’s Court, and the NSDAP Party Census of 1949 was already underway when the committee reported ‘chaotic conditions’ in the BDC. The organisation of the archive left much to be desired, and many of the staff members familiar with the files were already reaching retirement age.

The archivist Robert Wolfe recommended that the alphabetically organised personal files be filmed first, as they represented the most sensitive data and would therefore be the first to be returned to Bonn or Koblenz.23 In 1969, after a four-week visit to the BDC, Wolfe presented the committee with another list of recommendations for handover preparations. In December 1969, the Liaison Committee wrote a six-page report casting the Document Center in an unfavourable light and describing an urgent need for action. A copy of this report, presumably annotated by the then BDC director, has been preserved among the files.

The staff of the Document Center already had their hands full with 4000 requests a month, and there were only three cameras available to microfilm the material, which was in constant use. The filming of the NSDAP membership card files, which was right at the top of the list, would take more than two years. The BDC director complained in a marginal note: ‘These would be completed (using the methods of 1969) in 1985.’ The detailed statistical analysis of the data in the NSDAP membership card files demanded by historians was also viewed with some scepticism in the BDC: ‘What analysis of 10 million cards consisting of name, DOB, residence, profession and date of admitted [sic] to Party?’

Hansen and the hot potato

In 1968, the SPD MP Karl-Heinz Hansen demanded that the BDC be placed under the auspices of the Federal Republic once more. The American government had looked into the future of the BDC only the previous year, and in 1968 the US delegation in Berlin recommended to the State Department that the whole archive, including property and documents, be returned to the Federal Republic. But the West German government had no interest in a new de-Nazification process. Even under the direction of the Americans, there was not always a guarantee that data about the Nazi pasts of leading personalities in the Federal Republic would not be made public. The revelation of the NSDAP membership of chancellor Kiesinger in the same year had, after all, been based on information leaked from files captured by the Americans. Still, the West German government was able to shift all responsibility for the opening of the archive onto its American ally. If the documents had entered German possession in the 1960s, a debate about their content would have been inevitable in view of the considerable public pressure to appraise them.

The American public were also reluctant to hand over the files straight away. By the end of the 1960s, the US administration had only copied three series of archives on to microfilm. There was severe criticism from historians and Jewish associations of the plan to return the files before a complete set of microfilms had been made.

From 1970 onwards, Karl-Heinz Hansen pestered the West German government for eight years with parliamentary requests for the handover of the Document Center. When Hansen paid a visit to the BDC at the end of 1971, its director Richard Bauer assured him that representatives of the Bundestag were also allowed to request information. But when the SPD politician wanted to examine the files of a CDU parliamentary colleague, Bauer informed him that the request would have to pass through official channels.24

The answers that Hansen received from the Foreign Office were not very optimistic, either. At the peak of the Cold War, neither the West German government nor its US allies could decide what was to be done with the Nazi legacy. Its return to the Federal Republic, which had been financing it for a very long time, was repeatedly postponed. In 1974, foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher informed Hansen that the handover was solely dependent on the examination of ‘questions of finance and funding’ and ‘questions of the security of the archive against violent attack’.25 Two years later, Genscher’s minister of state, Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, declared that the West German government considered the continuation of negotiations ‘not to be opportune’.26 The Soviets were unlikely to tolerate the establishment of a further West German presence in the divided front-line city of Berlin. And there were not enough funds for the maintenance of the archive — at that point the Document Center was already being financed by Bonn with 1.3 million marks (approximately US$3.27million) from the reparation fund.27

It was not that the West German government was uninterested in the return of the German archive. That was ‘by no means the case’, declared Karl Moersch, minister of state for foreign affairs alongside Wischnewski, in reply to a fresh request from the stubborn Hansen in June 1976. In fact, the government was very keen on a ‘swift and conclusive settlement’.28

The SPD left-winger saw another reason for Bonn’s hesitant approach, as he explained to Der Spiegel: ‘To spare former servants of the Nazi Party who are now serving the state again and to protect it against “radicals” from embarrassing revelations about their dark pasts.’29 The average age of the former Nazis recorded in the Document Center was already over 70, the news magazine added, quoting the prognosis of the then president of the Federal Archives, Hans Booms, that the problem would ‘have sorted itself out by the 1990s’.

When Hansen levelled accusations against the West German government in a 1978 BBC programme, saying that it ‘doesn’t want the documents because it wants to hide former Nazis who would find themselves in an embarrassing situation if certain documents were published’, his party colleagues were absolutely furious. At a hastily summoned meeting of the Social Democrats, there was — according to Der Spiegel — a ‘pogrom mood’ towards the obdurate troublemaker. Chancellor Schmidt felt personally insulted, and demanded satisfaction. The SPD parliamentary group followed him and did something that had never happened before in the history of the Bundestag: they gave the MP a public reprimand.30

Criticism from within its own ranks could hardly have come at a more awkward time for the social–liberal coalition government. In March 1978, the prosecution of Nazi criminals was a very topical theme, one for which the government had planned a documentary report and drawn up statistics: according to these, between 1945 and 1 January 1978, 82,667 enquiries had been made into people suspected of involvement in Nazi crimes. Only 6426 individuals had been sentenced, while those involved in 71,554 cases went unpunished and 4688 trials were still pending.31

The papers stored in the Document Center were crucial as evidence in such investigative processes as these. Because of its obvious lack of interest in continuing the handover negotiations with the Americans, the German government was at risk of making itself look ridiculous. Admittedly, during the tribunal in which Hansen was reprimanded, the SPD parliamentary group had stressed that there were justified doubts about whether the examination of ‘the crimes of the SS regime’ had always been pursued with the necessary vigour after 1945.32 On the other hand, former chancellor Willy Brandt was forced to admit that during his time in government he had simply forgotten that the Document Center existed.33 Possibly not quite by accident. ‘We would lose all our best people,’ Brandt is supposed to have raged at the session, ‘if we […] now start rolling out all over again something that more or less came to an end 35 [sic!] years ago. That won’t advance us so much as an inch in domestic political terms.’34 Schmidt, as head of the government, defended himself, saying that no one had ever informed him about the problem of the handover of the BDC.35

As the Foreign Office files reveal, Schmidt had his memory jogged a few days later and wrote a letter to foreign minister Genscher, minister of the interior Maihofer, and justice minister Vogel, in which he asked his cabinet colleagues for enlightenment: ‘According to my information, the handover negotiations had been commenced back in 1967. I have never been able to work out why it wasn’t possible to conclude the negotiations.’36

He had also learned, Schmidt continued, that some of the papers in the Document Center ‘were stored in a special way’, and asked for a review of whether these papers were also accessible to German criminal prosecution authorities such as the Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.

It is possible that, with this rather cryptic formulation, Schmidt was referring to the documents pertaining to prominent German politicians that were sealed specially in the safe of the BDC director to keep them from falling into the wrong hands.

In the papers of the American National Archive, there is an inventory listing the contents of Mr Simon’s safe. These included not only SS badges, Hitler signatures, and original documents on Adolf Eichmann, Alfred Rosenberg, and the conspirators of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, but also ‘Information on Government Officials born in or before 1927’.37 But plainly this information could no longer be found in 1997, as an archivist had crossed out the entry. Was it removed before the Document Center was returned to Germany?

It is still clear that the US also considered it important to investigate the Nazi pasts of those German politicians who had belonged to the generation of the very youngest party members. People didn’t believe the legend, invented by the Germans themselves, that these men’s NSDAP memberships were based on a mistake and had happened without their knowledge. Why else should the NSDAP papers for those born in the years leading up to 1927 have been kept particularly secret?

‘Burn it!’

But even in the 1970s and 1980s, a far greater number of German politicians were affected than the public assumed. Sometime around 1980, the Americans had the whole of chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s cabinet investigated in the Document Center. The American State Department operated with extreme discretion. In July 1979, Robert D. Johnson of the State Department sent a list of names to BDC director Simon with the request that it be investigated. Johnson used vague terms to express what the checks were about: ‘I don’t want or need the information itself, just an indication of whether certain documents exist. In the course of this investigation please show your renowned discretion, as the names will make it clear what is at issue here. You can use your own code for direct hits and negative reports, I am only interested in the following: 1. Party membership; 2. Any SS activities; and 3. Any other, less sensitive category of BDC files.’ In true James Bond style, Johnson finally demanded that the recipient destroy the letter after reading — ‘Burn it!’

But Simon didn’t follow his instructions. In the same bundle of files as the letter, there is also a list of the members of Schmidt’s 1980 cabinet. The names of foreign minister Genscher, agriculture minister Josef Ertl (FDP), and chancellor Schmidt are crossed out. In the Document Center, Ertl and Genscher are listed as NSDAP members. Why Schmidt’s name was crossed out when no such information about him had been forthcoming is not clear.38 So far there is nothing to indicate that the Americans had any more information about the chancellor at the time than we know today.

When I spoke to Helmut Schmidt in Hamburg in December 2012, he told me that he didn’t know why his name was crossed out, either. ‘I’m not surprised that they checked us. I wouldn’t put any kind of secret-service nonsense past the Americans.’39 Schmidt claimed never to have known that Genscher and Ertl were former members of the NSDAP. He was also surprised by the NSDAP membership of his fellow SPD party member Karl Wienand, son of a communist father. ‘Didn’t know, first time I’ve heard of it,’ the former chancellor growled. ‘And it never interested me anyway.’ Probably even Genscher didn’t know, Schmidt suggested.

Of course, as he told me himself, Genscher had known about his file card since the early 1970s. But why did he and most of the other people involved, in spite of all appearances and without any proof, persist in denying that they had ever been NSDAP members?

‘Tell a lie and stick to it,’ Schmidt said, without referring specifically to Genscher or other fellow ministers. ‘They lied at the beginning, and they haven’t shifted.’ Wasn’t it possible for those leading democrats to admit to a comparatively harmless youthful indiscretion such as joining the NSDAP? ‘It isn’t easy to admit in public that you’ve lied,’ Schmidt suggested.

Under lock and key

‘There was plenty more in the poison cupboard,’ Der Spiegel chuckled in 1994 after Genscher’s Nazi papers came to light. But it would be more than 15 years before two other names emerged from Mr Simon’s safe. In 2011, on behalf of the democratic socialist party Die Linke, the historian Hans-Peter Klausch investigated the Nazi pasts of Hessian Landtag MPs between 1946 and 1987 in the Federal Archives. Klausch found out that over 20 times as many former NSDAP members as was officially known had sat in the parliament of the state of Hesse, and that they were represented in almost all the parties. In some parliamentary groups the former Nazi Party members were, at times, even the majority.40

In the course of his work on the Nazi files in the Federal Archives, the historian also made a curious discovery. The Federal Archives takes special care with original documents, and where possible offers researchers only microfilm copies. So, for his research, Klausch had been given access to the microfilms made by the Americans before the handover of the Document Center, of which there are copies in both Washington and the Federal Archives.

Looking through the microfilms, Klausch found two regional politicians for whom, instead of NSDAP membership cards, there were photographs of handwritten placeholders, each inscribed with the name and date of birth of the person concerned alongside the reference ‘SAFE — MR SIMON 1976’.41 The two men in question were the CDU politicians Alfred Dregger (1920–2002) and Otto Zink (1925–2008). By the time the cards of the CDU politicians disappeared into the safe of BDC director Simon, Dregger and Zink were no longer in the Hessian Landtag, and were now in the German Bundestag. Klausch concluded: ‘It was in 1976 that the CDU waged their Bundestag election campaign on Dregger’s slogan “Freedom not Socialism”. In that politically tense situation it would have been far from helpful for the CDU if the former NSDAP membership of two senior representatives of the regional and national CDU had come to light.’42

We can only speculate about the circumstances under which the cards of the two politicians found their way into the safe. At any rate, the BDC files confirm that for decades the Americans routinely investigated German politicians as soon as they rose to higher office. That included Bundestag seats, and ministerial, parliamentary group, and government offices. The fact that Dregger and Zink were in the Bundestag may have been enough to put them in the special security of Mr Simon’s safe.

The CDU politicians were in very good company there. But even today it remains unclear whose NSDAP files were kept in the safe. The last BDC director, David Marwell, told me he couldn’t remember any individual names apart from Genscher. But Marwell did give me one more reference when we met in 2011 at his house in College Park, Maryland. The microfilming of the NSDAP central card file had taken place at a time when some of the file cards were still in the safe. But the membership cards stored in the safe were re-catalogued in the central card file before the documents were transferred to the Federal Archives. The placeholders photographed by chance were the only reference indicating which cards had once been in the safe.

After the conversation with Marwell, with a rather queasy feeling in my stomach, I set about the task of finding a few dozen placeholders among the 10.7 million file cards photographed on hundreds of rolls of film. But, by a stroke of good fortune, I discovered something among the archive documents that spared me months of work: a copy of the list of papers in Mr Simon’s safe had been preserved, hidden among the administrative documents.43

The list includes the names of 134 Germans about whom there was original or copied material from the Nazi era or from post-war Germany. They range from prominent Nazis such as Hitler (41a), Himmler (39), and Martin Bormann (9), via Hans Globke (25), Kurt Georg Kiesinger (48), and Walter Scheel (80), to Hans-Dietrich Genscher (110), Karl Carstens (114), Erhard Eppler, Friedrich Zimmermann, and Alfred Dregger (all 115).44

Not all the people listed were filed as NSDAP members by the Americans. The names of chancellor Konrad Adenauer, president Gustav Heinemann, and CSU head Franz Josef Strauss are also listed. Neither is the list exhaustive; missing from it, for example, is the former justice minister and chief of staff of the German chancellery Horst Ehmke. But all those named have one thing in common: the papers referring to them were assessed as ‘politically sensitive’, and therefore stored in the safe of the BDC director. Thus, for example, the names of prominent people such as the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler or the archivist Wolfgang A. Mommsen are also on the list. The latter was an NSDAP member, and had worked in the occupied Soviet Union in archive protection before 1945.45 In 1967, Mommsen was appointed president of the Federal Archives and thus chair of the West German authorities who would be responsible for the card index of NSDAP members after the files were handed over by the Americans.

Protection against snooping

While the bilateral negotiations between the US and Germany progressed very slowly in the 1970s, renewed consultations in Berlin and Washington in 1980 led to a diplomatic agreement to hand over the BDC definitively once all personal data had been microfilmed. It was agreed that the documents in Berlin and the microfilm copies in Washington were to be used in line with the rules applying in the respective archives. ‘As both archives protect individual rights,’ it says in the draft contract, ‘it is established that the protection of individuals includes state of health, family relationships and other issues from the private sphere, questions of property and general assessments.’ But the paper was never signed. In Bonn they plainly only ever gave the appearance of haste; behind the scenes, Auswärtiges Amt staff were obstructing any attempts on the part of the Americans to finally bring the negotiations to an end. The minutes of a Foreign Office discussion from 1986 include the ominous view that ‘another 6–7 years will go by before the actual return, and then things will be unproblematic’. Might ‘things’ have meant the foreign minister’s file card? What was to be done with that and other Nazi documents? In the Auswärtiges Amt, they acted according to the motto ‘Let things take their course’. A senior ministry official noted on the same document that it would do no harm ‘if another few years pass before we take over the BDC’.46

When a reporter from the Berlin Volksblatt newspaper visited the Document Center, he was surprised by ‘the paradoxical situation whereby American or Japanese historians in Zehlendorf opened doors to one another, but German researchers — particularly doctoral students — could not openly view source material about the history of their own country’.47

Admittedly, historians and journalists were allowed to research in the files of the Document Center. But, as we have seen, information about living people was only given out to private individuals and researchers if the individuals in question had been sentenced for war crimes or were prominent Nazis. And not all requests were treated the same way. While foreigners were able to apply to the Americans to view the files, German citizens had to obtain authorisation from the minister of the interior in Bonn. Researchers from West Berlin had to turn to the senator of the interior in Berlin, who made his decision according to opaque criteria and was often more rigid in his decision-making than the Ministry of the Interior.

As a justification for this restrictive authorisation process, the German authorities referred to data protection, which was supposed to protect the personal rights of individuals. The publication of a simple membership application for the NSDAP only occurred with the permission of the person in question or, if that person had died, their next of kin. In the case of ‘prominent National Socialists’ this rule no longer applied, but it was the senator of the interior in Berlin who decided who qualified as a prominent Nazi. In 1984, the SPD parliamentary group in the Berlin House of Representatives demanded the immediate lifting of rules of access for academic research in the Document Center — rules which the group saw as ‘making arbitrary decisions possible, preventing actual use and serving to protect former National Socialists’.48 The spokesperson for the senator of the interior dismissed the politicians with a reference to the de-Nazification law which served as a legal foundation and granted no privilege to academic research.49 In the meantime, handover negotiations with the Americans, as one might have guessed, had so far been without success.

The main clients of the Document Center were German authorities, who made between 4000 and 5000 applications to the archive every month, even in the 1980s. These included insurance companies, state prosecutors’ departments, and citizenship offices dealing with the nationalities of immigrants.

But secret services, such as the Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and federal ministries sometimes wanted to cast an eye on the Nazi pasts of their staff in the context of security investigations — although not, of course, in the public eye. ‘Academics shout everything from the rooftops,’ the Volksblatt wrote, quoting a German official. ‘For us it works perfectly. We get everything.’50

In 1984, the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported: ‘Bonn is making a grab for the “Berlin Document Center”.’51 According to the article, the Germans had made ‘a final offer’ to the Americans, and proposed shouldering the expenses for the microfilming, estimated at 4.5 million deutschmarks. The author of the article, Mainhardt Graf Nayhauss, also mentioned the rumour that German politicians with Nazi pasts preferred to leave the material in the hands of the Americans, since the Americans were ‘less willing to divulge information than German authorities, so protection against snooping was better’. If a breakthrough was imminent, suggested Nayhauss, who had been provided with dependable background information by interested parties in Bonn, it was entirely thanks to foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who was advocating ‘promptly, emphatically and urgently’ (January 1983) in handwritten memos an ‘immediate solution’ (July 1984).52 That Nayhauss declared Genscher to be the driving force behind the transfer negotiations may be down to a small error on the part of the experienced capital-city correspondent: ‘having been born in 1927’, Genscher, Nayhauss claimed, was ‘too young for the NSDAP, and only a sapper’ during the war. In fact, the handover of the NSDAP membership card files would be protracted for another decade. When it finally happened in the summer of 1994, Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s NSDAP membership card was one of the first to be found and made public. The ex-foreign minister had stepped down from the government two years previously.

‘Avoid national embarrassment’: the Périot case

One person who refused to give up, and who drove the guardians of the Nazi files almost to despair for a decade with his constant requests, was the French journalist Gérard Périot.

He set his sights particularly on the CVs of West German politicians, smuggling their names into long lists of GDR notables on whom he requested information from the BDC. But the staff at the Document Center didn’t fall for it, and refused to tell him even whether there was any material available about these individuals.53

When making his requests, Périot adopted a scattergun approach. In 1972, he sent the Americans a list containing the names of 25 politicians, including Theodor Heuss, Horst Ehmke, Herbert Wehner, and Theodor Oberländer.

The deputy director of the BDC, Richard Bauer, immediately passed the list to US minister Klein and warned him that it contained the names of numerous leading personalities of the post-war era who had no connection whatsoever with the NSDAP — ‘So it should be assumed that Mr Périot is using the Berlin Document Center for his own political advantage.’54 It cannot have escaped Bauer that in many cases, such as those of Ehmke and Oberländer, Périot was quite correct, since their names actually did appear in the NSDAP card files.

When Périot was personally received at the BDC in the spring of 1972 — thanks to the intercession of French government bodies, whose support the ever-inventive Périot had managed to obtain — the diplomatic situation came to a head.55 Within a very few days he had ordered up more than 300 personal files, one-third of which concerned leading personalities in the Federal Republic. The BDC staff immediately informed the US mission in a letter marked ‘Sensitive’ that each individual request had to be carefully checked ‘to avoid national embarrassment’.56

Périot had requested, among other things, the papers for Martha and Emil Kuhlmann, chancellor Willy Brandt’s mother and stepfather.57 He also wanted to see the personal files of a certain ‘Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm’. The Americans knew that this was in fact Willy Brandt’s birth name. Many of Brandt’s cabinet colleagues were also on Périot’s list: foreign minister Walter Scheel, trade secretary Schiller, interior minister Genscher, justice minister Jahn, and defence minister Helmut Schmidt.58 Also on the list were opposition leaders Rainer Barzel and Kurt Georg Kiesinger, as well as many others. ‘These files were not shown to Mr Périot’, it says in the papers. If each individual name on which Périot wanted information was not first checked, there was a danger that ‘German–American relations would be damaged’.

Now the Americans were in a political quandary: on the one hand, they wanted to prevent any possible abuse of the files and spare their German allies embarrassing revelations. But, on the other, the French were putting on the pressure, and Périot himself kept threatening to publicly accuse the US of preventing the investigation of the German Nazi past. As internal correspondence from the Document Center shows, the Americans were aware of that risk. Périot even claimed that US minister Klein had informed him that the Nazis were ‘very nice people’, and that some of his best friends, such as minister Karl Schiller, were former party members. At the BDC, they considered such statements unthinkable, but warned that Périot might use any correspondence from Klein against the US in public: ‘Mr Périot said that the publication of his book, in which he is going to unmask people like Foreign Minister Scheel, will cause a scandal in Germany, and that this scandal, should the Americans refuse to cooperate with him and put the files at his disposal, will become an American scandal.’59

But Périot went too far when he repeated, in a submission to former US secretary of state William Rogers, his accusation that the Americans were protecting former Nazis in the BDC. On a copy of the letter, a visibly furious US diplomat wrote in red pen:

That is an insult to the USA. Question to Mr Périot: Who saved France? How many Americans collaborated with the Nazis compared with the French, for example Laval, Déat, Pétain etc. etc. Who appointed Mr Périot as supreme judge over the Germans? What criteria does he use to define ‘Nazi criminals’? What is a Nazi criminal? Does Mr Périot want to have a new deNazification process in 1972? What political interests does he represent?60

In the meantime, Périot even approached an adviser to president Carter. But the Americans continued to freeze him out. It was important, an internal BDC memo noted, to remain polite, but ‘we must not and will not tolerate any nonsense from Mr Périot — whether he complains or not’.61

In fact, this just turned the Americans into a censoring authority that decided which information from Nazi files should be kept secret for political reasons and which should not.62 The BDC went on processing Périot’s requests, but steadfastly refused to give out ‘sensitive’ information about German politicians, or even to tell him if information was available. In this way, the Americans hoped to prevent Périot from drawing indirect conclusions about possible party memberships. Admittedly, no Nazi papers had been found on minister Hans-Jochen Vogel, a BDC memo from 1975 noted. But despite having requested access to such papers, Périot was not to be informed of this fact, so that he couldn’t draw any conclusions if he asked about Genscher and did not receive the same answer.63

The example of Périot shows that the Americans controlled access to the Nazi files in the Document Center according to restrictive but understandable criteria that, for the most part, were consistently applied. The tightly limited access for individual applicants made it effectively impossible for information to reach the German public directly via journalists. That would have required the help of influential people, and it was not forthcoming.

‘Slowly getting fed up’ — the delaying tactics of the men in power

The only actual abuse of information from the Document Center was to do with power politics, and was carried out by interested parties in German politics. After all, only parliamentary or government insiders were able to access information from the Document Center through the Americans — and some of them clearly had no qualms about using that information for political ends, either to exert pressure or to leak the information to the public at opportune moments.

The Nazi revelation about Karl Carstens, for example, who had not yet been officially chosen as the CDU’s presidential candidate, was the result of a deliberate political plot: ‘Carstens has become the victim of political opponents,’ Die Zeit reported in November 1978, ‘presumably from his own party, which threw a pebble into the pool to scupper his presidential candidacy before it had even been decided.’64

When it came to light at the end of the 1980s that the theft of valuable documents from the BDC had been going on for years, pressure grew to find a definitive solution. A German member of the Document Center staff had pilfered a large number of files — particularly the autographs of prominent National Socialists and files of leading SS men — and sold them on the military memorabilia black market. There was a well-publicised trial against the perpetrators, but no political motivation could be identified for the theft of the files.65

In the wake of this scandal, the US State Department replaced Daniel Simon, the director of the BDC for many years, with the young historian David Marwell, who had made a name for himself in the Office of Special Investigations for his involvement in the prosecution of Klaus Barbie. When Marwell took office as director of the Document Center in 1988, the staff were still working more or less as they had since the end of the war. The first thing the young boss did was step up security measures and ensure that the microfilming of the remaining Nazi documents went ahead at full speed. By the end of Marwell’s tenure, the Americans had produced more than 40,000 rolls of microfilm.

Marwell also drew up a ‘BDC plan’ designed to restore the reputation of the American archive and its custodians, damaged by administrative chaos and theft. Marwell hoped that the ‘decades of neglect of the BDC and the unhappy events of the late eighties’ would be forgotten if a carefully organised and strictly run archive was handed over to the Germans.66

He introduced computers and simplified the system of requests and checks. In 1992, the files of the SS, the Reich Chamber of Culture, and the Race and Settlement Office, as well as party correspondence and various other collections, were stored in the internal computer system. The storage methods and training of the staff were to be organised in such a way that the administration of the archive could easily be taken over by the Federal Archives. Thirty thousand archive boxes and 85,000 acid-free archive files were purchased, and 690 metres of shelves renewed. Daily measurements of temperature and humidity were instituted.

In 1988, the Green Party in the Bundestag called for the immediate return of the Document Center, the lifting of privacy restrictions on the Nazi files, and the establishment of a National Socialism research institution modelled on the Munich Institute of Contemporary History.67 Green MP Ellen Olms picked up the arguments of SPD maverick Karl-Heinz Hansen and accused Hansen’s party colleagues Brandt, Schmidt, and Vogel of having dragged out negotiations for years. A ‘tacit, stifling consensus’ that the documents should be kept secret had prevailed, Olms said, criticising the ‘decades of German-American complicity’ in the suppression of personal responsibility with reference to National Socialism. Green MP Antje Vollmer suspected that this was based on an attempt to ‘stabilise post-war West German society’.68

In response, the home affairs select committee decided to press the West German government to resume negotiations with the US with a view to achieving a return of the BDC even before the microfilming was completed. The application to lift privacy protection for Nazi perpetrators was a resounding failure, however, because even the social-democratic opposition was not prepared to lift the term of protection. FDP member Wolfgang Lüder warned against making the files ‘the basis for determining a revival of de-Nazification’. The spokespersons for the government parties responded by attesting that West German governments had always striven for the return of the files of the Document Center.69

That information was incorrect. In fact, the Americans had for some time been growing increasingly frustrated with the delaying tactics of the West German government. In 1987, when German government representatives had once again stated how dear to them the idea of the speedy return of the files really was, the BDC director had exploded. In a memo to the legal adviser of the US Ministry in Berlin, Daniel Simon gave vent to his fury: ‘I’m slowly getting fed up with them always, always publicly holding us responsible for the delays. And I have no doubt that they would refuse it [a return of the files] if we offered them the BDC tomorrow with no strings attached.’70

Shortly after this, it would become apparent how right Simon had been in his assessment of the German negotiating position. As American files reveal, even in the early 1990s, the West German government had set in motion diplomatic efforts to delay negotiations, and called upon the US for help.

The 1989 parliamentary resolution initiated by the Greens had put the government under pressure. But rather than taking the opportunity to press for the return of the archive, Bonn went on playing for time.

In a confidential despatch from October 1989, the US Embassy in Bonn informed the State Department in Washington ‘that the Foreign Office is clearly asking for the resumption of negotiations in order to meet the political pressure of those calling for a speedier return of the BDC’.71

Early in 1990, informal preliminary discussions took place between the director of the BDC and German delegates from the Federal Archives in Berlin. The Americans were forced to admit that the German delegation had no interest in a swift return of the files. In fact, the emissaries of the German government had been given the task of performing a diplomatic charade. In February 1990, the US envoy in Berlin, Harry Gilmore, informed Washington that the German delegation would uncompromisingly demand the immediate return of the Document Center — but only for show. The Auswärtiges Amt delegation expected to be able to return to Bonn with a clear refusal and to be able to inform parliament accordingly.72

The Americans, relying on diplomatic cooperation, went along with the horse-trading and thus enabled the West German government to shift the blame onto their ally, and on technical problems with the microfilming of the archive.73 The strategy paid off: ‘West German government in Washington in bid to release Document Center,’ German newspapers announced shortly afterwards, reporting that Washington had refused to release the archive so as not to impede current investigations into Nazi war criminals.74 It was a watertight alibi, because the West German government was able to assume that American critics and the Jewish World Congress would agree.

It would be another two years before negotiations for the return of the Nazi files could be concluded. In 1992, the US ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke, had it confirmed to him once more by the historians Fritz Stern (Columbia University) and Michael Berenbaum (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) that there were no academic reasons to prevent the archive being returned. In the same year, Hans-Dietrich Genscher returned unexpectedly as foreign minister after 18 years. On 18 October 1993, the US and Germany finally set the seal on the return of the Document Center with an international agreement.75

Handover

Shortly before the definitive handover in summer 1994, an article by the journalist Gerald Posner published in The New Yorker caused something of a furore. Posner suggested that the Federal Archives Act, which had come into effect in 1988, made it possible to keep Nazi documents under lock and key for up to 110 years after the birth of the individuals named in them.76

But the clause in question was a discretionary ruling: for documents about people who had been deceased for no longer than 30 years, or who were born less than 110 years before, the term of protection could be shortened even without the consent of those concerned if their ‘use is indispensable in order to carry out specified scholarly research projects or to pursue legitimate concerns’. For persons of public interest and ‘office-holders in pursuance of their duties’, the Federal Archives Act allowed a shortening of the term of protection ‘if the legitimate concerns of the person are taken into consideration appropriately’.77

As it would later transpire, the Americans had already broken off negotiations at the end of the 1960s because the conditions of use for private academics suggested by the Germans appeared too restrictive.78 The negotiations of 1980 had also been unproductive because the US was unwilling to concede to Germany’s demands that, in the case of relevant requests from researchers, the NSDAP membership of living individuals be kept secret.79

The crucial question in 1994 was: How would German archivists apply the law? The critics invoked by Posner feared the worst. BDC director Marwell, on the other hand, informed his superiors that the Federal Archives had, over the previous few years, often made use of the possibility of shortening the period of restricted access for academic researchers.80

In response to criticism of the imminent handover, there was a hearing in the US House of Representatives on 28 April 1994. Tom Lantos, chair of the Foreign Policy Committee, and a Holocaust survivor, expressed ‘extremely serious concerns’ about access to the files. He stressed that the authorisation practice of the German government — unlike the liberal access granted by the Americans — had blocked researchers from using the Document Center or made it possible only under restricted circumstances.81

This scepticism on the part of the Americans was shared by many German archivists. After all, it was not their decision but the result of political regulations that access to personal data from the era of National Socialism was restricted in the Federal Republic. But according to the ethics of their profession, archivists are not only responsible for the preservation of the documents entrusted to them; they also have an interest in opening up their treasure troves and making them accessible to researchers. In 1997, after the handover of the Document Center to the Federal Archives, senior archivist Dieter Krüger expressed his sympathy with the earlier American scepticism: ‘German archivists were expected to keep the contents of the documents away from the public rather than helping the public to evaluate them … In actual fact access to the BDC was difficult, particularly for Germans but certainly for West Berliners.’82

While critical voices were raised in the US about free access to the records, the West German political establishment worried that, in taking over the archives 50 years after the end of the war, they might be opening a Pandora’s box. After all, the names of over 8 million filed individuals presented enough material for a new debate about personal responsibility with reference to National Socialism.

For the archivist Robert Wolfe, who had travelled to Hitler’s defeated Germany immediately after the end of the war as a captain in the US Army, the return of the Nazi files to the former enemy was a matter of democratic sovereignty. No archivist in an open democratic society could do his duty to preserve its cultural memory if he did not have access to the material records in their entirety.83

And in any case, what option did the Americans have but to hand over the documents to their allies sooner or later? It was impossible after all, Wolfe believed, to either protect the archive with bayonets at the ready, or to transport tons of documents away in the freight trains of the withdrawing US troops.

In the last weeks leading up to the handover, BDC director David Marwell and his staff worked around the clock to ensure that the microfilming of the files was completed in time. Some of the administrative records were destroyed, and the rest were shipped to Washington along with the microfilms.

On 30 June 1994, the American military police took down the Stars and Stripes that flew over the Document Center and formally handed the flag to Marwell. Standing beside him was 88-year-old Kurt Rosenow, who had been the first director of the Document Center almost half a century before. Marwell passed the flag on to his elderly colleague: ‘I can’t imagine a more worthy owner of this flag than the man who was there when it was first flown over the Document Center.’84

The Americans then celebrated with the German delegation until midnight, when Marwell climbed a ladder and personally unscrewed the administrative sign from the building on the Wasserkäfersteig. Almost half a century after the end of the war, the last building occupied by the Allies closed its doors.

A quarter of an hour to deal with the past

In December 2010, Die Linke’s parliamentary group, led by MP Jan Korte, presented to the government a large catalogue of questions about the institutions of the Federal Republic and their response to the Nazi past. It concerned personal continuities in ministries and authorities in the country and the regions, as well as the prosecution of Nazi crimes, reparations, and the financing of memorials.

The questions could have been drawn up for a historical seminar about Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and the government clearly wanted to come across as a model student. The Ministry of the Interior requested an extension of the deadline twice, and finally presented an 85-page report in December 2011.85

It contained, among others, the names of 26 government ministers and a chancellor who had been members of the NSDAP or other Nazi organisations such as the SA, the SS, or the Gestapo before 1945, including Horst Ehmke, Walter Scheel, Friedrich Zimmermann, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

Their NSDAP membership had already been made public, thanks to the research of academics or journalists. But it was often disputed, even among historians. The individuals in question claimed never to have signed an application, and to have become members of Hitler’s party unwittingly.

The government made a point by including former ministers such as Genscher and Ehmke in the list anyway. Since then, regardless of their own views on the matter, their NSDAP membership has been officially recognised even though the government expressly indicated ‘that mere membership of the NSDAP does not allow us to draw definite conclusions about a deeper fundamental National Socialist attitude’.86

The German government referred in its report to historical research suggesting that ‘the very fact of Party membership tells us little about the behaviour of officials in the Nazi dictatorship — apart from the fact that it makes a considerable difference at which point someone joined the NSDAP’.87 Research into perpetrators had also shown that not all individuals involved in Nazi crimes had belonged to Nazi organisations and that, conversely, not all members of the NSDAP or other Nazi organisations were involved in crimes. So evidence of Nazi guilt could only be established by considering cases individually.

A huge amount of research needed to be done: the documents listed in the report run to hundreds of thousands of personal files for former officials. Research in the Federal Archives took an average of between 30 and 60 minutes per person, government rapporteurs calculated. Even simply comparing a name against the NSDAP membership card file took 15 minutes.

A quarter of an hour doesn’t sound like much when it comes to dealing with the past, but it mounts up. So it’s understandable that the German government should have limited the research to spot checks, and apart from that referred only to future research.

But it remains a mystery why the rapporteurs clearly didn’t even take the trouble to check the data in a prominent case like that of Genscher’s. The date of his NSDAP membership is given as 1945, as indeed it is in Wikipedia, while the year given on his file card in the Federal Archives is 1944.

The German government didn’t want to say anything at all on the matter of former NSDAP members of the Bundestag in the 1950s and 1960s. They had no cause to carry out research into other government bodies, they added brusquely.

In contrast, the list of dismissals carried out on grounds of Nazi guilt was highly informative. In the Auswärtiges Amt, some 34 per cent of whose senior members were former NSDAP members, a grand total of three officials were fired on the grounds of their past in the Third Reich. In the Federal Ministry of Justice, it was one.

On the other hand, during the 1950s, officials who had previously been sacked on the grounds of their activities in the Nazi state were industriously recruited into the civil service. The basis of these reappointments was a piece of supplementary legislation to Article 131 of the Constitution, according to which minor offenders could be re-employed. The figures are startling: by 31 March 1955, 77.4 per cent of posts in the Ministry of Defence were occupied by ‘131ers’; 68.3 per cent in the Ministry of Finance; and 58.1 per cent in the press and information office of the federal government.

The 12 years of the Third Reich may by now be one of the most thoroughly researched periods in German history, as the government report on the subject, with its hundreds of references, suggests. But that is only taking into account the post-1945 examination of the Nazi period, which was carried out all too often by individual special-interest organisations, academics, and the media. It is no surprise that commissions into the investigation of individual authorities such as the German Foreign Office, the Federal Intelligence Service, or the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution have only recently been put into action.

Given the sobering results of such research, the finding that perpetually recurs in the government report sounds almost like a magic spell: in spite of all continuities in staff, we must not forget ‘that the unconditional normative state rejection of National Socialism shaped the construction of all state institutions in the Federal Republic of Germany’.88

A Nazi past for institutions in the Federal Republic, the government argued, could not possibly exist, because these institutions had only existed since 1949. That may be the case in a formal sense, and in terms of state policy, but the argument looks somewhat contrived given the fact that, even in the new institutions, the redeployment of the old workforce could lead to an intellectual continuity.

The Federal Intelligence Service and the Chancellor’s Office could no longer ignore this insight when, in 1963, the double agents Heinz Felfe and Johannes Clemens were accused of spying for Moscow. These two senior members of the Intelligence Service already knew one another from their time working together for Himmler’s Reich Security Headquarters, and they were part of a network of former Gestapo members working in the intelligence service of the Federal Republic, as a strictly secret government report from August 1963 makes clear. According to this document, ‘the former members of the SD [the SS intelligence service] felt very strongly their connectedness and obligations to one another’ and ‘the equality of the methods of Bolshevism and National Socialism and the affinity between the two systems was plainly such that individuals with pasts in the SD and other areas of Nazism stuck together and were susceptible to recruitment bids by the Soviets’.89 The fact that the organisation, under its first director, Reinhard Gehlen, had employed many former Gestapo members after 1945 — not only because of their expert knowledge, but also because of their anti-communism, clearly apparent during the Nazi era — plainly counted little with regard to this argument, concerned as it was with exoneration.

‘Not everything is in the files’

In spite of such cases, the development of the Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic success story. But the federal government’s report about the examination of the Nazi past of the state pushes the cardinal question back to the forefront: How did it manage to build up democratic institutions with undemocratic staff? How could a national community compromised by the constraints and temptations of 12 years of dictatorship end up as an open, democratic society of a sort that had never before existed in Germany?

Certainly the ‘re-education’ program of the Western Allies wasn’t the only factor involved. The country’s rapid economic success was likely to woo even diehard reactionaries to the young republic.

But for one generation, ‘re-education’ also meant ‘self-education’: Erich Loest’s ‘leftover boys’ had to de-Nazify themselves in the courtroom of their own conscience. Again and again.

We Germans are notoriously unyielding in our moral judgements, and equally harsh in our condemnation of those selfsame judgements. Perhaps this is the reason why many prominent Germans still portray their party membership as a matter of chance when confronted with their NSDAP file cards.

What began as a tragedy is thus repeating itself as farce. The most recent highlight was a bizarre appearance by the former Baader-Meinhof terrorist Stefan Wisniewski in the Buback trial. (German attorney-general Siegfried Buback was murdered by Baader-Meinhof terrorists in 1977, and important details of the crime are yet to be satisfactorily resolved.) At his hearing before the Stuttgart Regional Court in 1981, 57-year-old Wisniewski wore a black hooded jumper with the Polish inscription ‘Follow this trail’ and the numbers ‘8179469’ — Siegfried Buback’s NSDAP membership number.

The Nazi Party membership of the former attorney general is a well-known fact by now in Germany. But in 1977, his murderers couldn’t have known any more about it than they did about the membership of his successor, Kurt Rebmann, who had joined Hitler’s party on 1 September 1942.

More recent research indicates a greater number of hidden former Nazi Party members than previously supposed even in German parliaments, right up until the 1980s and 1990s. While the official biographical handbook of the Hessian regional parliament lists only three MPs with Nazi pasts, a study commissioned by the president of the Landtag and published in February 2013 reached the conclusion that there were points in time during which one-third of all MPs were former NSDAP members. Apart from the communist KPD, all parties represented in the Hessian parliament had former Nazi Party members in their ranks. Overall, the historians found 92 former SS members and 26 former members of the SA. Between 1954 and 1970, about 60 per cent of the FDP parliamentary group in the Landtag were former Nazi Party members.

There are as yet no reliable figures for the Bundestag and the federal ministries; but here, too, researchers believe that there are many unreported cases. In years to come, the file cards will yield up long-guarded secrets: about life in the Third Reich and coming to terms with it all in the Federal Republic. But they will reveal nothing about the guilt and involvement of young people.

‘Files can lie, too, when they reproduce lies,’ Hans-Dietrich Genscher said at the end of our meeting in Bad Godesberg, going on to add, ‘Not everything’s in the files.’ Genscher knows what he’s talking about. In his long years in power, he always remembered the lesson that he once learned as a schoolboy in Halle: Knowledge is power. Sometimes, so too is ignorance.