File this one under “What are they thinking?”
The German newspaper whose web site really could be better organized reports today that the Foreign Ministry’s internal magazine no longer publishes obituaries for diplomats who, during their lifetime, were members of the Nazi party.
I’m not sure why this is controversial, but apparently the FAZ thinks it is front-page news. (Links are not practical, but search for “Fischers Gedenkpraxis.)
The practice has allegedly been in place since late 2003, but a retired ambassador made it public in January of this year. Now the topic has also been taken up by a member of the furthest-right party represented in the national parliament, the CSU. He’s upset that Nazis are treated differently from Communists. (I’m not making this up.)
Apparently dozens of former Foreign Office officials took out a memorial ad yesterday to commemorate a former Ambassador who joined the NSDAP in 1936 and, after the war, was eventually Ambassador to NATO.
I’m just wondering what are these people thinking?
Do they really want to go out of the way to make sure these folks are honored?
Do they really want to call attention to how many old Nazis went on to have perfectly good careers in the Bundesrepublik? How many went on to hold very high posts in the postwar government? That’s the sort of thing that’s known to people who are well versed in Germany’s post-war history but has generally been left unsaid.
Because you can bet your bottom euro that if this story takes off, the headline of this post will be the first of many, and it will probably be one of the milder ones.
The one and only valid point is that a number of people in the Foreign Office were active in the resistance to Hitler. But they were far fewer than the convinced NSDAP members, the opportunists and the careerists. It looks as if the people making a fuss now would like to borrow that luster to shine up any number of others.
But really, what does it say about the diplomatic savvy of people launching a campaign to say, well, yes, so-and-so was a Nazi but he really wasn’t such a bad guy?
If you have a problem with somebody, you should face him. Waiting until they are dead is no style.
Many years ago I attended a session of the Bundesgerichtshof (i.e., Germany’s highest instance of ordinary jurisdiction). On the wall in a corridor outside the courtroom was a tablet to the memory of those German judges and prosecutors who had died in Soviet imprisonment following WWII.
This pissed me off a bit.
Yes, some plain old apolitical German soldiers ended up in Soviet PW camps whose worst sin was unthinking loyalty to a regime that (to put it mildly) was not worthy of their sacrifice. (And perhaps the occasional more-or-less Good Guy was caught up in this; if the narrative of The Pianist is accurate, at least one German officer who managed to retain his humanity died in Kriegsgefangenschaft.)
But the judges and prosecutors of the nazi era were as gleichgeschaltet as they come. I do not know of any exceptions. If there were exceptions, I’d have no problem with a tablet commemorating those few. But that is not what this tablet did. As a group, these are people whose memory deserves to be blotted out. I do not know, for example, whether any of the prosecutors or judges involved in the judicial murder of the Weisse Rose ended their days in a Soviet prison camp (if so, it is better than they deserved); but if that is the case, that they should be commemorated by an institution of the postwar democratic German state is obscene.
But that is beside the point. The government of the republic had decided that they were to be ambassadors. Their work caused no grounds for complaints. You cannot on the one hand appoint an ambassador and then refuse to publish an obituary. That’s pure hypocrisy.
Now, M. Fischer might not have appointed the ambassador in question. But that is irrelevant. He’s bound by the obligations his predecessors have created, just as his successors will fulfill obligations he has created.
IIRC the beef was with the fact that several of these people did serve their country well for many years after the war and that it is this what their obituary by the ministry is supposed to honor. Based on that, it _is_ artifical to distinguish based on past Nazi-membership since that is irrelevant to the question of whether they did a good job after the war.
Now, I have a lot of sympathy for the move based on something like “government shouldn’t honor people who once were in league* with mass murderers”, but have to concede that this stance is open to criticism on a much stronger principle, namely why should these people be employed in the first place. (and again, if they were good enough to be employed, why target them only once they’re dead?). And yes, if it is now accepted practice that a tainted past is in some cases more important than subsequent service, that means it’s worth taking a look at some communists.
That said, IMO the whole thing is unfortunate either way and I can’t think of a pleasant solution. Maybe we should have another long look at the number of Nazi members who ended up in positions of responsibility after 1945. Ugly, but probably necessary. (Anyone know a good book on the matter?)
* if possible I’d like to avoid discussion on how much support for Hitler membership in the NSDAP actually implied and what degree of culpability it confers. Obviously some, but beyond that I believe one has to consider each case on its own merits.