Ex-Nazis in West Germany

Late last year, the German Interior Ministry published a list of all former members of the German government with a Nazi past. Turns out a total of 25 cabinet ministers, one president and one chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (postwar Germany) had been members of Nazi organizations!

Now think for a minute: this is just the number of politicians who became ministers, so how many ex-Nazis must have been elected in total? More importantly, how did they all slip through the net?

It gets worse. The Nazis found their way into pretty much all roles, as the records show: public servants, police, intelligence services, media, you name it, the Nazis were there. And once you have them all over the place, the old boys network will obviously protect each other.

For example, diplomats with Nazi pasts would protect and warn their counterparts on the run in different countries. Others in the foreign ministry shaped policy towards Arab and South American countries. In the 1950s’s, for example, the German embassy in Argentina issued travel documents to the family of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organizers of the Holocaust. No German bothered to make the obvious conclusion as to where Eichmann was. (The Israelis made the connection: they kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina, tried him, and executed him).

So how were so many Nazis able to get into positions of power and influence? Well, it was a whole lot of pragmatic reasons. After all, if you threw out everyone in government ministries at the time of the Nazi era, where would you find people to govern? People with relevant experience or abilities? So Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first chancellor, may not necessarily have been a Nazi sympathizer when he demanded an “end to this sniffing out of Nazis”: he may just have been trying to find people to help him govern the new country! Similarly, you can’t build a new judiciary with completely new people, so you inevitably retain a large number of judges from the old era.

But wouldn’t the victorious Allies have wanted to prosecute the Nazis? Sure, but even they had to look at the “bigger picture”. Go after all the Nazis, and they might plot to overthrow the new, fragile government. But make (some of) them a part of the government and they had a stake to make the new system survive! Besides, in Allied thinking, Germany could not be allowed to fall to the communists. Looking the other way at the Nazis was the lesser evil than allowing communism to win.

Like it or not, real life is a matter of simple choices between good and evil. Doesn’t make things right, but it sure helps to know why things are the way they are.