Report about the the German Foreign Ministry’s role in the Holocaust

On 28 October, a report by historians who investigated the role of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the persecution and extermination of Jews between 1933 and 1945 was published. From the major conclusions of the study, commissioned in 2005 by Joschka Fischer, the then German Foreign Minister, it appears that contrary to common knowledge, the German Foreign Ministry participated to a large extent in the Holocaust.

Eckhard Contze, the head of the commission of the historians involved in the research, called the ministry a “criminal organisation” in one interview. Such an assessment is based, among other elements, on thorough research into the documents and business correspondence of diplomats. The documents already revealed feature a letter written by Ernst von Weizsäcker (the father of the future president of the Federal Republic of Germany) in 1936, in which he demanded that Thomas Mann be deprived of German citizenship. The Nazi diplomats were the overwhelming majority of those who built the ‘new’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II

The publication of this report will allow the verification of the ever-present (especially in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) canard that German diplomats in the Third Reich were not involved in the Holocaust. This is also another piece of evidence that the de-Nazification process in post-War Germany was conducted only superficially. <ciechan>