A large majority of the magistrates in post after the Second World War in the German Federal Prosecutor's Office, one of the most important judicial institutions in the Federal Republic, were former Nazis: this is the final conclusion of a report presented this Thursday.
"
On the front of the stage, highly competent lawyers (...) and behind the death sentences and the racial laws in which they have been implicated
", summed up the Secretary of State to the Ministry of Justice, Margaretha Sudhof, insisting on these "
disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind
".
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In a report of more than 600 pages called "
State security during the Cold War
", the historian Friedrich Kiessling and the lawyer Christoph Safferling draw up an edifying observation: between 1953 and 1959, some 75% of the civil servants of the Federal Prosecutor's Office had were members of the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler.
In 1966, among the federal prosecutors responsible for criminal prosecution, ten out of eleven had their cards with the NSDAP party, continue the authors of this report commissioned at the end of 2017 by the leader of the prosecution based in Karlsruhe (south-west), Peter Frank.
And it was not until 1992 that the prosecution finally moved away from its sulphurous past with the departure of the last prosecutor involved in the Nazi regime.
"No break"
"
There was no break, or even a conscious break with the Nazi past
" within the federal prosecution, conclude the experts. "
The Nazi past has been repressed, it has been passed over in silence,
" added Margaretha Sudhof during the presentation of the report. "
Justice and the administration have also struggled to confront their history
." In Germany, the Federal Prosecutor's Office is one of the most prestigious judicial authorities, competent in terrorism and espionage cases. With more than a hundred prosecutors, he is "
the central figure in the fight against terror.
», Recall the authors of the report, stressing its even more predominant role since the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the increased Islamic terrorist threat.
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To support their work, researchers have been able to access files classified as secret or confidential since the end of World War II.
The fact that West Germany used former collaborators of the Nazi regime in its post-war administration has been known for a long time.
“
There was no zero hour.
The Nazi tyranny was crushed, yes but not a large part of its elites,
”summarized Margaretha Sudhof.
“
The Federal Republic was built by office holders under the Nazi regime
".
Thus Hans Globke, one of the closest advisers to the Conservative Chancellor Konrad Adenauer from 1953 to 1963, was under the Nazi regime a high official at the origin of the obligation for Jews in 1938 to add the first name Sara or Israel to their identity.
"Recycling"
But in recent years, a series of historical research has shed light on the extent of this “
recycling
”.
Thus in 2016, a government report shed a harsh light on the functioning of the Ministry of Justice.
The research carried out had shown that the number of former Nazis in the ministry had not decreased after the war ... but increased in the 1950s. This massive presence is explained in particular by the need to resort to experienced executives. to reorganize West German justice.
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In addition, the priorities of the Allies, victorious in 1945, were quickly turned upside down in the face of the communist threat.
After having sought to denazify in the immediate post-war period, they saw the need to rebuild a country in ruins.
This often went through the use of officials already trained and regardless of their involvement in the Third Reich.
And this massive recourse to these former Nazis had the consequence of slowing down considerably the procedures to judge Nazi crimes, even to bury them.
Thus Germany only very late began to judge those formerly responsible for Nazi atrocities, as evidenced in recent years by a series of trials of nonagenarians who had worked in extermination or concentration camps.