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Initiator: Artist Gunter Demnig has been laying stumbling blocks for victims of the Nazi regime since 2006.
The picture was taken last summer in Berlin-Köpenick.
Photo: Jean MW / Future Image / IMAGO
The artist and initiator of the stumbling block initiative, Gunter Demnig, is calling on the Foreign Office to come to terms with the Nazi past of diplomats who were honored with memorial stones despite their sympathy for Adolf Hitler.
"The Foreign Ministry has a duty to investigate the cases," said Demnig. "It's embarrassing that this hasn't happened yet." At the end of July, SPIEGEL reported that there were three stumbling blocks for suspected Nazi helpers in front of the former official headquarters in Berlin .
"We relied on the information from the office when we laid the stones last fall," said Demnig.
"If the suspicion is confirmed, we'll rip them out again."
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Export consultant at IG Farben
Not only the three stumbling blocks are questionable, but also at least one other: Legation counselor Vollrath von Maltzan was dismissed from the diplomatic service in 1938 because of his mother's Jewish descent.
As a result, however, Maltzan worked for the chemical company IG Farben, which was notorious for the exploitation of concentration camp prisoners.
From 1939 to 1942 he was again employed in the NS Foreign Ministry before moving back to IG Farben as a consultant for export issues.
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After the war, Maltzan was taken back to the foreign service and in 1955 he became the German ambassador in Paris.
In this function he intervened in 1956 on behalf of Bonn at the Paris Ministry of Foreign Affairs against the French concentration camp documentary "Night and Fog" by Alain Resnais, which had been nominated as a contribution to the Cannes Film Festival.
Maltzan justified this by saying that "only films that do not hurt the national feelings of another people or do not impair the peaceful coexistence of peoples may be shown in Cannes".
At the urging of the French government, the documentary about the German concentration camps, especially Auschwitz, was eventually withdrawn from the competition.
Image film on YouTube
When asked, the Federal Foreign Office emphasized that the laying of the stumbling blocks was organized by a group of employees on a voluntary basis and “without instructions” from the ministry.
In doing so, the authority rejects any responsibility.
When the 56 stumbling blocks were laid in November 2022, a state secretary gave the official speech.
And on the official YouTube channel of the Federal Foreign Office there is a short film that was produced to accompany the laying of the stumbling blocks.
In it, Michaela Küchler, the then »Special Representative of the Federal Foreign Office for Holocaust Remembrance«, says: »Remembrance is something that we can never do too much.«
Controversies surrounding the Historical Commission
The total of 56 stumbling blocks on Berlin's Wilhelmstrasse, where the Foreign Office was based from 1870 to 1945, are actually intended to commemorate Nazi victims among the diplomats.
However, the majority of cases do not involve execution or deportation, only forced retirement.
After the long controversy surrounding the Commission of Historians, which presented its findings on Nazi history to the Foreign Ministry in 2010, it is all the more astonishing that serious mistakes were apparently made when the stumbling blocks were laid.
