Report Confirms German Foreign Ministry Role in Holocaust
I hate German Nazis…
One of the pillars of Germany’s political establishment, the Foreign Ministry, was a “criminal organization” during the Nazi era, and the country’s diplomats played a far more active role in the Holocaust than was previously acknowledged. Those are some of the troubling findings of a new 880-page government-sponsored report, called “The Ministry and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic,” which has shaken the nation. Drawn from thousands of historical documents, the report, due to be officially released on Thursday, makes for uncomfortable reading as it debunks a long cherished belief that Germany’s Foreign Ministry was a hive of resistance to the Nazi regime and that German diplomats were not involved in the mass extermination of millions of Jews in Nazi death camps.
“The sheer scale of the participation of Germany’s Foreign Ministry in the Holocaust is bewildering. It wasn’t just one department; it was the whole institution,” Eckart Conze, a professor of modern history at the Philipps University of Marburg and one of the authors of the report, tells TIME. “The ministry collaborated with the Nazis’ violent policies and took part in all aspects of the discrimination, deportation, persecution and genocide of the Jews.”