Ex-Nazis ‘hellbent’ on helping comrades
Print Edition
GERMANY’S post-World War II justice ministry was infested with former Nazis hellbent on protecting former comrades, according to a new official study released yesterday.
Fully 77 percent of senior ministry officials in 1957 were former members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, a higher proportion even than during the 1933-45 Third Reich, the study found.
“We didn’t expect the figure to be this high,” said study co-author Christoph Safferling, who evaluated former ministry personnel files, speaking to the daily “Sueddeutsche Zeitung.”
The fascist old-boys network closed ranks, enabling its members to shield each other from justice, the study found — helping to explain why so few Nazi war criminals ever went to prison.
“The Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it and thereby created new injustice,” said Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister, who presented the report.
Though the report only deals with ministry bureaucrats, it roughly matches figures for the wider justice apparatus.
Historians have previously found that in the 1950s, more than 70 percent of West Germany’s top judges also had former Nazi connections.
Safferling said that “at a time when a fierce struggle was under way about punishing Nazi crimes, the old comrades were reluctant to come under the scrutiny of young, unencumbered outsiders.”
While other government ministries were able to look to Germany’s future, said Safferling, “justice always deals with the past.”
Those officials questioned about their roles in the Holocaust machinery usually claimed ignorance, said they had only followed orders, or argued that by staying in their posts they had prevented even worse crimes.
“You never find words of regret, only justifications,” said Safferling.
Between 1949 and the early 1970s, 90 of the 170 top ministry officials were former Nazi party members, and many had served as Holocaust-era judges who had handed down death sentences, said former justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who initiated the study in 2012.
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