Christian Hasse, Christian Kraiker, Jorn Kreuzer, et al. Contemporary European History. Volume 21, Issue 1, Cambridge, February 2012.
On 7 November 1968, the political activist Beate Klarsfeld entered the stage of a CDU party convention in Berlin, slapped the West German chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger in the face and cried ‘Nazi, Nazi’. During the Third Reich, Kiesinger had worked in one of the propaganda departments of the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office). The history of the German foreign office received additional attention in 1968 due to the fact that the then vice-chancellor and foreign secretary of the Grand Coalition, Willy Brandt, was a former resistance fighter, who had been stripped of his citizenship by the Auswärtiges Amt in 1938. Despite numerous scandals about the post-war careers of former Nazi diplomats in the 1950s and 60s, the Auswärtiges Amt escaped closer scrutiny until 2005, when the then foreign secretary Joschka Fischer set up a historical inquiry commission. In his memoirs, Fischer has argued that his decision was influenced by the events of 1968.
Fischer entrusted a team of historians around Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Moshe Zimmerman and Peter Hayes with the scholarly analysis of such continuities. They studied the involvement of the German foreign office in the Holocaust and aimed to shed new light on the post-war careers of many German diplomats. The commission published its findings in October 2010. The book, Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, has sold more than 70,000 copies and is one of the best-selling German history books of the last few years. It has been the subject of much controversy, reminding observers of the debate on the exhibition ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht‘ in the mid-1990s. The exhibition was largely based on prior research, but presented these results to a larger audience for the first time. Unfortunately, the first version of the exhibition also contained some factual mistakes.
The book Das Amt has catalysed the establishment of the topic ‘Germany’s foreign relations and the Nazi past in the twentieth century’ as a distinct research field. The book combines biographical studies, Holocaust studies, Nazi diplomatic history, post-war history and studies on the memorialisation of the Nazi period after 1945. These research fields scarcely acknowledge each other’s results. Recent publications on the memorialisation of the Nazi past underline this trend. The seminal book Der Nationalsozialismus: Die Zweite Geschichte by Reichel, Schmid and Steinbach, for example, has little to say about foreign policy, which is rather surprising considering the enormous significance of the Nazi past for the foreign relations of East and West Germany during the Cold War. Thus, the challenge that lies ahead is to reintegrate the various research strands into a more coherent research field. This article aims to make a small contribution towards this wider goal by surveying a number of books that deal with questions of Germany’s foreign relations and the Nazi past before and after 1945.
The book Das Amt has put the biographies of German diplomats at the centre of its analysis. The commission argues that there was hardly a change in outlook among the diplomatic elites when Joachim von Ribbentrop succeeded Konstantin von Neurath as foreign secretary in 1938. Moshe Zimmermann, who was responsible for the relevant chapter, and the other historians of the commission argue that antisemitic ideas were widespread among the more traditional diplomats and the new Nazi party members of the foreign office. These shared ideas contributed to the involvement of the foreign office in the radicalisation towards the Holocaust. In the Part 2 of the book, on the years after 1945, the commission shows that many diplomats tried to put the blame for the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime on a few Nazi ‘radicals’ and stressed the role of the resistance against Hitler in the Auswärtiges Amt. The analysis focuses on the years between the early 1930s and the 1950s. During these years, the Auswärtiges Amt was transformed three times: in 1939, when war broke out, the ministerial responsibilities for the relations with war zones, occupied countries and alliance partners were changed. After the war, the Auswärtiges Amt was abolished by the Allies. In the early 1950s, it was reconstructed from a smaller government department allocated to the Kanzleramt. Due to these changes, the commission has put the main emphasis on the analysis of biographical continuities.
The biographical approach of the commission has been inspired by a recent upsurge in biographical studies on Nazi perpetrators, victims of the Third Reich and members of the resistance against Hitler. The results of Ulrich Herbert’s ground-breaking biography of Werner Best, a leading figure of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), were of particular importance for the commission. Since the publication of the book in 1992, biographical research on Nazi perpetrators has been growing. Herbert’s seminal study has traced Best’s rise through the ranks of the RSHA, his co-operation with the Auswärtiges Amt as Reichsbevollmächtigter in Denmark and his post-war career in the Federal Republic. The book Das Amt also draws on Norbert Frei’s important biographical work on the post-war years. In recent years, Frei has stimulated numerous research projects about biographical continuities from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic, particularly with regard to the careers of journalists, doctors and judges. Further, the commission of inquiry was able to take advantage of the new biographical dictionary of the foreign office published by Maria Keipert and others.
However, the commission faced the difficult task of analysing the biographies of more than 6,000 persons who had worked for the German foreign office during the Third Reich. In the last few years, many biographies have been published that have provided important clues, such as the biography of Otto Dietrich by Stefan Krings or the group biography of former officers of the Wehrmacht in the Bundeswehr by Hubert Rottleuthner. Thus, it is not surprising that some publications have been overlooked. The report of the inquiry commission, for example, only cites the book by Lutz Hachmeister on Franz Alfred Six. Franz Alfred Six was a member of the SS who joined the Foreign Office and contributed to its involvement in the Holocaust. The recent publications by Botsch are not cited, nor has the outstanding book recently published Hilary Earl on the Einsatzgruppen Trial been included – despite the fact that Six was trialled at the Einsatzgruppen Trial. The trial was the ninth of the twelve subsequent Nuremberg Trials known as the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT). It was conducted by the United States against Otto Ohlendorf and twenty-three further leaders of the Einsatzgruppen. The commission Auswärtiges Amt has focused in more depth on the eighth of the trials, the so-called ‘Ministries Trial’ against Ernst von Weizsäcker and other members of the Auswärtiges Amt and the Nazi bureaucracy. It would have been interesting to illuminate the connection between these trials and the defendants in more detail.
The authors of the book Das Amt have not attributed individual authorship to the different parts of the book. There were several collaborators. At times, more than fourteen persons worked on the book. However, Moshe Zimmermann was responsible for Part 1, which he supervised. It deals with the involvement of the Auswärtiges Amt in the Holocaust. Most mistakes were made in this part, while Part 2, co-authored by Frei, Conze and others, is excellent. The authors of Part 1 argue, for example, that Hitler and Ribbentrop took the decision for the final solution on 17 September 1941. This is wrong. They also contend that the Auswärtiges Amt played an active, at times even more active role than the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, in the Holocaust. Richard Evans, Hans Mommsen, Johannes Hürther and others, however, have criticised this interpretation. The latter have pointed out that the foreign office under Ribbentrop lost influence. However, it would be wrong to ascribe these mistakes solely to individuals. The problems facing the commission reflect the fragmentation of the wider research field.
Historians of Nazi diplomacy and cultural-social historians have been suspicious of each other since the so-called ‘primacy debate’ between Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Klaus Hildebrand in the 1970s. The primacy debate focused on whether foreign policy is primarily driven by international or domestic and social conflicts. Hildebrand stressed that states tried to uphold the balance of power. Wehler, on the other hand, emphasised the social roots of foreign policy. Based on these different premises, German historians have attached a very different value to the study of diplomatic relations since the debate. The commission of inquiry tried to overcome these old frictions and invited Hildebrand to participate. However, he unfortunately fell ill. As it transpired, Moshe Zimmermann, an expert in nineteenth-century social history, was solely responsible for the analysis of diplomacy during the Nazi era. The resulting outcome is telling about the traditional lack of communication between diplomatic, social and Holocaust history: the commission published a book about the foreign office that scarcely imparts any information on foreign policy. Only five out of 879 pages deal with the diplomatic history leading up to the Second World War, and only nineteen pages are dedicated to the important aspect of alliance diplomacy between the Axis Powers. Some more background information on the role of the foreign office in the Third Reich would have clarified its role in the Holocaust.
The decision to cut back on pre-1945 diplomatic history is even more surprising if one considers its significance for the outbreak of the Second World War. At the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, the judges found the former foreign secretaries of Nazi Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Konstantin von Neurath, guilty on all four counts: conspiracy to commit of a crime against peace, conducting of a war of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ribbentrop was sentenced to death alongside Wilhelm Keitl, Alfred Jodl, Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg and others. Neurath, who had been foreign secretary up until February 1938, was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. At the IMT and the subsequent NMT against the state secretary of the foreign office, Ernst von Weizsäcker, former German diplomats argued that there was a difference between ‘Nazi careerists’ such as Ribbentrop and the more traditional diplomats. The argument of the defendants was that the traditional, often noble elites, had been sidelined by Hitler and Nazi ‘upstarts’ in the run-up to the war after the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis in early 1938. It was further claimed that they had tried to avert the outbreak of war and had not been involved in the Holocaust. This line of argument has been partially disproved with regard to the military elites of the Third Reich, who willingly turned the Wehrmacht into an instrument in Hitler’s war of annihilation in the East. A detailed biographical analysis of the nazification of the foreign office in 1937 and 1938 was outstanding.
The commission avoids a clear analysis of the ‘revirement’ in 1938. In the introduction, the book argues that there was no significant change of outlook among the diplomats when Ribbentrop took over from Neurath. However, the book then argues that the old diplomats were relegated to areas of ‘classical diplomacy’ that became ‘less significant’. The new Nazi career diplomats expanded their sphere of influence in the foreign office. Among them, for example, was Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, the leader of the NSDAP-AO, who joined the Auswärtiges Amt as state secretary in 1937. His appointment signalled a more aggressive nazification of the Foreign Office and a new approach to foreign relations, in which international party contacts and contacts towards ethnical groups played an increasingly important role. Thus, the evidence presented by the inquiry commission implies a new, more detailed and nuanced interpretation of continuity, radicalisation and change. Some areas of foreign policy were dominated by new SA and SS members, while in other areas traditional diplomats played an active role in supporting the aggressive radicalisation of Nazi foreign policy and antisemitic policies.
This implicit interpretation of the inquiry commission is in line with two further recent publications that have shed important light on the radicalisation of the diplomatic elites. Sebastian Weitkamp’s book Braune Diplomaten: Horst Wagner und Eberhard von Thadden als Funktionäre der Endlösung analyses the role of Thadden and Wagner in the Holocaust. Thadden and Wagner personified two different career paths in the Auswärtiges Amt. Thadden had studied law and acquired a PhD. He joined the NSDAP and the SS and followed a traditional diplomatic career. Wagner, on the contrary, was a typical Nazi ‘upstart’. He had allegedly studied sports, falsified his diploma, worked as a freelance journalist and then joined the Dienststelle Ribbentrop. Wagner joined the Foreign Office after Ribbentrop had assumed the position of foreign secretary. He became the liaison diplomat between Himmler and Ribbentrop and the leader of the Referatsgruppe Inland II, to which also the so-called Judenreferat belonged. Weitkamp’s book takes up the research conducted by Christopher Browning and provides an analysis of the role that both diplomats played in the Holocaust. Weitkamp shows that both, despite their different career paths, actively co-operated and supported the Holocaust. Further, he shows that not only the Referatsgruppe Inland II, but many departments of the Auswärtiges Amt were actively involved in contributing to the Holocaust. Like the inquiry commission, he disproves the myth that only a few ‘radicals’ supported these policies.
In his recent study Staaten als Täter: Ministerialbürokratie und ‘Judenpolitik’ in NS-Deutschland und Vichy-Frankreich, Michael Mayer has come to a slightly different conclusion. Mayer analyses the role of traditional bureaucrats in Germany and France in developing ‘segregationist’ antisemitic laws and policies. He compares the development of the Nuremberg Laws with the antisemitic legislation in Vichy France in 1940. He argues that France and Germany were dominated by conservative and antisemitic traditional elites. Mayer’s main argument is that the ‘segregationist’ antisemitism of the ‘old elites’ differed from the ‘eliminatory antisemitism’ of the new Nazi agencies such as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. According to Mayer, the old elites supported antisemitic segregation but refused the extermination policy of the Nazis. He argues that the structural radicalisation of Nazi Germany ‘spilt over’ to Vichy and set in motion a radicalisation of antisemitic policies. However, Mayer could have provided more insight into the policies of the German bureaucracy and the final solution. He fails to identify in greater detail the role of individuals in Nazi crimes. Nonetheless, the book displays convincing arguments and shows that both perspectives, the more structural as well as the more biographically orientated, can be usefully combined in order to explain the radicalisation of foreign policy.
The three books by Weitkamp, Mayer and the inquiry commission indicate the extent to which the recent upsurge of biographical studies has begun to add detail to the crucial question about the radicalisation of Germany’s diplomatic elites after 1937/38. The books by Weitkamp and Mayer show that the combination of diplomatic and biographical history works well. It would have strengthened the biographical approach of the inquiry commission further if it had taken closer account of the results of diplomatic history, in particular the diplomacy towards south-eastern European history during the Second World War. The book by Hans-Joachim Hoppe on Nazi foreign policy in Bulgaria, for example, has been overlooked by the authors, as well as numerous further research articles on Nazi diplomacy in south-eastern Europe. Diplomacy in this geographical area was mainly conducted by SA and SS-diplomats who were recruited into the foreign office. The results of south-eastern European and diplomatic history would have added important additional insight to the radicalisation of the Germany’s foreign policy elites after 1937/38.
Further, it would have been interesting to reflect on the fundamental changes to the way foreign policy was conducted in the Third Reich during the war. The SA, the SS and the RSHA began to intervene in fields which were considered the prerogative of the foreign office. Elizabeth Harvey has recently shown how women played a significant role in the planned colonisation of the ‘East’. In an additional publication, she has also shown the significance of travels by Nazi students in south-eastern Europe. In addition, it would have been interesting to reflect in more depth on the rise of propaganda departments in the foreign office. Christian Plöger published an important book in 2009 on Ribbentrop’s propaganda specialist Paul Karl Schmidt, who enjoyed an important journalistic career after 1945.
The recent publications on Nazi foreign policy are indicative of another trend in the historiography of the Holocaust, namely to analyse the crimes of Nazi Germany in a comparative regional perspective. A recent publication that has stirred some attention is Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. Snyder analyses the crimes of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, centring on the ‘bloodlands’ of eastern Europe, in particular Poland, the Ukraine, Western Russia and the Baltic States. Snyder argues that the geographical perspective enables the historian to understand the dynamic of the massacres, genocides and crimes against humanity that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany committed in this area between 1933 and 1945. However, the exact definition of this geographical area suggests a clarity of order that did not exist. On the contrary, the supposed clarity of order and ethnic relationships that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union tried to impose was part of the problem. The ambivalence of the terms Volk, Raum, Imperium and Osten is explored in much more detail in the recently published extended essay Ordnung durch Terror by Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Jörg Baberowski, as well as in the book by Elizabeth Harvey on Women and the Nazi East.
While Snyder’s book makes many worthwhile points, his comparison between Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes is not always convincing. Snyder argues that ‘Germans and Soviets provoked each other into committing ever greater crimes’. Again the analysis could have been more detailed. What does ‘provoked’ really mean? Doering-Manteuffel and Baberowski argue that the racial reordering of eastern Europe by the Nazis confirmed the ideas of ethnic loyalties and hierarchies in the Soviet Union. They argue more convincingly than Snyder that both regimes reaffirmed their world-views and partially copied from each other, but neither was the primary root cause of the other regime’s crimes. One would have wished for a much more detailed discussion of these central terms in Snyder’s book in relation to the historiography that he cites. Dietrich Beyrau’s Schlachtfeld der Diktatoren: Osteuropa im Schatten von Hitler und Stalin would also have merited a more detailed discussion. Beyrau chooses a very different time span for his careful comparison between the Third Reich and Soviet Communism. One major difference between the two regimes was the duration of their existence. The Third Reich, as Hans Mommsen argues in the introduction to the book by Doering-Manteuffel and Baberowski, ‘imploded’ at the end of the war, while the Soviet Union existed for more than eighty years. A more long-term perspective on Soviet designs for eastern Europe would have added to Snyder’s argument. Thus, while the internationalisation and Europeanisation of research on the Holocaust and German foreign policy during the Third Reich has many advantages and has contributed to an outstanding differentiation of our understanding of Nazi foreign policy and the causes of the Holocaust, most of the recent books suffer from a lack of in-depth communication among historians and research projects conducted in various countries.
The fundamental changes in the conduct of German diplomacy during the Third Reich towards a stronger emphasis on propaganda, international party diplomacy and ethnic relationships contributed to a significant expansion of the staff of the German foreign office. Staff numbers, including all associated party officials, embassy staff, and so on, sky-rocketed from approximately 2,000 to more than 6,000 towards the end of the war. Naturally this had an influence on the immediate post-war period, when the foreign office was dissolved and was not – in contrast to most other ministries – reconstructed on a larger scale until the early 1950s, due to Allied restrictions. A number of organisations developed that helped former diplomats to make a living. Recent research has shown how diplomats and other members of the foreign office staff began to make careers in various sectors, including the media and research institutes, after 1945.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a number of factors came together which facilitated the reintegration of former Nazi-tainted diplomats into West Germany’s political system and helped some of them to regain positions in the nascent Dienststelle für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (government department for foreign affairs). The early Cold War had a multitude of effects on the former Nazi foreign policy elites. While the strong ethic of anti-communism, together with their existing networks, helped some of the Nazi diplomats to rekindle their careers, others were completely sidelined or moved abroad. Contemporaries were already highly sceptical of the high number of former members of the Nazi party in the nascent foreign office, but it is less than clear what direct influence this had on West German foreign policy. Until 1955, foreign policy was controlled from the chancellery by Adenauer and was kept in check by the Allies through their special rights. The first embassies were staffed with ‘outsiders’ such as the art historian Wilhelm Hausenstein. Herbert Blankenhorn, who was a central figure in the reintegration of former diplomats into the nascent diplomatic service, was highly loyal to Adenauer. The inquiry commission has rightly pointed out a number of scandals in relation to the policies towards Israel. However, in sum one has to say that those who were reintegrated into the government machinery were under more pressure to conform to the new guidelines of Western and West European integration in the early 1950s than those who sought other jobs, in particular in the media sector. The inquiry commission has found a document from Weizsäcker’s defence team at the NMT that makes this point quite clear. The defence team stopped supplying information to Die Zeit at some point because the lawyers felt that the reports by some former diplomats, who had become journalists, were so aggressive and shameless that they could backfire.
While many of the recent publications have unearthed considerable evidence about the post-war careers of former Nazis and perpetrators, there have also been advances on the post-war stories of the victims of National Socialism. Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung by Frei, Goschler and Brunner is a particularly important book that sheds new light on various aspects and experiences of reparation policies in Germany and Israel. The edited book weaves together, in twenty-two chapters, representative personal stories of Jewish families and political victims of National Socialism. It adds another important dimension to the various publications on reparation policies.
The current state of research on reparation policies, the Nuremberg Trials and other aspects of Vergangenheitspolitik is neatly summarised in the edited volume by Reichel, Schmid and Steinbach, Der Nationalsozialismus: Die zweite Geschichte. The book underlines the breadth of research on the legacies of National Socialism in post-war Germany, ranging from theatre and film to monuments and legal developments. Most of the current research on the politics of memory has a very strong grounding in cultural history. In a book recently edited by Bill Niven, for example, there is a similar strong bias towards the study of monuments, films and all kinds of media. Niven includes a number of highly interesting articles on the transnational aspects of memory formation. David Livingstone, for example, has contributed an interesting chapter on the role of the German War Graves Commission for remembering the war on foreign soil. It is hoped that the recent publications will rekindle greater interest in the transnational effects of memory formation. Equally, some more classic foreign policy histories of the Federal Republic, such as the seminal studies by Haftendorn, would benefit from a wider cultural and biographical angle.
Eckart Conze’s most recent book on Germany and the country’s international relations shows one possible way to weave together recent findings in social, cultural history and international relations. In his book, Conze refers to the connection between the Nazi past and foreign policy. In Die Suche nach Sicherheit, he argues that the search for security was the driving element behind West German policy in general and foreign policy in particular. The experience of two world wars, hyperinflation, the world economic crisis, the division of the country and rapid social change shaped a search for security and stability that found its expression in foreign policy as much as in the architecture, political views and moral ideas of the post-war and Adenauer era. Conze’s book was published in 2009, the year which saw the celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of the Federal Republic and the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall. The book follows the now established periodisation of German history: the 1950s (1949-57) are followed by the long 1960s (1957-74), the crisis years (1974-82/85), the final years of the Federal Republic (1982-89) and unified Germany since 1990.
In the context of this review article, it is interesting to note that these widely established periods of West German history since 1945 correspond to major changes in the field of foreign policy and the Nazi past. In fact, the Nazi past was so fundamental, both to the development of West and East German foreign policy and to the relations between the two German states and towards the superpowers of the Western and Eastern blocs, that Haftendorn has pointed out that the German past was a ‘structural force’ that shaped and moulded West and East German foreign policy from 1949 until 1989. Even the transitions from the 1950s to the ‘long 1960s’ and the 1970s were co-determined by foreign policy questions. Towards the end of the 1950s, in 1955, Germany regained its full sovereignty, and thus important control rights of the Allied powers, designed to safeguard democracy against resurgent National Socialists, were scaled back. European integration was advanced between 1955 and 1957 on the understanding that France and Germany should reconcile. The end of the ‘long 1960s’ was also symbolised by the end of Brandt’s chancellorship, which saw major advances in the reconciliation with eastern Europe and the famous kneefall in Warsaw.
In recent years, a number of books have highlighted the important influence of generations on the politics of memory in West Germany. The topic is in particular well explored in the edited volume by Philipp Gassert and Alan E. Steinweis, Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict. It contains a number of chapters that deal with aspects of international relations, including a chapter by Carole Fink on German-Israeli relations, a chapter by Brunner on West German judicial enquiries into Nazi crimes in relation to France, and a chapter Jonathan Wiesen on the making of transatlantic memory. The latter chapter is particularly interesting. It underlines a wider trend in the literature on the 1960s to conceptualise processes of transnational memory formation.
In The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global 1960s, Martin Klimke shows how the politics of memory was engrained in the rise of the student protests all over Europe and in the United States: from the criticism of the ‘Nazi past’ by the German students, to criticisms of the racist history in the United States to student protests in Belgium and Italy – there was a hardly a student revolt in which issues of the past did not play a significant role. 39 Klimke’s well researched and innovative book shows how German-American relations, or more specifically the ‘other alliance’ – the contacts between the West German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) and the American SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), shaped processes of memory formation. Klimke also highlights how the 1968 revolution de-contextualised Germany’s ‘Nazi past’ and began to turn it into a political slogan that could be used in various contexts. Many students in West Germany compared the USA with the Nazi state. A popular slogan, shouted at demonstrations, was ‘USA-SA-SS’. For the 1968 student movement, the Nazi past served as a foil for the criticism of American and West German policies. Thus, it is worth noting that the use of the ‘Nazi past’ was an ambivalent political weapon in West Germany in the 1960s.
The ambivalent nature of the politics of memory in West Germany was symbolised by the problems surrounding the Munich 1972 Olympics. For the first time since 1936, Germany was host to the Olympic Games. This provided the opportunity to present the FRG as a modern and liberal state. In their book The Munich 1972 Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany, Kay Schiller and Christopher Young offer a new perspective on the 1972 Olympics. So far, analyses have been dominated by the kidnapping and assassination of the Israeli Olympic team. Schiller and Young, however, put a stronger emphasis on the linkage between the 1936 and 1972 Olympics without neglecting the other aspects. The key person in this linkage was the controversial President of the IOC, Avery Brundage. Brundage, born in 1887 in Detroit, became a member of the IOC in the 1930s and convinced the American Olympic Committee not to boycott the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. On his return from Berlin, he claimed that reports about antisemitism in Nazi Germany were exaggerated. In 1968, athletes associated with the black power movement demanded that Brundage step down due to his links to the Nazis in the 1930s. Brundage played a major role in bringing the games to Munich in 1972. While the Germans wanted to show that they were a different state twenty-seven years after the end of the Second World War, Brundage went on record saying that he welcomed Germany’s bid, ‘because the Germans had shown their organisational competence in 1936’. Quite worryingly, the Berlin Games in 1936 served as a role model for the IOC until the 1970s.
In the early 1970s, the direct biographical links to the Nazi past became less significant due to generational change. Brundage stepped down as IOC president after the Munich games, Brandt stepped down as chancellor in 1974. However, the Nazi past hardly lost importance for Germany’s foreign relations. On the contrary, it was in the late 1970s and the 1980s that transnational exchanges in film, television, books and research about the Nazi past reached their peak. TV series, such as Holocaust, screened in 1979, have inspired generations of academics and film-makers. The extent to which the public discussion of the Holocaust became a transnational phenomenon has been recently shown in a very well edited volume by Frank Bösch and Constantin Goschler on Public History. The TV series Holocaust also changed the way that individuals publicly recollected their life stories. Frank Bajohr has shown in his excellent biography of Erik Blumenfeld that the CDU politician, who had survived Auschwitz, became much more outspoken about his personal experiences in the 1980s. It is certainly not exaggerated to say that the wider cultural shift in the politics of memory in the 1980s laid the foundations for the upsurge of biographical studies that began in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Recent research has also begun to shed more light on the connection between the TV series Holocaust and anti-nuclear protest and the peace movement. The intermingling of various developments at the end of the 1970s can be observed, for example, in the usage of the highly ambivalent term ‘nuclear holocaust’ in West Germany. The term was widely used by peace protesters and television viewers alike. The term Holocaust with a capital H originated in the US and the UK before 1979 as a reference to the extermination policies of the Nazis. In Germany, the term holocaust had served as a reference to mass extermination through fire, often in connotation to the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, up until then. The breakthrough of the English term Holocaust in the late 1970s and early 1980s thus created some confusion. A random sample of letters on the TV series Holocaust sent to the editor of Die Zeit, Marion Dönhoff, reveals that a very high proportion of those who wrote to Die Zeit were more concerned about the supposedly imminent ‘nuclear holocaust’ than about Germany’s Nazi past. Interesting observations on the history of this ambivalent term have been made in Benjamin Ziemann’s recent edited collection on Peace Movemements, in the book by Silke Mende on the rise of the Green Party, and in the volume edited by Bernd Greiner and others on Angst im Kalten Krieg, not to mention the recent important publications by Holger Nehring on the West German peace movements.
The term also gave the opposition against nuclear power in Germany an additional historical dimension. The state was identified with support for atomic power, potential nuclear holocaust and the Nazi Holocaust. The politics of memory supercharged the protest movements in the Federal Republic in the 1970s and 80s. In her outstanding book on the Green Party, Silke Mende shows how the idea of the ‘nuclear holocaust’ was further woven into a general criticism of progress and doomsday visions of the future. Many of the early members of the Green Party were convinced that the world had reached a ‘point of no return’. The German artist Joseph Beuys proclaimed that ‘we have for the first time in human history [sic!] a situation where we cannot go on like this’. Mende’s analysis is written from the angle of the new history of ideas as championed by Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Lutz Raphael and others. She takes an in-depth look at the various factions that formed the Green Party, and argues that the transatlantic crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which saw the biggest peace demonstrations in the history of the Federal Republic, was the crucial catalyst that brought these diverse groups together.
The recent books and articles on the origins of the Green Party and the protest movements of the 1970s and 1980s provide the background to understanding the rise of Joschka Fischer from a 1968 activist to foreign secretary. In his recently published political autobiography, Fischer has stressed the extent to which he is indebted to the protests of the 1968 generation and the peace movement of 1979. The two volumes of his political autobiography are testimony to the outstanding importance of the politics of memory for Germany’s foreign relations. From the domestic power battles to the decision to support the NATO airstrikes against Serbia, many aspects of German foreign policy between 1998 and 2005 can hardly be understood without reference to the Nazi past. In the first volume of his autobiography, the chapters on the Kosovo conflict stand out. Fischer recalls how he argued that the German support for the Kosovo war was meant to stop ‘another Holocaust’. In the second volume, Fischer continues the underlying theme of ‘German foreign relations and the Nazi past’. The theme culminates in the final chapter of the second volume. Fischer presents the setting up of the inquiry commission on the Nazi past of the foreign office in 2005 as a pinnacle of his political career. He argues that it was his mission as a member of the ‘1968 generation’ to show the ‘mummies’ of the foreign office what kind of crimes their colleagues had committed between 1933 and 1945.
There can be no doubt that the links between Germany’s foreign relations and the Nazi past continue to attract attention and to cause controversy. Recent research has underlined the extent to which the Nazi past has fundamentally shaped the foreign relations of the Federal Republic since 1949. The rivalry between the two German states was moulded by allegations about the other side’s alleged Nazi past. Adenauer’s policies towards Israel, Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the policies of the German peace movement in the 1970s and 1980s and the foreign policy of the first ‘red-green’ government between 1998 and 2005 cannot well be explained without reference to the legacies of the Nazi past. Research on the Holocaust, biographical studies, studies in cultural diplomacy and studies in transnational memory formation have made important progress in recent years. Future progress in this growing research field will depend on improved communication and co-operation among the various strands of research.