A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
facts about Globke to West German officials. These were mocked as “more Communist propaganda.” But as more nasty facts seeped out, Adenauer feared they might hurt his fourth-term election chances in 1961 against West Berlin’s Social Democratic mayor Willy Brandt. So Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss attacked Brandt’s anti-fascist emigration as a betrayal of German patriotic duties. Years later, their deal was revealed: no more attacks on Brandt as a “draft-dodging” traitor and no mention of Globke’s past.
But then Franz Bauer, a former Jewish emigrant and uniquely anti-fascist prosecutor in Hesse, defied all attempts to hush up the whereabouts of major war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and tipped off Israel. After Eichmann’s sensational streetside capture in May 1960, he was put on trial in Israel, not in mild West Germany. Would he spill any beans about his Nazi-era ties with Globke? CIA-boss Allen Dulles and Gehlen’s BDN were able to edit Eichmann’s memoirs in Life magazine and spent 50,000 marks to keep a book exposé off the market. The next job was to keep Globke’s name out of both the trial and media. When the GDR’s top legal expert, also a former Jewish emigrant, went to Israel as a co-plaintiff, Gehlen agents broke into his hotel room and stole the Eichmann-Globke documents, and when the Knesset quickly voted to rule out co-plaintiffs, the GDR lawyer was condemned to the sidelines. Once Eichmann did mention Globke; the men from Bonn raced madly to reach the nearest phone, but the media made sure this ripple went almost fully unnoticed. Israeli cooperation was rewarded; after the trial Adenauer okayed 240 million marks’ worth of military weapons aid.
The GDR media was far from silent, however, and in 1963 there was a public fourteen-day trial of Globke in East Berlin. As our bulletin reported: “The court heard witnesses from all parts of Europe who testified on Globke’s role in the liquidation of the Jews during the Second World War and in ‘Germanization’ measures in many occupied countries. The main evidence consisted of original Nazi documents.… On July 23 the GDR Supreme Court, trying Globke in absentia, found him guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes and murder and sentenced him to life at hard labor.”
This show trial was roundly condemned as communist propaganda, but the undeniable facts disturbed too many people, especially in Britain. Within three months, two weeks before Adenauer resigned, at age eighty-even, Globke did the same, at sixty-five. Although he was awarded a Distinguished Cross of Merit, his retirement plans in his Lake Geneva villa were dashed when Switzerland refused entry to the “second most important man in Bonn.” (Globke material based on Der Spiegel, January 23, 1963; and DGR, esp. June 14, 1963, 91–93.)
14—The Top Ranks
Globke was no lone wolf. In an earlier East Berlin “absentia” trial, Minister Theodor Oberländer had been convicted, while a top-ranking officer in the conquered city of Lvov (Ukrainian L’viv, German Lemberg), for the brutal massacres of Jews and Poles. Bonn denied it all again, but the extreme anti-Semitism and racism of this far-right politician were hideous enough to upset Western media. Five days after the East Berlin trial, in April 1960, Oberländer also resigned. (DGR, April 29, 1960, 67; May 13, 1960, 74.)
Out of twenty-one ministers in the cabinet of Ludwig Erhard, Adenauer’s successor, ten had been in the Nazi Party, eleven had been Wehrmacht officers, others were judges or prosecutors. The Foreign Minister had joined the Storm Troopers. Many still dreamed of claiming not only the GDR but other “lost territories” as well. Minister von Merkatz, once instructor at a Nazi espionage school, insisted, “Now we must win back what Bismarck and others won.” Minister Hans-Christoph Seebohm said, “European culture can only be found where Germans live.” He demanded a return of the Czech Sudetenland regions given Hitler at Munich in 1938. Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss stated, “We are living in a technical age in which the combined strength of our allies is sufficient to wipe the Soviet Union off the map”; he rejected appeals for a “nuclear-free” Central Europe, and urged that the Bundestag approve nuclear weapons so West Germany could keep up with its NATO allies. He said: “There must be a continuity of tradition between the German soldiers of World War II and the German soldiers of the future. The duties the future soldier will face will be the same as those faced by the older generation of soldiers.”
The state secretaries (deputy ministers) were even worse. Thirteen of twenty held good posts before 1945. Ludger Westrick headed Germany’s biggest aluminum company, crucial in making warplanes. Over 75 percent of his “employees” were POWs or forced laborers, including older women and children of thirteen. Nazi big-shot Hermann Goering made him a “War Economy Leader.” Westrick became Globke’s successor as head of the Chancellery.
Karl Friedrich Vialon had been in charge of registering the clothing, valuables, furniture, and other property of 120,000 Jews in the ghettos of Riga and Belorussia. Despite evidence sent by GDR authorities, nothing came of the trials on his complicity. In one he stated: “I deny emphatically that I had any knowledge about the extermination of Jews.” I wondered how many of those killed in Riga were my relatives, less lucky than my grandparents who had escaped earlier pogroms and emigrated.
Challenged on such appointments, Adenauer made a famous, all too apt reply: “It’s time we ended all this snooping around for Nazis; you can be sure that if we once get started nobody can tell where it will end.” But I, for Democratic German Report, kept snooping around.
A dramatic episode involved Erhard’s successor, Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger. After joining the Nazi Party when Hitler took over, faithful to the end in the Radio Department of the Foreign Ministry and as liaison man with Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, he was soon “de-Nazified” and reached the top in 1966 in a coalition with the Social Democrats of Vice-Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Beate Klarsfeld, as an au pair in Paris, married a Jewish Frenchman whose father was murdered during the Occupation. He told her things she had never heard about in her West German school. Together, they began exposing powerful ex-Nazis. Just before the thirtieth anniversary of the mass attacks on Jews that the Nazis called Kristallnacht, she used a journalist pass at a congress of the Christian Democratic Union, climbed onto the podium and gave Chancellor Kiesinger a resounding slap in the face, shouting “Nazi, Nazi!” and adding: “In the name of millions of victims who died in World War Two.” She was sentenced to a year in prison but not jailed; the event was simply too embarrassing. A year later Kiesinger lost a tight race and stepped down.
SO WHAT DID the past of GDR government big shots look like?
Minister-President Otto Grotewohl, once a leading Social Democrat, was twice arrested by the Nazis and blacklisted from his profession. Construction Minister Ernst Scholz, forced to flee Germany in 1937, joined the International Brigade in Spain and, escaping from internment in France, became a machine-gunner with the Resistance as a member of “Free Germany in the West.” This won him honorary citizenship in the town of d’Ivry-sur-Seine, which he helped liberate.
Grete Kuckhoff was a friend of Mildred Harnack, an American anti-Nazi in Berlin. The two women and their husbands became leaders of an underground group famous under its Gestapo nickname as “Rote Kapelle” (Red Orchestra). Caught by the Nazis in 1943, three were guillotined. She, too, was condemned to die, but the sentence was changed to ten years in prison. After liberation, she helped build a new financial system and became first president of the GDR state bank.
Hilde Benjamin, from a well-to-do family (an exception), had been a lawyer defending people victimized during the Depression years. She married a “poor people’s doctor,” a Jewish Communist who was killed in 1942 in Mauthausen concentration camp. (His brother, the famous philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, took his life to escape the Nazis.) She was barred from her practice and her son was rejected by the university. In the GDR, she became a top jurist and in 1953 Minister of Justice. West German media attacked her relentlessly as a brutal hardliner, calling her “Bloody Hilde.” Few if any mentioned her past travails and losses.
Most powerful in the GDR (if we postpone questions on the role of the USSR) was the Politburo, the highest body in the dominant Socialist Unity Party, or SED, often called the Communist Party outside the GDR, thus oversimplifying the complex question of the 1946 fusion of East German Communists and Social Democrats. Its head, Walter Ulbricht, had organized Communist resistance to the Nazis from