Diplomacy and the Shoah

“Study of the liberation,” headlines Tagesspiegel, on the 28 October publication of a new report on postwar Germany “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” [The administration and the past]. Offering new information on the diplomatic service’s role in the extermination of the Jews, the document reveals that Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs played a much more active role in the Shoah than was previously thought. The group of four historians (two Germans, one American and one Israeli), commissioned by the former minister of foreign affairs Joschka Fischer to write the report, also show how the ministry and the German administration in general, continued to shelter former Nazis after 1951. In the years that followed, “the actions and identities of the executioners were revealed in waves. But in the intervening periods between these waves, the administration took steps to cover their tracks,” notes the daily.