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German Formula One teams slam Mosley over Nazi sex scandal

German carmakers and Formula One team BMW and Mercedes on Thursday put pressure on FIA boss Max Mosley to resign over a Nazi-themed sex scandal.

German Formula One teams slam Mosley over Nazi sex scandal
Is he hearing the calls to resign? Mosley in 2005. Photo:DPA

BMW and Mercedes felt compelled to issue a joint statement addressing the bizarre sex scandal involving the millionaire that came to light over the weekend.

“The content of the publications is disgraceful,” said the statement, which came before the start of Sunday’s Grand Prix race in Bahrain. “As companies, we strongly distance ourselves from it. This incident concerns Max Mosley both personally and as president of the FIA, the global umbrella organization for motoring clubs. Its consequences therefore extend far beyond the motor sport industry. We await a response from the relevant FIA bodies.”

In a statement to Reuters, the 67-year-old president of the Formula One governing body responded briskly to the BMW-Mercedes criticism. “Given the history of BMW and Mercedes Benz, particularly before and during the Second World War, I fully understand why they would wish to strongly distance themselves from what they rightly describe as the disgraceful content of these publications” Mosley said.

“Unfortunately, they did not contact me before putting out their statement to ask whether the content was in fact true. No doubt the FIA will respond to them in due course as I am about to respond to the newspaper in question.”

The “newspaper in question” is British tabloid The News of the World, which claimed on Sunday to have obtained a five-hour video of Mosley engaging in disturbing sado-masochistic Nazi role-playing with five prostitutes. Clips of the alleged incident have been posted on the internet.

Mosley has denied the allegations in the face of public outrage and calls for his resignation by Jewish leaders.

Mosely has repeatedly rejected Nazism in the past, as his family had significant ties to Nazi Germany before the Second World War. His father, Oswald Mosley, founded the British Union of Fascists, and was married in the home of Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels – an event attended by Adolf Hitler.

Reuters reported on Thursday that Japanese car manufacturers Honda and Toyota have also released critical statements on Mosley’s conduct.

Mosley has cancelled his plans to attend the Grand Prix in Bahrain.

dpa/ddp

NAZIS

German justice contaminated by Nazis in post-war years

Germany's justice system was still filled with former Nazis well into the 1970s, as the Cold War coloured efforts to root out fascists, according a damning official inquiry presented Thursday.

Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report "State Security in the Cold War". Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Anspach

In the 600-page collection of findings entitled “State Security in the Cold War”, historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling focused on the period from the early 1950s until 1974.

Their research found that between 1953 and 1959, around three in four top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office, which commissioned the report, had belonged to the Nazi party.

More than 80 percent had worked in Adolf Hitler’s justice apparatus, and it would take until 1972 before they were no longer in the majority.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” said Margaretha Sudhof, state secretary at the justice ministry, unveiling the report.

“These are disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind.”

‘Combat mission’

It was not until 1992, two years after Germany’s national reunification, that the last prosecutor with a fascist background left the office.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past” at the federal prosecutor’s office, the authors concluded, stressing “the great and long continuity” of the functions held and “the high number” of officials involved in Hitler’s regime.

Chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank commissioned the study in 2017. The federal prosecutor’s office is one of Germany’s most powerful institutions, handling the most serious national security cases including those involving terrorism and espionage.

With more than 100 prosecutors, it is “the central actor in the fight against terror,” the report authors said, underlining its growing role in the decades since the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The researchers were given unfettered access to hundreds of files labelled classified after the war, and found that rooting out alleged communists was often prioritised over other threats, including from the far right.

“In the 1950s the federal prosecutor’s office had a combat mission – not a legal but a political one: to pursue all the communists in the country,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said in a summary of the report.

‘Recycling’ Nazis

The fact that West Germany widely used former officials from the Nazi regime in its post-war administration had long been known.

For example, Hans Globke served as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer between 1953 and 1963 and was responsible for recruitment to top posts.

However, Globke had also been a senior civil servant in the Nazi-era interior ministry and was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws that imposed the first dramatic restrictions on Jews.

In recent years, systematic digging into the past of key ministries and institutions has unearthed a troubling and previously hidden degree of “recycling” of Third Reich officials in the post-war decades.

A 2016 government report revealed that in 1957, more than a decade after the war ended, around 77 percent of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. That study, also carried out by Safferling, revealed that the number of former Nazis at the ministry did not decline after the fall of the regime but actually grew in the 1950s.

Part of the justification was cynical pragmatism: the new republic needed experienced civil servants to establish the West German justice system. Furthermore, the priorities of the Allies who won the war and “liberated” the country from the Nazis were quickly turned upside down in the Cold War context.

After seeking to de-Nazify West Germany after 1945, the aim quickly shifted to building a capitalist bulwark against the communist threat. That approach often meant turning a blind eye to Germans’ previous involvement in the Third Reich.

In recent years, Germany has embarked on a twilight attempt to provide justice for concentration camp victims, placing several former guards in their 90s on trial for wartime crimes.

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