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NAZIS

Author and Holocaust survivor dies aged 91

Best-selling German author and Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano, whose writing offered a moral compass for the nation in the post-war period, died Wednesday aged 91, his publisher said.

Published: 11 December 2014 12:04 CET
Author and Holocaust survivor dies aged 91
Ralph Giordano. Photo: DPA

His death in hospital in Cologne followed a bad fall at his home several weeks ago, a spokeswoman for the Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing house told AFP.

Born to a German-Jewish mother and a Sicilian father in 1923, Giordano's life nearly spanned the century of bloody upheaval in Germany in which the Nazi and communist dictatorships exacted a heavy toll.

A passionate Ferrari driver with an impressive mane of white hair, Giordano weighed in on the most divisive issues of those tumultuous decades in 23 books and countless newspaper articles and rarely skirted controversy.

Culture Minister Monika Grütters said the country had lost a "potent and contentious character in Germany's political culture" who prodded the nation "toward a self-critical and rigorous reckoning with our past".

The experiences of his youth, in which he had to hole up with his family in a friend's cellar in the northern port city of Hamburg to avert his mother's deportation to a concentration camp, lent searing urgency to his warnings about the reappearance of far-right ideology and anti-Semitism.

The Giordano family, which nearly starved in hiding, was liberated on May 4, 1945 by the British army.

"It was a time of my life that marked everything I did after that," he said.

He opted to stay in Germany after the Second World War, soon joining the communist party, but grew estranged by Stalinist abuses.

Complex politics

His 1982 semi-autobiographical novel "Die Bertinis" recounted the persecution incurred by a German-Italian Jewish family under Hitler.

However he touched off a storm of criticism in 2007 with his vocal opposition to the building of one of the biggest mosques in Europe in Cologne.

Saying that Muslim women "veiled from head to toe" looked like "human penguins," Giordano found himself in uncomfortably close company with a right-wing citizens' group called "Pro-Cologne" which waged an anti-foreigner campaign against the mosque.

He came to the defence of Nobel prize-winning author Günter Grass when he admitted in 2006 that he had served in the Nazis' notorious Waffen SS elite force in the final months of the Second World War.

"What else could he have become during that time in the face of the Nazis' all-powerful propaganda apparatus? Nothing," Giordano asked.

"I believe he suffered terribly for keeping his silence about this."

Giordano expressed horror when it emerged in 2011 that a string of immigrant murders had been carried out by the NSU neo-Nazi cell under the noses of the German authorities.

"It makes me worry about the state of our democratic republic – the only societal form under which I can feel safe," he said.

Giordano was married three times, having lost two of his wives to cancer.

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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.

Published: 18 November 2021 17:09 CET
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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