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NAZIS

75 years later: Germany moves to get rid of lingering Nazi laws

Germany is moving to rid itself of a cluster of laws introduced by the Nazis, still lingering on its books 75 years after World War II.

Published: 22 January 2021 09:11 CET
75 years later: Germany moves to get rid of lingering Nazi laws
An information sign on the enaction of the Nuremberg Laws, racist and anti-Semitic laws passed during Nazi times. Photo: DPA

There are 29 German legal or regulatory texts that still use wording introduced when Hitler was in power, according to Felix Klein, the government's point man for fighting anti-Semitism.

Some of them have “a very clear anti-Semitic background”, Klein told AFP.

Now, with the support of several parties in the Bundestag lower house of parliament as well as Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, Klein wants to wipe the slate clean — preferably before the end of the current term in September.

But the question remains whether to introduce a single law to reform all the texts at once, or to approach them one by one.

Germany has already reformed several Nazi-era laws over the years, including the infamous Paragraph 175 that criminalised sex between men and was repealed in 1994.

More recently, a 1933 ban on medical practitioners “advertising” that they carry out pregnancy terminations was partially scrapped in 2019.

READ ALSO: German court fines two doctors for advertising abortion

But some pertinent examples remain, including a law on altering names introduced by Nazi interior minister Wilhelm Frick in 1938.

From January 1939, a change to the law forced Jewish people to add the names “Sara” or “Israel” to their first names if they did not have a name that was considered typically Jewish.

The law “played a huge role in the exclusion and disenfranchisement of Jews”, said Thorsten Frei, deputy leader of the conservative CDU party's parliamentary group.

The section on Jewish names was scrapped by the Allies immediately after World War II, but the remaining text from 1938 was incorporated into federal law in 1954.

'German Reich'

The remaining parts of the law, which deal with issues such as the right to change one's name, are still “written as though the Third Reich still existed”, Klein points out.

Terms such as “German Reich”, “Reich government” and “Reich interior minister” are used, he said.

“It is absolutely unacceptable that Nazi language should continue to shape our federal law in 2021,” Social Democratic Party politician Helge Lindh told AFP.

“It is high time to send a clear signal with this long overdue form of denazification.”

Felix Klein speaking at a press conference in November. Photo: DPA

The law should also be cleaned up so it applies to all foreign nationals living in Germany, not just Germans, Lindh urged.

The law on names may be the most prominent, but there are at least 28 other German legal texts dating from the Nazi era — and possibly as many as 40, he added.

“Other laws and regulations deal with very technical issues, such as the upkeep of the river Elbe in the Hamburg region,” explains Frei.

Further texts include regulations on alternative medical practitioners, casinos and mutual legal assistance between Germany and Greece.

'Race' debate

Although it was adopted four years after World War II ended on May 8th, 1945, aspects of Germany's Basic Law, which charted a clear course away from Nazi ideology, have also come under fire — particularly from the political left.

Critics are calling for a revision of Article 3 of the constitution, which contains the term “race”. In June 2020, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared herself open to the idea.

But any changes to the Basic Law require a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Germany is also planning to scrap alphabet tables — phonetic aids with phrases like “F for Friedrich” — that have remained largely unchanged since the Nazis removed all names with Jewish associations in 1934.

READ ALSO: Why Germany plans to return to pre-Nazi alphabet tables

Although the tables were revised in 1950, most of the old names were not reinstated.

A temporary return to pre-Nazi era tables is planned from autumn 2021, with a new version using mainly city names to be rolled out from autumn 2022.

The tables are not laid down in law, but overseen by the German Institute for Standardisation (DIN).

By Mathieu Foulkes

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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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