Adenauer's Foreign Office: West German Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Third Reich

By Thomas Maulucci

The creation of the Foreign Office under Adenauer tells us much about the possibilities and limits of professional diplomacy in the mid-twentieth century. It also demonstrates three themes central to the early history of the Federal Republic: the integration of the new state into the international community, the cooptation of German elites and traditions by the new political system, and the creation of government in a state under foreign occupation.

In this important study, Thomas Maulucci argues that, despite an improvised start and a considerable continuity of practice and personnel with pre-1945 Germany, the changed international anddomestic situation proved decisive in creating a ministry that could help to implement new directions in German foreign policy. In addition, Maulucci explores the interactions between international, political, and social history, contributing to a literature that bridges the gap between the pre- and post-World War Two eras that characterized previous writing on German history.

Based on extensive research in German, American, British, and French archives, Adenauer's Foreign Office is the only English-language book of its kind. The troubling question of personnel continuity in the German diplomatic service is of considerable importance today, especially because of the Foreign Office's previous attempts to portray its past in the best possible light. Of interest to scholars and students of German history and politics as well as non-specialists, this book provides new insights into post-war diplomacy, the sociology of German elites, and the problems involved in creating a new government after losing a major war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781609090777

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© 2012 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper.

All Rights Reserved

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The views or opinions expressed in this book, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maulucci, Thomas W.

Adenauer’s foreign office : West German diplomacy in the shadow of the Third Reich / Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87580-463-7 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-60909-077-7 (electronic)

1. Germany (West)—Foreign relations. 2. Germany (West). Auswärtiges Amt. 3. Adenauer, Konrad, 1876–1967. 4. Germany—History—1945–1955. I. Title.

DD258.8.M38 2012

327.43009’045—dc23

2012030665

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations and Foreign Words Used in the Text

Introduction

1—The Auswärtiges Amt of the German Reich, 1871–1945

2—The Foreign Affairs Question in Occupied Germany, 1945–49

3—The Return of the German Diplomats

4—Foreign Policy without a Foreign Office, 1949–51

5—The Foreign Office’s Childhood Illnesses, 1949–55

6—Personnel Policy, 1949–55

7—The Leadership Structure in the Auswärtiges Amt, 1951–55

8—The Career Diplomats and Adenauer’s Foreign Policy

Conclusion

Appendix: The Auswärtiges Amt, 1951–June 1955

Abbreviations used in Notes

Notes to introduction

Notes to chapter 1

Notes to chapter 2

Notes to chapter 3

Notes to chapter 4

Notes to chapter 5

Notes to chapter 6

Notes to chapter 7

Notes to chapter 8

Notes to conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The idea for a study on the West German Foreign Office came to me while I was a graduate student searching for a dissertation topic at Yale University. I had long been interested in both Germany’s foreign relations and the Adenauer era. It also struck me as intriguing that in the early 1950s, in a society that by and large was trying to put the Nazi past behind it, the return of veteran diplomats to the new ministry had produced public controversy. As I am writing this introduction, years after having begun work on this book, it does not surprise me that the history of the Foreign Office in the mid-twentieth century still provokes controversy in Germany. What I could not have expected, however, is that the issue of how to create new democratic governments in countries that had experienced dictatorship or authoritarian rule would take on new relevance in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and perhaps soon also through broader sections of the Middle East and Africa. Through a combination of design, luck, and the influence of external factors, Germans in the Federal Republic managed to build a democratic system and society from the ruins of a dictatorship. This book presents a small but important part of this story.

While at Yale I was fortunate to have good mentors and teachers. My advisor Paul M. Kennedy provided constant encouragement and excellent training in the fields of international history and security studies. I had the pleasure of participating in several seminars led by Sir Michael Howard. Jim Boyden, Paul Bushkovitch, John Merriman, Mark Steinberg, and the late Robin Winks also influenced my development as a historian. So too did the late Henry A. Turner—may he rest in peace. After graduating I worked several years as a research assistant to the late David F. Musto at the Yale School of Medicine. John Harley Warner, Sarah Tracy, and the late Larry Holmes exposed me to entirely new worlds of history, which I happily explored along with my office mate, the late Pam Korsmeyer. John Lewis Gaddis, who arrived at Yale just before I left New Haven, was kind enough to read my dissertation and also to invite me to the stimulating book discussions he holds at his home with other faculty and grad students.

My fellow graduate students at Yale were a great source of support. Kennedy’s assistant Will Hitchcock provided me with several opportunities to present my work at International Security Studies. David Hermann convinced me that I could speak French in preparation for my first research trip to Europe, and Talbot Imlay helped guide me through the French Foreign Ministry archives. Mary Sarotte, Pertti Ahonen, Will Gray, John Lowry, and Jay Geller provided me with a fine group of German historians to bounce ideas off. Anne Louise Antonoff was a constant source of encouragement. Doug Selvage, Heather (Ruland) Staines, and George Williamson all read parts of my first draft and managed to survive the process. Jason Lavery and I are still good friends even though we started writing our dissertations in the same apartment.

Thomas A. Schwartz of Vanderbilt University offered much useful advice during the early stages of my project and later served on my dissertation committee. Samuel Williamson read my finished dissertation and kindly provided detailed comments for revising it.

In Germany I was fortunate to be taken under the wing of Hans-Peter Schwarz at the University of Bonn, who was my advisor during the research year provided by the German Educational Exchange Service in 1992–93. He gave me many valuable suggestions and also helped me to arrange interviews with German diplomats who had served during the early 1950s. His colleague Hanns Jürgen Küsters took an interest in my project and provided helpful insights, as did Udo Wengst of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Wengst also allowed me to use the photocopied documents, especially of hard to find political newsletters, that he had collected for his own study of the creation of the West German government. I would also like to thank Alexander Böker, Sigismund Freiherr von Braun, Wilhelm Grewe, Hans von der Groben, Hans von Herwarth, Heinz Krekeler, and Rolf Pauls. All of these men from the first hours of West German diplomacy are now departed, but in the early 1990s they kindly invited me into their homes and provided interviews that helped me understand the atmosphere of the time. While in Bonn I formed part of a multinational crew of young researchers in the Foreign Office archives that included David Cameron, Maddalena Guiotto, Andreas Rödder, Katherine Sams, Christiane Scheidemann, and Dominique Trimbur.

Between 1999 and 2002 I returned to Germany to work, first as a research associate at the University of Heidelberg and then as an assistant professor of history at UMUC Schwäbisch Gmünd. At Heidelberg I had the great pleasure of working for Detlef Junker. He and his staff, especially Philipp Gassert, strongly encouraged me to continue work on my foreign office manuscript. So too did my colleagues at UMUC, including Beth Plummer, the late Gary Anderson, and John Gunkel. In March 2001 I was invited by Bernhard Brunner of the University of Freiburg to a weekend colloquium organized by his advisor Ulrich Herbert at St. Peter in the Black Forest on Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic. For me this was a very important experience, since it underlined the need when writing about the Auswärtiges Amt to further break down the artificial barrier in German history represented by the year 1945 and also to take a sociological as well as a foreign policy perspective on my topic. Since returning to the States in 2002 I have had wonderful and supportive colleagues at SUNY Fredonia and at my current institution, American International College, where Julie Walsh, Robin Varnum, Gary Jones, and Vickie Hess have all taken an interest in my project.

Due to my previous work on the Foreign Office, in 2007 Peter Hayes of Northwestern University asked me to contribute to the work of the Independent Historians’ Commission commissioned by the Auswärtiges Amt. The Commission’s work was published as Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik [The Office and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic] (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010). Hayes’s research team was responsible for the years 1945 to 1951, and I contributed sections on denazification and the diplomats’ search for new careers. Peter was great to work with, and I am thankful to him and the other lead authors for this opportunity. It also was fun to be reunited with old friends like Will Gray and Astrid Eckert and to meet new ones like Katrin Paehler, Norm Goda, and Annette Weinke. I relied on Das Amt where necessary to update my research—its unprecedented access to German records makes it a valuable resource—and to address some issues that were not my primary focus. However, this study and its findings are my own, and it will be obvious to those familiar with Das Amt where my interpretations differ.

I would like to express my thanks to all of the many archivists and librarians who have provided assistance in researching this book. Their kindnesses have ranged from helping to find documents to providing tea with honey for a deathly ill graduate student. Above all, I would like to thank Ludwig Biewer, director of the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, and his staff, especially Martin Kroeger, Lucia van der Linde, Knud Piening, and Günther Scheidemann. The interlibrary loan librarians at AIC, especially Amy Schack and Gilana Chelimsky, have been tireless in tracking down books and articles for me.

It has been a great pleasure working with my editor, Amy Farranto, and managing editor Susan Bean at Northern Illinois University Press. I also greatly appreciated the useful and detailed suggestions provided by the manuscript’s two anonymous readers.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my own family in the United States as well as my various German host families and friends in Stade, Hamburg, Dortmund, Saarbrücken, Bonn, Heidelberg, Schwäbisch Gmünd, Berlin, and elsewhere who have shown me their kindness over the years. Lisa Edwards is not only an excellent wife but, as a fellow historian, not just tolerant but understanding of what it means to try to write a book.

List of Abbreviations and Key Foreign Terms Used in the Text

Auswärtiges Amt—Foreign Office

BMGF—Federal Ministry for All-German Affairs

BP—Bavaria Party

BVN—Union of Victims of the Nazi Regime

CDU—Christian Democratic Union

CSU—Christian Social Union

CTB—Allied Combined Travel Board

DBFF—German Office for Peace Questions

DDP—German Democratic Party (Weimar Republic)

DfAA—Office for Foreign Affairs (Federal Chancellery, 1950–51)

DNVP—German National People’s Party (Weimar Republic)

DP—German Party

DVP—German People’s Party (Weimar Republic)

ECSC—European Coal and Steel Community

EDC—European Defense Community

ERP—European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan)

Evangelisches Hilfswerk—Protestant Relief Agency

FDP—Free Democratic Party

FM-SS—Patron Member of the SS

FRG—Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)

GATT—General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

GDR—German Democratic Republic (East Germany)

HICOG—(US, UK, French) US, UK, French Element, Allied High Commission

HICOM—Allied High Commission in Germany

JEIA—Allied Joint Export-Import Agency

KPD—German Communist Party (West Germany)

MdB—Member of Bundestag

NSDAP—National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party

OEEC—Organization for European Economic Cooperation

OMGUS—Office of US Military Government in Germany 1945–49

OSS—US Office of Strategic Services

RHSA—Reich Main Security Office (Third Reich)

SA—Sturmabteilung (NSDAP paramilitary group)

SD—Sicherheitsdienst (SS intelligence agency, part of RHSA)

SED—Socialist Unity Party (East Germany)

SPD—Social Democratic Party of Germany

SS—Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad of NSDAP)

UA-47—Bundestag Investigative Committee 47

Verbindungsstelle zur AHK—Liaison Office to the Allied High Commission

VfW—Frankfurt Economics Administration

Westbindung—Policy of political adherence to the West in the Cold War

Wilhelmstraße—Nickname for German Foreign Office before 1945

Z—Center Party

Introduction

On March 15, 1951, some eighteen months after the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a small ceremony took place at the Museum Koenig to mark the official establishment of a Foreign Office [Auswärtiges Amt]. The Museum Koenig was a natural history museum that had been pressed into service by West German authorities to address the lack of office and meeting space in Bonn four years after the Second World War. In September 1948 it had hosted the opening session of the Parliamentary Council that drafted the West German constitution, or Basic Law. After the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in the late summer of 1949 the museum would be used as temporary housing for various parts of the government, including the Chancellery and some of the offices that would be incorporated into the Auswärtiges Amt.¹

Now, in a building filled with taxidermied animals, the diplomats assembled to meet their newly appointed foreign minister, Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer took his place at the head of a reception line, greeted his subordinates, and exchanged pleasantries with a few pre-selected officials. The French High Commissioner in Germany, André François-Poncet, reported that until then some of the higher functionaries present had enjoyed little or even no contact with their inaccessible boss, even though they had been in government service for months already working on foreign policy issues. Adenauer then made a speech in which he stressed how significant it was that the Western Occupation Powers had finally allowed West Germany to set up a Foreign Office and conduct its own diplomacy. He emphasized that he could not remain foreign minister over the long term, but that he would do his utmost to return Germany to the family of European nations on a basis of equality and mutual respect. Finally, he cautioned that the Federal Republic’s representatives in foreign countries needed to exercise restraint if they were going to win trust abroad.

The same afternoon, Adenauer spoke with the press. He said that despite the new Foreign Ministry, in the immediate future the Federal Republic would not become very active in foreign policy. Due to the distrust of Germany by much of the international community, it seemed more advisable for the time being to exercise a refined sense of restraint [vornehme Zurückhaltung]. He then added that it was appropriate to maintain the structure of the pre-1945 Auswärtiges Amt with some modifications since, he asserted, the old Wilhelmstraße had never been a Nazi institution, and it would be useful to retain some foreign policy traditions. François-Poncet noted that this comment must have pleased many of those present at the earlier ceremony, who themselves had joined the German diplomatic service before 1945, served during the Third Reich, and then, in ever-increasing numbers, found employment in the Federal Republic. However, Adenauer also said that it was wrong to select West Germany’s new diplomatic representatives only from the stocks of the old school. Despite the need for experience and tradition, a new start was also necessary.²

This account of the opening ceremony for the new Foreign Office and the related press conference nicely illustrates the main themes of this study, which describes the creation and early history of that ministry through 1955, the period Adenauer served as foreign minister, and the related issue of how and why the Western Occupation Powers granted the Federal Republic the right to conduct an independent foreign policy. The creation of the Foreign Office tells us much about the possibilities and limits of professional diplomacy in the mid-twentieth century. It also clearly illustrates three of the central themes in the early history of the Federal Republic of Germany: the integration of the new state into the international community, the cooptation of old German elites and traditions by the political system, and the creation of that new system itself. This study argues that, despite an improvised start and a considerable continuity of practice and personnel with pre-1945 Germany, the changed international and domestic situation proved decisive in creating a ministry that could help to implement new directions in German foreign policy. It also seeks to explore the interactions between international, political, and social history as well as to contribute to an increasing literature that bridges the gap between the pre– and post–World War II eras that characterized previous writing on German history.

The troubling question of personnel continuity in the German diplomatic service remains of considerable interest today, thanks to a great extent to the groundbreaking work of historian Hans-Jürgen Döscher.³ But it has not remained a subject only for scholars, especially because of the Foreign Office’s previous attempts to portray its past in the best possible light. A heated controversy developed within the ministry itself concerning Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s refusal in 2003 to continue to issue the standard official obituary containing the phrase ehrendes Andenken [honored memory] for diplomats with formal ties to the Nazi Party. In response, in 2005 the Auswärtiges Amt convened an international Independent Historians’ Commission to examine the role of its former employees in the Third Reich, personnel continuities with the Federal Republic’s foreign service, and how the post-1951 ministry handled issues related to the Nazi past. The commission’s study, Das Amt und die Vergangenheit [The Office and the Past], appeared in the fall of 2010 and received an enthusiastic response from the public.⁴ However, it has also drawn sharp criticism from scholars. They have focused on the section about the years 1933–45, which they claim, among other things, exaggerates the Foreign Office’s role in the Holocaust and ignores its activities in other areas.⁵ In response to the Obituary Affair, in January 2006 WDR Television in Germany also aired a 45-minute documentary titled Hitler’s Diplomats in Bonn.⁶ Personnel policy and the politics of the past are crucial subjects for any history of the Auswärtiges Amt in the twentieth century. However, the current study seeks to broaden the focus to include the ministry’s role in international and domestic politics and how it was shaped by these same politics. Moreover, the study concentrates on the formative years of the new Foreign Office between 1949 and 1955, years which, as will be argued below, are often treated in a cursory way by scholars of West Germany’s foreign relations.

As the ceremony in the Museum Koenig suggested, the ministry’s early years saw considerable improvisation, and not just because a new government was being established in Bonn, a medium-sized city that had never served as Germany’s capital before. An important reason was that the creation of a full-fledged Auswärtiges Amt had to wait for some eighteen months after the establishment of the Federal Republic’s government, at which time most of its other ministries and offices had started to function and had laid claim to the best available buildings. The delay was caused by Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the subsequent policies of the victor powers from the Second World War. Initially the Four Powers (the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union) controlled relations between the outside world and occupied Germany. After the start of the Cold War, the Occupation Statute proclaimed on May 12, 1949, for the new West German state named foreign affairs as an area reserved for the three Western Occupation Powers. The Three Powers also returned the German diplomatic documents they had captured during the war only in a piecemeal fashion starting in the 1950s.⁷ As a result, not only were proper facilities lacking (a situation not remedied until a new ministry building opened in 1954), but administrative practices and even the simplest forms and documents had to be remembered or re-created. The first generation of diplomats in the Federal Republic felt with some justification that we built things up out of nothing, as head of protocol Hans Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld (a.k.a. Hans von Herwarth) put it.⁸ It would be several years before the ministry was functioning smoothly. Due to the late start, the new Foreign Office’s role in the government also was no longer first among equals, as it had been before 1945 (at least in the minds of its own officials), and other ministries would play a growing role in West Germany’s international affairs.

A related problem concerned the fact that Adenauer had decided to serve simultaneously as chancellor and foreign minister. At first glance, this strategy gave him significant political advantages. As early as 1954 Theodor Eschenburg called attention to the fact that like Gustav Stresemann and Heinrich Brüning during the Weimar Republic, not to mention the chancellors of the Second German Empire, Adenauer enjoyed an extraordinarily strong position within the German government because he held these dual offices at a time in which foreign policy successes were important for domestic politics.⁹ After his tremendous electoral success in 1953 Adenauer was able to fully assert himself vis-à-vis his cabinet and his own parliamentary alliance, the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), thus initiating the Chancellor Democracy—a parliamentary system that became characteristic for the Federal Republic in which the head of government played a dominant role in relation to the parties of the ruling coalition.¹⁰ However, as he mentioned at the March 15, 1951, press conference, Adenauer could not hold both of these offices indefinitely. His critics, and even some of his closest coworkers and political allies, believed that he did not have enough time or energy to lead the government, conduct diplomatic relations, and oversee the construction of the new Foreign Office effectively all at the same time. The charge that the leadership of the ministry was too narrow, and thus overworked and overstretched, arose repeatedly during the early 1950s. Yet Adenauer was unwilling to abandon the Auswärtiges Amt until West Germany attained sovereignty, arguing that he needed to personally direct the Federal Republic’s foreign policy until that time. Only on June 7, 1955, did he turn over the ministry to his party colleague Heinrich von Brentano.

If the aforementioned problems were related to a new start, the journalists at the press conference were keenly aware that considerable continuities remained between the old Wilhelmstraße and the new ministry in terms of both organizational structures and, more seriously, personnel. Herwarth was one of many officials present at the earlier ceremony who had begun their careers in the 1920s and 1930s. He was considered a non-Aryan and left the foreign service for the army in 1939, and he also played a small role in the German resistance against Hitler.¹¹ Other colleagues, however, had continued to work in the ministry loyally until Germany’s defeat in 1945. Not just journalists but also West German politicians from all parties except those on the far right would question Adenauer’s assertion that the Wilhelmstraße had not been a Nazi institution, and these concerns would culminate in 1951 and 1952 in a parliamentary investigation by the Bundestag’s Investigative Committee 47 [Untersuchungsausschuß Nr. 47, or UA-47]. The committee’s report and the resulting Bundestag debate disappointed many observers. As could be expected, the diplomats’ defenders felt that both were unnecessary and even outrageous. In reality, however, UA-47’s investigations were limited and incomplete and did not result in lasting changes in the ministry’s personnel policies, which ensured a high degree of continuity with the old Wilhelmstraße.

The veteran diplomats were a prime example of the process by which German elites that had served under National Socialism, and that in some cases were responsible for its worst crimes, were able to reenter public life in large numbers after 1945. To explain this phenomenon, in 1983 philosopher Hermann Lübbe suggested that Germans in the immediate postwar decades did not repress the Nazi past and knew full well what they and their neighbors had done during the Third Reich. However, they were willing to overlook many individual histories as long as those concerned accepted the new democratic ground rules, which were widely viewed as a preferable alternative to a continuation of the Nazi system. Lübbe posited that this strategy of communicative silence, along with time, was the only way to successfully transform a society that had been exposed to National Socialist ideology for so long.¹² West German diplomat Paul Frank expressed this idea somewhat differently when he described colleagues from the old Wilhelmstraße as "burned children [gebrannte Kinder], scalded by Nazism, who now were happy to play by the new rules as long as no one questioned their continued employment.¹³ As Norbert Frei pointed out in the mid-1990s, however, there is one major flaw in such arguments: state and society in Western Germany were neither neutral nor autonomous instruments in this process. Simply on the basis of their numbers alone those that were to be integrated were themselves able to determine to a great extent the conditions of their integration."¹⁴ The diplomats were able to take advantage of the fact that until the 1960s West German society was far more interested in rehabilitating or forgetting about those who had collaborated with Nazism than in persecuting them.

Adenauer himself did not fully trust the veteran diplomats and thought that they were too much of a clique that would represent its own interests and, perhaps, not his foreign policy priorities. This was the other aspect of the continuity question that hung over the opening ceremony and press conference that March 15—to what extent could the new West German state be trusted by the outside world to pursue a constructive and peaceful foreign policy just six years after the Second World War? This was the very issue that had caused an eighteen-month delay in creating a new ministry. Adenauer warned both his diplomats and the reporters that the goal of German diplomacy had to be to obtain equal treatment and respect from the outside world, and this would require a good deal of tact and hard work.

These problems faced by the new ministry stood in stark contrast to the successful foreign policy through 1955 of the Adenauer government, whose policies helped to lift the Occupation Statute, lead to West German membership in NATO, contribute to the start of the European project, and in general place the Federal Republic in a position of some prominence internationally. At first glance, these successes happened in spite of the situation in the Auswärtiges Amt, not because of it. This contradiction was, however, part of a broader international development. Since the late nineteenth century, professional diplomats in almost every country had experienced a decline in status and lost considerable influence on the policy-making process.¹⁵ Modern communications and transportation revolutionized diplomatic practice. Summit diplomacy often reduced the role of the resident ambassadors to that of reporters whose reports were often disregarded by the home office.¹⁶ In almost every country there was also a proliferation of agencies and specialists with no diplomatic background to deal with specific aspects of international relations (e.g., economic affairs) and new forums to coordinate overall foreign policy. No longer did the Foreign Ministry retain its undisputed role in advising the head of state on relations with the outside world and managing the same.¹⁷ Diplomats like George F. Kennan and Harold Nicolson pointed at mid-century to an additional recent development that had eroded professionalism in their field: the rising influence of public opinion on the policy-making process. Under leaders like Wilson and Lenin, diplomacy became openly ideological and addressed itself to peoples, not governments.¹⁸ One veteran of the early years of the new Auswärtiges Amt even titled his memoirs "Diplomats aren’t good for anything [Diplomaten taugen nichts]." This was an actual comment that Helmut Schmidt made to Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in 1974 in the presence of both of their foreign ministers, who politely laughed along with the joke.¹⁹

A few scholars have devoted attention to the foreign policy–making process in the early Federal Republic.²⁰ But the available histories on the Auswärtiges Amt concentrate heavily on its personnel policy or on its internal administration as opposed to its wider political role.²¹ This ministry came into being shortly after the end of the Second World War, which arguably was the most important watershed for the trends described above. It needed to cope both with these challenges and with an ever-increasing number of fields, international forums (e.g., the United Nations system and European organizations), and due to decolonization, states where the Federal Republic’s interests had to be represented. One could argue that its weight in the West German government grew over time due to the increased importance of international issues, despite a superficial formal loss of status as the main organization responsible for shaping the Federal Republic’s foreign policy.²² Yet the clear message of the early 1950s is that important foreign policy decisions did not require a full-fledged Foreign Office as long as there was an energetic foreign minister—in this case Chancellor Adenauer—with a competent albeit overworked circle of advisors.

Adenauer’s comments on that March day also pointed to other key aspects of West Germany’s relationship not only with the Three Powers but with the outside world as a whole. As he noted, it was indeed significant that the Federal Republic could now conduct its own diplomacy directly with foreign countries, even if this had to be done with great caution due to resentments arising from the recent past. Nonetheless, scholars have often treated the years of the Occupation Statute 1949–55 merely as a prelude to West German foreign policy per se. In its early years, writes Wolfram F. Hanrieder, the Federal Republic had neither the power nor the legitimacy to conduct its own foreign policy.²³ To be sure, the Federal Republic had to deal with both the Three Powers and the reunification question. But the former clearly made the new state more an object than a subject, while the latter, especially for Germans, represented a special aspect of domestic policy. Indeed, many scholars depict the central task of the Federal Republic’s foreign policy as one of overcoming or dealing with restraints—some of which arose from the international system, some of which were legacies of the Nazi past and World War II, and some of which were self-imposed.²⁴ Yet it is also clear that starting around 1952 the Adenauer government’s successful policy of Western integration allowed the Federal Republic a great deal of de facto foreign policy sovereignty despite the formal continuation of the Occupation Statute.²⁵ Because its form closely followed Bonn’s evolving foreign policy competencies, the early history of the new Auswärtiges Amt allows us to examine how, starting in 1949, the Federal Republic actively tried to shape its relations with the entire outside world, not just Western countries, and its possibilities for doing so. Moreover, as will be demonstrated, already by 1951 the Three Powers had decided that formal controls over West German foreign policy would be of no avail if they did not have a trusting relationship with the Federal Republic.

Furthermore, despite a plethora of studies on German foreign policy in the twentieth century, we still do not know very much about the learning processes that the foreign policy elites went through that would help explain how Germany went from seeking a place in the sun to renouncing power politics and emphasizing international cooperation.²⁶ A dramatic change in the political operating environment, such as occurred in Germany around 1945, may totally invalidate people’s previous behavior or goals, even long-standing ones, and cause them to look for new options.²⁷ But what exactly was the relationship between the new thinking and historical learning processes in terms of the diplomatic corps? This question is the key to explaining the support of both veteran diplomats and newcomers not just for the new state but also for its foreign policy. Due to the new Auswärtiges Amt’s strong political leadership and somewhat chaotic initial growth, the diplomatic corps would not have the opportunity to shape the overall lines of West German foreign policy. However, most diplomats became advocates of this policy due to their appreciation of the changed international and domestic environments in which they had to operate.

These new circumstances are important to bear in mind because many aspects of the early history of the Foreign Office reflect a mentality that was very influential in the Federal Republic in the 1950s: the search for normality or normalization. To quote Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, the 1950s was a decade of normality throughout Western Europe, marked by the reconstruction of personal lives, the economy, and the physical environment, that followed the decade of violence of the 1940s. For the average person in the Federal Republic this meant a return to normal conditions in the private sphere, associated with stable home lives and rising prosperity. As Mary Fulbrook emphasizes, wanting to be normal also involved a desire to pick up the pieces as if nothing had happened or, in other words, the urge to forget about and distance oneself from the barbarity of the Third Reich.²⁸ Likewise, the Federal Republic in the early 1950s wished a return to normality through the achievement of sovereignty (including the right to conduct normal diplomacy with all of its trappings), international equality [Gleichberechtigung] and at some point national reunification. The veteran diplomats sought the normality of renewed employment in their profession and a ministry organized according to what they perceived as the sound practices of the pre-Nazi time. They also wanted to disassociate themselves from their own role under National Socialism as well as from Allied denazification policies. The debate about a restoration, a term popularized by Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon in the journal Frankfurter Hefte, indicates that many contemporaries in the early Federal Republic were aware of social, economic, and political continuities in Germany and that visions of the normal were sometimes contentious. By the mid-1950s, left-wing intellectuals often used the term restoration narrowly to discuss troubling personnel continuities with the Third Reich.²⁹ By this time it had so entered the public consciousness that a wide variety of observers, including Adenauer himself, would speak of a restoration when describing conditions in the new Foreign Office. In the end, however, enough had happened that there would be no simple return to the past for German diplomacy or its practitioners.

1—The Auswärtiges Amt of the German Reich, 1871–1945

In the 1950s, the Federal Republic of Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt displayed significant personnel and organizational continuities with its predecessor in the German Reich. The Wilhelmstraße had implemented the foreign policies of Otto von Bismarck and Gustav Stresemann and, more ominously, of Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. As a result, interpretations of the pre-1945 history of both German diplomacy and the German diplomatic corps played an important role in postwar debates about the new ministry and who should serve in it. Veteran German diplomats attempted to promulgate a positive vision of this past, and ironically those who had experienced setbacks under or who had opposed National Socialism were often the most active. For example, Hans E. Riesser was a career diplomat whose clashes with his new mission chief in Paris starting in 1932 led to his recall. Forced to leave the service in 1934 as a non-Aryan, he established himself as a businessman in France and then Switzerland. On Christmas Day 1941, the Nazi state revoked his German citizenship under new legislation targeting Jews living abroad, even though Riesser had also worked for German military intelligence in Switzerland since 1939. He restarted his diplomatic career in 1950 and served the Federal Republic as head of its Consulate General in New York and as its observer at the United Nations.¹ In 1959, after he retired, Riesser wrote a book titled Did Germany’s Diplomats Fail?² He concluded that, considering normal human weaknesses, the ministry’s past record was good. As will be discussed later, starting in the late 1940s his colleagues Wilhelm Haas and Gustav Strohm, who like Riesser had personal difficulties with the National Socialists, pointed to the Weimar Republic’s Foreign Office (1918/19–33) as a progressive ministry led for six years by a democratic foreign minister, Stresemann. Others, like State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker in his 1950 memoirs, held Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and other Nazi diplomats brought into the ministry guilty for crimes committed during the Second World War and claimed that the career diplomats were only marginally involved in these affairs. They initiated what one scholar has called the minimal guilt thesis that has characterized the ministry’s official self-depiction until very recently.³ Yet these theses were immediately challenged, both in Germany and abroad. As historian Paul Seabury pointed out in 1951, In the vast collection of memoirs and apologia produced by former diplomats of Nazi Germany, Ribbentrop serves the purpose of whipping boy for former German diplomatists now engaged in cleansing their own reputations before the bar of history.⁴ Since perceptions of the past played an important role in the creation of the new Foreign Office, we will begin by considering the history of the German Auswärtiges Amt from 1871 to 1945.

The German diplomatic corps never numbered more than approximately five hundred individuals active at any given time before the Second World War. With a generally conservative worldview, its members felt strong ties of solidarity to their institution and to their colleagues. They shared a peculiar lifestyle and relationship to the government, which included regular rotating postings at home and abroad for themselves and their immediate families as well as the tradition of nonpartisanship common to German government officials before 1945. Weizsäcker, who worked for the Second German Empire (1871–1918), Weimar Republic, and Third Reich (1933–45) as a naval officer and then as a diplomat, told the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in June 1948 that as a civil servant, one doesn’t serve a constitution, but the Fatherland. One serves whichever government and constitution is given to the country by the people.⁵ This was an exclusive professional group both conservative and cosmopolitan in outlook, which defined itself in terms of state service.⁶

Despite their selectivity, however, the diplomats’ outlook and conduct during the first half of the twentieth century shared much in common with other predominantly conservative elite groups in Germany. The diplomats were worried about maintaining their social and political positions during a period of intense upheaval marked by two world wars, two major economic crises (the hyperinflation of the early 1920s and the Great Depression), and two political revolutions (a democratic one in 1918–19 and a National Socialist one in 1933). Furthermore, they wanted to uphold Germany’s status as a great power. Whatever government seemed best able to ensure these ends would secure the career diplomats’ support as a group.⁷ Within these parameters there was considerable room in the Auswärtiges Amt for flexibility in further professionalizing the ministry, for contrasting foreign policy strategies, and even for divergent views of both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Yet like other German elites, the German diplomats’ enthusiasm for republican government clearly weakened as the 1920s progressed and then died as the Weimar Republic entered its crisis phase. With few exceptions they cautiously greeted the rise of National Socialism as the best means of restoring national stability and strength.⁸ And despite increasing evidence that the new government was pursuing criminal policies, most continued to serve loyally and sometimes enthusiastically until it collapsed in 1945.

In the past, some scholars have argued that the diplomats’ university studies, privileged social backgrounds, and typically conservative political views made it highly unlikely that they would identify wholeheartedly with Nazi ideology, goals, or political methods.⁹ However, these authors focus on foreign policy issues or on the German resistance and generally are not concerned with the sociology of elites or the internal functioning of the National Socialist system insofar as they do not directly relate to international affairs. Recent studies have demonstrated that many of the most dedicated servants of the Nazi state, for example those with leadership functions in the police system, were relatively young, well-educated members of the middle class who did not need the Party to help them advance their careers.¹⁰ Likewise, the German nobility, despite its public image in West Germany starting in the 1950s, contained far more supporters of Hitler than resistance members.¹¹ Therefore there is no reason to assume that the diplomats were less likely to cooperate or empathize with the NSDAP [the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party] just because of their background. Although a resistance movement existed in the Auswärtiges Amt by 1938, most diplomats did not become critical of Nazism until well into the Second World War, despite the fact that they resented incursions by outsiders into their ministry. By the end of the war, many had become deeply implicated in National Socialist crimes.¹²

The Auswärtiges Amt during the Kaiserreich

The modern Auswärtiges Amt arose out of the Prussian Foreign Office in 1870 as part of the process of German unification. During the Second German Empire the Foreign Office’s stature as first among the civilian ministries derived in no small measure from the fact that it was directly subordinate to the chancellor, starting with Bismarck himself. There was no independent minister in charge of its operations but instead a bureaucrat, a state secretary [Staats­sekretär]. In 1885 the Auswärtiges Amt adopted a new internal configuration based around four divisions: the Political Division (IA), the Personnel and Administrative Division (IB), the Foreign Trade Division [Handelspolitische Abteilung] (II), and the Legal Division (III). The ministry also created a Colonial Division in 1890, which became an independent Reich Colonial Office in 1907, and a Press Division [Nachrichtenabteilung] in 1915, but otherwise it maintained its basic structure with few changes until the end of the Kaiserreich in 1918.¹³

Throughout this era there was a strict distinction between the diplomatic and consular career tracks. Moreover, Division IA held a predominant place within the ministry. It not only handled all political matters but also contained all of the diplomatic personnel. Most of its officials were aristocrats, although the balance between nobles and non-nobles working in the central office in Berlin was by no means unfavorable to the latter.¹⁴ However, the nobility predominated in appointments to foreign posts, in part because of the importance of the European royal courts in international relations and assumptions about the nobility’s international experience, language skills, and overall sophistication. In addition, the diplomatic track required men (and before 1918 only men) of independent wealth. Attachés did not receive a salary, although it might take as long as three years to pass all of the requisite examinations for becoming a diplomat. Moreover, expense accounts frequently did not come anywhere close to covering the costs incurred by mission chiefs for social functions. Around 1912 the Auswärtiges Amt estimated that applicants for the diplomatic career track needed private incomes of 15,000 Reichsmark a year, a great burden even for most propertied men.¹⁵ In the public mind, Division IA came to represent the entire Foreign Office: an aristocratic stronghold concerned mainly with questions of high politics. Its diplomats treated their mainly bourgeois colleagues from the other divisions, at best, as useful advisors on technical questions.¹⁶

Before 1945 Germans both admired their Foreign Office for its glamour and criticized it for its traditionalism. Starting in the 1880s the German press, the business community, and the Reichstag alike began to question whether it was in step with the times. Parliamentary critics emphasized the need for liberalization of the ministry’s recruitment policies in order to break the nobles’ monopoly and to draw increased attention to trade matters.¹⁷ Implicit in the criticism after 1890 was also a frustration with Wilhelm II’s erratic leadership style. Since the Kaiser could not be attacked openly, the Foreign Office became an obvious target for detractors of German foreign policy, as for example in the wake of the 1908 Daily Telegraph affair.¹⁸ Even Wilhelm Freiherr von Schoen, state secretary in the Foreign Office from 1907 to 1910, publicly admitted that the Auswärtiges Amt was behind the times in light of the increasing volume and complexity of its work.¹⁹ Nonetheless, calls from parliament to combine the German diplomatic and consular services went unheeded by the Foreign Office before World War I, as did persistent requests to abolish income requirements for entering the foreign service and to modernize the examination process for potential attachés.

Starting in 1917 a series of developments finally forced the ministry’s hand. First, several diplomatic missteps by the Foreign Office provoked neutral countries and threatened to bring them into the war against Germany. For example, in anticipation of Germany’s return to unrestricted submarine warfare, in January 1917 State Secretary Arthur Zimmermann proposed a military alliance with Mexico in the case of the United States’ entry into the war. In return, Mexico would receive Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. British intelligence intercepted the Zimmermann Telegram, which was published in American newspapers in March. Then in September, the United States made public telegrams intercepted several months earlier from Germany’s minister in Buenos Aries, Karl Graf von Luxburg, in which Luxburg recommended sinking Argentine ships trading with the Allies and called the Argentine foreign minister an anglophile ass. The Foreign Office managed to repair relations with neutral Argentina, but the Luxburg Affair outraged German trading interests. By the spring of 1918 overseas merchants were calling openly for sweeping reforms, forcefully supported by National Liberal delegate Stresemann in the Reichstag in July. However, change became imminent only during the second half of 1918. Frustrated international businessmen began to think that the Imperial Economics Office [Reichswirtschaftsamt] would be more responsive to their interests. In order to prevent the loss of its foreign trade competencies to another ministry, the Foreign Office was finally ready to undertake concrete reforms.²⁰

The Auswärtiges Amt during the Weimar Republic, 1918–33

First, however, came the unexpected and sudden collapse of the German Empire in November 1918 and the subsequent creation of the Weimar Republic. According to one view, the Revolution of 1918–19 stopped before the gates of the Auswärtiges Amt and left the ministry’s leadership firmly in the hands of the career officials who had made policy during the Kaiserreich.²¹ Yet these events led to a tremendous turnover in the ministry’s leadership personnel. Between July 1, 1918, and April 10, 1919, alone, thirty-nine diplomats left the office, including both deputy state secretaries and seven division leaders [Direktoren] or deputy leaders [Dirigenten]. Many of these changes came about because the individuals in question were monarchists who could not support a republic or its probable new foreign policies. Further resignations would come to protest the signing of the Versailles Treaty in August 1919, although these were often merely temporary.²² Over the next decade the ministry would experiment with modernizing its structures, professionalizing its personnel, and trying to adapt the best traditions in German foreign policy to the changed international scenario. For some time its officials also were willing to cooperate with, or at least tolerate, the new republic. Nonetheless, it is also undeniable that by the late 1920s the diplomatic corps’s patience with the Weimar Republic and with the progress made in revising the Versailles peace settlement—with its limitations on the German armed forces, territorial losses above all in the East, and reparations—was wearing dangerously thin.

During the Weimar Republic the vast majority of diplomats continued to cling to a tradition of nonpartisanship insofar as they declined to join a party and, at least in public, refrained from commenting on government policy.²³ Many of them disliked the Republic, yet anti-republican sentiment remained muted. Some who, like Weizsäcker, decried the party system mess [Parteischweinerei], nonetheless obediently [brav] voted for Strese­mann’s German People’s Party (DVP) in the 1924 elections.²⁴ Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath was, in the words of his biographer, one of a large number of conservatives who found no place within the Weimar political system, but gave passive and unenthusiastic loyalty to the new state.²⁵ Monarchists like Neurath and Weizsäcker knew that it was impossible and indeed undesirable to turn the clock back to 1918, and a well-functioning German republic was tolerable given the lack of other alternatives.²⁶ Weizsäcker also noted that you could conduct a normal foreign policy with some Weimar governments.²⁷ Moreover, loyalty toward the republican system depended to a great extent on the government’s respect for the principle that an actual parliamentarisation of the foreign service was not possible, as Foreign Minister Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau told the cabinet on April 1, 1919. The foreign minister might take suggestions from the parties, but in the end he alone