Federal Foreign Office
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The Federal Foreign Office (
The term Auswärtiges Amt was the name of the Foreign Office established in 1870 by the North German Confederation, which then became the German Empire's Foreign Office in 1871. It is still the name of the German foreign ministry today. From 1871 to 1919, the Foreign Office was led by a Foreign Secretary, and since 1919, it has been led by the Foreign Minister of Germany.
History
Early years
Foundation
The Auswärtiges Amt was established in 1870 to form the foreign policy of the North German Confederation, and from 1871 of the German Empire. The Foreign Office was originally led by a state secretary (therefore not called a ministry), while the Chancellor, who usually also held the office of Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, remained in charge of foreign affairs.
Bismarck
In the first years of the German nation-state under
An exclusive club
Right from the start, the Auswärtiges Amt was very socially exclusive. To join, one needed a university degree, preferably in
The income requirement to enter the AA was only dropped in 1918.
Additionally, during the entire duration of the "old" Auswärtiges Amt from 1871 to 1945, Roman Catholics were underrepresented in the Auswärtiges Amt, comprising between 15 and 20% of the AA's personnel.
Wilhelm II
The reign of Emperor Wilhelm II was from 1888 to 1918.
In the years preceding
The Auswärtiges Amt was split into three factions competing against one another, namely one faction of men loyal to Bismarck, another faction loyal to Friedrich von Holstein, and yet another faction led by Prince Philipp von Eulenburg and Prince Bernhard von Bülow, who would later become chancellor.[8] This constant plotting and scheming between these factions weakened the execution of German foreign policy.[9] As a whole, the Wilhelmstrasse was never entirely in charge of foreign policy in the German Empire, but was instead just one out of several agencies, albeit a very important one that made and executed foreign policy.[10]
In the years 1904–1907, the Reich attempted to form an alliance with the United States on the basis of the supposedly shared fear of the "
Ottomans and the Armenians
A nation with whom the Auswärtiges Amt was much concerned during the Imperial period was the
Post-imperial period
In 1919, the Foreign Office was reorganised as the Auswärtiges Amt and a modern structure was established. It was now under the authority of a
Nazi Germany
In 1933, the vast majority of the diplomats serving in the Auswärtiges Amt came from upper-class families with a disproportionate number coming from the aristocracy.[16] The overrepresentation of aristocrats together with its overwhelming upper-class character gave the Auswärtiges Amt an elitist cachet, and made the Auswärtiges Amt into one of the most prestigious institutions in Germany. Because of its upper-class composition, the diplomats could afford extremely expensive clothes, and the men of Auswärtiges Amt were generally considered to the best dressed officials in the entire German government, contributing to the Auswärtiges Amt's glamorous, stylist image. There were no female diplomats, and besides for the women employed as secretaries, clerks and cleaners, the Auswärtiges Amt had no female employees. That the men of the Auswärtiges Amt formed an elitist group can be seen that every single diplomat had a university degree (before the 1950s, most Germans did not go to university).[16] The requirement that one had to have a university degree to enter the Auswärtiges Amt effectively guaranteed upper-class dominance of the Auswärtiges Amt.
All of the senior diplomats in the 1930s were veterans of the struggle to win Germany "world power status" in the first years of the 20th century. Hitler's goal of making Germany into the world's greatest power was thus a foreign policy goal that the diplomats embraced quite headily. The German historian Eckart Conze stated about the overlap in viewpoints between the diplomats and the Nazis: "...the top diplomats in the Weimar Republic were opposed to a liberal political order and parliamentarianism. And then the Nazis built political and ideological bridges for them. They announced their intention to reverse the Treaty of Versailles and make the German Reich into a world power. The majority of the diplomats were able to sign their names on to such a program."[17] In March 1933, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron, the Ambassador to the United States, resigned on the grounds that he could not in good conscience serve the Nazi government; he was the only member of the entire Auswärtiges Amt who resigned in protest at the Nazi regime.
Officially, the men of the Auswärtiges Amt were supposed to be non-political, but in practice the diplomats formed a "quite exclusive group" with extremely conservative views and values.[16] For these men, unconditional loyalty to the state was the highest possible value, and though the majority of the diplomats were not ideological National Socialists, they served the Nazi regime loyally until the very end.[18] The dominance of the traditional "insiders" at the Auswärtiges Amt can be seen that every State Secretary during the Nazi era was a professional diplomat. The State Secretaries of Nazi Germany were Prince Bernhard von Bülow (State Secretary 1930–36), Count Hans Georg von Mackensen (State Secretary 1936–1938 and ambassador to Italy 1938–1942), Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker (State Secretary 1938–1943 and ambassador to the Holy See 1943–1945) and Baron Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland (State Secretary 1943–1945). The overlap in goals between the professional diplomats and the Nazis were well illustrated by the memo on what should be the foreign policy of the Hitler government written by Bülow in March 1933 calling for Germany to recover the borders of 1914 and all of the lost colonies, annexation of Austria, and German domination of Eastern Europe.[19]
During the Neurath years (1932–1938), there were very few "outsiders" allowed into the Auswärtiges Amt.
Post-WWII
Founding of the Federal Republic
After Germany's defeat in May 1945, the country was occupied and the German state was abolished by the Allies. The country was administered as four zones controlled respectively by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. In August 1949, a German government was reestablished in the western zones, the Federal Republic of Germany, which in its first years had very limited powers. In October 1949, the German Democratic Republic was founded in what had been the Soviet zone. Whereas Georg Dertinger had already been appointed the first minister of foreign affairs of East Germany in 1949, due to the Allied occupation statute the Auswärtiges Amt of West Germany was not reestablished until 15 March 1951.
Adenauer
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer took office as the first Foreign Minister in Bonn until he was succeeded by Heinrich von Brentano in 1955. By and large, the men who had served in the new Auswärtiges Amt were the same men who had served in the old Auswärtiges Amt. In a Bundestag debate on 23 October 1952, Adenauer admitted that 66% of the diplomats of the Auswärtiges Amt had belonged to the NSDAP, but justified their employment as: "I could not build up a Foreign Office without relying upon such skilled men".[23] Upon Willy Brandt's taking office as Foreign Minister in the Grand coalition under Kurt Georg Kiesinger starting in 1966, the office was usually connected with the position of the Vice-Chancellor. From 1974 until 1992—with a short pause in 1982—Hans-Dietrich Genscher served as Foreign Minister and continued to champion Brandt's Ostpolitik while also playing a crucial role in the preparation of German reunification.
Berlin
In 2000 the Foreign Office returned to Berlin where it took up quarters in the
Further historiography and analysis
2010 report by the historical commission
A report entitled The Ministry and the Past written by historians and released by the German government in October 2010 shows that wartime-era diplomats played an important role in assisting the Nazis in carrying out the Holocaust, and disproved the claim often made after 1945 that German diplomats were "sand in the machine" who acted to moderate the actions of the Nazi regime.[24][25][26][27][28][29][30] In a 2010 interview, the German historian Eckart Conze, who had been in charge of the committee to investigate the war-time actions of the Auswärtiges Amt, stated that the Auswärtiges Amt was a "criminal organization" that was as every bit involved in the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" as the SS were.[31] In another interview, Conze stated: "This document makes it clear that all officials in the Foreign Ministry—including low-level office clerks—knew about the mass persecution of Jews and were actively involved in the Holocaust. It was an open secret."[32] In October 1941, when Franz Rademacher visited Belgrade to meet officials of the Government of National Salvation of General Milan Nedić of Serbia, he submitted an expense claim for his trip to his superiors at the Auswärtiges Amt after his return to Berlin; on his expenses claim, Rademacher described the purpose of his trip to Belgrade as the "liquidation of Jews".[33] At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the Auswärtiges Amt was represented by Martin Luther, who agreed that the Auswärtiges Amt would do everything within its power to persuade the governments of neutral and allied states to hand over their Jewish populations to be exterminated. Later on in 1942, Ambassador Otto Abetz arranged for the deportation of 25,000 French Jews to the death camps in Poland while Ambassador Hanns Ludin arranged for the deportation of 50,000 Slovak Jews to the death camps.[34] In the spring of 1944, Ambassador Edmund Veesenmayer played a key role in having 400,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz.[35]
Kolbe
In 2003, the French historian Lucas Delattre published a biography of Fritz Kolbe, a mid-ranking diplomat who become a spy for the American Office of Strategic Services because he believed his country deserved to lose the war on the account of the genocide it was waging against the Jews. Delattre stated that Kolbe really was a case of a diplomat being "sand in the machine" as Kolbe provided intelligence to help his country lose the war, but added sarcastically that if every German civil servant really were "sand in the machine" as almost all of them claimed to be after 1945 that Hitler would never had managed to get anything done.[36] Diplomats like Kolbe were very much the exception, not the rule.[36]
German representation overseas
In addition to the ministry's headquarters in Berlin, Germany has established embassies and consulates around the world.
See also
- Minister for Foreign Affairs (Germany)
- Cabinet of Germany
- Foreign relations of Germany
- List of diplomatic missions of Germany
- Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the German Democratic Republic
- Ambassadors of Nazi Germany
Sources
- Fiebig-von Hase, Ragnhild (17 November 2003). "6 The Uses of 'friendship': The 'personal regime' of Wilhelm II and Theodore Roosevelt 1901–1909". In Mombauer, Annika; Deist, Wilhelm (eds.). The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II's Role in Imperial Germany. Cambridge University Press. OCLC 57567237. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
- OCLC 851117719.
- OCLC 868562991. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
- Hürter, Johannes; Mayer, Michael, eds. (2014). Das Auswärtige Amt in der NS-Diktatur [The German Foreign Office under National Socialism]. Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 109 (in German). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. ISBN 978-3-11-034543-8.
References
- ^ "Staff". www.auswaertiges-amt.de.
- ^ "Bundeshaushalt". www.bundeshaushalt.de. Retrieved 10 May 2021.
- ^ a b Röhl 1994, p. 158.
- ^ a b c Röhl 1994, p. 151.
- ^ a b c d Röhl 1994, p. 152.
- ^ a b Röhl 1994, p. 154.
- ^ a b Röhl 1994, p. 153.
- ^ Röhl 1994, p. 159-160.
- ^ Röhl 1994, p. 159.
- ^ Röhl 1994, p. 157-161.
- ^ Fiebig-von Hase 2003, p. 155.
- ^ Fiebig-von Hase 2003, p. 166.
- ^ Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris, New York: HarperCollins, 2003 page 285.
- i24news. April 23, 2015. Archived from the originalon June 19, 2015. Retrieved 2015-06-18..
- ^ a b Rothwell, Victor The Origins of the Second World War, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001 page 30.
- ^ a b c Jacobsen 1999, p. 60.
- ^ Conze, Eckart (October 27, 2010). "Hitler's Diplomats Historian Calls Wartime Ministry A 'Criminal Organization'". Der Spiegel. Retrieved 2011-07-07.
- ^ Jacobsen 1999, p. 60–61.
- ^ Kershaw, Ian (1998). Hitler Hubris, New York: Norton, pages 490–491
- ^ a b Jacobsen 1999, p. 61.
- ^ Jacobsen 1999, p. 62–63.
- ^ a b Jacobsen 1999, p. 63.
- ^ Tetens, T.H. The New Germany and the Old Nazis, New York: Random House, 1961 page 48
- ^ "Germany—Speech by Federal Minister Westerwelle on the presentation of the study by the Independent Commission of Historians Federal Foreign Office".
- ^ "Telegraph-Journal | TJ.news". tj.news.
- ^ "Report Confirms German Foreign Ministry Role in Holocaust - TIME". October 29, 2010. Archived from the original on 29 October 2010.
- ^ "German foreign minister 'ashamed' of diplomats' role in Holocaust - Winnipeg Free Press". Winnipeg Free Press.
- ^ "Niemcy: Szokujący raport. "To nas zawstydza"". Onet Wiadomości. October 28, 2010.
- ^ "Moshe Zimmermann. Secrets and Revelations: The German Foreign Ministry and the Final Solution, in: Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Vol. V, No. 1 (2011)" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March 11, 2012.
- ^ "The Machine's Accomplices". The Economist. October 28, 2010. Retrieved 2011-07-07..
- ^ Conze, Eckart (October 27, 2010). "Hitler's Diplomats Historian Calls Wartime Ministry A 'Criminal Organization'". Der Spiegel. Retrieved 2011-07-07.
- ^ Moore, Tristana (October 27, 2010). "Were German Diplomats Complicit in the Holocaust?". Time. Retrieved 2011-07-07.
- ^ "The Machine's Accomplices". The Economist. October 28, 2010. Retrieved 2011-07-07.
- ^ Bloch, Michael (1992). Ribbentrop. New York: Crown Publishing, p. 356.
- ^ Bloch, Michael (1992). Ribbentrop. New York: Crown Publishing, pp. 400–401.
- ^ OCLC 948034826.
External links
- Media related to Auswärtiges Amt at Wikimedia Commons
- Official website (in English)
- Official website (in German)