Report to point finger at German foreign service

An historical report to be published this week will show the link between the German foreign service and the Nazi party.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in an interview on German television on Sunday evening said the report was worrying and would be carefully studied.

The report points to a link between the foreign service of the Federal Republic and former Nazis.

The genesis of the report goes back to the period of Joschka Fischer as foreign minister when he prohibited an obituary of a West German diplomat to be published because of his links with the Nazis. His ruling was set aside by the foreign service and the obituary appeared.

The father of former Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker, Ernst von Weizsäcker, while state secretary under Hitler reportedly told a Swiss ambassador in 1938 that, “The Jews will have to leave Germany, otherwise they will, one way or the other, be simply confronted with their own destruction’.

von Weizsäcker was ambassador in Switzerland when Thomas Mann wrote an article in a Swiss newspaper critical of the Nazis. In a report to Berlin, he recommended that Mann be stripped of his German citizenship.

If what this report has to say is true, then it is shocking. And yet in another sense not at all. Institutions, whatever their hue will always do what they can to survive.

And then to think how we doff our caps at those in power and authority.

In the current economic disaster in Ireland there is so far little criticism of our civil service. These are the women and men who since the foundation of the State have been considered the ‘mandarins’. They are often referred to as the ‘permanent government’

They receive preferential treatment, paid phenomenal salaries.

Was it that they simply kowtowed to their political masters or was it that they were incompetent?

One way or another they were and are simply part of the nomenclature.

Can anyone ever reach a position of the most insignificant power without selling their soul in some way or other to the institution which feeds them, church or State?

It is a shocking reality.